Showing posts with label electronica. Show all posts
Showing posts with label electronica. Show all posts
Monday, January 07, 2013
Sunday, April 10, 2011
James Blake's The Wilhelm Scream (+chords)
James Blake has had a good year, releasing an EP in fall and an eponymous debut album earlier this year. He's got a fresh sound, very sparse, lean, kind of dubstep, kind of grimy, kind of retro-fi, and a touch of pure pop ballad, and he's getting a lot of well deserved attention. His tunes are very simple but heartfelt, and his arranging of noise and atmospheric sounds are what makes them interesting. On his debut album probably my initial favorite was "The Wilhelm Scream," which is no more than ten measures of one melody, two lyrics over and over in an increasingly noisy and dense atmosphere. I like it.
I haven't figured out exactly what he's doing under the noise, and I haven't really seen the chord progression anywhere, so for some more beginner musicians out there who might enjoy playing this tune I'll just toss up a quick guess:
Intro: CMaj7 - - - Em - - - CMaj7 - - - G - - -
[pick up] I don't know about my
CMaj 7 - - - Em - - -
Dreams...... I don't know about my
CMaj7 - - - G
dreaming anymore, All that I know is I'm
G - F, F - Em, Em - D, D - C - - - - - G - - - - - - -
Fal-ling, fal-ling, fal-ling, fal-ling...might as well fall
Then the progression is repeated with the second line. The interesting thing is that the melody is so simple that Blake can change the chords underneath it, and what makes it really interesting is that he begins to do this as the texture gets noisier.
At some point the G chord for two bars at the end becomes one bar of G then a GMaj7 for the second bar. Later still the second bar becomes two beats each of GMa7 and G7 (which leads nicely to a CMaj7). Sometimes instead of ending on the G he moves to either Em or something else, and at some point he changes the progression to G - - - GMa7/F# - - - Em - - - G/D - - - CMaj - - - D [and then holds it past the normal resolution spot; from here you could go to the Em or G]
I wish I had more time to really figure it out. Below is the official video and then a really nice live version, which has different alterations of the chords; listening to it now as I type I can hear that he doesn't resolve to the G at the end of the line but goes to Em, then to D (with a possible finish on GMaj7-G7). I'd like to figure more out but I have to get back to work, but I thought I'd throw this out there for whomever...
I haven't figured out exactly what he's doing under the noise, and I haven't really seen the chord progression anywhere, so for some more beginner musicians out there who might enjoy playing this tune I'll just toss up a quick guess:
Intro: CMaj7 - - - Em - - - CMaj7 - - - G - - -
[pick up] I don't know about my
CMaj 7 - - - Em - - -
Dreams...... I don't know about my
CMaj7 - - - G
dreaming anymore, All that I know is I'm
G - F, F - Em, Em - D, D - C - - - - - G - - - - - - -
Fal-ling, fal-ling, fal-ling, fal-ling...might as well fall
Then the progression is repeated with the second line. The interesting thing is that the melody is so simple that Blake can change the chords underneath it, and what makes it really interesting is that he begins to do this as the texture gets noisier.
At some point the G chord for two bars at the end becomes one bar of G then a GMaj7 for the second bar. Later still the second bar becomes two beats each of GMa7 and G7 (which leads nicely to a CMaj7). Sometimes instead of ending on the G he moves to either Em or something else, and at some point he changes the progression to G - - - GMa7/F# - - - Em - - - G/D - - - CMaj - - - D [and then holds it past the normal resolution spot; from here you could go to the Em or G]
I wish I had more time to really figure it out. Below is the official video and then a really nice live version, which has different alterations of the chords; listening to it now as I type I can hear that he doesn't resolve to the G at the end of the line but goes to Em, then to D (with a possible finish on GMaj7-G7). I'd like to figure more out but I have to get back to work, but I thought I'd throw this out there for whomever...
Sunday, May 03, 2009
What is your sampling epiphany? (Massive Attack samples)
UK Guardian Music Blog
Check out the original post HERE for lots of embedded hyperlinks and media examples of the samples discussed.
What is your sampling epiphany?
An unofficial compilation of tracks sampled by Massive Attack showcases the group's aesthetic through the songs that informed it – and provides fans with the thrill of discovering the originals
Posted by Simon Reynolds Thursday 26 February 2009 16.43 GMT guardian.co.uk
Sampling is weird. We're so used to it, it's been such a commonplace part of pop music for so long (since the late 1980s), that it's easy to lose sight of what a peculiar thing it is. Although sampling is often compared with collage, I think there's a profound difference which relates to the added dimension of time that music inhabits. With recorded music, however much it's doctored and enhanced through studio techniques (multitracking, overdubs etc), there generally remains a kernel of life inside it; what you are hearing is a sequence of human actions happening in real-time. (I'm talking about played music here, as opposed to programmed music. But it is overwhelmingly the case that played music is what gets sampled – music of the 70s particularly, when analogue recording quality was at its peak but drum machines and sequencers had yet to replace tight rhythm sections.) To take a chunk of living time – which is what a sample is – and chain it into a loop isn't just appropriation, it's a form of enslavement. But to pluck several different segments of live playing from separate space-time contexts and force them into unholy congress with each other … that's sorcery.
When sampling first made waves in the mid-80s, most journalistic discussions focused on the legal aspect, typically framing the samplers in punk-like terms as renegade, naughty, larcenous, irreverent. Likewise, academic studies of sampling in pop over the ensuing decades have largely concerned themselves with copyright and corporate power, typically siding with "the streets" versus the entertainment-media complex. These are perennially interesting issues, for sure, especially when given a postcolonial inflection: not just pirating and bootlegging, but the fact that non-western or pre-capitalist folk cultures typically have much looser, more collective notions of authorship and originality. (A friend of mine who's both a DJ and a law student is currently doing dissertation research in Jamaica looking at the "fluid" – a euphemism – notion of copyright in dancehall culture.) None the less, there appears to other crucial dimensions to sampling – its aesthetics and its philosophical implications – that are relatively neglected. (I could be wrong here, of course, and if you know of really penetrating and provocative work in this area, please point me in its direction!)
What got me thinking about all this was the arrival several weeks ago of an advance CD called Protected: Massive Samples. It's the second in a series started by Rapster Records compiling the original tracks that a well-known group has sampled, in this case Massive Attack. The first volume, released a year ago, was Discovered: A Collection of Daft Funk Samples, which showcased raw material for all those hot hits by Daft Punk. These compilations have not been done as a collaboration with, or even with the blessing of, the group in question; the titles and packaging take great care not to use either band's full name at any point, presumably for legal reasons. And I wonder if Daft Punk or Massive Attack are happy about having their sources so clearly signposted.
The sample-source album isn't a brand new idea. When Kanye West was first blowing up circa The College Drop-out, I recall a vinyl bootleg LP in circulation that collated the tunes he'd sampled, such as Chaka Khan's Through the Fire – the basis for his Through the Wire (although "virtual entirety of" would be nearer the mark, give or take the drums and West's rhymes). I expect there have been other such unofficial compilations. I didn't buy the Kanye Samples record because I was reluctant to interfere with my enjoyment of his album. Similarly I was slightly nervous about playing Protected: Massive Samples the first time. Would I ever be able to listen to Blue Lines the same way again? Would knowing the extent of Massive's debts diminish my admiration, sabotage my sense of awe at their achievement?
This dilemma is unique to pop music of the post-sampling era. There's no counterpart in other artforms that I can think of. It's not like looking at the sketches for a painting, or the rushes for a movie, or even like seeing the original movie from which remake is based. It's sort of like a scenario where you venerate a particular painting and then get presented with tubes of the specific colors of oil paint the artist used on that work. Except not really, because the groove of Billy Cobham's Stratus simply is – in a direct and exact and supremely concrete way – the groove of Massive's Safe from Harm. So we're back to that idea of the sample as a living thing, a portion of time and energy wrested away from its original owners and put to service. Idea for a feature: track down the players on that Cobham session and find out what they really think and feel about being used in this manner. I assume Cobham, as composer of the tune, has at least been remunerated (he gets a credit on Safe from Harm) but quite possibly not the other players (Jan Hammer, Lee Sklar, Tommy Bolin). It's not just about the money, though, it's about having one's performance taken out of its context, severed from its original artistic intent. For what is interesting about comparing Stratus with Safe from Harm is how much all the stuff that clearly mattered to Cobham and crew (the noodly, improvised jazziness – there's a long abstract intro, for instance) gets jettisoned as Massive Attack, being typical B-boys, focus on the driving bass-and-drums groove. Indeed, they focus on the most linear, straightforward segment of the rhythm track, which gets looser and wilder at other points in the song.
I'd heard Stratus before and immediately spotted the Massive connection, so its appearance on Protected didn't surprise me. But I was slightly startled by how extensively Daydreaming – another killer tune from Blue Lines – is based on Mambo by Wally Badarou, a session keyboardist associated with Island Records's Compass Point studios in Nassau, who came to moderate renown in the 80s through his work with Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Grace Jones, Black Uhuru and others. Indeed, it makes me want to hunt down Badarou's solo albums to see what other gems are secreted there.
The overall effect of Protected: Massive Samples is less "gotcha" sample-spotting, though, and more like listening to one of those Back to Mine albums: it's a delectably consistent and mood-unified collection of plushly produced, mostly downtempo soul and reggae. Lowrell's Mellow Mellow – the gorgeous source for Blue Lines's Lately – defines the vibe precisely. Getting stoned to these tunes – as you can be sure the Massive boys did on many a Bristol afternoon in the 80s – must have been like lolling around on a gigantic sofa made of marshmallow. Protected also resembles the Under the Influence series: like a photographic negative of a Best Of compilation, it showcases the group's aesthetic through the listening that informed it.
Some self-consciously arty or iconoclastic exponents of sampling recall the appropriation artists of late 70s New York, figures like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, whose work involved gambits like copying famous pictures and appending your own signature, or rephotographing photographs (sometimes famous shots, sometimes iconic adverts) and then cropping or otherwise reframing them. That seems quite close to what the early Justified Ancients of Mu Mu did, or avant-pranksters like Plunderphonics and Negativland, where the whole point is sampling a group or song that is universally known and freighted with associations.
But the approach of Massive Attack, Daft Punk and their peers was not based on exploiting familiarity; only the real cratedigging headz ever knew the sources they were drawing on. If the Rapster series continues there's no shortage of potential candidates for this treatment: DJ Shadow, RZA, Chemical Brothers, J Dilla. Most likely the crate-diggers types have got there first and already pulled together unofficial sample-spotting compilations for these artists, and many others besides, for circulation on the web. Similarly, there's a whole site dedicated to identifying samples used in jungle, but for the moment it contents itself with simply citing the source, as opposed to offering MP3s or embedded YouTube audio streams.
Talking of jungle, I'm reminded of how sampling has created a unique and unprecedented form of pop rapture: the epiphany of suddenly, accidentally encountering the source track for a favourite tune. This happens all the time if you are a fan of jungle and hardcore rave. I vividly remember the thrill that ambushed me during a James Bond movie when suddenly I heard a portentous orchestral theme that I'd loved for years as a key element of Acen's 1992 rave classic Trip to the Moon. (The source in question: John Barry's Space March, from his score for You Only Live Twice, soundtracking the moment when a Soviet capsule in orbit is swallowed up by a mysterious shark-like spacecraft).
But probably my all-time favourite sample epiphany relates to a mystery tune, also from 1992, by an artist who trafficked under the period-evocative moniker E. I taped this track off a pirate radio show and have no idea if it ever saw proper release or what its title is. But it's a real lost classic, propelled by the most boombastic breakbeat loop and featuring a comic little vocal hook that coarsely roars "Oi!!!! I've got a little black disc wiv me tune on it!". But there's also an incongruously plangent guitar part and a slow fade where the groove drops away leaving just an aching guitar solo and a totally blissed raver gasping "I... I... I … luvvit!!!". Several years ago, idly channel surfing, I landed midway through The Wall and realised with a shock of delight that the lead guitar on E's tune was actually David Gilmour. But it was only a few months back, once again chancing upon Alan Parker's overripe farrago, that I realised the whole "little black disc" bit was a parody of Nobody Home, specifically the bit that goes "Oi! I've got a little black book with me poems in!"
The French philosopher Paul Virilio argued that every new technology comes complete with its own unique catastrophe; the invention of the aeroplane, for instance, was also the invention of the plane crash. The corollary of the sample epiphany is what I call the "sample stain". But that's a subject I'll return to in a future blogpost.
