MetaFilter posts tagged with experimental and synthesizer

'Legends of the Cassette Underground'

wcfields — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:16:04 -0800

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. Some write-ups about their career include:

A sampler of songs from the Free Music Archive.
A write up by Seattle radio's KEXP of "The Part of the Animal That People Don’t Like" LP.
An interview of the band in their basement recording studio 1988 video interview shot by Frank Edward Nora (host of the Overnightscape).
WFMU has a blog write up of the band from which many of the above information was gleamed.

Selected Songs:

Greasing Wheezer & Hollow Promises [The Beat From 20,000 Fathoms LP (RRR, USA 1986)]
Jungle Bonnie [Hothouse Bodies In A Cool Culture Cassette (Atlas King, USA 1983)]
Armored Man Dub [Emmanuelle Goes to Bangkok LP/CD (KK, BE 1990)]
Rhythm Crash [Deep House Anthems (Atlas King, USA 1991)]
The Meandering Profile ["Aural Fixation" Cassette Comp. (Sound Of Pig, USA 198?)]
She is Nervous ["The Gift Of Noise" LP Comp. (L'Invitation au Suicide, France 1983)]

"Another Green World" - Brian Eno BBC documentary

item — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 22:56:34 -0800

Earlier this year, the BBC's Arena produced and aired an excellent documentary on Brian Eno entitled "Another Green World" containing "a series of conversations on science, art, systems analysis, producing and cybernetics". Watch it here 2 3 and/or download it here.

Oh Say Can You See The Way I Play "In C"?

jonp72 — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:16:27 -0800

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.

Machine-made synthesizer weirdness.

zonkout — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 12:34:14 -0800

Doktor Future's modular synthesizer has been set up to send a real audio stream, 24/7. The analog modular synthesizer will be running a quadraphonic aleatoric patch that will change from day to day. (via Matrixsynth)