FOOL'S JEWELS: September 2009

Wednesday 30 September 2009

When The World Comes To An End

More info and a downloadable MP3 at Stereogum.

Saturday 26 September 2009

Malek Khorshid

I really like dated animations with surreal and very interpretable plotlines.

So I enjoyed this 1975 animation by Ali Akbar Sadeghi.

There's something quite videogame-like about the whole thing too.

Courtesy of UBU again.

The Finger

It's just a relatively cheap plug-in enabling you to play around with sound in loads of ways using different keys to trigger different effects and editing techniques.

Kind of ridiculous how easy and accessable it will make all of that stuff, but that's probably a good thing!

LOOK

Saying that, for it to be fully customisable you've got to run it through Reaktor, which is relatively hardcore territory.

Friday 25 September 2009

Good Morning Mr. Orwell

Amazing video from 1984 led by Nam June Paik.

Played on New Year's Day and presented live by various people across the globe, so there are some awkward live moments but it's filled with amazing people and graphics.

More info at UBU.

Thursday 24 September 2009

At risk of just being a filter of Mutant Sounds (which would actually be quite useful in a way), I found a really good post they did earlier this year on Logic System (aka this guy, who did loads of sound programming for the Yellow Magic Orchestra).

In my opinion the first album is better than the second one but they're both HERE.

Good, quite dancey, melodic, 1981, Japanese, pretty fashionable...

Library Music

Companies hire composers to write music, the music is then fully owned by the companies who can easily licence the music, which is useful for people who make television etc.

There are quite a few blogs dedicated to spreading library music, and the amount that was made is incredible.

They were never available for public sale, so blogging them is sort of the only way for them to really exist nowadays.

A lot of of the composers who were involved are fairly anonymous in the sense that it's hard to find out much about them even if the names are clearly labelled, although I think some of them might have used pen names, and there are a few cases of musicians who did this sort of work for a bit to make money then became famous for other things.

As I said there are a lot of blogs dedicated to Library Music but the one that seems to have the most consistent results is The Library Hunt.

This is also to do with the fact that all of the posts are quite clear about what style of music each collection holds.

Saying that, the records themselves had to have quite clear titles for commercial reasons.

Two particularly good ones I've come across are "High Tension" and "Thrills and Spills", both from the company Bruton Music.

I've also uploaded the title track from this alb um by Simon Park.

It's a bit different to some of the other tracks I've come across in the sense that it's less atmospheric and a bit more like a wacky instrumental pop song.

CHECK IT OUT

Monday 21 September 2009

More Mario

Sunday 20 September 2009

DanielRadcliffe777

Friday 18 September 2009

Many Many Women

Petr Kotik

Many Many Women

Text by Gertrude Stein

S.E.M. Ensemble

3 hours and 35 minute excerpt

"The recording is an edited version of the complete 6-hour long performance. The nature of the music makes it impossible to to repeat and correct various passages, therefore, the recording proceeded despite occasional lapses and mistakes, impossible to avoid in a live performance. The recordings (two complete performances) were edited and combined by discarding parts, not acceptable for a record release."

Written in the late 70s and recorded in 1980 by Petr Kotik's own ensemble, Many Many Women was apparently respected within certain circles, but is definitely not famous, and the same pretty much goes for composer Petr Kotik.

I heard one of his compositions (via this) and really liked it, so tried to get hold of his "magnum opus" but found it extremely difficult.

Ended up finding it on eBay and it involved a fairly extreme price and shipping distance but it got here eventually.

I definitely feel that it was worth sharing via the blog for that fact alone!

I still haven't listened to it in it's entirety but I'm impressed.

It's got a pretty much non-stop use of parallel fifths, which is a hardcore approach to melody and harmony, but I think it works.

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

Here is quite a nice review with good photos and anecdotal details.

Thursday 17 September 2009

Artikulation

Wednesday 16 September 2009

Hot Troche

My parents got a few CDs for me when they went to Japan last year.

Quite a lot of it was fairly extreme electronic stuff that they had never heard of, like this album Munaa Poyu by Hot Troche which I didn't really like at first.

Listened to it recently though and actually now I really like it!

Still quite extreme though, there's a quote online (which could be a joke) about it containing "approximately 700 hours of music compressed".

It does remind me of these guys as well as maybe more obviously this guy.

Impressively, the blog Mutant Sounds have beat me to uploading this by about a year, so download it from there.

Dirty Talk

Tuesday 15 September 2009

MIDI Player Piano

Jeff Stolet using an infared sensor to trigger MIDI algorithms which are then sent to a player piano.

Taken from Deviant Synth.

Ascending Melody

Coming out in two weeks on their Temecula Sunrise EP.

Muse

Muse are so shit it's insane.

However, in anticipation of their new album which has just been released, loads of fans put up fake versions of what they thought the final tracks (the Muse penned Exogenesis Symphony) would sound like, which sort of brings the "Muse sound" to a new level.

Here are just two of them: