Sounds from Innerspace

innerspaceboy · 10-10-2015, 05:54 PM

Below is an article I published to my music journal on this day last year.

Today it finally arrived! The 5-disc Super Deluxe 20th Anniversary Edition of Underworld's incredible album, Dubnobasswithmyheadman.

Underworld is perhaps where I go off the deep end from fan to fringe fanatic. The first album I ever heard which wasn't commercial pop radio - this record changed my life forever. The album packaging also marked the definitive moment when I knew I had to become a graphic designer.

To date I now have 394 of their albums and EPs in my digital library and nearly every LP, single, book, poster and print they've issued since 1979.

It's collections like this that make me cautious - While I don't buy these titles blindly, I feel somewhat of a sense of responsibility to have them all - perhaps as a part of what critic Simon Reynolds called the growing "curatorial culture" of music fans.

The snapshot below comprises the majority of the releases linked directly to Dubnobass in 1994. But emotionally it feels like I'm archiving my own life story at the crossroads where my preconceived notions of Music were shattered.

I'm really at a thoughtful point in my self-appointed archival career. I'm reading a number of books that examine the nature of post-millennium economy of music sales. Most address the same fundamental points -

- The ease of distribution of digital files and their compact size has stripped music of its commercial value and rendered the majority of physical media useless, making music more of a utility than a property. Most casual listeners are satisfied to sacrifice fidelity and dynamic range for the convenience of carrying thousand of albums with them while they shop, eat, and work, or to give up possession of their libraries entire in exchange for cloud-based music services.

- Simultaneously, the inevitable gluttony of music acquisition which takes place in the digital age further diminishes the value of commercial music.

- However, vinyl sales continue to increase year after year while all other media sales plummet as music consumers discover the merit of the EXPERIENCE of actively listening and participating in their music instead of consuming it passively while performing other tasks.

- And finally, there is an ever-growing culture of music curators who collect physical artifacts of any number of periods, artists, styles, and formats in an effort to reaffirm the value of their music. Another benefit of the digital age is that the Web grants these "curators" access to the furthest reaches of obscure and limited-pressing musics from cultures near and far and from (most) any period in history.

I've found myself spending more time and energy (and money) than I ever have before building my library of "artifacts," in part to document my own personal story via music and also out of a sense of duty to build a library of Music that Matters, so that I can share it with the world and open the minds of listeners yearning for strange and wonderful sounds.

What about you? Are you a cultural curator? Are we wasting our time and our money with these antiquated and out-dated treasures or does our very act of collecting them somehow justify their value?

innerspaceboy · 10-15-2015, 07:31 PM

This installment of Innerspace features a special look at a unique pick from The Internet Archive. Mark Davis, former K-Mart employee and dedicated crap-audio archivist rescued a stockpile of K-Mart muzak cassettes which were broadcast over the store's PA system throughout the 80s and 90s. Davis wrote an excellent summary of the library on the collection page titled, Attention K-Mart Shoppers:

OK, I have to admit this this is a strange collection. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive, odd collection.
Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was intoduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether.

The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs.

The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's becuase they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.

Finally, one tape in the collection was from the Kmart 30th anniversary celebration on 3/1/92. This was a special day at the store where employees spent all night setting up for special promotions and extra excitement. It was a real fun day, the store was packed wall to wall, and I recall that the stores were asked to play the music at a much higher volume. The tape contains oldies and all sorts of fun facts from 1962. This may have been one of the last days where Kmart was in their heyday - really!

One last thing for you techies, the stores built in the early 1970's (such as Naperville, IL Ogden Mall Kmart #3066, Harwood Heights, IL #3503 and Bridgeview, IL #4381) orignally had Altec-Lansing amplifiers with high quality speakers throughout the store. When you applied a higher quality sounding source, the audio was extremely good. Later stores had cheaper speakers and eventually the amps were switched out with different ones usually lacking bass and treble controls.

Disaffected millennials raised in the age of irony and cynicism will love these plastic corporate recordings. If you've any vaporwave music in your library, this is the archive for you.

Tune in and don't miss the blue light special.

innerspaceboy · 10-17-2015, 09:03 PM

Today is a wonderful milestone! Forgive the slight detour from the usual musical content but I've just finished unpacking in this, my first home. It is a charming house of antiquity built in 1926 and I've worked hard to make every square foot reflect my own style.

