January 2004 - zorn-list - mailman.xmission.com

Spillane
by Ken Waxman 13 Jan '04

13 Jan '04

Picking up a thread from last week: For those interested, Micky Spillane has just published a new novel called Something's Down There. But at 86, it seems that his best work is behind him, Here are the first and last sentences of the review from the (Toronto) Glone & Mail: "Possbily the most remarkable thing about this novel is that it is written by the real Spillane" ... "Older readers will have a nostalgai hit. Younger ones will wonder why there was so much fuss over I, the Jury and Kiss Me Deadly." Ken Waxman ===== Ken Waxman mingusaum(a)yahoo.ca www.jazzword.com - Jazz/improv news, CD reviews and photos ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca

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RE: sampling in avant garde and pop music
by Herb Levy 13 Jan '04

13 Jan '04

As always, I don't read the Zorn digest as it arrives, so I may have missed some of the responses in this thread, but so many folks have ignored the long history of using recordings in electronic music since the post-WWII musique concrete studios in French that it's hard to know where to start. The following are just some of the highlights I can think off the top of my head: Most of the early Pierre Henry & Pierre Shaffer recordings are constructed entirely from recordings of natural sounds, including some recordings of music. James Tenney's " Study #1 (Blue Suede)" and Lawrence (? I could have his first name wrong) Trythall's "Ommagio a Jerry Lee Lewis" were two early (1950s, I think) reconfigurings of pop music using classic tape studio manipulations. David Mahler's King of Angels is a later (mid 1970s) tape technique piece on a different Presley recording. (Mahler also has a Tzadik release called Hearing Voices that's a set of four more recent works, all edited digitally, that are "portraits" of four artists he knew made by manipulating recordings of them talking.) Steve Reich has been mentioned (though I think his recent pieces Different Trains, the Cave and the new triptych work very differently from his early tape pieces like Come Out and are worth a separate kind of listen). Also Terry Riley's The Gift is quite interesting on its own as well as a precursor to the Ostertag Verbatim/Say No More project. There were dozens of other pieces like these made long digital sampling was an idea let alone a possibility. Other pre-sampler work was done by Carl Stone a composer who's been making electronic pieces out of other recordings since the early 1980s. One of his earliest mature works, Sukothai, was made simply with one album bouncing tracks back and forth until he'd dubbed the same thing out of synch with itself 1,028 times. In the mid-1980s, he used a stereo digital delay fed by record players to do collage pieces using classical recordings, Motown songs, field recordings, etc. When that piece of equipment was stolen he went to a (new at the time) MIDI system and continues to make the same kinds of pieces. He's got CDs on many different labels. Many of Alvin Curran's pieces use tape collages and or samples in idiomatic ways. Most of his Tzadik discs have some of this material, as do some of his other recordings. Also in the mid-1980s, guitarist Scott Johnson made several works based on vocal sounds. The tour de force of these works was John Somebody, for tape and instruments. The tape part was edited by hand splicing many hundreds of short sounds (words, laughter, crying, etc) to create the melodic and harmonic basis for the work. He apparently had strings of laughs of various pitches and lengths that he cut together using a razor blade and editing block. Nic Collins has been mentioned for his piece Devil's Music, but several other of his works use previously recorded material as his source. His albums It Was a Dark & Stormy Night & Sound Without Picture have a lot of this kind of work. Bob Ostertag who was also mentioned is perhaps particularly interesting because so little of his work, until quite recently, used commercially available music. For the most part his music is made from recordings he made himself (Sooner or Later may be the strongest of these) or from recordings provided by friends such as Fred Frith and John Zorn (Attention Span includes some of this work). His disc Burns Like Fire begins and ends with Ostertag's own recordings with a particularly striking use of other musical material. Noah Creshevsky is a NY composer who makes work quite different from John Wall's (Creshevsky's work is vaguely more "classical") but in some ways at least uses similar material in similar ways. In terms of the pop stuff that's been mentioned, you don't want to miss out on Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel, which may the first commercially distributed recording of a rap turntable solo piece that's not backing up a vocal (though it uses some earlier recordings by the rappers with whom Flash performed); Steinski's piece with a title something like The Motorcade Drove On is probably also of interest. And, if you want to dig into the history of the pop stuff, don't forget things like Alvin and the Chipmunks and the various fake news recordings with a "reporter" asking a question and getting a song lyric in reply. Some else may have a better memory for a name of one or more of these; they were released throughout the 1960s. And, though this may get me into some trouble, but hey. In terms of use of electronic music tape techniques, Sgt Pepper's use of multi-tracking is MUCH more innovative, more of a technical breakthrough, and much more influential, than something like Revolution #9 which, given what was being done in non-popular music is extremely derivative. For me the distinction that it's the "first" tape collage on a pop album has roughly the same as, say, the first rock songs recorded by Ella Fitzgerald on her Reprise discs. It's great that the Beatles were interested in that kind of work, great that they wanted to expose their audience to it, but within the constellation of the electronic music being done at the time, there'd already been a lot of work that was just as good if not better. If I have time to look around later this week, I may have some other sampled things to suggest. Bests, Herb -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb(a)eskimo.com

