With Sonic Youth on
indefinite hiatus, the band members are keeping themselves busy with other projects. Thurston Moore is playing
solo shows centered around his latest solo album, the Beck-produced
Demolished Thoughts, with a band he jokingly(?) referred to this past Friday night as "
Dush Krew" in honor of his crush on actress Eliza Dushku. Kim Gordon recently
designed clothes for French brand Surface to Air, is currently playing shows with Bill Nace as part of the noise improvisation duo
Body/Head, and was kind enough recently to share
her favorite taco recipe. Lee Ranaldo is poised to release his first song-oriented
solo album on Matador Records; he debuted
the music video for the first single ("Off the Wall") today on his website. Steve Shelley played drums on Lee's new album, recently
collaborated with Pete Nolan of Magik Markers (Sonic Youth's most
interesting protégés) on Nolan's side-project Spectre Folk, and is currently drumming for Chicago's
Disappears whose
new album is out via Kranky records in March. Meanwhile, Jim O'Rourke is preparing to curate the All Tomorrow's Parties
I'll Be Your Mirror Festival in Tokyo this April, where he will also perform his 1999 album
Eureka in full with a 12-piece band.
posted by Houyhnhnm
on Feb 7, 2012 -
53 comments
"We were so dumbfounded at the noise that was coming out of our instruments it took us a while to get a handle on what we were hearing, let alone thinking in terms of how any records would be structured." Music journalist Ned Raggett assembles the oral history of British experimental rock group
Disco Inferno's five EPs.
posted by Houyhnhnm
on Jan 23, 2012 -
17 comments
WALK
.. is a trippy 1983 journey from one part of Minneapolis to another. It begins with a guy who can hardly move. He slowly gains stuttered motion and utters basic letter sounds, then begins a real and imaginary walk. His journey is from his view - floating. At the end of this walk, he meets a friend. Walk's film surface is hand worked and street noise is composed as music-concrete. 16mm B/W SLYT
posted by louche mustachio
on Jan 7, 2012 -
13 comments
Phonozoic, Patrick Feaster's website "dedicated to the history of the phonograph and related media," is an amazing collection of information about historic recordings. Not just early recordings, however, but also
experimental "eduction projects": the "automatic 'playing' of primeval inscriptions of sound."
[more inside]
posted by litlnemo
on Dec 30, 2011 -
1 comment
When not terrorizing
Mr Bond, from the late 1970s until 1994, Mike Mangino and Chris Shepard were in a basement full of musical toys, novelty space microphones, a
TR-606, and a
SH-09 in
Piscataway, NJ recording cassettes as the band
Smersh. In 1981
Smersh released their first cassette under their own label of
Atlas King. They never rehearsed, they couldn't read music, and they never played live, and they
contributed to far too many compilations throughout the known world. In the early eighties they
established a unique sound that is known and loved, combining cheap electronics and wild guitar sounds with distorted vocals. By trading cassettes they garnered international acclaim
leading to releases on dozens of other labels.
[more inside]
posted by wcfields
on Dec 22, 2011 -
5 comments
The Movie Set That Ate Itself. Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home.
posted by mykescipark
on Oct 30, 2011 -
53 comments
Vimeo user
Charlie Bucket has created a "Fluid Dress" made from 600 feet of plastic tubing, throughout which courses a controlled mixture of air and fluorescent liquid. The result is
quite fascinating (SLVimeo)
posted by ShutterBun
on Jul 30, 2011 -
32 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.
[more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Jun 28, 2011 -
17 comments
Instant Cinema is a comprehensive platform for experimental film, video and computer art, making the best audio-visual work of artists of all generations available to a worldwide audience. Not a tonne in the
archive just yet--it's still in rough beta--but still some nice viewing. For instance:
Balance Study, or
Trying.
posted by dobbs
on May 11, 2011 -
5 comments
New Weird Australia is a not-for-profit, government-sponsored initiative promoting new eclectic & experimental music - plenty of free downloads & podcasts are available on the site.
posted by UbuRoivas
on Dec 4, 2010 -
6 comments
"
The TV Wheel was a television experiment created by and starring
Joel Hodgson, of
Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame. Cable network HBO ordered a pilot, but ultimately passed on picking up the show. The pilot episode eventually aired once on Comedy Central as a special presentation following the last new episode of MST3K to be broadcast on that network."
