What About Bob Ostertag?

March 10, 2008 8:02 AM

w00t is a 50-minute collage piece by Bob Ostertag, using sounds and music from 18 different videogames. It's a lot of fun to listen to, and it's freely available and downloadable, as are a bunch of other albums of his.
posted by sleevener (8 comments total)

Wow -- I'll have to listen to this. Bob was my next-door neighbor in the dorms at Oberlin in the late '70s, and he was so far ahead of his time musically it was like meeting someone from the future. He had built his own synthesizer from scratch. He was playing in a free-jazz/electronic band called Fall Mountain with Ned Rothenberg, who went on to become of the leading lights of the downtown NYC jazz scene, recording on John Zorn's label Tzadik. Bob played a long piece in concert that consisted of brief what-we-would-now-call samples of music and sound from all over the world, as if a restless hand was tuning up and down a cosmic radio band (Bob described it as a "mental shower.") One night with psychedelic assistance, he and his buddies wired up an old box spring with percussion instruments and microphones and played that. He was also an incredibly sweet, soft-spoken guy. I'm glad he's still thriving.
posted by digaman at 8:29 AM on March 10, 2008 [2 favorites]

It's interesting, but I would never call it "fun to listen to". I kept hoping for a song.
posted by demiurge at 9:07 AM on March 10, 2008

> I kept hoping for a song

That's not what Bob does. :)
posted by digaman at 9:12 AM on March 10, 2008

I love stuff like this. Thanks for pointing it out, digaman. When I have to really concentrate at my desk and there's background noise, I put on symphony for dot matrix printers, and it puts me in a deep, almost hypnotic groove.
posted by boo_radley at 9:47 AM on March 10, 2008

sleevener! I meant sleevener! ah, crap.
posted by boo_radley at 9:47 AM on March 10, 2008

Man, what about Bob Ostertag. This is noise, and not much fun to listen to at all. At least, that's my opinion about it.
posted by Imperfect at 11:00 AM on March 10, 2008

Listen to this for FIFTY minutes - as in FIVE ZERO? Mmmm. Okay.

...

Jeeebus H. KEEE-ronst!! ...

STOP IT AGENT BAUER! ... I"LL TALK! I"LL TALK!!!

THE BOMB IS IN L.A.! It's... in...EEEELLLLL AAAAAAAYAAAA! Turn it OFF!!!
posted by tkchrist at 4:15 PM on March 10, 2008

"This is noise."

- Imperfect

"Bring the noise!"

- Chuck D
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:24 PM on March 10, 2008