Sounds from Innerspace
 

This thread will feature highlights from The Innerspace Connection - my foundation's music blog. The blog showcases LPs from our Special Collections Library and music news from around the world.

I thought I'd kick things off with an article I wrote on contemporary music culture.

What will be generation Z's musical, artistic, and cultural movement/identity?

Generation Z includes children born 1995-2009 (though these dates are not universally accepted as of yet.) With what movement in art, theater, dance, and music do they identify? What cultural value set inspires its growth and evolution? I am speaking of the "Belieber" generation. (For perspective, Justin Bieber was born in 1994 and released his first album in 2010 at age 16.)


With my general understanding of the development of Western and world culture, I have a basic awareness the socio-musical climates which inspired the blues, big band, the birth of jazz, its many changes, the punk scene, art music, the renaissance of classical influence in progressive rock, the musical impact of the 7” single, the LP, the shift to FM radio, and the academic New Music movement in New York in the 1960s.

I understand the blurring and vanishing of the difference between so-called “high” and “low” art as the democratization of recording technology facilitated independent production and a cultural move away from the dependence on record labels and producers to record, market, and distribute one’s work in the digital age.

Why pay Universal for a studio when you've got ProTools at home?


I have fundamental knowledge of music and the arts up until and including the end of the rock era and the paradigm shift in the way listeners discover and consume music at the end of the 20th century from Napster-forward. FM and television have plummeted in popularity and neither bares any relevance to the generation who experience music through streaming networks and social media.

The last movements I encountered directly were the Icelandic-influenced popularization of post-rock and its inspirations lifted from neo-classical sound. I remember the rise of the indie-rock scene as a cultural reaction to the corporatization of music at the end of the rock era and the dominance of top 40 pop. Programs like American Idol and the interminable NOW! That’s What I Call Music! series worked to re-enforce the prevailing position of Clear Channel / Warner Music’s stranglehold on the emerging youth culture, effectively raising a generation to consume their product.


And so I posed the question to Quora.com - a forum of user-generated question-and-answer content.

I feared that an entire culture was being bred with no concept of the centuries of great works from which they can build upon, reshape and re-purpose to serve the values and needs of their own generation. What is next?


The first answer I received was not promising. In jest, a user offered:


But the next answer I received completely shattered my preconceived notion that Gen-Z-ers were nothing more than "Belieber" simpletons. (And shame on me for oversimplifying the demographic.)

The response was offered by Quora user and future rockstar, Will Tuckwell. Will studied Music at University of Birmingham and offered a great deal of insight into the promise of his generation. He said:



As you can imagine, this response was entirely unexpected and has really given me hope about the future of the arts and music.

I pressed on, looking for other sources of Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha inspiration. This lead me to an article on 21st century composers (because apparently, THAT IS A THING.) A Wikipedia entry for 21st century classical offered a list of composers I could arrange by birth date. At the end of the list I found a name - Alma Deutscher, who was born in 2005.


I had to look her up. Youtube thankfully offered a video of her appearance on Ellen from October of last year. The eight-year-old has composed operas in her sleep, arisen and written the notation for each instrument entirely from memory.

And here is her own Quartet Movement in A Major, composed in 2012.

You are in journal town! Welcome on board the journal voyage. Happy to have you.

I was born in '94 and have solo or co-written and produced I think 8 albums now, ranging from concept albums about growing up and leaving high school to concept albums about a dystopian society to an album written and recorded entirely on a plane flight to dark experimental albums to reflect a deep, recent depression.

...and yet I can't even buy a beer

So yeah I think I can confidently say I'm not a gen Z drone that you described at first, so yay!

Anyway I'm very excited for when you start sharing all the music you know with us. Based on your intro thread, I think there's going to be a lot of cool stuff

Woo-hoo! I knew you could do it! Welcome to Journaltown. This is going to be some ride! :clap:

That was a really excellent first post!

Nice way to start; as a member of that generation (born 2000) I can identify.

Subscribed.

I would definitely echo Will's sentiments. Granted, I think there'll be a lot of junk to sift through in retrospect, but that's always been the case. There's a wealth of resources available to those with the vision and motivation to make things happen.