*
The pilot, bookended by introduction segments, is right through this door:
[more inside]
posted by item
on Aug 11, 2010 -
41 comments
Acousmata is a unique music blog devoted to "idiosyncratic research in electronic and experimental music, sound and acoustics, mysticism and technology" with special focus on the early history of electronic music.
posted by speicus
on Jul 30, 2010 -
16 comments
Shared social responsibility -
When customers could pay what they wanted in the knowledge that half of that would go to charity, sales and profits went through the roof ... Gneezy describes the combination of charitable donations and paying what you like as 'shared social responsibility', where businesses and customers work together for the public good. (via
mr) [also see
1,
2,
3]
posted by kliuless
on Jul 28, 2010 -
19 comments
A favorite of
John Cage and Gyorgy Ligeti, the latter describing his music as "so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed but at the same time emotional...the best of any composer living today,"
Conlon Nancarrow's
musical ideas were nevertheless too complex and technically demanding for human performers, and his political ideas too radical and leftist for McCarthy-era America. Expatriated to Mexico, the Texarkana-born avant-gardeist
lived most of his life in isolation, in a cluttered, dusty
studio surrounded by records, piles of books, empty Vodka bottles, newspapers, cigarette cartons, and the tools of his trade: 2 old player pianos and a custom-built
piano roll press.
[more inside]
posted by swift
on Feb 15, 2010 -
16 comments
Terry Riley celebrates
the 45th anniversary of his groundbreaking composition,
In C. A major work in the history of
minimalist music, In C has an incredibly flexible
score and performance guidelines, which have inspired many musicians to make their own versions, including a
French guitar quintet, a
traditional Chinese orchestra, a
keyboard ensemble, an
all-synthesizer group,
CalArts Music students,
French-Canadian hippies, a
Danish vocal and percussion ensemble, another
percussion ensemble,
Japanese acidheads, a
"laptop orchestra", the
Bang on a Can Orchestra, and a
rock "orchestration" by the Styrenes. No two versions can sound exactly the same, but it's still an open question how they will compare to the performance of In C at its
Carnegie Hall debut next month. No recording of the original 1964 performance has ever been publicly released, but some eyewitness accounts can be found
here.
posted by jonp72
on Mar 4, 2009 -
40 comments
Punkcast is a long running series of videos of live underground music in NYC shot by
Joly MacFie. Each video is usually one song. The Internet Archive hosts
its videos and offers downloads in a variety of formats. MacFie also has a
YouTube channel with
480 videos and a video podcast
[iTunes link, feedburner link]. Here are a few bands that caught my fancy:
The Icicles and The Besties, The Slits (
1,
2 ),
Andrew W. K., Oneida (
1,
2),
The Long Blondes,
The Gossip,
Acid Mothers Temple & Cosmic Inferno,
Art Brut,
Be Your Own Pet,
Cansei de Ser Sexy,
Lesbians on Ecstasy,
The Fall,
Fred Frith,
Rose Melberg and Jennifer O'Connor,
The Horrors,
The Homosexuals,
Bat for Lashes,
Radio 4 and Teddybears,
Kimya Dawson and Tiny Masters of Today,
Yeah Yeah Yeahs and
Nikki Sudden.
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 25, 2008 -
12 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
The Most Serene Republic, quite possibly the most underrated of all the acts on the
Arts & Crafts label, create music in a similar vein to fellow Canadian indie rockers
Arcade Fire,
Stars, and
Broken Social Scene. Experience their explosive, big-band, polyphonic, experimental flair by listening to their 3 releases in full:
Underwater Cinematographer (2005),
Phages EP (2006), and
Population (2007). A few video music videos as well:
The Men Who Live Upstairs,
Oh God,
Content Always Was My Favourite
posted by Christ, what an asshole
on Sep 30, 2008 -
21 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