Check out the original post HERE for lots of embedded hyperlinks and media examples of the samples discussed.
What is your sampling epiphany?
An unofficial compilation of tracks sampled by Massive Attack showcases the group's aesthetic through the songs that informed it – and provides fans with the thrill of discovering the originals
Posted by Simon Reynolds Thursday 26 February 2009 16.43 GMT guardian.co.uk
Sampling is weird. We're so used to it, it's been such a commonplace part of pop music for so long (since the late 1980s), that it's easy to lose sight of what a peculiar thing it is. Although sampling is often compared with collage, I think there's a profound difference which relates to the added dimension of time that music inhabits. With recorded music, however much it's doctored and enhanced through studio techniques (multitracking, overdubs etc), there generally remains a kernel of life inside it; what you are hearing is a sequence of human actions happening in real-time. (I'm talking about played music here, as opposed to programmed music. But it is overwhelmingly the case that played music is what gets sampled – music of the 70s particularly, when analogue recording quality was at its peak but drum machines and sequencers had yet to replace tight rhythm sections.) To take a chunk of living time – which is what a sample is – and chain it into a loop isn't just appropriation, it's a form of enslavement. But to pluck several different segments of live playing from separate space-time contexts and force them into unholy congress with each other … that's sorcery.
When sampling first made waves in the mid-80s, most journalistic discussions focused on the legal aspect, typically framing the samplers in punk-like terms as renegade, naughty, larcenous, irreverent. Likewise, academic studies of sampling in pop over the ensuing decades have largely concerned themselves with copyright and corporate power, typically siding with "the streets" versus the entertainment-media complex. These are perennially interesting issues, for sure, especially when given a postcolonial inflection: not just pirating and bootlegging, but the fact that non-western or pre-capitalist folk cultures typically have much looser, more collective notions of authorship and originality. (A friend of mine who's both a DJ and a law student is currently doing dissertation research in Jamaica looking at the "fluid" – a euphemism – notion of copyright in dancehall culture.) None the less, there appears to other crucial dimensions to sampling – its aesthetics and its philosophical implications – that are relatively neglected. (I could be wrong here, of course, and if you know of really penetrating and provocative work in this area, please point me in its direction!)
What got me thinking about all this was the arrival several weeks ago of an advance CD called Protected: Massive Samples. It's the second in a series started by Rapster Records compiling the original tracks that a well-known group has sampled, in this case Massive Attack. The first volume, released a year ago, was Discovered: A Collection of Daft Funk Samples, which showcased raw material for all those hot hits by Daft Punk. These compilations have not been done as a collaboration with, or even with the blessing of, the group in question; the titles and packaging take great care not to use either band's full name at any point, presumably for legal reasons. And I wonder if Daft Punk or Massive Attack are happy about having their sources so clearly signposted.
The sample-source album isn't a brand new idea. When Kanye West was first blowing up circa The College Drop-out, I recall a vinyl bootleg LP in circulation that collated the tunes he'd sampled, such as Chaka Khan's Through the Fire – the basis for his Through the Wire (although "virtual entirety of" would be nearer the mark, give or take the drums and West's rhymes). I expect there have been other such unofficial compilations. I didn't buy the Kanye Samples record because I was reluctant to interfere with my enjoyment of his album. Similarly I was slightly nervous about playing Protected: Massive Samples the first time. Would I ever be able to listen to Blue Lines the same way again? Would knowing the extent of Massive's debts diminish my admiration, sabotage my sense of awe at their achievement?
This dilemma is unique to pop music of the post-sampling era. There's no counterpart in other artforms that I can think of. It's not like looking at the sketches for a painting, or the rushes for a movie, or even like seeing the original movie from which remake is based. It's sort of like a scenario where you venerate a particular painting and then get presented with tubes of the specific colors of oil paint the artist used on that work. Except not really, because the groove of Billy Cobham's Stratus simply is – in a direct and exact and supremely concrete way – the groove of Massive's Safe from Harm. So we're back to that idea of the sample as a living thing, a portion of time and energy wrested away from its original owners and put to service. Idea for a feature: track down the players on that Cobham session and find out what they really think and feel about being used in this manner. I assume Cobham, as composer of the tune, has at least been remunerated (he gets a credit on Safe from Harm) but quite possibly not the other players (Jan Hammer, Lee Sklar, Tommy Bolin). It's not just about the money, though, it's about having one's performance taken out of its context, severed from its original artistic intent. For what is interesting about comparing Stratus with Safe from Harm is how much all the stuff that clearly mattered to Cobham and crew (the noodly, improvised jazziness – there's a long abstract intro, for instance) gets jettisoned as Massive Attack, being typical B-boys, focus on the driving bass-and-drums groove. Indeed, they focus on the most linear, straightforward segment of the rhythm track, which gets looser and wilder at other points in the song.
I'd heard Stratus before and immediately spotted the Massive connection, so its appearance on Protected didn't surprise me. But I was slightly startled by how extensively Daydreaming – another killer tune from Blue Lines – is based on Mambo by Wally Badarou, a session keyboardist associated with Island Records's Compass Point studios in Nassau, who came to moderate renown in the 80s through his work with Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Grace Jones, Black Uhuru and others. Indeed, it makes me want to hunt down Badarou's solo albums to see what other gems are secreted there.
The overall effect of Protected: Massive Samples is less "gotcha" sample-spotting, though, and more like listening to one of those Back to Mine albums: it's a delectably consistent and mood-unified collection of plushly produced, mostly downtempo soul and reggae. Lowrell's Mellow Mellow – the gorgeous source for Blue Lines's Lately – defines the vibe precisely. Getting stoned to these tunes – as you can be sure the Massive boys did on many a Bristol afternoon in the 80s – must have been like lolling around on a gigantic sofa made of marshmallow. Protected also resembles the Under the Influence series: like a photographic negative of a Best Of compilation, it showcases the group's aesthetic through the listening that informed it.
Some self-consciously arty or iconoclastic exponents of sampling recall the appropriation artists of late 70s New York, figures like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, whose work involved gambits like copying famous pictures and appending your own signature, or rephotographing photographs (sometimes famous shots, sometimes iconic adverts) and then cropping or otherwise reframing them. That seems quite close to what the early Justified Ancients of Mu Mu did, or avant-pranksters like Plunderphonics and Negativland, where the whole point is sampling a group or song that is universally known and freighted with associations.
But the approach of Massive Attack, Daft Punk and their peers was not based on exploiting familiarity; only the real cratedigging headz ever knew the sources they were drawing on. If the Rapster series continues there's no shortage of potential candidates for this treatment: DJ Shadow, RZA, Chemical Brothers, J Dilla. Most likely the crate-diggers types have got there first and already pulled together unofficial sample-spotting compilations for these artists, and many others besides, for circulation on the web. Similarly, there's a whole site dedicated to identifying samples used in jungle, but for the moment it contents itself with simply citing the source, as opposed to offering MP3s or embedded YouTube audio streams.
Talking of jungle, I'm reminded of how sampling has created a unique and unprecedented form of pop rapture: the epiphany of suddenly, accidentally encountering the source track for a favourite tune. This happens all the time if you are a fan of jungle and hardcore rave. I vividly remember the thrill that ambushed me during a James Bond movie when suddenly I heard a portentous orchestral theme that I'd loved for years as a key element of Acen's 1992 rave classic Trip to the Moon. (The source in question: John Barry's Space March, from his score for You Only Live Twice, soundtracking the moment when a Soviet capsule in orbit is swallowed up by a mysterious shark-like spacecraft).
But probably my all-time favourite sample epiphany relates to a mystery tune, also from 1992, by an artist who trafficked under the period-evocative moniker E. I taped this track off a pirate radio show and have no idea if it ever saw proper release or what its title is. But it's a real lost classic, propelled by the most boombastic breakbeat loop and featuring a comic little vocal hook that coarsely roars "Oi!!!! I've got a little black disc wiv me tune on it!". But there's also an incongruously plangent guitar part and a slow fade where the groove drops away leaving just an aching guitar solo and a totally blissed raver gasping "I... I... I … luvvit!!!". Several years ago, idly channel surfing, I landed midway through The Wall and realised with a shock of delight that the lead guitar on E's tune was actually David Gilmour. But it was only a few months back, once again chancing upon Alan Parker's overripe farrago, that I realised the whole "little black disc" bit was a parody of Nobody Home, specifically the bit that goes "Oi! I've got a little black book with me poems in!"
The French philosopher Paul Virilio argued that every new technology comes complete with its own unique catastrophe; the invention of the aeroplane, for instance, was also the invention of the plane crash. The corollary of the sample epiphany is what I call the "sample stain". But that's a subject I'll return to in a future blogpost.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Four sound effects that made TV history (BBC's Radiophonic Workshop)
BBC NEWS
Four sound effects that made TV history
See the BBC NEWS story for video link demonstrations.
By Tom Geoghegan
BBC News Magazine
The BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, a pioneering force in sound effects, would have been 50 this month. Ten years after it was disbanded, what remains of its former glory?
Deep in the bowels of BBC Maida Vale studios, behind a door marked B11, is all that's left of an institution in British television history.
A green lampshade, an immersion tank and half a guitar lie forlornly on a shelf, above a couple of old synthesisers in a room full of electrical bric-a-brac.
These are the sad remnants of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, set up 50 years ago to create innovative sound effects and incidental music for radio and television.
The corporation initially only offered its founders a six-month contract, because it feared any longer in the throes of such creative and experimental exercises might make them ill.
Using reel-to-reel tape machines, early heroines such as Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire recorded everyday or strange sounds and then manipulated these by speeding up, slowing down or cutting the tape with razor blades and piecing it back together.
The sound of the Tardis was one sound engineer's front-door key scraped across the bass strings on a broken piano. Other impromptu props included a lampshade, champagne corks and assorted cutlery.
Ten years ago the workshop was disbanded due to costs but its reputation as a Heath Robinson-style, pioneering force in sound is as strong as ever, acknowledged by ambient DJs like Aphex Twin.
Although much of its equipment has long been sold off, every sound and musical theme it created has been preserved. To mark its 50 years, there are plans for a CD box-set.
Here Dick Mills and Mark Ayres, who both worked there, use the surviving equipment to revive four sounds from the past.
GREEN LAMPSHADE
This was a stroke of genius from Delia Derbyshire, who died in 2001 and famously created the Doctor Who theme tune from Ron Grainer's score.
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The magic of Delia Derbyshire's lampshade, recreated by Dick Mills and Mark Ayres
She would hit the tatty-looking aluminium lampshade to create a sound with a natural, pure frequency. After recording it on tape, she would play with it to make the desired sound effect.
For a documentary on the Tuareg people of the Sahara desert, she took the ringing part of the lampshade sound, faded it up and then reconstructed it using the workshop's 12 oscillators to give a whooshing sound, allied to her own voice.
"So the camels rode off into the sunset with my voice in their hooves and a green lampshade on their backs," she once said.
The green lampshade has since gained near-mythical status and Peter Howell, who succeeded Derbyshire in the early 1970s and reworked the Doctor Who theme tune, can see why.
"It's a useful thing to cling on to because everyone knows what a lampshade is because it symbolises the use of domestic objects to produce sounds."
The workshop fascinates his music students today because of all the kit used back then, he says, and its influence is still clearly seen - an advert for a VW Golf that uses only sounds of the car, for example.
"The sampling era we're now in is the next generation of the same principle."
DALEK VOICE
The sound that sent youngsters, and many adults, cowering behind sofas was co-created by Mills, a sound engineer who joined the workshop in its first year and left 35 years later.
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Creating the voice of the Daleks
"We tried to give the impression that whenever a Dalek spoke, it wasn't speaking like we do, it was accessing words from a memory bank, so they all sound the same - dispassionate, mechanical and retrievable."
He used a centre-tap transformer plugged into the microphone of an actor standing at the side of the set, and the threat in the voice was all in the performance.
Sometimes the tape got played at the wrong speed and the voice came out slightly differently, but the arrival of the EMS VCS3 synthesiser in the late 60s did not signal the end for this tried and tested method.
In other ways, however, the synthesisers changed the way the workshop operated and - despite some resistance by individuals - offered a bigger choice.
"Synthesisers provided a wide open palate of colours and sounds to play with, but you still had to choose what you wanted to do and learn the discipline of this new technological form," says Mills.
"So on the one hand, it was easy but you still had the original difficulty of thinking of the idea in the first place."
