voices of the computer

missing = track number 7 :

R. N. Shepard*

Shepard's Tones

horrortronica #8

the Tangs

horrortronica #7

horrortronica #6

Brian and Delia

horrortronica #5

score, Howard Shore

horrortronica #4

score by Richard Einhorn

horrortronica #3

Jerry Fielding

horrortronica #2

intermittently electronic

score by Phillan Biship

horrortronica #1

soundtrack by Phillan Bishop

so fresh and so McLean

at first it's just some really fine electronic music...


and then something seems to happen to them






i suppose in its own way it's quite intense

almost dolphins into the future zone



or verging into ferraro digi-fantasia simulacrum stuff




but it's not simply that they get a bit New Agey and mystical

it's that they start getting into the idea of theatricality - injecting the absurd and zany into electronic music performance

some sorely needed entertainment and visual divertissement

inventors of something they call the McLean Mix

sounds a bit like a Mind Meld idea -  duo synergy / symbiosis....  one personality,  two bodies

more likely it's their term for a new "total performance" approach" - sonics, video, gestures, costumes, jokes, etc?








" a burlesque involving music boxes, Happy Apple, synthesizer, party favors, and flexatones"




a huge repository of texts by and about Mr and Mrs McLean

greylands

electronic experimenter by night, bankruptcy judge by day - Dave Segal of the Stranger with the lowdown on Marc Barreca








music from the Greylands - excellent titling!



another good title

from the album Twilight (1980)  - verily a disque du crepuscule if not a disc on Crepuscule

excellent stuff in a "everything merges with the night" meets "the lost day" sort of way

from the expanded reissue









this later album is more like "taking a Cabs ride across Seattle after dusk"




even later stuff




getting a bit IDM / digital-era electroacoustica



but way with a title persists!








back to the start




there's no end to music, is there?

woo woo

review by mike powell
















"limpid aesthetic"





an odd mix of very lo budget lo-fi DIY with serious instrumental ability, Vini Reilly levels.

usually DIY = can't play that well

in that respect reminds in the tiniest way of Rangers


(via James Durden)

cover of a cover ( and some other covers)

Turk told me it wasn't a cover of the Syd song, it was a cover of Martin's cover of the Syd song

other covers that Belong could have covered

mouth music (fully baked)

clouded crystals

Boylan's crotch amazes

the not-often-mentioned proggers

love it when the proggers just carried on as if New Wave never happened - this is 1979

"A hardback book and double vinyl album... conceived, written and illustrated by Patrick Woodroffe, with music written and performed by Dave Greenslade. The title means, approximately, 'the first five books (pentateuch) of the creation (cosmogony)'.  The story and artwork within 'Pentateuch' concerns the discovery of an abandoned spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter, and the project to decipher the ideograms in the pentateuch 'document' discovered within. Most of the book is a retelling of the document, in much the same way as a modern translator might retell the contents of a Babylonian tablet or Egyptian papyrus scroll. Particularly remarkable is the combinatorial ideographic script created by Woodroffe and used throughout the artwork."

Although I've seen the band's logo and their album covers countless times when flicking through piles of second hand vinyl,  it doesn't feel like Greenslade is a name that comes up much in discussions of prog, either pro or anti (like the articles written around that new book The Show Must Go On)

it's a man and it's a band at the same time





well that one starts with some quite nifty drumming and jauntily florid keyboard work






Other not-often-mentioned proggers:

- Stackridge

- Barclay James Harvest

- Gryphon

- Camel

- Renaissance

- Strawbs (not precisely prog but on the edge of it)


Who else gets forgot?

outta psych man

mouth music (vocoding life)

(via continuo's)

jailbreak!

+

bonus beast

mouth music (oh wouldn't it be Lovely)

bonus non-mouth / non-Lovely tracks

cockney boogie 2

if the Stones weren't threatened when this lot came along they should have been



ian, diana, and arthur!

cockney boogie

verbals

口楽 (choke 'n' croak)

There Will Come Soft Rains

by Malcolm Clarke of Radiophonic Workshop

Hillage Green Preservation Society

Deeply Vale - wish i'd been there!



i'd have had to have been  a very different 15 year old than the just turned fifteen year old i was in July 1978
























As I've noted before,  one thing that's striking - and surprising if you had preconceptions - about Hillage’s music from 1977’s Motivation Radio onwards is its sheer funk -  the hot rhythm section of Joe Blocker and Reggie McBride shimmy and strut on a par with the Blockheads.

in a mini-interview he told me that he was mad about Parliament-Funkadelic which can hear on "Unidentified" for sure

the Ash and the Melon

read the most fantastic thing the other day, can't remember where, gist of it was that - far from dub being the one thing that united the members of Public Image Ltd, it was actually a shared love of Wishbone Ash!

it was from the horse's mouth too, Johnny R himself...



their one moment of moderate sublimity

(he says having not listened exhaustively to the discography in all honesty)

