High School Recordings: The 25-Year Anniversary

Around the time of my 17th birthday (1986), I'd saved up enough money grilling hamburgers to buy my first E-lectric guitar. It was a beaut: a Black-and-White Zebra-Striped Strat copy, $100 new. Already had my casio keyboard with built-in drum machine that I'd earned waiting tables at the old folks' home the year before, so I was all ready to go. After a couple weeks of teaching myself some chords I started recording.

These recordings span Summer '86 to Summer '87, at which time I graduated high school and left for the army to put life on creative hold for two years. I used the aforementioned casio keyboard and guitar to begin with, then acquired a casio sk-1 and programmable Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine, and borrowed a friend's casio cz-101 synth (retail price: $500) much of the time.

Not all of these are original melodies. Some are bits I lifted from my punk rock records, or sometimes jingles from TV commercials and saturday morning cartoons (many years of classical piano training helped my sense of perfect pitch). To do multitrack songs, I would record the first part (usually drum machine and bass) through a wired condenser mic onto my Montgomery Ward one-piece Hi-FI (cassette, radio, phonograph AND 8-track tape), then transfer that tape over to my little portable cassette recorder, which had a speaker of about 2" diameter. I'd set that up next to my guitar amp, put the mic in front of them, hit 'record' on the Hi-Fi with the mixdown cassette in it, then hit 'play' on the portable and play along to the backing track. So the sound is total dogshit. But it's ten songs clocking in at a merciful 12 minutes, and I think it's pretty funny. They're all instrumentals. I omitted the ones in which I'm singing in a hormone-addled imitation of Lux Interior, Joey Ramone or John Lydon. I know we're all friends, but I'm not willing to put that part of myself out there yet. Maybe some other time.

Soundlab 11-28-11

awakening

frankensynth, persephone, chimera

auracle

theremin (with loop pedal), persephone, moog, frankensynth

loungitude

tr-33, frankensynth, moog, persephone

R.I.P. Ken Russell

Netflix Stream of the Week: Linda Blair Triple Feature

Click the titles to go to the streams. Let's approach them chronologically, starting with the most maligned (but actually the best) of the Exorcist films:


Exorcist II: The Heretic



The picture asks: Does great goodness bring upon itself great evil? This goes back to the Book of Job; it's God testing the good… I like the first Exorcist, because of the Catholic guilt I have, and because it scared the hell out of me; but Exorcist II: The Heretic surpasses it. Maybe (director John) Boorman failed to execute the material, but the movie still deserved better than it got.
-Martin Scorcese


Roller Boogie



If you don't enjoy this movie, then I don't even want to know you, because you are dead inside. Filmed in Venice Beach, same location for the similarly-plotted Xanadu a year later (which would also use many of the same skaters as extras).


Hell Night



I saw this for the first time recently, and was surprised by how good it was in terms of pacing and suspense. The 1981 production has some tired cliches of its era, but it also borrows from olde-timey haunted house and monster movies to great effect. It's genuinely scary and builds to a nice finish.

I can guarantee you that Ms. Blair is treated with utmost respect in all three of these films. If you wish to see her exploited and tormented in fare like Born Innocent or Chained Heat, then you can go search out those movies yourself, pervert.

Diorama #5

My most recent binocular diorama. Nearly impossible to photograph or film, but here's the best I could do. The case is PET plastic that I pulled on a homemade vacuum-forming rig. It mounts to a standard microphone stand, so the height is easily adjustable. A 9-volt transformer supplies power to light the interior with white LEDs, as well as a series of custom-made circuits that make red mini-LEDs pulse inside each of the bugs.

Automaterror

33 Seconds from "Winterbeast"

Movie of the Week: Carnival Magic

A magician in a carnival--who actually can read minds and levitate people and objects--works with a superintelligent chimp named Alex, who can also talk. The magician and the chimp soon become the stars of the carnival, drawing in big crowds. However, the wild-animal trainer, who has been displaced by the team as the carnival's top act, decides to kidnap Alex and sell him to a medical laboratory for experimentation, thereby getting rid of his competition.

The penultimate film of Al Adamson (the man behind Movie-of-the-Week favorite Dracula vs. Frankenstein), unavailable on home video or any streaming options besides Hulu and their annoying advertisements. Produced by "The Krypton Corporation".

Chimp Haven

from Wired Science,

The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would ban medical research on chimpanzees, has bipartisan support in Congress... the Institutes of Medicine may soon declare that using chimps isn't necessary to fight disease.

Should that research end, more than 1,000 chimpanzees now in U.S. laboratories will need new homes. Wired Science visited Chimp Haven to see how that might be done.

Click image or here to read the rest.

New Etsy Items

This holiday season, buy some stuff from my Etsy store. If not for your loved ones, then at least for yourself. Here's the Christmas 2011 Wishbook:

EXCLUSIVE DISCOUNT TO READERS OF THIS BLOG

After selecting your items, enter this coupon code at the prompt:

FREESHIP1

You'll receive free shipping on your entire order. That's big savings! This offer stands until Nov. 30, 2011.

The Age of the Teenager

Frankenribbon Solo

Since I also own a Persephone and a theremin, I don't play this homemade device very often. But it has a quality all its own, and I'm inspired enough by it to start building an improved version that can be worn and played more like a guitar.

The Life of an Agent

We visited Memento Park a few days ago, just outside of Budapest. It's a graveyard for monuments of Hungary's Soviet-occupied era (mid-40's to late 80's). One of my favorites is the one above, all that's left of an enormous likeness of Stalin. The rest of him was sawed down by protesters during the 1956 uprising.

