'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
All Together Now. Every Beatles tune, played together, sequenced in order of lengths, with the longest starting first and all 226 tunes ending together. This is a single link SoundCloud post.
posted by The Discredited Ape
on Dec 14, 2011 -
36 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
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
What? From WFMU: "What happens when a man covered in microphones walks into a room covered with speakers? Feedback. Lots of it." (might be NSFW)
posted by minkll
on Apr 7, 2006 -
91 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