(but i'd take a small wager that was and is in fact their one moment of moderate sublimity)

studio is even better - so fresh and so clean



listening to it now for the first time in a while I feel increasingly certain it was a source for Blind Melon when they came up with this (their one moment of moderate sublimity)



earlier post on the Ash and their great gatefolds 

wigwam bam

a Finnish Caravan







blanding out



solo



track six of that was sampled by DJ Shadow for "Midnight in a Perfect World" (it sez here)



with Oldfields (Mike and Sally) and that chap from the post-Aellen Gong... on Virgin... in '77

pumping pumping bass

they once did a cover - rather a good one - of this tune (for a Peel session I believe) so Jean-Jacques must be where they got the pumping thugly bass thing from



"I love the feel of the bass guitar between my legs"



"the ebony embittered souls of children"

robot music

Frank Garvey's OmniCircus from Vincent Tremblay on Vimeo.

chime has come today

Μουσική στο στόμα

Anastasis Teil 2 von Anestis Logothetis - Fernsehaufführung 1971 mit Claudia Brodzinska-Behrend und Siegfried Behrend.

forgot about ra

should always be mentioned in conversations about the synthesiser



feel like he is Rev's lost brother, especially  here



Disco 3000 is still my favorite, taped off Stubbsy back in the day



do you know, I've seen Sun Ra and the Arkestra twice?



once in  late 1985 at the Fridge, Brixton...  just amazing... the full procession of the band through the audience in all their finery

and then, once again, in 1989  at the Knitting Factory - not quite as amazing, but still a grand sight and sound



and then - pinch myself in disbelief at the thought - around about that time I actually had an audience with the great man

it is really rather unbelievable to contemplate - i mean, it's a bit like having interviewed Miles Davis or Coltrane, or - in non-jazz terms -  Stravinsky or Stockhausen  -  these would be equivalent figures in terms of 20th Century modernist out-there-ness....

but there I sat for a couple of hours, in a New York hotel, listening and taping, and I do not believe getting in so much as a word edge-wise

and - what's truly absurd - then having to edit it down to be a third-of-a-page featurette for a section of Melody Maker called Sidelines generally dedicated to up-and-coming bands.

an outrage!

(although in mitigation, I'm not sure NME or Sounds or Select would have given him any space at all by that point - MM  was pretty much alone in holding fast to the cover-everything spirit of the golden-era music press)

(still, in the early 70s, Melody Maker would have - and in fact did - give Sun Ra a double-page spread)

Polskie analogowe epiki elektroniczne

1976







hard to work out what he's launching off from - Tonto's Expanding? Zawinul?





Or Time's Encomium?







that one is a tiny bit Magma


the whole thing in one bloc 

Czeslaw Niemen had major prog form 

so the synth excursion seems to be a detour from the main proggy path

have yourself a buchla buchla christmas

"San Francisco Bay Area: 1969  - I'd been playing Buchla music in various galleries for openings, as well as MOMA openings. They liked them enough, since the music gave a good time, was infectious and totally new to people. So MOMA asked me to provide music for their annual Christmas party for Children on a Saturday morning. 
So I took off one evening for Mills College where the Buchla now was kept to take up my usual time time slot of 8pm. At the time use of the Tape/Buchla room was very loose; I could stay as long as I liked after the building closed at 10; sometimes I would be there almost till dawn. There were times, however, when I'd go back home at midnight dejected at having found nothing exciting. 

This night I was already across the Bay Bridge when I realized I hadn't brought any Christmas music, no carols! I was going to have to remember what I could. Turned out I knew enough of them to play with. 
The Buchla doesn't' have a keyboard like a piano (with twelve notes to the octave), just slits in a metal plate with two tuning knobs to give each slit a pitch or a pair of pitches. I didn't have to reconstruct all twelve notes of a scale, just the notes needed in the song. Tuning what few notes I needed for each tone was fairly easy. But one carol sounded like church bells because it one of the notes sounded out of tune as some church bells because their tuning doesn't fit with a tempered tuning so goes out of tune with the other notes. At first I thought this a problem, but since it did resemble church bells it decided it added to the charm. Other sounds reminded me of lighter caroling bells as I imagined in old Germany or the Alps, at least, as I remembered hearing them. 

The most pleasure came when I incorporated the sequencing module that gave a tune rhythm that it never had nor would have, since it came from a synthesizer with a different kind of creativity that a human wouldn't have. The unusual rhythm added a kick to the carol.

I didn't have enough carols to make a long enough session so I added here and there, especially at the end, some synthesizer music that I'd previously made on the Buchla that sounded shimmering and might evoke a starry sleigh filled night" 

- Warner Jepson. 

digital kitsch (Hubert & Harald)

actually pretty wacky stuff, missing link between Art of Noise and Ferraro's Far Side Virtual

a Fairlight fantasia



the full album




this one really is kitschtastic though





ooh they had prior prog form (bit like Vangelis with Aphrodite's Child maybe)











from Austria, Hubert and Harald also recorded -  later on -  as Blue Chip Orchestra



their kitschitude recognised no borders




Harald still going,  quite recently, at least

Excentrique