Really? The Belieber generation?

Eyeroll.

This generation discrimination nonsense never ceases to amuse me. If you look in any generation, you are going to find a sea of terrible bull****. If you are going to define a generation by whatever pop star is around at the time, you're pretty much ****ting all over that generation -- and you can do it for any generation. I think art now, more than ever, is at it's best
.
Look at hipster subculture. I know, I know, "hurr durr hipsters", but look at what that says about people like us. The hipster ideology actually prides itself on obscure tastes in music and art in general. You can't call it the Belieber generation when the poster child of the biggest cultural movement in that generation is an elitist, pretentious snob who prides themselves on having obscure taste.

I think by labeling it as the Belieber generation you are expressing an ignorance of the actual artistic movements in the last 15 years. You should call it the DIY generation.

Look at the revitalization of synthpop, the experimental r&b movement, electronic music in general is huge, post-rock, electronic shoegaze, experimental pop, dance music finally making it into the mainstream, experimental hip hop, the new wave of drone music, noise rock, noise pop, contemporary classical artsts finally being accepted and admired by a huge chunk of our youth...

Why aren't you referencing the Chamber Pop movement in the late 90s - early 2000s? Why aren't you referencing trip hop? Why aren't you referencing electronic soul? The new generation of Baroque Pop?

You call it the Belieber generation when art is literally at it's best -- so unrestrained by record labels and recording studios, and you're almost saying it like it's bad thing that now, more than ever, mainstream is a joke. Underground music is finally valid and an alternative artist can finally tour the world. It's not the Belieber generation at all. This is hands down the best generation of music so far.

You are absolutely right, grtwhtgrvty and I appreciate your response. I have an incredibly limited interaction with society and mass media - I'm now 12 years without a television, I order everything online instead of going to brick & mortar, and I left FM behind around 2002. Other than my walks to and from the office, I really have little/no interaction with society - the consequence of which is my ignorance about what's really going on.

The. Gen Z post was my realization that, just like you said - this is the most connected and culturally-literate generation of all-time. The web has given us access to more art and music than has ever been accessible to generations past.

It is an incredible time to be alive.

Wow that was a great way to start off a journal. Being a musician myself and firmly rooted in this generation (1999) I know that we have a lot to offer if people are willing to hear it.

Happy V-Day everyone! Getting down to the funky sounds of Sesame Street this morni
 

Happy V-Day everyone!

Getting down to the funky sounds of Sesame Street this morning.

A few stand-out recordings instantly come to mind -

For starters, here's everyone's favorite jazz-funk segment - "Pinball Number Count" from 1976, sung by none other than The Pointer Sisters.



Surprisingly, the track didn't see a proper vinyl release until 2003 when DJ Food released it as the B-Side to "C is for Cookie" on the Ninja Tune label.

http://i.imgur.com/0C9NMVI.jpg?w=470

Next up is The Year of Roosevelt Franklin - Columbia C 30387 released in 1970 (and once more four years later as My Name is Roosevelt Franklin.) This LP is highly-sought after by DJs in search of funky samples of Roosevelt scatting his A-B-Cs.

https://i.imgur.com/x6Poyd6.jpg?w=470

http://i.imgur.com/k1T8fS3.jpg?w=470



But I'll end with a favorite of mine which has been filed away in the dusty Forgotten Memories of Sesame Street section of our culture's collective consciousness - an early children's synth pop video and the only hit offered by purple post-punk rocker, "Billy Idle."

http://i.imgur.com/aK4zY55.jpg?w=470



Keep it funky everyone.

Oh yes - and before everyone says it - there are two other unforgettable Sesame moments which must be mentioned -

Brilliant! That certainly brought back some fond childhood memories, though in fairness my favourite ever Sesame Street tune has to be this...

Awesome Trollheart! Here's my copy of the original LP!

http://i.imgur.com/oJPoAJ4.jpg

Sesame Street scared me.

Die Welt ist Klang: A Tribute to Pete Namlook
 

I had a quiet evening to myself, and I took advantage of the free time and finally sat down to explore Klaus Schulze and Pete Namlook's Dark Side of the Moog 12-disc series.