SCI-FI DOOR OPENING
Sci-fi fans will recognise the "swooshing" door from programmes such as Doctor Who and Blake's 7, plus in the odd hotel scene in other programmes.
The suitcase synthesiser was a portable version of the VCS3, useful for jobs out of the studio.
The workshop's suitcase synth
Recalling the early days and influences, Mills says: "We would take a pre-recorded sound effect from the BBC's vast library but treated them to produce cerebral effects. If you wanted a character to appear to be thinking, you got him to read the line and put in a strange echo."
Similar techniques were already used in Europe in "musique concrete".
"They did it for their own investigation and research, but our way of life was we never did anything until a commission. So all our experimentation and research was taking place in the context of that radio or television programme."
One of Mills' proudest creations was the slimy monster sound, which was him spreading Swarfega cleaning gel on his hands and then slowing down the sound.
And he made the upset tummy of Major Bloodnok in The Goon Show, a colonial officer who liked curry, by using burp sounds and an oscillator to give a violent, explosive gastro-effect. Using contrasting sounds very quickly is a trick in audio comedy.
"We did our own thing in the name of artistic creation. Working here was a bit like surf riding. Every so often a creative wave of energy kept you going until the wave ran out."
BROKEN GUITAR
One pluck of a guitar string became the famous Dr Who bass line. Derbyshire and Mills sped it up and slowed it down to get the different notes, and these were cut to give it an extra twang on the front of every note.
Demonstration of the Radiophonic Workshop's guitar
"It slides up to the note every time if you listen carefully," says Mills. "Delia fabricated the baseline out of two or three lines of tape.
"You'd be scrabbling around the floor saying 'Where's that half-inch of tape I wanted to play on the front of that note?'"
Every sound generated by the workshop and used in radio or television is preserved, partly in thanks to archivist Mark Ayres, who worked there while a student.
He believes one of its greatest legacies is that it made listeners more used to hearing such sounds as part of everyday entertainment and education.
"[It led to] the steady integration of experimental sound into popular culture and the placement of such sound into the mainstream rather than it being confined to various strictly academic studios.
"Certainly, much of this took place in parallel with developments elsewhere - The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon for example.
"Later on, the workshop housed a couple of the most advanced computer-based MIDI studios in the world, but by that time competition from the outside world was too great and, under [the BBC's policy] Producer Choice, the workshop could not compete on price and its demise was inevitable."
Four sound effects that made TV history
See the BBC NEWS story for video link demonstrations.
By Tom Geoghegan
BBC News Magazine
The BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, a pioneering force in sound effects, would have been 50 this month. Ten years after it was disbanded, what remains of its former glory?
Deep in the bowels of BBC Maida Vale studios, behind a door marked B11, is all that's left of an institution in British television history.
A green lampshade, an immersion tank and half a guitar lie forlornly on a shelf, above a couple of old synthesisers in a room full of electrical bric-a-brac.
These are the sad remnants of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, set up 50 years ago to create innovative sound effects and incidental music for radio and television.
The corporation initially only offered its founders a six-month contract, because it feared any longer in the throes of such creative and experimental exercises might make them ill.
Using reel-to-reel tape machines, early heroines such as Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire recorded everyday or strange sounds and then manipulated these by speeding up, slowing down or cutting the tape with razor blades and piecing it back together.
The sound of the Tardis was one sound engineer's front-door key scraped across the bass strings on a broken piano. Other impromptu props included a lampshade, champagne corks and assorted cutlery.
Ten years ago the workshop was disbanded due to costs but its reputation as a Heath Robinson-style, pioneering force in sound is as strong as ever, acknowledged by ambient DJs like Aphex Twin.
Although much of its equipment has long been sold off, every sound and musical theme it created has been preserved. To mark its 50 years, there are plans for a CD box-set.
Here Dick Mills and Mark Ayres, who both worked there, use the surviving equipment to revive four sounds from the past.
GREEN LAMPSHADE
This was a stroke of genius from Delia Derbyshire, who died in 2001 and famously created the Doctor Who theme tune from Ron Grainer's score.
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The magic of Delia Derbyshire's lampshade, recreated by Dick Mills and Mark Ayres
She would hit the tatty-looking aluminium lampshade to create a sound with a natural, pure frequency. After recording it on tape, she would play with it to make the desired sound effect.
For a documentary on the Tuareg people of the Sahara desert, she took the ringing part of the lampshade sound, faded it up and then reconstructed it using the workshop's 12 oscillators to give a whooshing sound, allied to her own voice.
"So the camels rode off into the sunset with my voice in their hooves and a green lampshade on their backs," she once said.
The green lampshade has since gained near-mythical status and Peter Howell, who succeeded Derbyshire in the early 1970s and reworked the Doctor Who theme tune, can see why.
"It's a useful thing to cling on to because everyone knows what a lampshade is because it symbolises the use of domestic objects to produce sounds."
The workshop fascinates his music students today because of all the kit used back then, he says, and its influence is still clearly seen - an advert for a VW Golf that uses only sounds of the car, for example.
"The sampling era we're now in is the next generation of the same principle."
DALEK VOICE
The sound that sent youngsters, and many adults, cowering behind sofas was co-created by Mills, a sound engineer who joined the workshop in its first year and left 35 years later.
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Creating the voice of the Daleks
"We tried to give the impression that whenever a Dalek spoke, it wasn't speaking like we do, it was accessing words from a memory bank, so they all sound the same - dispassionate, mechanical and retrievable."
He used a centre-tap transformer plugged into the microphone of an actor standing at the side of the set, and the threat in the voice was all in the performance.
Sometimes the tape got played at the wrong speed and the voice came out slightly differently, but the arrival of the EMS VCS3 synthesiser in the late 60s did not signal the end for this tried and tested method.
In other ways, however, the synthesisers changed the way the workshop operated and - despite some resistance by individuals - offered a bigger choice.
"Synthesisers provided a wide open palate of colours and sounds to play with, but you still had to choose what you wanted to do and learn the discipline of this new technological form," says Mills.
"So on the one hand, it was easy but you still had the original difficulty of thinking of the idea in the first place."
SCI-FI DOOR OPENING
Sci-fi fans will recognise the "swooshing" door from programmes such as Doctor Who and Blake's 7, plus in the odd hotel scene in other programmes.
The suitcase synthesiser was a portable version of the VCS3, useful for jobs out of the studio.
The workshop's suitcase synth
Recalling the early days and influences, Mills says: "We would take a pre-recorded sound effect from the BBC's vast library but treated them to produce cerebral effects. If you wanted a character to appear to be thinking, you got him to read the line and put in a strange echo."
Similar techniques were already used in Europe in "musique concrete".
"They did it for their own investigation and research, but our way of life was we never did anything until a commission. So all our experimentation and research was taking place in the context of that radio or television programme."
One of Mills' proudest creations was the slimy monster sound, which was him spreading Swarfega cleaning gel on his hands and then slowing down the sound.
And he made the upset tummy of Major Bloodnok in The Goon Show, a colonial officer who liked curry, by using burp sounds and an oscillator to give a violent, explosive gastro-effect. Using contrasting sounds very quickly is a trick in audio comedy.
"We did our own thing in the name of artistic creation. Working here was a bit like surf riding. Every so often a creative wave of energy kept you going until the wave ran out."
BROKEN GUITAR
One pluck of a guitar string became the famous Dr Who bass line. Derbyshire and Mills sped it up and slowed it down to get the different notes, and these were cut to give it an extra twang on the front of every note.
Demonstration of the Radiophonic Workshop's guitar
"It slides up to the note every time if you listen carefully," says Mills. "Delia fabricated the baseline out of two or three lines of tape.
"You'd be scrabbling around the floor saying 'Where's that half-inch of tape I wanted to play on the front of that note?'"
Every sound generated by the workshop and used in radio or television is preserved, partly in thanks to archivist Mark Ayres, who worked there while a student.
He believes one of its greatest legacies is that it made listeners more used to hearing such sounds as part of everyday entertainment and education.
"[It led to] the steady integration of experimental sound into popular culture and the placement of such sound into the mainstream rather than it being confined to various strictly academic studios.
"Certainly, much of this took place in parallel with developments elsewhere - The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon for example.
"Later on, the workshop housed a couple of the most advanced computer-based MIDI studios in the world, but by that time competition from the outside world was too great and, under [the BBC's policy] Producer Choice, the workshop could not compete on price and its demise was inevitable."
De Phazz: Jazz with a Turntable (NPR)
De Phazz: Jazz with a Turntable
Listen to the story at NPR
Weekend Edition Saturday, April 26, 2008 - The music of German DJ Pit Baumgartner — a.k.a. De Phazz — is a bit hard to categorize. Calling it "jazz with a turntable," De Phazz samples and remixes music he finds just about anywhere, from Ella Fitzgerald hits to 10 cent flea market records. The outcome is both surprising and seamless.
Baumgartner plays a hybrid of electronic dance music and jazz while touring with his band and recording albums, but most of the time he works as a remixer — most notably for the Verve Remix Series — reworking classic songs by Ella Fitzgerald, Kurtis Blow and Boy George.
Baumgartner describes himself as more of a musical collage artist than composer or instrumentalist. "It's a collage thing. I love to bring things together that normally don't fit." he explains. "My music, it joins you while you are doing something. It gives you space to not listen to it immediately or constantly. But if you listen to it constantly and deeper, you should have some little pearls to find."
The artist's latest album is Tales of Trust, a solo effort that gave Baumgartner the freedom to move beyond the live band format. He says experimenting with the song dictates how it will turn out. "At a certain point the song gives you the direction. The song tells you 'listen I need a trumpet' or 'I don't need nothing, I'm an instrumental song' and then it goes by itself."
It's those combinations that Baumgartner finds most interesting. He says, "I don't think that somebody really invents new music. I don't think that's possible. There's so much music — in the train, the supermarket and the airport. I can't really tell you, 'Am I composing this or did I hear this just two days before somewhere?'"
Listen to the story at NPR
Weekend Edition Saturday, April 26, 2008 - The music of German DJ Pit Baumgartner — a.k.a. De Phazz — is a bit hard to categorize. Calling it "jazz with a turntable," De Phazz samples and remixes music he finds just about anywhere, from Ella Fitzgerald hits to 10 cent flea market records. The outcome is both surprising and seamless.
Baumgartner plays a hybrid of electronic dance music and jazz while touring with his band and recording albums, but most of the time he works as a remixer — most notably for the Verve Remix Series — reworking classic songs by Ella Fitzgerald, Kurtis Blow and Boy George.
Baumgartner describes himself as more of a musical collage artist than composer or instrumentalist. "It's a collage thing. I love to bring things together that normally don't fit." he explains. "My music, it joins you while you are doing something. It gives you space to not listen to it immediately or constantly. But if you listen to it constantly and deeper, you should have some little pearls to find."
The artist's latest album is Tales of Trust, a solo effort that gave Baumgartner the freedom to move beyond the live band format. He says experimenting with the song dictates how it will turn out. "At a certain point the song gives you the direction. The song tells you 'listen I need a trumpet' or 'I don't need nothing, I'm an instrumental song' and then it goes by itself."
It's those combinations that Baumgartner finds most interesting. He says, "I don't think that somebody really invents new music. I don't think that's possible. There's so much music — in the train, the supermarket and the airport. I can't really tell you, 'Am I composing this or did I hear this just two days before somewhere?'"
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Sa Dingding, Breakthrough Chinese Artist
World Music Central
Sa Dingding, The Breakthrough Chinese Artist, Wins Major BBC World Music Award and is Nominated for Audience Award
04/15/2008 06:34AM
Contributed by: WMC_News_Dept.
AwardsLondon, UK - Singer/songwriter Sa Dingding is helping to keep the spotlight on her native China in this Olympic year by winning the prestigious BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for Asia Pacific. This award helps establish Sa Dingding as the new face - and voice - of China around the world.
Sa Dingding is also due to appear at the Award Winners’ Concert on 30th July at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms and is confirmed artist for the WOMAD festival.
The prestigious BBC World Music award is based on the album Alive which was released globally last year through Universal Music, and which drew worldwide critical acclaim.
Sa Dingding has created a powerful and sophisticated sound by fusing the music of Chinese folk traditions and minority religions - including Tibetan Buddhism - with Western dance music and electronica. This is overlaid with her strong, haunting voice to create a uniquely appealing sound.
Sa Dingding is already well known in China, having won the title ‘Best Dance Music Singer’ there after the release of her first album in 1998. With growing international recognition, her recent trip to the UK generated significant interest from a diverse range of media, including Newsnight and the Independent.