Of no less interest was this interactive exhibit you could climb inside of; a real-life Trabant, a.k.a "The People's Car". This East German product was virtually the only car on the road when I visited Hungary in 1990. Now it's obsolete, presumably because of its shameful emissions; It put out nearly ten times as many hydrocarbons as the average European car, due to its two cylinder, two stroke engine. The shell was made of resin and recycled cotton.

In a small indoor exhibit era they screened this fascinating compilation of films, made between the 40's and the 70's, specifically to train members of Hungary's secret police: : how to interrogate, tap phone lines, photograph suspects, break into their homes to collect supposed evidence... unconscionable actions, treated like an ordinary matter of course.



On a related note, the House of Terror is a fantastic place to visit in Budapest. located in the actual building that housed HQ and prisons / torture chambers for the Nazis (Hungary was an axis country) as well as the Communists, it's an engrossing and terrifying subject, told in some of the best exhibit design I've seen.

Taxitrocities

Photos I shot last week at the Natural History Museum in Florence, Italy.

Windows 95 with Greta

Lux and Ivy's Favorites

Since Lux Interior's death I've been spending more time listening to the Cramps, my favorite rock n' roll band since I was 16, and appreciating the tributes and memoriams throughout the internet. It's a sad event, but this resurgence of Cramps interest has been a good thing.

A massive find is "Lux and Ivy's Favorites", 11 volumes (321 tracks!) of songs they spent most of their lives hunting down and enjoying, all for free.

Lux Interior and Ivy Rorshach were record collectors first, and a band second. They only started playing music after many years of digging up rare 45's of trashy rockabilly and doo-wop, and even then almost all of their songs were covers. They often freely admitted they were fans, trying to recreate the music they loved.

Listening to this collection is a special insight to Lux's tastes, and seemingly like Lux himself: unique, sincere, and always with a sense of humor. A short playlist is below (I found these tracks a few days ago, so I've barely listened to it all), and you can download the whole thing HERE.

(personal recommendation: combine these songs with those 255 free grindhouse radio ads I linked a few weeks ago into an itunes playlist and hit "shuffle").

Vincent Price, Art Connousieur

In 1962, the Sears-Roebuck chain of department stores approached Vincent Price and invited him to sponsor a new art collection. He was already known for his exquisite taste in the finer things, from music to literature to cooking. Price accepted the offer, and personally bought over 50,000 pieces to be sold in the stores' galleries.

These weren't chintzy Hummel figurines or Patrick Nagel posters; you could walk into a Sears and buy an original canvas by Picasso or Mondrian for about $400. In the attached film, Vincent points out some Goya Capriccio etchings which sold for $35 at the time, and are currently worth at least $5000.

Vincent wasn't just attaching his name to a product line for a few bucks. He truly believed in bringing art to the masses. "The crevices and cracks of your life, the places where the mortar comes out and falls away--you can fill it up with the love of art", he once exclaimed. Besides curating the Sears galleries until their closing in 1971, Price also served as a juror for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and was on the UCLA Art Council and the U.S. Dept. of Interior's Indian Arts Board. He also owned a performing chimp named Jerry.



(this clip is edited. I saw the full film on video a few years ago, and remember it being at least half an hour long. If anyone can find a longer version online, let me know)

Futurechimp Theater: Narcotics, Pit of Despair

17 Species of North American Mammals

Grizzly Bear :0 - :17
Harbor Seal :17 - :33
Dall's Sheep :33 - :44
Timber Wolf :44 - :51
Moose :51 - 1:22
Cougar/Mountain Lion 1:22 - 1:26
Sea Lion 1:26 - 1:51
Porcupine 1:51 - 1:58
Bison 1:58 - 3:26
Ringtail/Rodent 3:26 - 3:41
Musk Ox 3:41 - 4:11
Columbia Black Tail Deer 4:11 - 4:37
Caribou 4:37 - 5:06
Coyote 5:06 - 5:25
Mountain Goat 5:25 - 5:48
Peccary 5:48 - 6:26
Mule Deer 6:26 - 6:58

From Sonic Scenery, an exhibit I worked on at the natural history museum in Los Angeles a couple years ago. Composers were invited to record music specifically to be heard in wings of the museum. The visitor wears a headset, which plays the compositions when triggered by remote signals in the galleries. Experimental duo Matmos took it all the way by making audio environments for each of the seventeen dioramas in the North American Mammals hall. The timechart (above) was intended to cue the visitor to move from one window to the next, but you can read along for a similar effect.

artist statement:
In general, our work starts by taking an object, making sounds with that object, and working outward from those sounds in a free-associative manner, without a preconceived result or specifically targeted genre in mind.
In this case, we have had to reverse this process and have tried to think about the precise specifics of the North American Mammals hall and work to gather sounds that will evoke both the natural locale and the specific behaviors of the animals in the room. We decided to anchor our piece around the sounds of animals eating, breathing, and sniffing their environment, and to locate these noises of animal life against a backdrop of plateaulike drones generated with musical instruments associated with "Americana": pedal steel, acoustic guitar, banjo, harmonica, and autoharp. Feeding peanut butter to a friend's dog, we built up a basic library of mammalian lip-smacking, huffing, barking, whining, sniffling, and breathing noises, and combined this with a percussive battery of antler noises made by smacking deer antlers against each other and some softer rustling textures harvested by stroking and rubbing the pelt of a wolf.
The work is divided into miniature 'cells,' which stand in for the seventeen distinct dioramas/environments and animal species represented in the room, and this is split down the middle by a central section that corresponds to the large bison display at the far end of the room. Our work is intended to be a sound map of a walk through this room and is paced to coincide with a five-to-seven-minute counterclockwise walk through its contents - Matmos

More about the exhibit here.