Each of the track titles play off of classics from Pink Floyd's catalog, such as "Wish You Were There," "A Saucerful of Ambience," "Obscured by Klaus," and "Careful with the AKS, Peter."



From Dark Side of the Moog I moved on to Pete Namlook's solo efforts on his record label - Germany's Fax +49-69/450464 (and yes, that was his fax number.) Nearly 450 releases premiered on the label from 1992 until his death in November of 2012, and additional research revealed that Namlook, himself was performing with the ~40 artists and under various monikers which comprised the label's catalog. FAX earned a reputation for ahead-of-the-curve, timeless electronic ambient music, which still sounds fresh today.

Unfortunately, Namlook released only 500–1000 copies of the majority of the titles on his label. There is a holy grail of the label - an incredible 17 LP retrospective of FAX's finest work called the Final Vinyl Collector's Box Set. Devastatingly, there were only 25 copies produced worldwide. The set was meant to be officially released, but at that time Fax changed to a non-vinyl distributor and so the boxsets have never been officially distributed. The last copy to surface sold for $550 in 2010.

http://i.imgur.com/t5ixmHF.jpg

While scouring the web for more information, I cued up what I had of Namlook in my library, beginning with his 4CD set performing as "Air" from 1993-1996, which was released as a box set in '97, and then on to 2003's Ten Years of Silence - a 5CD set of his tribal ambient work as Silence. These two series are excellent highlights of the FAX label.



For newcomers to the label (or to the genre as a whole,) I would highly recommend two retrospective compilations titled The Ambient Cookbook volumes I and II.

The first was a 4-disc box set from 1995 which highlighted various artists from the FAX archive. The second volume, released in 2002, introduced four more discs demonstrating how the ambient genre had evolved over the decade.

If you're exploring Fax +49-69/450464 Records for the first time, these collections are an excellent place to begin.

https://i.imgur.com/jljhIGW.jpg


After the untimely passing of Pete Namlook in 2012, Carpe Sonum Records was formed by EAR/Rational Music, (the North American distributor of FAX and related labels) and issued a handsome limited edition 8-disc box set celebrating his music. The first four discs showcase tracks from FAX artist alumni. The remaining four discs feature exclusive recordings submitted by fans of the label.

Released in two limited runs in 2013, the box set has since sold out. However I am excited to announce that Carpe Sonum is now accepting donations and pre-orders for a reissue of the set AND are considering a 10LP special edition! All sales proceeds will go to Namlook's family.


You can subscribe to their mailing list for updates, contribute your own tracks to the project, or simply offer a financial contribution to help make the release happen. Visit Carpe Sonum for more information!

I'm excited to see that you are regularly updating this journal since this journal was one I was really excited to see pop up in my new posts. Also, I may have to check out that Dark Side of the Moog album that you mentioned, it sounds awesome from the sample you posted.

Thanks Ki. I'd originally intended to post once a week but I'm just having too much fun. Three more LPs arrived in the post today and as long as they keep landing I'll keep posting.

As for The Dark Side of the Moog series, there are were 11 volumes released between 1994 and 2008, and a retrospective called The Evolution Of The Dark Side Of The Moog on the Ambient World FAX sublabel in 2002, which is probably the best introduction to the series.

http://i.imgur.com/2vZMPTu.jpg

Tom Waits - Orphans and other Grails
 

I consider myself a very lucky man. It is a great fortune to discover something you truly enjoy, (in my case the music of Tom Waits), but it is a winning lotto ticket to be able to amass an absurd collection of his finest works for your own library.

An enormous box arrived in the post today containing most of the titles missing from my Tom Waits collection, most notably one of my elusive grails - a mint, unplayed copy of the massive Orphans - Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards 7LP set. This monumental box set contains 62 "orphaned" selections which never made it on to his major album releases. The six tracks on the final disc are exclusive to the vinyl release, and I can't wait to drink them in.