Sa Dingding’s fascination with the music of music from the South Asian region stems from her own background; she is half Mongolian. She plays traditional Chinese string, wind and percussion instruments, and writes in several languages including Sanskrit and one she created herself from the emotions evoked by music.
More information about the Alive album and Sa Dingding is available at www.sadingding.co.uk.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
The Story Of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop
Sound On Sound
The Story Of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop
Founded in 1958
Published in SOS April 2008
[ARTICLE PREVIEW ONLY]
People : Artists/Engineers/Producers/Programmers
50 years ago this month, the most celebrated electronic music studio in the world was established. We trace the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, talking to the composers and technical staff who helped to create its unique body of work.
by Steve Marshall
I was 10 years old. As the last 'whoosh' of the Doctor Who theme dissolved into a wash of tape echo I sat transfixed by the light of the television, eagerly reading all of the end credits. "Wow!" I exclaimed. "I want to get a job in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop when I grow up!"
"I'm sorry, son," said my father. "You won't be able to do both."
Although it never felt like a 'job', I did eventually get to work in the Radiophonic Workshop. I was only there for three months, but I've never stopped going on about it. Wouldn't you too, if you'd been lucky enough to have worked in the most famous electronic music studio in history?
The story of the Radiophonic Workshop began half a century ago, in 1958.
Britain in the 1950s was a bleak place, as the nation struggled to rebuild itself after the devastation of war. Food rationing had continued right up until 1954, when bananas finally came back on sale; anything worth having was still in short supply. We now think of the '50s as the rock & roll years, but the UK charts for 1958 tell quite a different story. Elvis was there for a few weeks; so was Jerry Lee Lewis — but the chart is mostly dominated by the likes of Perry Como, Connie Francis and Vick Damone. It was a dull time for music, but things were about to get more interesting...
Defects Of The Brain
One of the few benefits of wartime had been that some women had an opportunity to work in jobs previously denied to them; Daphne Oram was one. Daphne had started working for the BBC as a 'music balancer' during the war, turning down a place at the Royal College of Music to do so. After her promotion to studio manager in the '50s, she began pestering the BBC to follow the lead of the French broadcasters, and to provide a facility for the production of electronic sound and musique concrète. Desmond Briscoe (1925-2006) was also a studio manager, with similar interests, so in 1957 the pair teamed up to produce some innovative programmes for the BBC Drama Department. Using borrowed test oscillators and tape-splicing techniques, they produced sounds that had never been heard before on the BBC.
Their nagging finally paid off, and in April 1958 Desmond and Daphne founded the Radiophonic Workshop in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios (a former ice-skating rink). They were joined later in the year by 'technical assistant' Dick Mills. Brian Hodgson came along in 1962 and he eventually ended up running the place. Brian adds: "Workshop was then a very popular word among theatre 'types', and it gave away the Drama Department origins. It was originally going to be called the Electrophonic Workshop, but it was discovered that 'electrophonic' referred to some sort of defect of the brain, so it had to be changed! A board was set up to see that the place was run properly. Unfortunately, one board member had a doctor friend, who advised that three months should be the maximum length of time that anyone could work there, as staying any longer could be injurious to their health; they'd go mad, or something. This problem recurred throughout the Workshop's history — just as a recruit was getting into the swing of things, they'd have to leave."
Daphne Oram was the first to fall foul of this rule. After three months in her new job, she was ordered back to work in a control room at Broadcasting House. But for some reason Desmond Briscoe was not required to leave: instead he was appointed as the Workshop's Senior Studio Manager. For the BBC's women, it seemed, the war was over. A lengthy and bitter row ensued, and eventually, Daphne left the BBC for good in 1959, moving to an oast-house that she'd bought in Kent and establishing her own Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition. She was replaced by Maddalena Fagandini.
Fag-ends & Lollipops
John Baker was another stalwart Radiophonic Workshop composer.
The Workshop's reputation grew over the next few years, and the ranks swelled with the addition of Brian Hodgson, Delia Derbyshire and jazz pianist John Baker. The equipment at their disposal was minimal, to say the least, as Brian recalls. "In the very beginning, Desmond had been given £2000 and the key to 'redundant plant' [the BBC's junk pile] and that was it! The place kept going for years on what we called 'fag-ends and lollipops'. 'Fag-ends' were the bits of unwanted rubbish that other departments had thrown away; 'lollipops' were the much rarer treats that were occasionally sent down to keep Desmond quiet. Like the vocoder, for instance: it was very nice, but we hadn't asked for one and didn't really need it. It was like the icing on a non-existent cake!"
The Workshop's equipment consisted merely of a lot of old tape recorders and a few pieces of test equipment that could make noises. The tape recorders could be used for echo, and reverb was also available — it came from an empty room downstairs with a microphone at one end and a speaker at the other. Maida Vale Studios is an unusual building, long and thin with one of its two floors below ground. The Radiophonic Workshop's rooms were at street level, spanning an extremely long corridor.
One room was occupied by a succession of dedicated engineers who had the tools and the know-how to fix all the broken rubbish that arrived; they also built special equipment to order. First was 'Dickie' Bird; then came Dave Young, and finally 'The Two Rays' (White and Riley). Dave Young started a tradition of visiting the nearby Portobello Market every week to buy bits and pieces for the Workshop, and this continued long after he'd left. In the '60s, a lot of ex-military kit from the war was still being sold off; Dave would return with items such as a genuine aircraft's joystick!
Much of the Workshop's output then was produced simply by using the techniques of musique concr te: natural sounds were recorded and manipulated on tape by editing, pitch-changing, and very often by reversing the tape. There was a standing joke that a Radiophonic composer could enthusiastically churn out original compositions for several years. When the inspiration ran out, all their old tracks could be re-used (and improved?) by playing them backwards!
Wobbulating The World
In the early '60s, synthesizers simply did not exist. Producer Joe Meek was using the monophonic, valve-operated Clavioline but the Radiophonic Workshop, oddly enough, never had one. What they did have, though, was all the test oscillators that they could beg, borrow or steal from other BBC departments. A method was devised for controlling 12 oscillators at a time, triggering them from a tiny home-built keyboard of recycled piano keys. Each oscillator could be independently tuned by means of a range switch and a chunky Bakelite frequency knob.
There was also the versatile 'wobbulator', a sine-wave oscillator that could be frequency modulated. It consisted of a very large metal box, with a few switches and one very large knob in the middle that could sweep the entire frequency range in one revolution. They were used in the BBC for 'calibrating reverb times in studios' apparently. And as far as the Workshop's electronic sound sources went, that was it!
Yet, curiously, it is the work produced in those early years that the Radiophonic Workshop's reputation still hangs on. The Doctor Who theme was first recorded in 1963, and still there are fans who insist that the original is the best of many versions made over the years. What's more, some of the sound effects made for the first series of Doctor Who are still being used! When the newly revamped Doctor Who appeared in 2005, hardcore fans recognised the original effects and wrote to Brian Hodgson: "How nice to hear the old original Dalek Control Room again, after all these years!"
Brian's 'Tardis' sound, dating from 1963, is also still used. "I spent a long time in planning the Tardis sound," says Brian. "I wanted a sound that seemed to be travelling in two directions at once; coming and going at the same time." The sound was actually made from the bare strings of a piano that had been dismantled. Brian scraped along some bass strings with his mum's front-door key, then set about processing the recordings, as he describes it, "with a lot of reverse feedback". (By this, I assume he means that tape echo was added, then the tape reversed so that it played backwards.) Eventually, Brian played the finished results to Dick Mills and Desmond Briscoe; at their insistence he added a slowly rising note, played on the wobbulator.
Working Up A Storm
Brian and Delia Derbyshire were, as he says, "best mates. We used to go on holiday together." In 1966, together with the founder of synth manufacturers EMS, Peter Zinovieff, they formed Unit Delta Plus, a band of sorts, and began performing on London's psychedelic underground scene. As one Workshop member remembers it, "At the end of their day at the BBC they used to race off to the West End, changing into their kaftans in the taxi." Unit Delta Plus split in 1967, but some of their gigs sound like crackers: how about the two-day 'Million Volt Light and Sound Rave' at the Roundhouse? I'm sorry to have missed that one! In 1969 the pair teamed up with David Vorhaus as the White Noise, releasing the cult classic album An Electric Storm.
The Story Of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop
Founded in 1958
Published in SOS April 2008
[ARTICLE PREVIEW ONLY]
People : Artists/Engineers/Producers/Programmers
50 years ago this month, the most celebrated electronic music studio in the world was established. We trace the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, talking to the composers and technical staff who helped to create its unique body of work.
by Steve Marshall
I was 10 years old. As the last 'whoosh' of the Doctor Who theme dissolved into a wash of tape echo I sat transfixed by the light of the television, eagerly reading all of the end credits. "Wow!" I exclaimed. "I want to get a job in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop when I grow up!"
"I'm sorry, son," said my father. "You won't be able to do both."
Although it never felt like a 'job', I did eventually get to work in the Radiophonic Workshop. I was only there for three months, but I've never stopped going on about it. Wouldn't you too, if you'd been lucky enough to have worked in the most famous electronic music studio in history?
The story of the Radiophonic Workshop began half a century ago, in 1958.
Britain in the 1950s was a bleak place, as the nation struggled to rebuild itself after the devastation of war. Food rationing had continued right up until 1954, when bananas finally came back on sale; anything worth having was still in short supply. We now think of the '50s as the rock & roll years, but the UK charts for 1958 tell quite a different story. Elvis was there for a few weeks; so was Jerry Lee Lewis — but the chart is mostly dominated by the likes of Perry Como, Connie Francis and Vick Damone. It was a dull time for music, but things were about to get more interesting...
Defects Of The Brain
One of the few benefits of wartime had been that some women had an opportunity to work in jobs previously denied to them; Daphne Oram was one. Daphne had started working for the BBC as a 'music balancer' during the war, turning down a place at the Royal College of Music to do so. After her promotion to studio manager in the '50s, she began pestering the BBC to follow the lead of the French broadcasters, and to provide a facility for the production of electronic sound and musique concrète. Desmond Briscoe (1925-2006) was also a studio manager, with similar interests, so in 1957 the pair teamed up to produce some innovative programmes for the BBC Drama Department. Using borrowed test oscillators and tape-splicing techniques, they produced sounds that had never been heard before on the BBC.
Their nagging finally paid off, and in April 1958 Desmond and Daphne founded the Radiophonic Workshop in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios (a former ice-skating rink). They were joined later in the year by 'technical assistant' Dick Mills. Brian Hodgson came along in 1962 and he eventually ended up running the place. Brian adds: "Workshop was then a very popular word among theatre 'types', and it gave away the Drama Department origins. It was originally going to be called the Electrophonic Workshop, but it was discovered that 'electrophonic' referred to some sort of defect of the brain, so it had to be changed! A board was set up to see that the place was run properly. Unfortunately, one board member had a doctor friend, who advised that three months should be the maximum length of time that anyone could work there, as staying any longer could be injurious to their health; they'd go mad, or something. This problem recurred throughout the Workshop's history — just as a recruit was getting into the swing of things, they'd have to leave."
Daphne Oram was the first to fall foul of this rule. After three months in her new job, she was ordered back to work in a control room at Broadcasting House. But for some reason Desmond Briscoe was not required to leave: instead he was appointed as the Workshop's Senior Studio Manager. For the BBC's women, it seemed, the war was over. A lengthy and bitter row ensued, and eventually, Daphne left the BBC for good in 1959, moving to an oast-house that she'd bought in Kent and establishing her own Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition. She was replaced by Maddalena Fagandini.
Fag-ends & Lollipops
John Baker was another stalwart Radiophonic Workshop composer.
The Workshop's reputation grew over the next few years, and the ranks swelled with the addition of Brian Hodgson, Delia Derbyshire and jazz pianist John Baker. The equipment at their disposal was minimal, to say the least, as Brian recalls. "In the very beginning, Desmond had been given £2000 and the key to 'redundant plant' [the BBC's junk pile] and that was it! The place kept going for years on what we called 'fag-ends and lollipops'. 'Fag-ends' were the bits of unwanted rubbish that other departments had thrown away; 'lollipops' were the much rarer treats that were occasionally sent down to keep Desmond quiet. Like the vocoder, for instance: it was very nice, but we hadn't asked for one and didn't really need it. It was like the icing on a non-existent cake!"
