'It's probably easy today to dismiss
Negativland's activities as trifle, banal or plain stupid. They probably wouldn't be too uncomfortable with that, as they rarely claimed to go beyond the softest platitudes of the entertainment biz.
No Other Possibility (1989, 58 mins,
.avi d/l link), their first video work, showcases the band at a career threshold, before their
U2ploitation move and just after their
Christianity hoax. It typically explores the debris of American pop culture, dealing with automobile fetishism, televised preaching, halloween traditions, Marlboro masculinity, soft drinks and MTV.'
[more inside]
posted by item
on Nov 30, 2012 -
31 comments
One of New Zealand's greatest-ever exports of experimental music,
The Dead C. have built a huge catalog of challenging "rock" music over the last 25 years that offers massively dosed
psychedelic excess, improvised all-night flights, blistering free noise and deconstruction of
blazing garage punk for adventurous listeners. They've cheekily called themselves "The
AMM of punk rock" and it's not far from the truth. Their high-water mark -- the double-LP
Harsh 70s Reality -- has reached twentieth anniversary status and has just been
reissued on vinyl by legendary US imprint
Siltbreeze, restoring a few cuts that didn't make it to the late 1990s CD re-release and offering this fearless free music to a new generation of fans.
[more inside]
posted by porn in the woods
on Oct 23, 2012 -
24 comments
this website is a collection of underground / independantly released cassette tapes from the days when the audio cassette was the standard method of music sharing, generally the mid eighties through early nineties.
material represented includes tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indy, rock, diy, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials... most of what you are about to hear is rather difficult to file under any one category, and thus has not been. [more inside]
posted by artof.mulata
on Sep 9, 2012 -
12 comments
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
The band Thulebasen succeeds in matching a rambling audio side with just as rambling visuals. I have never seen anything like this before. Seriously! It's a
monster!
posted by Sexy Motherfucker
on Sep 24, 2011 -
29 comments
Who are the grandfathers of noise music? The
Nihilist Spasm Band formed in 1965 when eight men, using homemade instruments, began creating noise together in London, Ontario. None of these men were traditionally trained musicians, yet they are often credited as being the major influence behind modern noise music, inspiring Japanese noisemakers like
Hijokaiden and
Masonna, as well as western artists like Thurston Moore of
Sonic Youth.
[more inside]
posted by threetoed
on May 4, 2010 -
28 comments
Luigi Russolo was a
futurist painter,
experimental composer, and
instrument builder. In his 1913 manifesto "
The Art of Noises" he declaimed the death of traditional Western music and foresaw the dawning of a new music based on the grinding, screeching, moaning, crackling and buzzing of mechanical instruments. He and his assistant Ugo Piatti built the
Intonarumori to bring these new sounds -
"the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags" - to life. Listen to them,
then and
now.
posted by fire&wings
on Oct 28, 2009 -
10 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
Spartacus Roosevelt Hour Podcast is a weekly hour of obscure noise, glitchy electropop, fake nostalgia, bastardized exotica, tweaky lounge, creepy ambient and musical non-sequiturs. Also, it features an Alabaman with a Skype account named Spartacus Roosevelt.
posted by panoptican
on Feb 14, 2008 -
8 comments
Even if Lou Reed had dropped out of music after the break-up of the Velvet Underground, his name would still be forever etched in the history of rock music. Yet his solo career, filled with eccentric detours and radio-ready rockers in equal measure, remains one of the most fascinating canons in all of rock music. Metal Machine Music, however, is a unique entity in itself, proudly pushing at the very boundaries of what pop music is capable of. Zeitkratzer’s performance not only makes the original album ripe for critical re-evaluation, but it’s a performance that stands on its own ground...
Why Does the Music Have to End?: An Interview with Lou Reed regarding how he came to play
Metal Machine Music live in 2002.
posted by y2karl
on Nov 17, 2007 -
47 comments
Tokyo-Ga: this excerpt from a Wim Wenders film offers an interesting little glimpse into the world of
pachinko, a gambling obsession for so many in Japan. But while most are gazing hypnotically into the noisy little machines in order to win prizes or money, others are
circuit bending them to make them even
noisier.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Oct 21, 2007 -
31 comments
The idea of treating everyday, ambient noise as music is
not terribly new, but
Noah Vawter's device
turns ambient sounds
into music
(in a somewhat more traditional sense of the word):
Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone's sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener's world.
posted by 2or3whiskeysodas
on Dec 18, 2006 -
33 comments
Have you ever seen a synth and said "Man, what this needs is cartoon eyes?" A bit similar to the
Buchla Box or
theremin in that they don't have a keyboard to control the sounds -- it's probably closest to the Booper, invented by
The Weatherman from
Negativland (or, well,
Circuit Bending), the
Thingamagoop is a photosynthesizer... which means it basically uses light sensors to generate sounds. The signal's run through a couple oscillators and, well, it comes out as somethin' that's
pretty dang awesome. I'm on the fence on pickin' this one up. On one hand, it's a really neat toy that makes noise... on the other hand, um.... um.... I dunno. It's not made of candy?
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me
on Jul 8, 2006 -
18 comments
MAN - Mothers Against Noise. "Noise is music that uses unpleasant or painful or extremely loud or discordant sound. Noise is also a very dangerous musical trend that is hell bent on destroying civilized culture, this anti-cultural movement is quickly sweeping the globe, and is very dangerous to our youth."
via MonkeyFilter and our own panoptican.
posted by loquacious
on Dec 26, 2005 -
70 comments
Making music entirely from non-musical things:
McDonalds Happy Meals,
Henry Kissinger,
Bread,
Salad Tosser,
Fluorescent Lamps,
the Bible,
Hearts,
Dot Matrix Printers,
Photocopiers,
Volkswagen [possibly nsfw],
The Postal Service,
Blank Tapes,
Eiffel Tower,
Deportation Orders [scroll down],
Cakes,
Cucumbers,
Furniture [scroll down to #12],
Skin,
Roads,
Underpasses,
Frogs,
Vinyl Run-Out Grooves,
Radios,
Natural Geophysical Phenomena,
Carly Simon and
other stuff.
posted by nylon
on Aug 7, 2005 -
16 comments
Happy 10th Birthday "What? is Music".
This year's the 10th time around the block for Australian festival "
What? is Music", which showcases new (and not so new), unusual, fascinating and strange directions in contemporary music and sound exploration.
Starting today such outfits as
The Residents,
Dead C.,
Black Dice,
Chicks on Speed, and members of
Boredoms and
Sun City Girls tour Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Labels like
Last Visible Dog,
Touch,
ElectrO-CD and
Corpus Hermeticum
are represented, and last year's festivities saw
Whitehouse and
Merzbow rip up the stage.
So MeFites, what other events are there out there like this that have tickled your collective pickles? Which festivals or bands have unduly influenced your aural development and/or rearranged your head musicwise?
posted by soi-disant
on Mar 1, 2005 -
16 comments
Freenoise. "This site exists to provide information on 'unusual' music and arts; the word "unusual" being easily replaced by 'unconventional,' 'non-mainstream,' 'underground,' 'extreme' or by any one of a dozen other useless labels." This includes such projects as
Cock E.S.P.,
Wrong and the fascinating
Panelectric Living Sinema. The
link page is of particular interest, as it could open up a whole world to the uninitiated. I wish they linked my favorite bug faced noise band,
Winter Carousel.
posted by Joey Michaels
on Dec 2, 2002 -
8 comments