Tom Waits - Orphans 7LP set, the Record Store Day 7 inch, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, and the Under Review DVD

Don't think for a second that these are merely disused cutting-room-floor tracks which were omitted with good reason - every song from this incredible collection is just as fantastic as any of his best-loved hits, from the gritty gospel blues Tom delivers on "Lord I've Been Changed" to the back-porch foot stomper, "Buzz Fledderjohn" to the relentless rhythms of "2:19." This is one of the proudest additions to my library in my entire history as a record collector.

The set is accompanied by an oversize book, and each 180g disc is housed in a newsprint sleeve jam-packed with antique-typewritten factoids a la "News of the Weird."

It's sets like this which remind me why I haven't given up on physical media in exchange for the incredible convenience and portability of digital. As a man with nearly 13,000 albums I wholly embrace high-bitrate lossless audio for its many accolades, but damn, nothing comes close to the experience of dropping the needle on one of these LPs and spending hours poring over the liner notes and companion book.

My outstanding fortune relating to Tom Waits began when I walked into The Bop Shop in Rochester, NY and learned that the owner had just purchased a nearly-complete Tom Waits collection. Each disc had been purchased upon release, played once to rip digitally, and carefully shelved by its owner. I didn't hesitate for a single second and bought the whole lot on the spot.


And to make my evening ever BETTER - I've now added Blood Money, Alice, and Mule Variations to my Tom collection.

Thanks, Tom for all your wonderfully weird music. You are indeed one of a kind.

Holy shit that is an INCREDIBLE Waits collection you have there dude. Just...wow. All I can say is that I am extremely jealous and you should be very proud to own such a complete treasure of amazing music. Thank you for sharing!

Friends, I'm proud to share my first published article as a music journalist for Queens Free Press in NYC! The article is live on their website and will appear in print as well. And I'm already at work on a follow up piece.

CHECK IT OUT!

Pirates to the Rescue: Giving the Listening Public What Commercial Services Will Not

https://imgur.com/A86MUrt.jpg
Jon Aslund

Flood while you wait.
 

More exciting limited edition import LPs have hit my doorstep, and there's another one coming this Thursday! You'll have to wait a few for those, but for now...

They Might Be Giants just quietly released a live version of their seminal album, Flood, recorded in Australia, for free.

http://i.imgur.com/M6vgl0J.jpg

Congrats on the article!

Public Service Broadcasting - Documentary Rock
 

Public Service Broadcasting is a London-based duo who create retro-futuristic electronic music much in the spirit of classic krautrock. They use samples from old public information films, archival footage and propaganda material, to (quote) ‘teach the lessons of the past through the music of the future’. PSB combines classic synths with banjo, ukulele, sax and trumpets all propelled by a nearly-motorik beat.

PSB is a project of J. Willgoose and Wrigglesworth from London. The association with Jellyheads and fans of Sundae Club is instantly apparent – their music is electronic, but with a uniquely organic (and perhaps an emotive) element that separates it from the countless electro-pop artists of the day.

And their use of old public information films makes them fit well in a playlist of Found Sound Orchestra and Future Loop Foundation recordings. The result, when paired with their minimalist geometric album packaging, is a krautrock-flavored mechanical sort of BBC documentary music, if you can imagine such a thing.

I enjoyed their INFORM • EDUCATE • ENTERTAIN LP, but was most impressed by THE WAR ROOM EP. Just one look at the album jacket and anyone who follows my postings with any frequency will instantly understand why I just had to acquire this glorious disc.

http://i.imgur.com/smssQQS.jpg

See if you can detect traces of the metronomic percussion of Neu!’s “Hallo Gallo” in PSB’s music, or a touch of Kraftwerk inspiration in their packaging design.



http://i.imgur.com/5vtXUhC.jpg

A huge fan of the band, I pre-ordered their latest release – The Race For Space the moment it was announced.

The new record arrived yesterday afternoon. This is the limited clear-vinyl edition, featuring brilliant packaging design consistent with their previous releases and an 8-page booklet.

http://i.imgur.com/W3Mh3uO.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/nC0Zjw8.jpg

And this morning PSB posted their first video for the record – “Go!” loaded with footage and audio from the Apollo 11 mission.



Love it.

Public Service Broadcasting is awesome. Thanks for sharing. I might be biased because I'm a total krautrock junkie, though.

