Belbury is an English market town with a picturesque 11th century church, and some notable modernist architecture, including the Polytechnic College. None of which exist except in the constructed world of the
Ghost Box record label, whose founder Jim Jupp records under the name
Belbury Poly, and publishes the
Belbury Parish Magazine.
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posted by reynir
on Feb 11, 2012 -
5 comments
The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. Until now, of course.
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posted by carsonb
on Jun 28, 2011 -
17 comments
DetroitTechno.org presents a documentary (
1 2 3) about the history and politics of techno with a focus on the
Detroit Electronic Music Festival, now called
Movement, from its inception in 2000 until the most recent one in 2010.
[more inside]
posted by gman
on May 15, 2011 -
26 comments
The Books is a collaboration between musicians and found sound archivers Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong. If you're not familiar with their music, allow me to recommend giving their newest album,
The Way Out a
listen over at NPR (where you can no longer stream the album in its entirety, but individual tracks are still available for your listening pleasure). Two videos are already available—the summer camp hit
A Cold Freezin' Night and
We Bought The Flood, which was 'directed' by archival image researcher
Rich Remsberg. Since
The Way Out's release Nick has been proceeding track by track through the album, explaining and annotating the techniques, instruments, and ideas used on each song—and resulting in a collage of thoughts as powerful and varied as The Books' collage of sound.
[more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Aug 2, 2010 -
20 comments
The IDEA - The Indian Documentary of Electronic Arts - Seven somewhat dated collections of essays, music, videos, and thought curated and designed by Shankar Barua, backed by totally awesome early Internet-era graphics, and hosted at
Laurie Spiegel's also-rad
retiary.org.
Please note that many individual pages of The IDEA gazettes are very-very heavily loaded, by [2001's] WWWeb standards, with images/audio/video. In other words, if you can get past ugly old broken HTML and auto-playing music, you may find a lot to like in here.
posted by carsonb
on May 4, 2010 -
3 comments
"
Trance music" is not a new phenomenon. The ability for music to drive dancers into ecstatic frenzies has been known at least since
Euripides.
The Shakers got their name from the ecstatic behavior they exhibited when dancing to their
simple, repetitive hymns.
Voodoo rituals are built around
complex, trance-inducing rhythms. It was well known that trance-dancing can produce ecstastic states, but until the later part of the 20th century, and the invention of the 'extended dance remix', it was rare for commercial music to reach for it.
[more inside]
posted by empath
on Feb 1, 2010 -
86 comments
sc140: 22 minimal electronica tracks composed in
Super Collider using 140 characters or less. Twitter user, computer scientist, and compilation curator
Dan Stowell started the trend by tweeting his encoded field recordings of waves crashing on the beach.
[more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Nov 21, 2009 -
23 comments
The Works of
Swede Mason: "
Jeremy Clarkson," "
Get in the Back of the Van," "
Jungle All The Way," "
Bill Wyman's Metal Detector," "
Put the Lotion in the Basket, *" "
Got The Sucka," "
The Gobshite, *" "
Squashed Thingy," "
Spare Me The Madness," and the pair of tracks based on
Neighbors deaths "
Coffee And Croissants" and "
Todd....Dead."
[more inside]
posted by flatluigi
on Oct 13, 2009 -
14 comments
Lullatone are a half-Japanese, half-American duo based in Japan who make music that can probably best be described as twee folktronica; a recent EP of theirs is titled "Little Songs About Raindrops". And now, you can make your own with
their Raindrop Melody Maker Flash web toy, which looks a bit like a pastel-coloured
Tenori-On:
posted by acb
on Jun 4, 2009 -
9 comments
Muslimgauze was the sound of an angry Middle East, a prolific source of music
dark,
spacious and
smothering. Tension was a constant theme not only in the music but in the packaging. (For example,
Betrayal shows the hands of Yassir Arafat and Yitzak Rabin, and guns, knives, and news photos of an Arab world at war were a common motif in titles and sleeve art.) However, the music wasn't the usual agitprop fare: Music meant to rile a public to a cause isn't normally pigeonholed as
ambient,
electronica or
musique concrete. But the band, hidden from public view, was rumored to donate proceeds to Palestinian terrorists, and that they were eventually silenced by Mossad.
Despite the prodigious output -- issuing almost a hundred EPs and albums between 1983 and 1998, over a hundred more since -- limited distribution and perpetual obscurity ensured the rumors were easier to find than the music. While the facts about Muslimgauze have little in common with the fictions, they are, if anything, stranger...
