Category: music

Avalanches!

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Not the big, rumbling wall of snow coming down the side of a mountain with the sole intention of killing you, but rather the Australian electronic music group who gave us this in 2000:

TIL that the manufacture of this sort of musical composition is called “plunderphonics” – the ‘theft’ of various soundbites and samples and their amalgamation into some sort of musical collage.

Plunderphonics is a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative.

Must have missed that one. Sorry, John.

Either way, this is a great example of it, as was this earlier in the week.

Go! (again)

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((again) because it’s not this post)

I was going to share some music with you this morning, but then I went into the lab and I listened to some other music and now I want to share some of that with you instead. The beauty of this arrangement is that I am still able to share the original music with you at a later date and therefore you get two tracks for the price of one and that price was free anyway.

Can you say “Bargain”?
Of course you can, because that throat surgery was wholly successful, wasn’t it?

That then, is “the other PSB” – Public Service Broadcasting, whose debut album, Inform – Educate – Entertain, was released in 2013 and was listened to in the lab a bit earlier today.

It’s very different, isn’t it? And also very catchy. The new album, The Race For Space, (from which the above is taken) is also worth almost 44 minutes of your valuable time (which is all it will take first time around, promise).

“Trance Party Will Traumatise Monkeys”

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Really?

Yes, really:

The SPCA is up in arms about a trance party planned for Saturday night at a venue in Monkey Town in Somerset West, which is home to more than 200 primates.

What, Somerset West?
Oh, the monkey zoo place. Sorry. Carry on.

It has threatened to have the organisers arrested if they go ahead with what is billed as “an epic night of thundering bass lines and psychedelic melodies taking us into the blissfulness of each other’s minds”.

Pftt. Is anyone else just hearing the hand-wringingly awful:

Won’t somebody please think of the monkeys?

Without wanting to belittle the SPCA’s concerns in any way, and hopefully without any use of the word “killjoys” (oops), am I alone in thinking that the monkeys might actually enjoy a night of banging trance? Given that they are our closet relatives, and that some humans enjoy trance music, I think it’s worth a go. In addition, there are no lyrics for their puny frontal and parietal lobes to have to struggle with. (It’s also a well known fact that gibbons are well into the rave scene. So it’s really not that much of a stretch.)

But, no. The SPCA attempt to strengthen their argument for having the event cancelled with this line:

“We get repeated complaints from horse owners when trance parties are held in the Boland that the continual thumping and laser lights caused their horses to go crazy.”

But horses aren’t monkeys. Horses are notoriously miserable animals with no opposable thumbs who are generally more into show-jumping and the Industrial Goth scene. They’re obviously going to be irritated by trance’s 4/4 time, 32 beat phrases, time-keeping downbeat kick drum and regular open hi-hat placed on the upbeat or every 1/8th division of the bar. That and the complete lack of challenging fences in the arena.
No wonder they go crazy.

Monkeys though? I reckon that’s right up their tree. And who wouldn’t want to be taken into the blissfulness of a chimpanzee’s mind, anyway?

C’mon SPCA… give it the green light. Just this once. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Next: Overberg Overrun By Lunatic Music Monkeys.

Nirvana Shovel

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Shovels get a bad press. Whether it be as bizarre plate replacements, or in their more natural habitat as grave digging implements or road works collaborators – they’re always causing mischief.
It’s about time that shovels gave something back.
And they have chosen to begin giving back with this: playing the open chords of a Nirvana song.

Is it fake? Is it not? Who cares: what has been heard cannot be unheard.

Incidentally, one thing that isn’t fake is the Blur Song 2 Jubilee Line Underground gate. I know this, because I actually went through it when I was in London late last year.