The Workshop's equipment consisted merely of a lot of old tape recorders and a few pieces of test equipment that could make noises. The tape recorders could be used for echo, and reverb was also available — it came from an empty room downstairs with a microphone at one end and a speaker at the other. Maida Vale Studios is an unusual building, long and thin with one of its two floors below ground. The Radiophonic Workshop's rooms were at street level, spanning an extremely long corridor.
One room was occupied by a succession of dedicated engineers who had the tools and the know-how to fix all the broken rubbish that arrived; they also built special equipment to order. First was 'Dickie' Bird; then came Dave Young, and finally 'The Two Rays' (White and Riley). Dave Young started a tradition of visiting the nearby Portobello Market every week to buy bits and pieces for the Workshop, and this continued long after he'd left. In the '60s, a lot of ex-military kit from the war was still being sold off; Dave would return with items such as a genuine aircraft's joystick!
Much of the Workshop's output then was produced simply by using the techniques of musique concr te: natural sounds were recorded and manipulated on tape by editing, pitch-changing, and very often by reversing the tape. There was a standing joke that a Radiophonic composer could enthusiastically churn out original compositions for several years. When the inspiration ran out, all their old tracks could be re-used (and improved?) by playing them backwards!
Wobbulating The World
In the early '60s, synthesizers simply did not exist. Producer Joe Meek was using the monophonic, valve-operated Clavioline but the Radiophonic Workshop, oddly enough, never had one. What they did have, though, was all the test oscillators that they could beg, borrow or steal from other BBC departments. A method was devised for controlling 12 oscillators at a time, triggering them from a tiny home-built keyboard of recycled piano keys. Each oscillator could be independently tuned by means of a range switch and a chunky Bakelite frequency knob.
There was also the versatile 'wobbulator', a sine-wave oscillator that could be frequency modulated. It consisted of a very large metal box, with a few switches and one very large knob in the middle that could sweep the entire frequency range in one revolution. They were used in the BBC for 'calibrating reverb times in studios' apparently. And as far as the Workshop's electronic sound sources went, that was it!
Yet, curiously, it is the work produced in those early years that the Radiophonic Workshop's reputation still hangs on. The Doctor Who theme was first recorded in 1963, and still there are fans who insist that the original is the best of many versions made over the years. What's more, some of the sound effects made for the first series of Doctor Who are still being used! When the newly revamped Doctor Who appeared in 2005, hardcore fans recognised the original effects and wrote to Brian Hodgson: "How nice to hear the old original Dalek Control Room again, after all these years!"
Brian's 'Tardis' sound, dating from 1963, is also still used. "I spent a long time in planning the Tardis sound," says Brian. "I wanted a sound that seemed to be travelling in two directions at once; coming and going at the same time." The sound was actually made from the bare strings of a piano that had been dismantled. Brian scraped along some bass strings with his mum's front-door key, then set about processing the recordings, as he describes it, "with a lot of reverse feedback". (By this, I assume he means that tape echo was added, then the tape reversed so that it played backwards.) Eventually, Brian played the finished results to Dick Mills and Desmond Briscoe; at their insistence he added a slowly rising note, played on the wobbulator.
Working Up A Storm
Brian and Delia Derbyshire were, as he says, "best mates. We used to go on holiday together." In 1966, together with the founder of synth manufacturers EMS, Peter Zinovieff, they formed Unit Delta Plus, a band of sorts, and began performing on London's psychedelic underground scene. As one Workshop member remembers it, "At the end of their day at the BBC they used to race off to the West End, changing into their kaftans in the taxi." Unit Delta Plus split in 1967, but some of their gigs sound like crackers: how about the two-day 'Million Volt Light and Sound Rave' at the Roundhouse? I'm sorry to have missed that one! In 1969 the pair teamed up with David Vorhaus as the White Noise, releasing the cult classic album An Electric Storm.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
British electronic musician Delia Derbyshire
A great find from Audio Lemon:
Amazing 1969 electronica pop from electronic musician/composer Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) as part of the group White Noise. "Love Without Sound" has a startlingly contemporary sound to it, basically sounding like 90s-2000s trip-hop minus the fat beats and contemporary recording technology. This was all done the hard way, with an X-acto knife, tape loops, primitive synthesizers:
And this clip of her beat matching reel to reel loops:
Amazing 1969 electronica pop from electronic musician/composer Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) as part of the group White Noise. "Love Without Sound" has a startlingly contemporary sound to it, basically sounding like 90s-2000s trip-hop minus the fat beats and contemporary recording technology. This was all done the hard way, with an X-acto knife, tape loops, primitive synthesizers:
And this clip of her beat matching reel to reel loops:
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Daft Punk Review in New York Times
Read it here.Cool photo of their pyramid control council and standard issue robot helmets (photos Michael Falco for The New York Times):
Friday, June 29, 2007
DJ Oakenfold Plays Concert w/Boston Pops
Pioneering DJ sets sights on Hollywood
By Jason Szep2 hours, 3 minutes ago
Paul Oakenfold is famous as a DJ, but this week the pioneer of "trance" dance music assumed the unusual role of playing with a 75-piece orchestra for well-heeled, champagne-sipping classical music lovers.
By playing in one of America's oldest symphony halls with the Boston Pops, he is remixing the conventional image of a DJ -- a job that has itself morphed from obscure nightclubs to celebrity status as DJs tour the globe like rock stars, put their spin on popular music and produce original work.
In an interview with Reuters, the 43-year-old Briton said his Pops performance reflected the evolution of DJs and dovetails with his work scoring music for Hollywood films such as "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Collateral."
"I'm comfortable with an orchestra because of working in film. I'm just trying to attempt more and more," said Oakenfold, who moved from Britain to Hollywood five years ago.
"From these couple of shows we are already in talks maybe to tour something around the world and hook into local orchestras," he said. "It's a challenge for me and something that I would enjoy doing."
But playing with the Boston Pops in such an intimate setting caused him some anxiety.
"I'm so used to people dancing right here in front," he said from the stage of Boston's Symphony Hall, surrounded by CD players, a turntable, synthesizer and mixer.
"They are just going to be sitting there looking up at me, so I'm a bit worried," he said before performing.
Oakenfold, one of the most influential figures in global club culture of the past 15 years, is known for remixing songs by Madonna and U2. His audience has developed beyond nightclubs into stadiums filled with thousands -- at fees as high as $50,000 a gig.
MOODY ATMOSPHERICS
The Boston performance, touted as a world premiere by the Boston Pops, was ambitious.
Oakenfold mixed samples and pre-recorded drum tracks, "scratched" on a turntable by nudging a vinyl record back and forth against the stylus, and played a synthesizer as the orchestra performed and a drummer kept pace with an electronic drum kit and another synthesizer.
The piece, part of a nearly two-hour "EdgeFest" concert by the Pops, was written by Los Angeles composer Felix Brenner and drew loud applause.
As Oakenfold played, some of the electronically produced parts were barely audible over the orchestra, creating moody atmospherics, although one section featured thundering electric bass drums that clearly startled the audience.
"You're talking about human versus the machine," said Brenner, describing the addition of a DJ to the orchestra as a live "symphonic remix."
"We're pushing that envelope. I approached a lot of different people to do this but most were scared of the idea. But Paul said 'That sounds cool.' So we got together with it."
Oakenfold's two-day Pops performance comes as classical music is gaining popularity.
Thanks to "crossover" acts such as Josh Groban, classical was the fastest-growing musical genre in 2006, with album sales up 22.5 percent. Meanwhile, many popular genres fell, including rap which dropped 20.7 percent, and R&B, which was down 18.4 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Oakenfold, who last year toured with Madonna and remixed Justin Timberlake's single "My Love," said the music that made him famous -- house and trance -- will never be as mainstream as hip hop and other music popularized by the likes of MTV.
"You just don't have the artists and the videos, radios are not playing it," he said.
The Boston Pops, famous for light classical music, is in the third year of its "Pops on the Edge" series that has also featured singer-songwriter Aimee Mann and soulful Kentucky rockers My Morning Jacket as it seeks a broader audience.
By Jason Szep2 hours, 3 minutes ago
Paul Oakenfold is famous as a DJ, but this week the pioneer of "trance" dance music assumed the unusual role of playing with a 75-piece orchestra for well-heeled, champagne-sipping classical music lovers.
By playing in one of America's oldest symphony halls with the Boston Pops, he is remixing the conventional image of a DJ -- a job that has itself morphed from obscure nightclubs to celebrity status as DJs tour the globe like rock stars, put their spin on popular music and produce original work.
In an interview with Reuters, the 43-year-old Briton said his Pops performance reflected the evolution of DJs and dovetails with his work scoring music for Hollywood films such as "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Collateral."
"I'm comfortable with an orchestra because of working in film. I'm just trying to attempt more and more," said Oakenfold, who moved from Britain to Hollywood five years ago.
"From these couple of shows we are already in talks maybe to tour something around the world and hook into local orchestras," he said. "It's a challenge for me and something that I would enjoy doing."
But playing with the Boston Pops in such an intimate setting caused him some anxiety.
"I'm so used to people dancing right here in front," he said from the stage of Boston's Symphony Hall, surrounded by CD players, a turntable, synthesizer and mixer.
"They are just going to be sitting there looking up at me, so I'm a bit worried," he said before performing.
Oakenfold, one of the most influential figures in global club culture of the past 15 years, is known for remixing songs by Madonna and U2. His audience has developed beyond nightclubs into stadiums filled with thousands -- at fees as high as $50,000 a gig.
MOODY ATMOSPHERICS
The Boston performance, touted as a world premiere by the Boston Pops, was ambitious.
Oakenfold mixed samples and pre-recorded drum tracks, "scratched" on a turntable by nudging a vinyl record back and forth against the stylus, and played a synthesizer as the orchestra performed and a drummer kept pace with an electronic drum kit and another synthesizer.
The piece, part of a nearly two-hour "EdgeFest" concert by the Pops, was written by Los Angeles composer Felix Brenner and drew loud applause.
As Oakenfold played, some of the electronically produced parts were barely audible over the orchestra, creating moody atmospherics, although one section featured thundering electric bass drums that clearly startled the audience.
"You're talking about human versus the machine," said Brenner, describing the addition of a DJ to the orchestra as a live "symphonic remix."
"We're pushing that envelope. I approached a lot of different people to do this but most were scared of the idea. But Paul said 'That sounds cool.' So we got together with it."
Oakenfold's two-day Pops performance comes as classical music is gaining popularity.
Thanks to "crossover" acts such as Josh Groban, classical was the fastest-growing musical genre in 2006, with album sales up 22.5 percent. Meanwhile, many popular genres fell, including rap which dropped 20.7 percent, and R&B, which was down 18.4 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Oakenfold, who last year toured with Madonna and remixed Justin Timberlake's single "My Love," said the music that made him famous -- house and trance -- will never be as mainstream as hip hop and other music popularized by the likes of MTV.
"You just don't have the artists and the videos, radios are not playing it," he said.
The Boston Pops, famous for light classical music, is in the third year of its "Pops on the Edge" series that has also featured singer-songwriter Aimee Mann and soulful Kentucky rockers My Morning Jacket as it seeks a broader audience.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Techno Pioneer Derrick May
Village Voice
Industrial Deevolutionary
A Detroit techno pioneer returns to woo the ladies back
by Kylen Campbell
February 23rd, 2007 5:20 PM
"Techno has been branded horribly," declares Derrick May. "A lot of people have a misconception of what it is. It's been branded as music that violates the cortex, as music that says, 'Girls, stay away.' It's been branded to be this music about teenage boys on ecstasy with their shirts off with red faces. So what most people have heard is a poor example of what the music is." In truth, as May—the Detroit native who helped invent the genre along with high school friends Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson—will be the first to tell you, techno is really just high-tech soul.
Nowadays, of course, the term is used—derisively, by some—to describe any electronic dance music, but its genesis is much more specific. Initially, it was a new spin on house music (i.e., disco's revenge) that distinguished itself with self-consciously synthesized sounds: a reconfiguring of classic Motor City soul with synthesizers that presaged the technology boom, which itself hit musicians just as the auto industry lurched and stumbled. Against that backdrop of industrial devolution, Atkins, Saunderson, and May married house's sensual bounce with funk's sweaty urgency, packaging it in gritty technology that betrayed its very human makers.