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RE: sampling in avant garde and pop music
by Sean Murphy 13 Jan '04

13 Jan '04

i think DJ Spooky's recent 'optometry' is a must-have CD--for all the right reasons. -----Original Message----- From: SELC - Andrew Mortensen [mailto:andrewm@mail.selc.com.au] Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 7:39 PM To: zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com Subject: RE: sampling in avant garde and pop music on this whole subject, I really recommend seeing the "Scratch" DVD. it's the history of hip-hop culture, turntablism etc. damn awesome!! refers to DXT & "Rockit" a heap of times! unfortunately, it doesn't touch on Whiz Kid or Christian Marclay. I was hoping seeing it's about turntablism, they'd mention Marclay, but being hip-hop based, it doesn't. I really wish someone had recorded Marclay's first jam with a hip-hopper at some art gallery in the 80s with Whiz Kid - that would've been cool! more recommendations on the whole sampling thing: Marclay Otomo: Smp Vrs & Ground Zero. Amon Tobin early Public Enemy any turntablism, esp - Kid Koala Skratch Piklz, X-ecutioners DJ Shadow DJ Spooky DJ Olive also Tony Buck, a lot of Peril was based on samples & triggers (I'm told). >>>Bill wrote: (Consume Red, both studio and live versions, is my favourite CD of all time)>>>>> me too!! I LOVE this CD!!! -----Original Message----- From: zorn-list-bounces+andrewm=mail.selc.com.au(a)mailman.xmission.com [mailto:zorn-list-bounces+andrewm=mail.selc.com.au@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Bill Ashline Sent: Tuesday, 13 January 2004 10:20 AM To: zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com Subject: Re: sampling in avant garde and pop music > From: "adam morosky" <amorosky(a)hotmail.com> > Subject: sampling in avant garde and pop music > i want to know if > there are any musicians/composers that stand out as true sampling pioneers > in Dub, Hip Hop, Pop, and avant garde music. > > what musician or composer do you feel really pushed the boundaries of what > sampling can be for their genre? In areas like dub/electronica, I'd say the pioneers are people like DJ Shadow, in particular, as well as DJ Olive and DJ Spooky. DXT is another pioneer, who has improvised using record collections with which he was unfamiliar. As far as the avant-garde, Otomo Yoshihide's early work with his sampling virus project is pretty important in this area, with the Ground Zero projects Consume Red and the Revolutionary Pekinese Opera being the best exemplifications (Consume Red, both studio and live versions, is my favorite CD of all time). As far as more recent music, clearly the best and most important pioneer is John Wall. Check out his Constructions and Fractuur recordings in particular. _______________________________________________ zorn-list mailing list zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com To UNSUBSCRIBE or Change Your Subscription Options, go to the webpage below http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zorn-list _______________________________________________ zorn-list mailing list zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com To UNSUBSCRIBE or Change Your Subscription Options, go to the webpage below http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zorn-list

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sampling in avant garde/pop music
by adam morosky 13 Jan '04

13 Jan '04

thanks a lot everybody for your great suggestions! i have more than enough reference to discuss now, thank you again. -adam morosky _________________________________________________________________ High-speed usersbe more efficient online with the new MSN Premium Internet Software. http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-us&page=byoa/prem&ST=1

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open a floating spirit
by vincent scarset 12 Jan '04

12 Jan '04

better and better, magma in zorn-zheul, do ya keep a floating spirit about actual muzik? i'd like to share some sounds for a un-computer machine, relative to the zheul, ruins and zappa, still some crazy underground in Hong Kong... captainlash _________________________________________________________________ MSN Messenger http://g.msn.fr/FR1001/866 : dialoguez en direct et gratuitement avec vos amis !