Airside and Lemon Jelly - Where Music Meets Design
 

Two of my greatest artistic inspirations are both musicians and design firms. The first is Underworld and Karl Hyde's Tomato art collective. The other is Lemon Jelly and Fred Deakin's design firm, Airside.

After the release of Lemon Jelly’s first three EPs, Lemonjelly.ky debuted in 2000 as their first proper album. A declarative sticker on the cover proclaimed, ” if you already own these EPs there is NO REASON for you to buy this product.”

Reviewers often compared their blissful electronic sound to the likes of Zero 7, Boards of Canada and Mr. Scruff, but what separated Lemon Jelly from other groups was their creative edge and the fact that you just can’t stay in a bad mood when listening to them.

The packaging for each of their albums and singles were designed by Fred Deakin (half of Lemon Jelly) and his award-winning design company. Their colorful style is instantly recognizable wherever it appears, from print ads to MTV commercials to music videos.

Below: The glorious triple-gatefold art of Lost Horizons.

http://i.imgur.com/SJnPYq3.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Qnm77aR.jpg

Upon hearing one of their tracks playing in an indie record shop back in 2002, I promptly purchased both their Lost Horizons LP and the EP collection, Lemonjelly.ky. Over the next ten years I’d add to my collection their DVD, 90 of their live shows, custom-packaged 7″ singles and prints of their work.

The triple gatefold artwork was originally available as a beautiful 50″ print suitable for framing. I hope to one day have it beautify my studio.

Here's one of their uniquely-packaged singles - Rolled Oats.

http://i.imgur.com/AvQa4.jpg

For a taste of their style both musically and graphically check out Airside’s video for the song I heard in the shop – “Nice Weather For Ducks.”



Lost Horizons was followed by the album and DVD project, 64-95 in 2004. The album's title comes from each of the tracks' sampling of various recordings released between 1964 and 1995. The DVD featured a creative video by Airside for each track presented in the form of a concept-art film. Perhaps the most memorable of which was the video for the single, "Stay With You."



In 2011 after the retirement of Lemon Jelly, Fred Deakin quietly released several hand-printed die-cut singles under the name "Frank Eddie." One of the track's videos was the particularly stylish, "Let Me Be the One You Call On." The single is a reworking of the song “Fix” by Blackstreet from 1996. Samples from both the original mix and the remix which featured Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Slash are detectable throughout this new version, with the lead vocal pitch shifted to befit the bizarre feminine "thing" singing in the video.



The video for Frank's final single, “Stay Another Day” was offered as a farewell from Airside, as they announced the closing of their doors in March of 2012. The video showcased highlights from many of their favorite design projects, and no one can turn a cheesy Brit-pop boy band tune into a Balearic anthem the way Fred Deakin can.



The early 2000s were an exciting time for graphic design, and Airside's carefree animations were the perfect complement to the music of Lemon Jelly. Highly-recommended for fans of summery downtempo or exquisite design.

Adventures in Music Lit
 

Greetings dear friends! It is a wonderful day - the weekend just hours away, spring is just around the corner, I'm tracking a wonderful surprise LP in the post, and more music lit has arrived at my doorstep.


I'm into the first chapter of a book that I believe I found while exploring titles from Goodreads.com's recommendation engine. (If one of you actually suggested this title in a forgotten conversation, please let me know and I'll correct my statement!)

David Toop's Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound, and Imaginary Worlds is a wonderful examination of the ethereal culture which developed in response to the intangibility of 20th century communications.

It reads like a Bradburian recollection of fleeting sights, sounds, smells and sensations - disconnected and fragmented memories expertly-woven together much like the subtle and indistinct tones of an ambient composition.

The author's aim is to demonstrate a different way of listening - an enjoyment of the sounds of our environment, whether by pneumatic drills, police helicopters or the distant croaking of tree frogs at night.

The Sunday Times praised Troop for his "rare instance of a music book which is about music, but WORKS", and The Face called it, "a Martian Chronicle from this planet Earth." I'm looking forward to spending these first days of spring cozily drinking it in.


And for further examinations of musico-cultural history I am delighted to finally have a physical copy of Simon Reynold's book, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past.