As for May personally, he is a wordly evangelist of the sound, DJ'ing internationally hundreds of days a year. His original production output, defined by emotive force and sublime grooves, ceased as such in 1991. But the 20-odd tracks he wrote between 1986 and 1991—songs like "Nude Photo" and the anthemic "Strings of Life"—are a microcosm of the formulas, sounds, riffs, vamps, and grooves that define much electronic music today. The studio is still a second home to the now prolific remixer, who recently completed work on the soundtrack to the film Tekkon Konkrete, hailed as Akira's successor in anime circles. He's also served as a producer for Detroit's seven-year-old electronic music festival, while his revered label, Transmat, will soon release Transmat 20: 20 Years of Detroit Techno.
A skilled turntable master by any reckoning, May is here this weekend in conjunction with a screening of Gary Bredow's documentary High Tech Soul: The Creation of Techno Music, a labor of love that chronicles techno's genesis via nuanced interviews and smart cultural context. It tells the tale, as May says, of "How three young black kids took on the world and, against the odds, made it happen." The minds have long since been freed; the asses continue to follow.
For more about Derrick May, check out his website (it's got a great techno groove pumping while you surf it):
http://www.derrickmay.com/
Industrial Deevolutionary
A Detroit techno pioneer returns to woo the ladies back
by Kylen Campbell
February 23rd, 2007 5:20 PM
"Techno has been branded horribly," declares Derrick May. "A lot of people have a misconception of what it is. It's been branded as music that violates the cortex, as music that says, 'Girls, stay away.' It's been branded to be this music about teenage boys on ecstasy with their shirts off with red faces. So what most people have heard is a poor example of what the music is." In truth, as May—the Detroit native who helped invent the genre along with high school friends Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson—will be the first to tell you, techno is really just high-tech soul.
Nowadays, of course, the term is used—derisively, by some—to describe any electronic dance music, but its genesis is much more specific. Initially, it was a new spin on house music (i.e., disco's revenge) that distinguished itself with self-consciously synthesized sounds: a reconfiguring of classic Motor City soul with synthesizers that presaged the technology boom, which itself hit musicians just as the auto industry lurched and stumbled. Against that backdrop of industrial devolution, Atkins, Saunderson, and May married house's sensual bounce with funk's sweaty urgency, packaging it in gritty technology that betrayed its very human makers.
As for May personally, he is a wordly evangelist of the sound, DJ'ing internationally hundreds of days a year. His original production output, defined by emotive force and sublime grooves, ceased as such in 1991. But the 20-odd tracks he wrote between 1986 and 1991—songs like "Nude Photo" and the anthemic "Strings of Life"—are a microcosm of the formulas, sounds, riffs, vamps, and grooves that define much electronic music today. The studio is still a second home to the now prolific remixer, who recently completed work on the soundtrack to the film Tekkon Konkrete, hailed as Akira's successor in anime circles. He's also served as a producer for Detroit's seven-year-old electronic music festival, while his revered label, Transmat, will soon release Transmat 20: 20 Years of Detroit Techno.
A skilled turntable master by any reckoning, May is here this weekend in conjunction with a screening of Gary Bredow's documentary High Tech Soul: The Creation of Techno Music, a labor of love that chronicles techno's genesis via nuanced interviews and smart cultural context. It tells the tale, as May says, of "How three young black kids took on the world and, against the odds, made it happen." The minds have long since been freed; the asses continue to follow.
For more about Derrick May, check out his website (it's got a great techno groove pumping while you surf it):
http://www.derrickmay.com/
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Academy Awards to Use DJ
New York Times
February 18, 2007
A Night Out With Liza Richardson
Strike Up the Turntable
By MONICA CORCORAN
WEST HOLLYWOOD
EVERY performer has a different definition of a tough crowd, from comedy clubs in Berlin to the buffet-obsessed folks aboard a cruise ship.
“You can’t pay me enough to play a wedding,” said Liza Richardson, a professional D.J., as she sipped a dirty martini here at the Italian bistro Dominick’s. “The couple has their list of favorite songs and then, you have to please the parents and maybe even the grandparents.”
A week from today, Ms. Richardson will be spinning tunes at the ultimate Hollywood wedding: the Academy Awards. Tense guys wearing tuxedos? Check. Rambling, awkward speeches that make everyone’s toes curl? Check. A crowd ranging in age from starlet to septuagenarian? Check.
She is the first-ever Oscar D.J., and admits that she is as nervous as a nominee.
“My job is to keep the mood upbeat and to keep everyone from wandering off to the bar during commercials,” said Ms. Richardson, 42, who will be playing three-minute sets from a suspended booth during untelevised breaks. “But my personal goal is to get Forest Whitaker to look up and give me a thumbs up.”
At that very moment on this recent Friday night, though, it was a roasted branzino with glassy eyes that was ogling her.
“Whoa! What? How?” Ms. Richardson exclaimed, fork in hand.
She and her friend Tereza Scharf, who is married to the artist Kenny Scharf, summoned a waiter. When he politely told them that the chef preferred patrons to fillet their own fish, the two didn’t fuss. They shrugged and gingerly dug in.
Ms. Richardson, who is as slender as a tulip stem and feline in her demeanor, wore a mint green minidress by the up-and-coming London designer Christopher Kane and minimal makeup. When she laughed, her head jerked backward as if someone had tugged at her long light-brown hair.
In Los Angeles, Ms. Richardson has a devout following for her weekly Saturday night radio show devoted to underground funk and house music called “The Drop” on KCRW. Techno music lovers melt at the mere mention of her name. She worked as music supervisor on the films “Lords of Dogtown” and “Failure to Launch,” and currently oversees the soundtrack for the NBC show “Friday Night Lights.”
Ms. Richardson and Ms. Scharf chatted about Beat poets, the current resurgence in Italo-disco music, and tinnitus. (Ms. Richardson, like most D.J.’s, is quite sure that she will need a hearing aid at some point in her career.)
When the topic veered to how the masses process music, a discussion on the dearth of modern philosophers ensued. “I don’t think music has replaced philosophy because people want songs to be so surface,” said Ms. Scharf, who is Brazilian. “But what else moves people on so many levels?”
After espressos, the two hopped into Ms. Richardson’s white station wagon and headed to a pre-Grammy party in Hollywood held by her manager and other music industry executives.
“Oh boy! I think we have to just dive in,” she said, upon arriving in a courtyard packed with a young (mostly male, scruffy-chinned) crowd. Ms. Richardson chatted with a few guests and nursed a plastic cup of vodka.
The two decamped shortly after 1 a.m. Plans for moving on to an underground D.J. party in Venice were trumped by Ms. Richardson’s intention to go surfing at dawn. “The industry isn’t about sleazy, rich music producers anymore because there’s not enough money,” she said, referring to the decidedly unpolished scene they left behind. “Now, it’s just a bunch of young guys hustling.”
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Story on Thievery Corporation
10 Years Later, Duo Is Still Thick as Thieves
By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 15, 2006; WE09
Consider Thievery Corporation's four-night stand at the 9:30 club Wednesday through Dec. 23 as part holiday party and part 10th anniversary celebration for the Washington-based production and DJ duo Rob Garza and Eric Hilton and their Eighteenth Street Lounge label. There will also be a series of after-concert parties at the Lounge (entry is free with a Thievery Corporation/9:30 club ticket) as well as a Dec. 22 concert at the Rock and Roll Hotel with three ESL acts.
But then it's back to work: beginning preparations for another studio album, Thievery Corporation's sixth, and the new album by Argentine guitarist Federico Aubele. (Hilton was putting finishing touches on it last weekend.) There's also a new ESL subsidiary, the more rock-oriented ViviColorSound, whose first release will be Garza's new rock-oriented side project, Dust Galaxy.
And Hilton has been busy editing "Babylon Central," which he describes as "a low-budget feature shot in high definition so it looks good." Shot locally with a mostly amateur cast, "it's very much about D.C.: cross-cultural threads, music threads, conspiratorial political threads, a love story. There's a lot going on in a 90-minute movie," says Hilton, who hopes to have a rough cut in the next month. Thievery may release it itself, or it may find a distributor. Hilton insists: "I don't have any delusions of grandeur. I've never made a movie before."
Of course, it wasn't that long ago Hilton could say he'd never made a record. Blame it on the bossa nova (at least partly). It's one of the musical styles that bonded Hilton and Garza when the two suburban Marylanders met in 1995 at the then-new Eighteenth Street Lounge opened by Hilton and some friends. Both had wide listening palettes -- punk (DC/Dischord punk in particular) and the edgier ends of rock, dancehall and dub, hip-hop and house, classic soul, jazz and, it turns out, bossa nova, a music first popularized in the United States by 1962's Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd album, "Jazz Samba," recorded at All Souls Unitarian Church just a few blocks from Thievery Corporation Central on Calvert Street NW.
Both Hilton and Garza were DJs and producers with inclinations toward what's now known as down-tempo electronica (a.k.a. chill, a.k.a. lounge). At the time, Hilton says, he "had more hopes and expectations for the lounge than for my own music career. It was a good location, and we were all into a certain kind of music that we could finally play every night in our own spot. DJ-ing there really inspired me to get back to it, and about a month into it, I met Rob."
They moved to a friend's apartment, "put our studio gear together, which was very minimal, and just worked on a track for four hours. And after four hours, it was pretty much finished -- the fastest either of us had ever made a decent piece of music." That first Hilton-Garza collaboration, "Far East Coast," came out credited to Exodus Quartet, a band Hilton had formed a few years earlier with Fari Ali to re-create the experience of the local Exodus acid jazz club, "but it was very Thievery-sounding," Hilton says.
In the early days, "we'd get together in the evenings, have a couple of beers and play records and play music -- experimenting with different sounds, seeing what would come of mixing all these [elements] in a recording studio. We pressed a couple of vinyl singles and thought that was great when they sold and people liked them."
In 1996, those people included producers Kruder & Dorfmeister, who licensed the "Shaolin Satellite" 12-inch for a volume in the popular "DJ Kicks" series. Day jobs -- Hilton managing the Lounge, Garza working for his father's aviation security and counterterrorism business while taking classes at community college -- suddenly seemed less interesting, or necessary. A decade later, Garza says he's still "really surprised. For me, it was just a hobby, and the same thing for Eric -- he'd try to sneak in some time when he wasn't managing the bar."
According to Hilton, "we pressed the CD [1997's 'Sounds From the Thievery Hi-Fi'] and sold the first 1,000 copies the first day, so we reordered and reordered, and, before you knew it, we were on the road to owning a label, doing more records. It just sort of happened step by step, very gradual."
Along the way, the two moved from underground status to low-key ubiquity: Their music has been in video games (albeit for cricket and golf, though the golf game was for Tiger Woods); commercials (Dockers, Citibank, Lincoln); television ("The West Wing," "ER," "The Sopranos," "Sex and the City") and movie soundtracks ("Vanilla Sky," the remake of "Psycho" and the Grammy-winning "Garden State," which used "Lebanese Blonde," the duo's only sort-of-a-hit).
One of the things that distinguished Thievery was its embrace of world sounds, not just from Brazil and Jamaica, but from India, the Middle East, West Africa and elsewhere. For that, Garza and Hilton thank the bars and restaurants of the multicultural Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle neighborhoods, where they hung out.
"Washington's a very cosmopolitan city," Garza says, "and at the time, we were going to all these bars where you could hear Brazilian music or reggae or West African music. On any given night, you could just go out and dive into all this great music."
It's where they met singer Pam Bricker, a master of jazz and Brazilian music who would be a big part of the first three Thievery albums (it's her vocals on "Lebanese Blonde") and who toured with them before her suicide in 1995.
Hilton remembers "going to Second Story Books in Bethesda and picking up really collectible Brazilian records for $3 that cost $100 on the Internet and were probably dropped off by someone who worked at the Brazilian Embassy."
Sometimes, he and Garza found inspiration around the corner or down the block. LouLou, who has contributed Thievery vocals in English, French and Farsi, was working as a waitress and manager at Tryst on 18th Street NW and hanging around the studio with her then-boyfriend, reggae singer Rootz, when Hilton and Garza heard her singing, decided to try her on some grooves and "knew we had to do something," Garza says. Colombian percussionist Verny Varela and Brazilian singer Patrick DeSantos were discovered when Hilton and Garza were "hanging out at the Rumba Cafe drinking mojitos and checking out the music. That we've been able to pull really talented people from our own back yard is really great," Garza says. Local vocalists performing at Thievery's 9:30 shows include Verela, LouLou, Sista Pat and Rootz & Zeebo, who will also perform with their dancehall reggae band See-I at the Eighteenth Street Lounge on Wednesday with guest Sleepy Wonder.