Click here for a guided tour!

innerspaceboy · 10-18-2015, 11:03 AM

What will follow in the days ahead will be a trilogy of entries showcasing rare and unreleased (or privately-circulated) material celebrating the catalog of The KLF. Wherever possible I will include the recordings for readers and fellow Discordians to savor for their own. Let’s dive right in...

Space Exploration: A Lost Ambient Milestone
(orig. pub. 2014/05/04)

I cannot express the level of my excitement in finally hearing this special recording. This new disc was to be the ninth in the series of unofficial reworkings of the KLF’s catalog – masterfully engineered and easily one of the finest ambient recordings of the year. Sadly, due to issues beyond the producer’s control, the disc will not be released to the public.

The disc contains a 2014 72-minute epic rework of the original Space LP created 24 years ago, originally as a collaboration between Dr. Alex Paterson and Jimmy Cauty – the original line-up of The Orb.

For those who aren’t familiar with the outstanding KLF: Recovered & Remastered unofficial releases from my past entries, let me bring you up to speed.

1987. British acid house. Drummond. Cauty. The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. The Timelords. The JAMs. One World Orchestra. 2K. The Stadium House Trilogy. Doctorin’ the Tardis. Anarchism. The White Room. The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Top of the Pops. America: What Time is Love? The Manual. A lost road movie. The K Foundation. Extreme Noise Terror. Why Sheep? Waiting. The Rites of Mu. Chill Out. The birth of Ambient House. Burning a million quid on the Isle of Jura. Abandon all art now. And Space.

There. That about sums it up.

20 years into the silence that followed the K Foundation’s exit from celebrity a man surfaced who set himself to the task of recovering and remastering the KLF’s catalog to fill the void left in Cauty and Drummond’s absence.

The first six releases, catalog #KLF 001 RE – KLF 006 RE were brilliant, and the sixth release, Live From The Lost Continent 2012 presented listeners with a 77-minute stadium-packed concert that never was.

Following this triumph, two more released emerged – KLF MINUS-ONE and KLF MINUS-FOUR, each better than the EP before.

But our hero had one last stupendous project up his sleeve. And in April of 2014, it was complete.

A message from its creator revealed that MINUS-SIX was to be:

“…a 72 minute remodel of the classic SPACE release, sounding like a cross between ‘Silence’ (from Pete Namlook’s legendary Fax +49-69/450464 label), SPACE, and classic ambient drone releases. It’s almost like Trainspotting for KLF fans.”

Listen to the original Space LP (1990) here.

The final piece is a monumental achievement – a new Music for Airports, or perhaps a new Selected Ambient Works Vol II. It effectively unites sparse white-noise drones with all of the familiar elements of the original Space record which made it so memorable. It is brilliantly subtle, while simultaneously making the sounds of simulated space flight an exciting and dramatic experience.

Then came the crushing news – the MINUS SIX project had suddenly been halted, and there were to be no more releases in the series.

I make no exaggeration when I state that, with this loss, the ambient music audience is experiencing its own Nick Drake, or more accurately – its own SugarMan.

At least this dude got his own movie.

Worse yet – because Rodriguez had a nation celebrating his work for generations an ocean away from his quiet daily life, and at least Nick Drake experienced posthumous success – becoming a household name in the years which followed his untimely demise.

But production of MINUS-6 has been cancelled. Quite sadly, the millennium’s ambient and drone audience and the millions of listeners who grew up with the KLF may never hear this record.

Its legend is shrouded in mystery. Will KLF fans ever know the engineer’s name? Why the sudden cease just before unveiling his holy grail?

But perhaps it is the legend and the mystery that adds a touch of vitality to the series.
And I still have hope. The K Foundation announced a 23-year moratorium on all projects beginning November 1995. Perhaps, in honor of the 2018 reformation of the KLF, our mysterious friend will emerge.

My sincerest hope is that the man behind these nine fantastic EPs one day receives the recognition (and listenership) that he deserves.

If you’re out there – Bring the beat back.