Reynolds is perhaps best-known for his coining of the term, “post-rock” but is also regarded for his incorporation of critical theory in his analysis of music. Retromania was my first encounter with his writing.

“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.

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 -

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!

After reading the eBook I promptly ordered a physical copy for my office. I'm now reading it again and this time - I'm taking notes.

Happy spring everyone!

The Renaissance of Vinyl Records in the Digital Age
 

This is, undeniably the second Golden Age for music collectors. The industry has finally acknowledged the massive resurgence of the vinyl format as a cultural response to the first decade of non-physical digital media. A growing percentage of the listening public are re-claiming the participatory listening experience of the vinyl era. And the undeniable consumer demand is most visible with the format’s own holiday - National Record Store Day.

There has been a tremendous shift over the last 10 years in the availability and selection of vinyl. Where once buyers had to dig through innumerable copies of Firestone Christmas, Barry Manilow LPs, and Sing Along With Mitch to find a hopeful grail, local new-and-used record shops are once again staples of every major city. Of course, the independent record store never really disappeared, but vinyl’s new-found popularity has drastically affected the stock you'll find at your local store.

The compromise is of the "hip" exclusivity of the format. Once-rare and prized LPs are now flooding the shelves of every local record shop. The Jesus and Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, The Stone Roses, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream… nearly every critical album of the 90s is being repressed by the thousands, and many for the first time on vinyl. The market is approaching a level of absurdity as even the least-likely candidates for what was once an audiophile market are now being issued as “limited edition” colored-vinyl exclusives. The soundtrack to the Nickelodeon series, The Adventures of Pete and Pete is scheduled for an upcoming release as is the soundtrack to the movie, Clueless (available in special yellow-plaid vinyl.)


The market was further impacted by the emergence of Discogs.com. Launched in the year 2000, Discogs raised the bar and revolutionized web-based record sales. The site's users have cataloged 5.7 million pressings of over 800,000 community-contributed albums. This crowd-sourced system has made Discogs the ideal place to buy and sell music and democratized record values to a single global standard.

This marks a potentially-dangerous turn for the format, where abundance of supply may result in a supersaturation of the market, and the flood of “nostalgia-vinyl” may cripple the perceived value of these novelty LPs. Where dedicated collectors previously drove city-to-city crate-digging for scarce acetates and private press LPs from special collections, the market was rapidly-transformed by web-based services offering global-accessibility to even the most elusive recordings. Now labels are repressing anything and everything that might tug at the nostalgic heartstrings of a budding collector, further changing the market landscape.

In the last decade, countless buyers shelled out an average of $95 to claim a hallowed copy of Aphex Twin’s classic, Selected Ambient Works Volume II. They likely paid an extra $20 to import it to the States. The scarcity of the record made it a grail for many lovers of electronic music. Fortunately for hopeful fans around the world (though not for the original buyers) WARP Records widely reissued the album and copies are available in malls across America for just $29.99. The lesson of this example and of thousands of others like it is that rarity-inspired purchases are a losing game, more so now than ever before.


But in this new buyer’s market, collectors should celebrate it as a wonderful time for music lovers everywhere. Listeners can have all the classic albums from their youth, or deluxe editions of classics from decades past - available right in their neighborhood and at an unbeatable price. But whatever you do, buy first and foremost for the love of the music - a return-on-investment that will not be shaken by the ebb and flow of a fickle consumer market. Free your holy grails from their sleeves and spin them. Your music is waiting to be played and enjoyed. And today, you can have it all.

A Bit of Eno.
 

I'm so very excited - just a few days ago I was browsing Discogs and by a sheer stroke of luck happened upon the newly-released first-ever vinyl pressing of Fripp & Eno's Equatorial Stars.

Recorded in 2004, the album marked a 30-year reunion for the two musicians, who last collaborated on the Evening Star LP in 1975. Evening Star was the follow-up to their premiere frippertronic album - the monumental classic, (No Pussyfooting.)


Brian Eno is an incredible hero of mine. From his genre-defining masterpiece, Music for Airports to his 77 Million Paintings project, from his zen-like Oblique Strategies deck to The Long Now Foundation, I've been following his work for more than 15 years and loving each new discovery.