"It's a D.C. thing, and we're very fortunate," Hilton says.
That also accounts for an increasing political consciousness that first appeared on 2002's "The Richest Man in Babylon" and became more evident on last year's "The Cosmic Game." Among that album's offerings: "Marching the Hate Machines (Into the Sun)," a peace anthem collaboration with Wayne Coyne and Flaming Lips, and "The Revolution Solution" with guest singer Perry Farrell. Thievery also helped organize the massive Operation Ceasefire concert last year on the Mall protesting the war in Iraq.
"It's part of our personal growth," Hilton says. "We've seen a lot of things go down in the last six years that made us wonder and think and change our perspective."
There are historic inspirations, Dischord and Positive Force locally, punk and reggae generally, but it's a relatively new element in the world of electronic music, Hilton says. "We've been fighting that whole 'lounge music' pigeonhole for a long time. It's such a broad category -- anything that doesn't have abrasive edges is thrown into the lounge category. We didn't want to exclude our sound from that type of positive energy."
Garza has been putting the finishing touches on his Dust Galaxy debut, recorded in London with British producer Brendan Lynch (Paul Weller, Primal Scream, Asian Dub Foundation, Ocean Colour Scene). "It was fun going over there and working with a bunch of different musicians and creating some new things," Garza said last week from a Munich airport as Dust Galaxy was on its way to Amsterdam after dates in Greece, Spain and Portugal. Guest musicians on the album include several members of Primal Scream and Adam Blake of Cornershop, but the touring band comprises a few Washington-based musicians: drummer Jerry Busher (Fugazi's roadie and "second drummer"), guitarist James Canty (the Make-Up, the Pharmacists) and bassist Ashish Vyas.
"It's been wild," says Garza, admitting that a new mindset has been necessary fronting a band rather than being a behind-the-scenes operator. "You get up and you really have to deliver the songs -- it's a different intensity of performing."
Ironically, Hilton is the Corporation man who'd played in rock bands before making what he calls "an electronic segue. I started out trying to make the whole Dischord sound with high school friends -- it wasn't hard, you just had to play fast and have strong wrists!"
"When Rob first started doing Dust Galaxy, I started worrying he was never going to do Thievery Corporation again, but after a year to process that and to work on my own, I realize everybody needs a break from what they're doing, and I think it's a healthy thing for him and for me."
Dust Galaxy performs Dec. 21 at Eighteenth Street Lounge. Other singers include Sleepy Wonder and Karina Zeviani, and the full band will feature bass, guitar, sitar, two percussionists, live horns, Garza on keyboards and effects, and Hilton on beats.
By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 15, 2006; WE09
Consider Thievery Corporation's four-night stand at the 9:30 club Wednesday through Dec. 23 as part holiday party and part 10th anniversary celebration for the Washington-based production and DJ duo Rob Garza and Eric Hilton and their Eighteenth Street Lounge label. There will also be a series of after-concert parties at the Lounge (entry is free with a Thievery Corporation/9:30 club ticket) as well as a Dec. 22 concert at the Rock and Roll Hotel with three ESL acts.
But then it's back to work: beginning preparations for another studio album, Thievery Corporation's sixth, and the new album by Argentine guitarist Federico Aubele. (Hilton was putting finishing touches on it last weekend.) There's also a new ESL subsidiary, the more rock-oriented ViviColorSound, whose first release will be Garza's new rock-oriented side project, Dust Galaxy.
And Hilton has been busy editing "Babylon Central," which he describes as "a low-budget feature shot in high definition so it looks good." Shot locally with a mostly amateur cast, "it's very much about D.C.: cross-cultural threads, music threads, conspiratorial political threads, a love story. There's a lot going on in a 90-minute movie," says Hilton, who hopes to have a rough cut in the next month. Thievery may release it itself, or it may find a distributor. Hilton insists: "I don't have any delusions of grandeur. I've never made a movie before."
Of course, it wasn't that long ago Hilton could say he'd never made a record. Blame it on the bossa nova (at least partly). It's one of the musical styles that bonded Hilton and Garza when the two suburban Marylanders met in 1995 at the then-new Eighteenth Street Lounge opened by Hilton and some friends. Both had wide listening palettes -- punk (DC/Dischord punk in particular) and the edgier ends of rock, dancehall and dub, hip-hop and house, classic soul, jazz and, it turns out, bossa nova, a music first popularized in the United States by 1962's Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd album, "Jazz Samba," recorded at All Souls Unitarian Church just a few blocks from Thievery Corporation Central on Calvert Street NW.
Both Hilton and Garza were DJs and producers with inclinations toward what's now known as down-tempo electronica (a.k.a. chill, a.k.a. lounge). At the time, Hilton says, he "had more hopes and expectations for the lounge than for my own music career. It was a good location, and we were all into a certain kind of music that we could finally play every night in our own spot. DJ-ing there really inspired me to get back to it, and about a month into it, I met Rob."
They moved to a friend's apartment, "put our studio gear together, which was very minimal, and just worked on a track for four hours. And after four hours, it was pretty much finished -- the fastest either of us had ever made a decent piece of music." That first Hilton-Garza collaboration, "Far East Coast," came out credited to Exodus Quartet, a band Hilton had formed a few years earlier with Fari Ali to re-create the experience of the local Exodus acid jazz club, "but it was very Thievery-sounding," Hilton says.
In the early days, "we'd get together in the evenings, have a couple of beers and play records and play music -- experimenting with different sounds, seeing what would come of mixing all these [elements] in a recording studio. We pressed a couple of vinyl singles and thought that was great when they sold and people liked them."
In 1996, those people included producers Kruder & Dorfmeister, who licensed the "Shaolin Satellite" 12-inch for a volume in the popular "DJ Kicks" series. Day jobs -- Hilton managing the Lounge, Garza working for his father's aviation security and counterterrorism business while taking classes at community college -- suddenly seemed less interesting, or necessary. A decade later, Garza says he's still "really surprised. For me, it was just a hobby, and the same thing for Eric -- he'd try to sneak in some time when he wasn't managing the bar."
According to Hilton, "we pressed the CD [1997's 'Sounds From the Thievery Hi-Fi'] and sold the first 1,000 copies the first day, so we reordered and reordered, and, before you knew it, we were on the road to owning a label, doing more records. It just sort of happened step by step, very gradual."
Along the way, the two moved from underground status to low-key ubiquity: Their music has been in video games (albeit for cricket and golf, though the golf game was for Tiger Woods); commercials (Dockers, Citibank, Lincoln); television ("The West Wing," "ER," "The Sopranos," "Sex and the City") and movie soundtracks ("Vanilla Sky," the remake of "Psycho" and the Grammy-winning "Garden State," which used "Lebanese Blonde," the duo's only sort-of-a-hit).
One of the things that distinguished Thievery was its embrace of world sounds, not just from Brazil and Jamaica, but from India, the Middle East, West Africa and elsewhere. For that, Garza and Hilton thank the bars and restaurants of the multicultural Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle neighborhoods, where they hung out.
"Washington's a very cosmopolitan city," Garza says, "and at the time, we were going to all these bars where you could hear Brazilian music or reggae or West African music. On any given night, you could just go out and dive into all this great music."
It's where they met singer Pam Bricker, a master of jazz and Brazilian music who would be a big part of the first three Thievery albums (it's her vocals on "Lebanese Blonde") and who toured with them before her suicide in 1995.
Hilton remembers "going to Second Story Books in Bethesda and picking up really collectible Brazilian records for $3 that cost $100 on the Internet and were probably dropped off by someone who worked at the Brazilian Embassy."
Sometimes, he and Garza found inspiration around the corner or down the block. LouLou, who has contributed Thievery vocals in English, French and Farsi, was working as a waitress and manager at Tryst on 18th Street NW and hanging around the studio with her then-boyfriend, reggae singer Rootz, when Hilton and Garza heard her singing, decided to try her on some grooves and "knew we had to do something," Garza says. Colombian percussionist Verny Varela and Brazilian singer Patrick DeSantos were discovered when Hilton and Garza were "hanging out at the Rumba Cafe drinking mojitos and checking out the music. That we've been able to pull really talented people from our own back yard is really great," Garza says. Local vocalists performing at Thievery's 9:30 shows include Verela, LouLou, Sista Pat and Rootz & Zeebo, who will also perform with their dancehall reggae band See-I at the Eighteenth Street Lounge on Wednesday with guest Sleepy Wonder.
"It's a D.C. thing, and we're very fortunate," Hilton says.
That also accounts for an increasing political consciousness that first appeared on 2002's "The Richest Man in Babylon" and became more evident on last year's "The Cosmic Game." Among that album's offerings: "Marching the Hate Machines (Into the Sun)," a peace anthem collaboration with Wayne Coyne and Flaming Lips, and "The Revolution Solution" with guest singer Perry Farrell. Thievery also helped organize the massive Operation Ceasefire concert last year on the Mall protesting the war in Iraq.
"It's part of our personal growth," Hilton says. "We've seen a lot of things go down in the last six years that made us wonder and think and change our perspective."
There are historic inspirations, Dischord and Positive Force locally, punk and reggae generally, but it's a relatively new element in the world of electronic music, Hilton says. "We've been fighting that whole 'lounge music' pigeonhole for a long time. It's such a broad category -- anything that doesn't have abrasive edges is thrown into the lounge category. We didn't want to exclude our sound from that type of positive energy."
Garza has been putting the finishing touches on his Dust Galaxy debut, recorded in London with British producer Brendan Lynch (Paul Weller, Primal Scream, Asian Dub Foundation, Ocean Colour Scene). "It was fun going over there and working with a bunch of different musicians and creating some new things," Garza said last week from a Munich airport as Dust Galaxy was on its way to Amsterdam after dates in Greece, Spain and Portugal. Guest musicians on the album include several members of Primal Scream and Adam Blake of Cornershop, but the touring band comprises a few Washington-based musicians: drummer Jerry Busher (Fugazi's roadie and "second drummer"), guitarist James Canty (the Make-Up, the Pharmacists) and bassist Ashish Vyas.
"It's been wild," says Garza, admitting that a new mindset has been necessary fronting a band rather than being a behind-the-scenes operator. "You get up and you really have to deliver the songs -- it's a different intensity of performing."
Ironically, Hilton is the Corporation man who'd played in rock bands before making what he calls "an electronic segue. I started out trying to make the whole Dischord sound with high school friends -- it wasn't hard, you just had to play fast and have strong wrists!"
"When Rob first started doing Dust Galaxy, I started worrying he was never going to do Thievery Corporation again, but after a year to process that and to work on my own, I realize everybody needs a break from what they're doing, and I think it's a healthy thing for him and for me."
Dust Galaxy performs Dec. 21 at Eighteenth Street Lounge. Other singers include Sleepy Wonder and Karina Zeviani, and the full band will feature bass, guitar, sitar, two percussionists, live horns, Garza on keyboards and effects, and Hilton on beats.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
2006: The Year the Superstar DJ Died
From miaminewtimes.com
Originally published by Miami New Times 2006-12-28
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
2006: The Year the Superstar DJ Died
Dinosaurs rule the dance floors no more
By Jean Carey
Superstar DJs
For nearly a decade, the giants of electronic dance music, a cold-blooded cadre mostly from northern Europe, lumbered across the earth. Tiësto, Paul van Dyk, Paul Oakenfold, Seb Fontaine, Judge Jules, and Fatboy Slim dominated small suburban dance floors and Ibizan caverns with crafty disco assembled from chest-rattling bass lines and sampled treasures from earlier civilizations.
Suddenly, in 2006, like dinosaurs shuddering in the freezing contrail of a passing comet, the time of the superstar DJs ended. Today the big boys are gasping for space as overpaid nightclub hosts, while small, furry mammals named Busdriver, Ellen Allien, and Otto von Schirach have sprung forth to occupy their musical niche in the ecosystem.
The sad thing — one of the sad things — about the superstar DJs' looming extinction is that they didn't begin with Brontosaurus brains. IDM, or intelligent dance music, is the obviously and deliberately limiting terminology for electronica that isn't stupid. The expression dates back to a description of Coil's 1991 album The Snow, which set the IQ bar pretty high, and the artists who followed in the last decade of the century — the Orb, Autechre, Future Sound of London — kept apace.