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RE: sampling in avant garde and pop music
by ahorton 12 Jan '04

12 Jan '04

>In pop music I was thinking about the Jamaican sound systems. The fathers of >dub. People like U-Roy and Lee "Scratch" Perry, I undertand he is virtually the >father of sampling. How so? There was really no "sampling" in any sense of the word involved in dub. andrew

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Re: sampling in avant garde and pop music
by Ben Axelrad 12 Jan '04

12 Jan '04

The first thing that came to my mind was also Public Enemy, but I was thinking of IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS.... It seems like around this time rappers were still borrowing heavily from relatively well-known musicians/songs. Check out "Rebel Without a Pause". If I recall correctly that's a sax solo from James Brown's Funky Bunch, Vol 1. And the noise loop in "Bring the Noise" is from the opening to Funkadelic's "Get Off Your Ass and Jam" (either that or "Take It To The Stage"). Who at that time was using JB and P-Funk in that way? I'll second the De La recommendation. Also the Automator's work on Dr. Octagon stands out. Also, while we're on the Laswell tip, I've always thought that the Jungle Brothers' "J Beez Wit The Remedy" was criminally underrecognized. This was made while the JBs were hanging with Laswell & co (Praxis, guest appearances on the Sly & Robby/Material and Bernie Worrell Gramavision albums...) and features Bootsy and Gary Mudbone Cooper. Half of the songs are really noisy, with lots of distortion, irregular beats, and strange vocals by Torture (Sensational). Ben >From: skip heller <thisparadise(a)sbcglobal.net> >To: adam morosky <amorosky(a)hotmail.com>, <zorn-list(a)lists.xmission.com> >Subject: Re: sampling in avant garde and pop music >Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 12:47:16 -0800 > >on 1/12/04 12:23 PM, adam morosky at amorosky(a)hotmail.com wrote: > > > what musician or composer do you feel really pushed the boundaries of >what > > sampling can be for their genre? > >Prince Paul's work on De La Soul's 3 FT HIGH, the Bomb Squad on Public >Enemy's FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET. Anything by Mixmaster Mike. NuMark on the >Jurassic 5 cut "Swing Set". > >skip h > > >_______________________________________________ >zorn-list mailing list >zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com >To UNSUBSCRIBE or Change Your Subscription Options, go to the webpage below >http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zorn-list _________________________________________________________________ Get a FREE online virus check for your PC here, from McAfee. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963

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Wave Twisters
by SELC - Andrew Mortensen 12 Jan '04

12 Jan '04

anyone seen "Wave Twisters" with Buckethead & Q-Bert? http://imdb.com/title/tt0291559/

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looking for john lindberg relative reliability w/ thurman barker/ehrlich trade
by brian sullivan 12 Jan '04

12 Jan '04

hi. does anyone have this album to trade? thanks, brian. _________________________________________________________________ Scope out the new MSN Plus Internet Software optimizes dial-up to the max! http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-us&page=byoa/plus&ST=1

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RE: sampling in avant garde and pop music
by Kurt Gottschalk 12 Jan '04

12 Jan '04

this on top of laswell might be enough to break my mailbox, but... for my money the first two djs in hiphop to rise above the trend and make truly great music were terminator x (public enemy's 'welcome to the terrordome') and prince paul (de la soul's 'three feet high and rising'). i then get bored for several decades, until timbaland came along. i don't listen to rap even 1/80th as much as i used to, so i'm sure there's a lot of stuff i'm missing. there's some great stuff in the documentary film 'scratch', if you're able to pull off showing that to your class. kg np: wfmu _________________________________________________________________ Check out the new MSN 9 Dial-up fast & reliable Internet access with prime features! http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-us&page=dialup/home&ST=1

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