[more inside]
posted by ardgedee
on Dec 22, 2008 -
48 comments
Connecticut's
Have a Nice Life is responsible for one of the year's most
acclaimed, highly conceptual albums this year, Deathconsciousness.
The two discs (entitled The Plow That Broke The Plains and The Future, respectively) feature music spanning over five years of collaboration between the two artists, and are accompanied by a 75-page booklet on medieval Italian heretics in lieu of liner notes. Combining elements of
shoegaze,
new wave,
ambient drone,
post-rock,
experimental industrial,
avant-garde dark metal, and
electronic music, and citing references such as
My Bloody Valentine and
Joy Division to their credit, the original and only pressings sold out
within hours. Full stream of all 85 minutes available
here. Direct mp3 samples
here and
here.
[more inside]
posted by Christ, what an asshole
on Jun 28, 2008 -
34 comments
Brian Eno and David Byrne released
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1981. It's a great album--and now it's available with a Creative Commons License. "
This is the first time complete and total access to original tracks with remix and sampling possibilities have been officially offered on line."
posted by dobbs
on Mar 30, 2006 -
44 comments
Legitimate MP3 downloads! If you like the
big
beat duo
The
Chemical Brothers, I'm sure you'll be impressed by these two excellent
remixes:
Flip The Switch
&
Believe EP.
Primal
Scream's
deep house masterpiece
is given similarly impressive treatment in
Screamixadelica.
Maybe you prefer the punkier electronica of
The
Prodigy; check out
Always Outsiders, Never Outdone.
BTW don't forget to donate to the nominated charities on each site if you decide
to keep the tracks.
On slightly more dodgy ground, copyright-wise, are the remixes and mashups
from
tone396,
lionel vinyl,
fakeID &
Go Home Productions
(these are clearly only a handful of artists, but in my opinion are some of the best) - I
wonder how, or even if you can, apply copyright laws to some of these kinds of
hybrid productions.
posted by smiffy
on Jun 28, 2005 -
19 comments
By a weird coincidence, after reading
this interview in New Scientist with three of the engineers who made electronic music possible, I walked by a poster for a
documentary film about Bob Moog. One of my earliest memories of electronic music in the 1970s was an elementary school music teacher who was really into
Wendy Carlos' and
Isao Tomita's early arrangements of classical works for synthesizer. Of course, electronic music history goes back to the 1920s with the
theremin developed as a classical instrument. It has its own
web portal filled with lots of good stuff. And now for something slightly different,
Conlon Nancarrow wrote piano compositions that could not be performed by human hands, demanding the use of a player piano.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Apr 4, 2005 -
20 comments
Galang-alang-alang-a. (insane, 18MB QuickTime music video) [MusicFilter] Cranking out music somewhere between hip-hop, electronica, Nintendo cartridges, and reggae, 27-year-old Maya Arulpragasam is getting a lot of attention for the results of tinkering with
one box.
M.I.A. (her stage name) dresses in garish flourescents like it's 1983, dances like no one's watching, and is making waves all around the critic-o-sphere.
[RS|NYT|Eye|pm|pfm|New Yorker|CBC] Want a sample?
The video for "Galang" takes her grattifi-esque art, animates it, and mashes it all together with her, um, unusual style of dance, for a music+video experience that is hard to forget. Is M.I.A. redefining the world of 21st century global pop... or is it just crap?
(via WG)
posted by blacklite
on Mar 12, 2005 -
118 comments
Will electronic music ever break in the US? DJs don't speak. Most don't produce their own full-length albums. When they perform, their only motions are precise hand movements and brief shuffles to record bins that are obscured from view and confined to a 5-foot square area. There are no David Lee Roth jump kicks, synchronized boy-band dances, Michael Jackson moonwalks or Janet Jackson ass-shaking.
For American consumers, this is a problem.
posted by fellorwaspushed
on Jun 20, 2002 -
73 comments
'WHOEVER I LENT MY NORD MODULAR TO /MSG ME ASAP' is an
extremely funny fake chat log between the bright stars of the IDM/techno music world. If you're familiar with the music of Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Plaid, and the like, and if you've ever used IRC, then you'll probably get a kick out of this.
posted by 40 Watt
on Nov 2, 2001 -
28 comments