By 2000, European electronic dance music evolved into dozens of microgenres from the various species of house music, techno, and EBM. Pioneering DJs such as Oakenfold and Fatboy Slim found they could press their popular discs and also attract respectable concert attendance numbers through careful marketing of their riveting live sets, which blended their own compositions with remixes of other artists' tracks. Meanwhile in the States, dance music factions were essentially limited to house and trance, a situation that continues today.
And why shouldn't it? Americans almost always muck up the nuance in the cultures we import, and dance music has proven no exception. While European DJs cultivated a humbly anonymous aesthetic, Americans reinvented the DJ as turntable-toting rock star. Thus today we enjoy the Crystal Method's relentless efforts to brand its members' faces on maximum party records, such as the cleverly named Tweekend and Legion of Boom. And this year, both the Crystal Method and tagger-along LCD Soundsystem produced 45-minute "workout mixes" in association with Nike.
But it is now clear that the DJ craze is on the wane in the United States. The huge throngs that once welcomed van Dyk, Carl Cox, and the ubiquitous Oakenfold have dried up, at least in the smaller major cities. Once people in places like Dallas and Atlanta figured out the headliner would show up at 3:00 a.m., play a twenty-minute set, and split, it was all over, and from then on, guys like that were forced to retreat to tried-and-true markets such as Miami, New York, and San Francisco for hosting duties at superclubs.
And the superstar DJ system never encouraged a farm team system, where beginners could earn their nightclub stripes in small markets and move up to larger ones. That role fell to the DJ music on MySpace and YouTube. But that system is far from perfect, or even viable. How many Optimo or Bugz in the Attic remixes by suburban Tulsa kids can anyone make it through?
Still, there were some outstanding offerings on the better sportswear floor of the dance music department store, and several of those were even from America.
Steve Lawler's Lights Out 3 (as well as the import Viva) reached our shores early in 2006, and the two-disc set featured some of the stalwart British producer's most symphonic work to date.
Trance music pioneer Brian Transeau, better known as BT, has been an amazingly prolific composer for years, and most of the songs he plays are originals, not remixes or compilations. His late-year release, This Binary Universe, continued the Marylander's exploration into mathematical and philosophical themes via the harmonically named (and sounding) "The Internal Locus" and "The Antikythera Mechanism." Plus BT dedicates the disc to his beloved pet dog, which died this year. All of this might seem precious, save for BT's long record of sincerity sans new-age ickiness. (BT is on tour right now with another IDM forefather, Thomas Dolby, who dropped his first record in years in December, The Sole Inhabitant, a collection of live performances and new material.)
"Burma," a trickily looped onslaught of deep progressive breaks from Australia's Lostep, leant itself to creative remixing by everyone from Sasha to Galaxy Girl, but the track was great on its own (as was the rest of the duo's cohesive album Because We Can). Perhaps a little Outback isolation is just what dance music needs.
Hybrid's I Choose Noise offered a good array of Mike Truman and Chris Healings's vast collection of regular collaborators, including Peter Hook, Judie Tzuke, and Quivver (John Graham). Strangely the atmospheric, dark tracks on I Choose Noise did not include "Space Manoeuvres Part 3," a Hybrid live set staple and one of the year's best Internet-disseminated singles. This remarkable, haunting number contains an overlay of Kiefer Sutherland (in character from Dark City) speaking the "First there was darkness ..." lines.
The Knife — Norwegian siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer — made much of their unwillingness to show their faces or become conventional pop stars, but they shook up CMJ with a live performance that is already legend. For all its lyrical anguish, their Silent Shout, whose every track is worthwhile, came close to the outright synth-pop of Depeche Mode's Speak and Spell.
The Knife robbed the slightly superior Sissy — singer Johanne Williams and audio landscaper David Trusz — of some of the bouquets that Sissy's female-fueled reinvention of trip-hop album All Under deserved. Why single "In the Dark" was not a huge crossover hit as well as a dance-floor smash was difficult to explain, but All Under's remaining tracks of furious distortion ("Anyone but You" and "Can't Save You") were just as captivating.
And then there's London nightclub-derived label Fabric, which almost by itself salvaged a pretty bad year for dance music. Fabric's voluminous (several discs per month) numbered output, even duds like the unlistenable Fabric 26 and Fabric 27 records, put forth a strong case that the Londoners are the collectivist label of record for every DJ and remix theorist on the planet. Fabric 29, featuring Tiefschwarz, was a hardy techno discovery, and Fabric 24, though a part of today's often overzealous re-release movement, argued eloquently that the overlooked Rob da Bank deserves a place on jammy/groovy house playlists.
Finally, Christian IDM: Who'd have thought of it? Dark Globe had always evoked a Kayak-ish cult of mysticism through its majestic orchestrations, but with this year's Nostalgia for the Future, the band picked up the lushness and pace with a Lawlerish turn in tunes, and, quite surprisingly, gave some shouts out to the Lord.
So don't despair. The state of electronica always depends on perception. Any song by Kraak & Smaak, whose Boogie Angst was an inconsistent mix of funk hooks plus bass, is still better than anything Sheryl Crow or Evanescence could come up with. Hearing a track by DJ Shadow on your car satellite radio isn't going to make you pull over and puke the way one by the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus will.
And in one last hopeful hurrah for 2006, Tom Ellard, founder of the Severed Heads and perhaps as influential in the genre's genesis as Cabaret Voltaire and John Balance, recently re-emerged with a body of new work. His soundtrack and animations grace the Australian Film Commission's The Illustrated Family Doctor, and slowly but surely he is posting remixed and remastered Severed Heads classics to YouTube, along with some new compositions. So hang in there, smarty pantses.
Originally published by Miami New Times 2006-12-28
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
2006: The Year the Superstar DJ Died
Dinosaurs rule the dance floors no more
By Jean Carey
Superstar DJs
For nearly a decade, the giants of electronic dance music, a cold-blooded cadre mostly from northern Europe, lumbered across the earth. Tiësto, Paul van Dyk, Paul Oakenfold, Seb Fontaine, Judge Jules, and Fatboy Slim dominated small suburban dance floors and Ibizan caverns with crafty disco assembled from chest-rattling bass lines and sampled treasures from earlier civilizations.
Suddenly, in 2006, like dinosaurs shuddering in the freezing contrail of a passing comet, the time of the superstar DJs ended. Today the big boys are gasping for space as overpaid nightclub hosts, while small, furry mammals named Busdriver, Ellen Allien, and Otto von Schirach have sprung forth to occupy their musical niche in the ecosystem.
The sad thing — one of the sad things — about the superstar DJs' looming extinction is that they didn't begin with Brontosaurus brains. IDM, or intelligent dance music, is the obviously and deliberately limiting terminology for electronica that isn't stupid. The expression dates back to a description of Coil's 1991 album The Snow, which set the IQ bar pretty high, and the artists who followed in the last decade of the century — the Orb, Autechre, Future Sound of London — kept apace.
By 2000, European electronic dance music evolved into dozens of microgenres from the various species of house music, techno, and EBM. Pioneering DJs such as Oakenfold and Fatboy Slim found they could press their popular discs and also attract respectable concert attendance numbers through careful marketing of their riveting live sets, which blended their own compositions with remixes of other artists' tracks. Meanwhile in the States, dance music factions were essentially limited to house and trance, a situation that continues today.
And why shouldn't it? Americans almost always muck up the nuance in the cultures we import, and dance music has proven no exception. While European DJs cultivated a humbly anonymous aesthetic, Americans reinvented the DJ as turntable-toting rock star. Thus today we enjoy the Crystal Method's relentless efforts to brand its members' faces on maximum party records, such as the cleverly named Tweekend and Legion of Boom. And this year, both the Crystal Method and tagger-along LCD Soundsystem produced 45-minute "workout mixes" in association with Nike.
But it is now clear that the DJ craze is on the wane in the United States. The huge throngs that once welcomed van Dyk, Carl Cox, and the ubiquitous Oakenfold have dried up, at least in the smaller major cities. Once people in places like Dallas and Atlanta figured out the headliner would show up at 3:00 a.m., play a twenty-minute set, and split, it was all over, and from then on, guys like that were forced to retreat to tried-and-true markets such as Miami, New York, and San Francisco for hosting duties at superclubs.
And the superstar DJ system never encouraged a farm team system, where beginners could earn their nightclub stripes in small markets and move up to larger ones. That role fell to the DJ music on MySpace and YouTube. But that system is far from perfect, or even viable. How many Optimo or Bugz in the Attic remixes by suburban Tulsa kids can anyone make it through?
Still, there were some outstanding offerings on the better sportswear floor of the dance music department store, and several of those were even from America.
Steve Lawler's Lights Out 3 (as well as the import Viva) reached our shores early in 2006, and the two-disc set featured some of the stalwart British producer's most symphonic work to date.
Trance music pioneer Brian Transeau, better known as BT, has been an amazingly prolific composer for years, and most of the songs he plays are originals, not remixes or compilations. His late-year release, This Binary Universe, continued the Marylander's exploration into mathematical and philosophical themes via the harmonically named (and sounding) "The Internal Locus" and "The Antikythera Mechanism." Plus BT dedicates the disc to his beloved pet dog, which died this year. All of this might seem precious, save for BT's long record of sincerity sans new-age ickiness. (BT is on tour right now with another IDM forefather, Thomas Dolby, who dropped his first record in years in December, The Sole Inhabitant, a collection of live performances and new material.)
"Burma," a trickily looped onslaught of deep progressive breaks from Australia's Lostep, leant itself to creative remixing by everyone from Sasha to Galaxy Girl, but the track was great on its own (as was the rest of the duo's cohesive album Because We Can). Perhaps a little Outback isolation is just what dance music needs.
Hybrid's I Choose Noise offered a good array of Mike Truman and Chris Healings's vast collection of regular collaborators, including Peter Hook, Judie Tzuke, and Quivver (John Graham). Strangely the atmospheric, dark tracks on I Choose Noise did not include "Space Manoeuvres Part 3," a Hybrid live set staple and one of the year's best Internet-disseminated singles. This remarkable, haunting number contains an overlay of Kiefer Sutherland (in character from Dark City) speaking the "First there was darkness ..." lines.
The Knife — Norwegian siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer — made much of their unwillingness to show their faces or become conventional pop stars, but they shook up CMJ with a live performance that is already legend. For all its lyrical anguish, their Silent Shout, whose every track is worthwhile, came close to the outright synth-pop of Depeche Mode's Speak and Spell.
The Knife robbed the slightly superior Sissy — singer Johanne Williams and audio landscaper David Trusz — of some of the bouquets that Sissy's female-fueled reinvention of trip-hop album All Under deserved. Why single "In the Dark" was not a huge crossover hit as well as a dance-floor smash was difficult to explain, but All Under's remaining tracks of furious distortion ("Anyone but You" and "Can't Save You") were just as captivating.
And then there's London nightclub-derived label Fabric, which almost by itself salvaged a pretty bad year for dance music. Fabric's voluminous (several discs per month) numbered output, even duds like the unlistenable Fabric 26 and Fabric 27 records, put forth a strong case that the Londoners are the collectivist label of record for every DJ and remix theorist on the planet. Fabric 29, featuring Tiefschwarz, was a hardy techno discovery, and Fabric 24, though a part of today's often overzealous re-release movement, argued eloquently that the overlooked Rob da Bank deserves a place on jammy/groovy house playlists.
Finally, Christian IDM: Who'd have thought of it? Dark Globe had always evoked a Kayak-ish cult of mysticism through its majestic orchestrations, but with this year's Nostalgia for the Future, the band picked up the lushness and pace with a Lawlerish turn in tunes, and, quite surprisingly, gave some shouts out to the Lord.
So don't despair. The state of electronica always depends on perception. Any song by Kraak & Smaak, whose Boogie Angst was an inconsistent mix of funk hooks plus bass, is still better than anything Sheryl Crow or Evanescence could come up with. Hearing a track by DJ Shadow on your car satellite radio isn't going to make you pull over and puke the way one by the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus will.
And in one last hopeful hurrah for 2006, Tom Ellard, founder of the Severed Heads and perhaps as influential in the genre's genesis as Cabaret Voltaire and John Balance, recently re-emerged with a body of new work. His soundtrack and animations grace the Australian Film Commission's The Illustrated Family Doctor, and slowly but surely he is posting remixed and remastered Severed Heads classics to YouTube, along with some new compositions. So hang in there, smarty pantses.
Friday, March 03, 2006
The Amen breakbeat
A great video about the history of a breakbeat by Nate Harrison
http://nkhstudio.com/pages/amen_mp4.html
http://nkhstudio.com/pages/amen_mp4.html
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