Tune in to The KLF: Recovered & Remastered ‎– KLF MINUS-SIX - This Is Not What Space Is About in full.

innerspaceboy · 10-21-2015, 05:04 PM

Principia Discordia: Contextual Insight into the Chaos of The KLF
(orig. pub. 2013/12/17)

There is no better analysis of the mayhem and madness of the band than John Higgs’ book – THE KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds.

To quote DJ Food, who himself blogged about the book upon its publication:

“If there’s one event that the book centers on it’s the burning of a million pounds and from there [Higgs] draws clear lines to Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea, Alan Moore, Ken Campbell, the number 23, Dr Who, magical thinking, The Dadaists, the Devil, Discordianism, the assassination of Kennedy, Wicker Men and the banking crisis of the late 20th Century.”

This is definitely not your average KLF biography.

I received my copy just days after publication so I was happy to create an entry for the title on Goodreads and to provide its first review.

I’m 3/4 through this brilliant book and with each new chapter I am amazed how much this humble little paperback reveals about global events and cultural responses of the 20th century.

For example, Chapter 12: Undercurrents examines the quiet death of 20th century culture – the forgettable early-to-mid 90s.

The chapter summarizes the beginnings and endings of cultural climates, citing key events beginning with Darwinism’s impact on the pillar of faith in the late nineteenth century to The Great War, the conflict of the 40s, the conformity of the 50s, the liberation of the 60s, the hedonistic self-indulgence of the 70s, and the shift toward material wealth in the 1980s.

All of this lead to the 90s – the point where culture simply burned out. “They were out of ideas.” Slacker became the iconic low-culture film of 1991. Nihilism peaked in 1994 with Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the KLF’s burning of a million pounds, and the death of Bill Hicks.

And with these events, Higgs declares, “this was the point when the constant creation of new musical genres that had characterized the 20th century came to an end.”

Higgs refers to 1991-94 as the “Age of Extremes,” bracketed by the end of the Cold War and by the birth of first popular web browser.

The chapter also touches upon Surrealism, Situationism, Anti-capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Dadaism, The Cabaret Voltaire, Generation X, Tony Blair, George W Bush, The Spice Girls, and how all of these lead us to the new millennium.

Other chapters are equally rich in content. Chapter 4: Magic and Moore, (specifically pp 80 – 89) examine the nature of consciousness, Carl Jung, Alan Moore’s concept of “Ideaspace,” and reality itself.

A thoroughly exciting book, I had to put it down mid-chapter just to collect my thoughts.

One thing is for certain – Higgs’ book will give you more insight into the mysterious entity that is the K-Foundation than you could ever have asked for.

A screen print design I made in tribute to the K Foundation

innerspaceboy · 10-24-2015, 10:30 AM

The Dawn Coming Up: Rare Treasures and Tributes to The KLF
(orig. pub. 2013/08/20)

I’ve loved the first two LPs by minimal drone artist, Black Swan since their release in 2010 and ’11. Black Swan composes what are perhaps the finest modern classical works I’ve ever heard. Quite sadly, the Wikipedia, allmusic, rateyourmusic, and discogs offer absolutely no information about the artist. And the Black Swan official homepage presents little more than snapshots of their minimal but breathtaking album covers.

Fortunately, a user review from Discogs sums it up nicely:

The anonymity of this New York-based artist has an effect on the listening experience. The music is given the right to exist on its own, as if it had always existed. It stakes its claim in the mind, making the listener a collaborator in a seductive narrative-noire that travels through a hall of horrors and memories, an escort to a final resting place. One might encounter spirit animals, forgotten lovers, faceless apparitions, leviathan rifts, or a cozy blanket of stars. It is easy to become comfortable in the soothing darkness, and when it seems like eternity has arrived, Black Swan pulls the plug.

And so I was absolutely floored when the artist posted a first-ever listen to a pre-Black Swan double album he produced back in 2001. The previously-unreleased album is called Alone Again With the Dawn Coming Up: A Tribute to the KLF.

It took a moment for the sheer awesomeness to fire across my synapses.
BLACK SWAN… POSTED A 12-YEAR OLD TRIBUTE RECORD… TO THE KLF. In its entirety. For free. Complete with album art (a la Chill Out.)

Once you’ve scooped your cerebral matter off the back wall of your room, head over to swanplague.com and download it NOW before it disappears.

