way too much korean music

questionable hits from our favorite lump of land by the sea of japan. This site is like a flamethrower of content coming right at you. it is funny to paw through as it contains everything from painful pop-folk-ethno-kitsch, to austere, dark and seductive string obsessions. my favorite sections are the "Seoul Saeul Kayagum Trio" and the "Our Favorite Music Series", but I havnt listened to everything. Hold onto your taste, bitches.

http://203.252.231.26/

John Cage visits the anechoic chamber

"In 1948, Cage joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, where he regularly worked on collaborations with Merce Cunningham. Around this time, he visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University (an anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are also generally soundproofed.) Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no sound, and yet sound was nevertheless discernible. He stated "until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." - wikipedia




+ + +

"He ended up composing a three-minute piece that consisted of nothing but silence, to allow audiences to reflect on the reality that no person has yet been able to escape noise entirely -- except presumably the deaf.">

PAUL AND THE BADGER

Hmmm...could there be a connection?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4130091321016210439&q=Badger

a singular christmas

this album was made by having a computer listen to christmas records for two weeks in an attempt to understand just what qualifies as holiday music. Yes, its slightly awful, but just as often there is something as dark and compelling as titles like "berries sleeping" would imply. Bring your own milk.

a singluar christmas

dont know exactly how the analysis worked, but the website told me this:

The recipe for generating this Eigenmusic (”synthesized music representing the maximal variety of the input music”) was cooked up in 2003 as the live radio station “Eigenradio.” It was a hilarious joke if you laughed at beehives, pleasing if you liked electric closets. Here’s what the process is: you parameterize music into some set of features (pitch content, frequency response, high level structure, etc) and set some rate — say a set of features every 100 milliseconds or four beats. You then pass those series of features to a popular statistical algorithm that tries to remove dependence among variables in the feature– removing “redundant” information– perceptual compression. Repetitive structures such as beat and harmony are whittled down to a representation that can always expand back later.

As for the role of composer, maybe semi-conductor– I locked myself and family up in a darkened studio on the top floor at MIT, we turned up the speakers, played every track in a row, and I hovered my index finger over the Delete key. There’s not a single window in that place, but I’m sure it started snowing.



my current fav is "mountain Noel"

Yoshi Wada is a sound installation artist living in the US. Wada's works often incorporate the use of drone and are usually performed at very high volume, allowing for the music's overtones to be heard very clearly. He frequently performs his own compositions, which feature much freedom of improvisation, on Scottish highland bagpipe and voice, and also employs a number of homemade instruments. These include "pipe horns" (very long horn-type instruments made from metal plumbing pipe) as well as large reed instruments involving multiple bagpipe-like pipes connected to a large air compressor; due to their appearance, Wada named these latter instruments "Alligator" and "the Elephantine Crocodile". -wikipedia

here's some of his stuff on ubuweb - http://www.ubu.com/sound/wada.html

"Standing at an even 5 feet tall (152 cm), Parton is well known for her large bust and low-cut, tight-fitting costumes. Her short height and thin waist accentuates her 40-inch bustline. She has turned down several offers to pose for Playboy magazine and similar publications. Breast-obsessed filmmaker Russ Meyer wanted to make movies about her." -wikipedia

i love dolly parton.