Sounds from Innerspace

innerspaceboy · 11-24-2016, 03:11 PM

In just 18 hours, I've automated the retrieval of the remaining 10,536 of my digital albums which were missing cover art, located and applied covers to 1,680 of them, (as the rest were non-commercial albums with no art to retrieve), and verified the applied covers with only 4 incorrectly assigned - a margin of error of just 0.23%.

For an encore, I installed a package of 66 user-configurable graphical layouts for the player application, selected my favorite and tweaked it to best fit my needs, added a lyrics plugin panel which scrolls in real-time with the audio, and activated a lovely desktop applet to control my music from the desktop.

gmusicbrowser's custom graphical interface with album art updated and newly-applied lyric plugin

Desktop environment with interactive player applet at the left.

Example of dynamic controls from the applet.

Yay for productivity!

The Batlord · 11-24-2016, 08:09 PM

You, sir, are a nerd's nerd.

innerspaceboy · 11-24-2016, 09:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Batlord

You, sir, are a nerd's nerd.

Aww, thanks, Bat. That's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said about me.

innerspaceboy · 11-25-2016, 11:00 PM

This evening on a late night drive back to the city, I queued up one of my favorite Underworld albums that I hadn't spun in some time. I wanted to share it with various music communities online but felt an obligatory responsibility to defend the album, as it received a lot of undeserved heat upon its release.

A Hundred Days Off (2002) was Underworld's first full-length LP after the departure of Darren Emerson. Darren was a critical contributor to the trademark sound of Underworld Mk2, which spanned the album trilogy of Dubnobasswithmyheadman, Second Toughest in the Infants, and Beaucoup Fish. This chapter of the band concluded with the release of their live concert DVD, Everything Everything Live in 2000.

What followed with A Hundred Days Off and Rick and Karl's subsequent LPs was a markedly more cerebral incarnation of the duo's sound. AHDO traded in the floor-stomping anthems and "lager lager lager..." lyricism for more artful explorations of electronic music. Rejected by some of the clubbing community as weak or lifeless, these listeners were too quick to reject the ambient soundscapes, natural percussion, and polyrhythmic intricacies that make A Hundred Days Off such an enjoyable and enduring record.

Call it what you like - "album-oriented techno", "progressive downtempo", or "music for aging ravers"... just know that the best of the band's recordings lie deep in the grooves beyond the club tracks of the late 1990s. And with The RiverRun Project, an array of web-only releases, and their music for both stage and screen, Underworld had an incredible wealth of music to offer after the dance floor had cleared at sunup.

innerspaceboy · 11-27-2016, 01:25 PM

Today I am delighted to have become the proud owner of a deck of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's infamous Oblique Strategies cards.

Subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas, these decks were first published in 1975 and are currently in their fifth edition. Each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists and musicians overcome mental blocks by encouraging lateral approaches to their creative works. The cards feature instructions such as:

Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them
Towards the insignificant
Give way to your worst impulse
Tape your mouth
Do something boring
Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame
Work at a different speed

Personal photo of my newly-received deck

The letterpress printed cards are housed in a black box with gold reflective lettering. There was also a limited edition of 500 boxes in burgundy rather than black issued in 2013.

While early editions command hundreds or even thousands of dollars on eBay, (there are at present two autographed first edition decks listed for $2,499.00 and $3,299.00 respectively), I was very pleased to find decks of the latest edition available from www.enoshop.co.uk for about $46 including shipping to the United States. It really is a small price to pay for such an influential and inspirational cultural artifact.

Autographed and numbered first edition deck from 1975 currently for sale on eBay

Brian Eno has been one of the most instrumental figures in my creative development. I've been following his visual works, his music, multimedia installation pieces, and his philosophy for the entirety of my adult life. In 2009, I created an infographic of his work as a writer, artist, and producer titled, Enography (The Grand Unified Theory of Contemporary Music). It really is a privilege to finally have claimed one of these decks for my own.

Tristan_Geoff · 11-27-2016, 06:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by innerspaceboy

Today I am delighted to have become the proud owner of a deck of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's infamous Oblique Strategies cards.

Subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas, these decks were first published in 1975 and are currently in their fifth edition. Each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists and musicians overcome mental blocks by encouraging lateral approaches to their creative works. The cards feature instructions such as:

Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them
Towards the insignificant
Give way to your worst impulse
Tape your mouth
Do something boring
Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame
Work at a different speed

Personal photo of my newly-received deck

The letterpress printed cards are housed in a black box with gold reflective lettering. There was also a limited edition of 500 boxes in burgundy rather than black issued in 2013.

While early editions command hundreds or even thousands of dollars on eBay, (there are at present two autographed first edition decks listed for $2,499.00 and $3,299.00 respectively), I was very pleased to find decks of the latest edition available from www.enoshop.co.uk for about $46 including shipping to the United States. It really is a small price to pay for such an influential and inspirational cultural artifact.