Thankfully, I’ve had the good fortune of meeting the mysterious artists in my travels since discovering the mix, and the moment Black Swan decides to release this gem on vinyl, I will be the first in line to claim a copy for my library.

It’s that good.

And as a final highlight of rare KLF material, no amount of praise will do justice to privately released KLF 006 RE (Live From the Lost Continent). Expertly mixed with cheering crowds and all of the KLF’s fire and energy, this mix transports you to the concert that never was. Some rabid fans have convinced themselves this was an actual show… and that they were there.

So turn off all the lights. Put on you finest circumaural studio monitors. And turn it up to eleven.

“This is what the KLF is about.”

Cheers to Mr. Ward for your magnificent work keeping the KLF alive into the new millennium.

Tune in to the entire Live From the Lost Continent Mix below.

innerspaceboy · 10-25-2015, 12:11 PM

Ludovic Navarre, aka St Germain's first album in 15 years is an exciting interweaving of downtempo electronic and deep house, jazz, folk, African, world, & country music.

St Germain is perhaps best-known for his downtempo singles, "So Flute" and "Rose Rouge" from 2000. I confess, when I read that the artist was releasing his first album in over a decade I was skeptical whether or not his best years were behind him. Thankfully, Navarre quickly dispelled my doubts as soon as I tuned in to the opening track.

Here are "So Flute..."

...and "Rose Rouge."

For the album's promotion, St Germain commissioned Urban Art creator Gregos, known for his smiling and frowning faces stuck on walls throughout Paris and Europe, to create a series of masks painted with the flags of the nations of the world. Navarre then traveled the globe covertly installing the masks in public spaces. His website features a map with mask markers indicating in which countries they have been found. Sending his listeners on a global treasure hunt, those who find the mask for their country receive the double LP for free.

Artists take note - This brilliant, heady music and the creator's unique promotional project are precisely the stuff that will make an album successful in the digital age.

Check out video for the first single which includes footage of the mask installations below.

UPDATE: Delighted to find that my local indie record shop had a copy in stock!

innerspaceboy · 10-26-2015, 10:20 PM

RETROMANIA: Pop Culture's Addition to Its Own Past (a Review)
Orig. Pub. 10-23-14

Music critic Simon Reynolds is perhaps best-known for his coining of the term, "post-rock." He is also regarded for his incorporation of critical theory in his analysis of music. His 2011 book, Retromania was my first encounter with his writing.

Quote:

"I recently read Simon Reynolds’ Retromania and it was so spot-on as far as our current attitude to music and its history. For my money he’s one of the most intelligent music writers in the last two decades"
-- DJ Food

Retromania turned out to be much more than a critical examination of popular culture’s fascination with its past. It was a revealing study of my own approach to culture, trends, styles, and music. And I’m certain that I wasn’t alone in this discovery. Like most readers who made the personal decision to read 500 pages of cultural analysis by a music critic, it demonstrates the emerging and growing demographic of cultural curators.

Quote:

Brian Eno noticed the rise of the curator and grasped its implications way ahead of the pack. In 1991, reviewing a book on hypertext for Artforum, he proclaimed: Curatorship is arguably the big new job of our times: it is the task of re-evaluating, filtering, digesting, and connecting together. In an age saturated with new artifacts and information, it is perhaps the curator, the connection maker, who is the new storyteller, the meta-author.'

The new century is rich with metadata and globally-accessible archives of content from all cultures and eras. Youtube alone adds 100 hours of new video content every minute, and the emergence of music streaming services have only further-accelerated the accessibility of media, old and new alike. This raises perhaps one of the biggest questions of our era: can culture survive in conditions of limitlessness?

Chapter 4: The Rise of the Rock Curator was the first glimpse into my own rationale as a cultural custodian. It begins with the New Musical Express’ weekly column in the early 1980s - ”Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer.” Several rock groups of the decade presented their music with a kind of invisible reading-and-movie-watching list attached, conveyed through literary references within their lyrics of images depicted on their album jackets. (Sgt. Peppers is perhaps the best-known example of this execution.)

Reynolds writes that “being a Throbbing Gristle or Coil fan was like enrolling in a university course of cultural extremism, the music virtually coming with footnotes and a ‘Further Reading’ section attached.”

As the decade progressed, this curatorial baton was passed from the artists to their fan-base, who began, (whether consciously or unconsciously) to compile not just their favorite artist’s records, but the films, novels, and art which inspired their recordings.

The book goes on to explore the nature of collector-culture in the digital age and touches upon both the decisively retro action of record collecting and the inherent merits and dysfunctions associated with the activity, as well as the hoarding habits of media collection with respect to digital music.

But it was in a chapter on the 60s’ embrace of revivalism that I found the greatest revelation regarding my own bizarre fascination with music, art, and culture of the past. Reynolds writes -

Quote:

Remember the Pop Boutique store in central London with its slogan 'Don't follow fashion. Buy something that's already out of date'? Just as vintage can have an undercurrent of recalcitrance towards fashion, similarly it is possible for rock nostalgia to contain dissident potential. If Time has become annexed by capitalism's cynical cycles of product shifting, one way to resist that is to reject temporality altogether. The revivalist does this by fixating on one era and saying: 'Here I make my stand.' By fixing identity to the absolute and abiding supremacy of one sound and one style, the revivalist says, ' This is me.'

Retromania is a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read. In a simple skimming of the book's index, I found what was effectively a list of the contents of my own studio. The book examines:

Pierre Henry’s Le voile d'Orphée I et II
Varese's Poème électronique
Perrey & Kingsley’s The In Sound From Way Out!
Bell Telephone Laboratories
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop
The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
Raymond Scott’s Manhattan Research Inc
The City of Tomorrow (1924)
Blade Runner
The Philips Prospective 21e Siècle label
The 1956 Ideal Home Exhibition
1958 World’s Fair in Brussels
Metropolis
Amazing Stories
Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970
Disney’s Tomorrowland
Einstürzende Neubauten
The Winstons’ Amen Break
Negativland
Public Image Ltd.
The Black Dog
Stereolab
Plunderphonics
2 Many DJs
24 Hour Party People
William Basinski
Steinski
Pop Will Eat Itself
Throbbing Gristle
Eno & Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
iPod Therefore I Am
Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children
The Avalanches’ Since I Left You
Fifties Revivalism
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Hauntology Exhibition at the Berkley Art Museum
The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld
The KLF / Justified Ancients of Mu Mu
DJ Shadow’s monumental Endtroducing LP
The glo-fi / chillwave / hypnagogic pop scene

and much, much more!

innerspaceboy · 10-27-2015, 07:00 PM

Upon moving Innerspace Labs into the office in the home I purchased, it was instantly apparent that something needed to be done. The larger open space and hardwood flooring acted as a resonating chamber for my already thunderously loud server. The resulting noise dominated the room, inhibiting my enjoyment of the sparse, ambient soundscapes I often play as an sonic wallpaper while I work.

Submitted for your amusement, here is an actual recording of my server churning away at idle with accompanying footage of a military subject in a wind tunnel.

I considered multiple potential solutions. Dampening pads for the tower would only muffle the noise. Liquid cooling is not my forte. And replacing the power supply, heat sinks, and case fans was a mess I didn't want to get into.

And then came the epiphany. I consulted a few wise colleagues regarding hardware specs and invested in a certified refurbished last-gen HP thin client. Fitted with an inexpensive wireless adapter, the troublesome tower was tucked away in a spare overhead cupboard well out of earshot of my office. (Don't worry, I'll work out ventilation in the days ahead). The thin client, free of moving parts, operates in absolute silence - a drastic departure from the sonic assault that was my server.

Here's a look at my desktop - no tower to be seen (or heard!)

And here, stealth-ly tucked behind Beethoven is the client.

The server now occupies this overhead cupboard, where it actually drowns out the sound of the massive appliance below it.

I'm proud to declare Project Pin Drop an absolute success!

innerspaceboy · 10-31-2015, 11:31 AM

I received a pleasant notification this AM. I am now among Quora's Top 10 Most Viewed Writers in the following topics:

- Digital Music
- Song Identification
- Free Lossless Audio Codec

with nearly 800 views in 5 days.

I'm also maintaining 10,000 - 20,000 annual views on my music blog. It feels great to have readers who enjoy my content.