Autographed and numbered first edition deck from 1975 currently for sale on eBay

Brian Eno has been one of the most instrumental figures in my creative development. I've been following his visual works, his music, multimedia installation pieces, and his philosophy for the entirety of my adult life. In 2009, I created an infographic of his work as a writer, artist, and producer titled, Enography (The Grand Unified Theory of Contemporary Music). It really is a privilege to finally have claimed one of these decks for my own.

This list marks "More Songs About Buildings and Food" as a Devo album. For shame, not checking your sources thoroughly.

innerspaceboy · 11-27-2016, 07:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tristan Geoff

This list marks "More Songs About Buildings and Food" as a Devo album. For shame, not checking your sources thoroughly.

Wow! Thanks for the catch. The source text was extracted from an official Eno bibliography so I'm surprised by the oversight! I'll patch it immediately.

Thanks again.

innerspaceboy · 12-03-2016, 07:55 AM

“There’s a brand new dance that’s sweepin’ the nation
The Peanut Duck is the new sensation…”

This northern soul single was recorded by an unknown artist at Philadelphia’s Virtue studio in the mid-60s, and was never released. An acetate copy surfaced at Stafford’s Top of the World all-nighters back in the early 80s. A discussion at soulsource.co.uk revealed that John Vincent was the first to play it, but it was the instrumental version. Keb Darge later played the vocal version, naming it “The Dance Track.”

Below is the unofficial 80s bootleg version which was released on the Joker label, which Paul Hallam was known to spin at Sneakers in Shepherd’s Bush, London.

In 2005 the song finally received an official, albeit limited vinyl release on Penniman Records out of Barcelona, Spain.

The song was again credited to Marsha Gee, but contrary to the Joker release the picture sleeve claims it was written by Scott / Hairston.

The name Marsha Gee has appeared before, such as on the 1965 Uptown 704 single, “Baby I Need You,” written by Phillips-Wright. The voice sounds quite different from The Peanut Duck so the singer’s true identity remains a mystery.

The weekend of my birthday I took a trip to my hometown of Rochester, NY and made a pilgrimage to the Bop Shop. I asked Tom (the owner) if he had seen any copies of the Penniman release. He had actually seen it a while back and said that he could track it down for me.

A few weeks later I spoke with him on the phone. I mentioned that I’d seen a few copies on Discogs.com but he pointed out that the disc was long out of print and said that it would disappear from the site in the next year. Tom had talked to a Spanish woman who had connections with Penniman in Spain. It turned out that the label had two copies left! He ordered one for me, and the other for himself.

I’m so excited to finally have this disc. I’ve wanted it ever since Lemon Jelly played it on the Breezeblock in 2002. Though the official single is now sold out from the Penniman label, you can look for it on Discogs or pick the song up as part of the Rhino box set titled One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds—Lost & Found. A clean copy on Discogs will run you around $70.

innerspaceboy · 12-03-2016, 05:56 PM

Had a blast at Vinyl Mania tonight in Buffalo, NY. Won 2nd place for my 1960s costume (I dressed as Number 48 from The Prisoner).

A lot of the vendors were new faces - ladies and gents who were selling from their personal collections and as a result, I took home some wonderful surprise finds!

For my massive KLF collection, I picked up The History of the JAMS - an essential work of plunderphonia, as well as Drummond's first solo effort featuring "Julian Cope Is Dead".

I also grabbed an original press of Slowdive's debut album, Just For a Day and the classic ethereal wave collaboration of Harold Budd, Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie & Simon Raymonde - The Moon and the Melodies which I've wanted for several years now.

Also delighted to snatch up an original Brain press of Klaus Schulze's Moondawn, which was the next of his catalog I'd planned on purchasing.

Equally excited to find Morton Subotnick's Touch, which is the next logical investment after one acquires Silver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull.

And the final surprise was Pierre Henry's Le Voyage: his famous electronic score based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Good haul!

innerspaceboy · 12-10-2016, 06:48 PM

I've just received the most WONDERFUL Christmas gift from one of my oldest and dearest friends. If every you've asked yourself, "what is the perfect gift for the audiophile who has everything?" this is precisely the sort of gift you should consider.

This is the Electronic Love Blueprint: A History of Electronic Music*by the Dorothy design collective - an electrical schematic of a theremin mapping 200 inventors, innovators, artists, composers spanning the entire history of recorded sound. Key pioneers featured include Léon Theremin, Bob Moog, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin.*

It loosely groups genres, from the obscure Musique Concrète (Pierre Schaeffer) to the better known Krautrock (Kraftwerk, Can, Tangerine Dream, Neu!, Faust, Cluster, Harmonia and Amon Düül II) Synthpop (Gary Numan, Human League, Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Pet Shop Boys) and Electronica (New Order, The Prodigy, Massive Attack, LCD Sound System and Daft Punk). There are also references to the experimental BBC Radiophonic Workshop and favourite innovating record labels Mute and Warp.

This metallic silver screen print on 120gsm Keaykolour Royal Blue uncoated paper measures 60 x 80cm and will be the pride of my listening room.

I've ordered a UK frame and can't wait to display it!