One of my favorite (and sadly lesser-known) works by Eno was his January 07003 / Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now which features chimes for a timepiece that operates with minimum human intervention for ten millennia.

I'm still missing a few of the albums from Eno's primary discography on vinyl, such as Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, Music for Films 2 and 3, and Thursday Afternoon, but I do maintain a 64-album digital discographic archive for added accessibility.

Eno's recent collaborative projects with my other hero, Karl Hyde were a dream come true. Both are highly-acclaimed visual artists as well as musicians and have been wonderful inspirations for my own creative ventures.

Their collaboration drew inspiration from the repetitive minimalism of my other favorite composers like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, and from the polyrhythmic music of Fela Kuti and funk. Check out the fractured groove of "DBF."


At age 66, Eno has no intention of slowing down, and I look forward to his next innovative project.

Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds
 

This evening's feature is one of my all-time favorite music biographies - John Higgs’ book – THE KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds.

To quote DJ Food, who blogged about the book in October '13:

“If there’s one event that the book centers on it’s the burning of a million pounds and from there he 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.”

I had a copy delivered the day it hit the shelves, and 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.

The Reclamation of Pop: A Musical Manifesto
 

Every few days I find myself writing an impassioned and somewhat crappy music manifesto. Here is one of them.

From at least the 1950s forward, with the popularity of the 7″ single and the commercial boom of post-war FM radio, music marketing exploded and marketers sought not to predict the future of popular music, but to direct it.

Console radios (and later their transistor offspring) moved music from the reach of the listening elite who would attend evening classical events to the masses, most of which had no particular ear or preference for music. The consequence of democratizing music listenership was that radio was forced to pander to youth culture masses who wanted the short, simple and familiar structure of rock & roll 24 hrs a day.

The 60s were a time of great revolution, reflected in both folk music and in new experimental sounds inspired in part by the drug culture of the day.

The 1970s offered the first hint of an audience demanding more than blues-based guitar riff rock with the rise of progressive rock and kosmische musik, incorporating madrigal song, classical, elements of jazz, and complex polyrhythms and time signatures.

Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, released in 1977 was the first dance track to forego a recorded orchestra and instead consisted of entirely synthesized sounds and voice effects. This was a warning sign on the path to the cultural “distillation” process, and was quickly gobbled up by the pop creature hungry for dancefloor rhythms and processed vocals.

By the 1980s, Video Killed the Radio Star, making popular music all about image at the expense of content and talent.

Still, a dedicated art rock and post-punk scene prevailed, with acts like Pere Ubu, Einstürzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, and Wire further demonstrating the survivalism of substance in music.

By 1989, ambient music which had (ever-so-quietly) exploded onto the scene with Eno’s Music for Airports found a new audience. After clubbers heard Dr. Alex Paterson spinning in the White Room at the Land of Oz albums like The KLF’s Chill Out, Space’s Space and The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld were released (all by the same few DJs). This sparked an experimental ambient culture soon embraced by Aphex Twin, Biosphere, and the then-newcomers Boards of Canada who would gain international acclaim for their LP, Music Has the Right to Children. This was the new heady music of 1990.

So-called “alternative rock” dominated the FM airwaves for the remainder of the decade with an indie sound that spoke directly to its generation of angst-riddled listeners. Seattle grunge died gracefully with the release of Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York and rock finished out what would be the last of its 40-year life, signing off with No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom in January of 1997. Save for a few rare exceptions in the world of pop music, there was a clear path of rotting decay which followed –

Later that year, The Prodigy released Fat of the Land, a best-selling sell-out record whereby they left the rave scene and embraced radio-friendly big beat. Spice Girls’ Spice followed, recycling the Monkees factory-assembled-band concept for another commercial success, and the nail in the coffin was the album, …Baby One More Time released on January 30th 1999. True to form, another polished and squeaky-clean band released their third album – Backstreet Boys’ Millennium in 1999, a record which secured their super-stardom.

By 2002, rock was dead and buried and the Core Media Group rebranded popular music as a reality program – a vehicle by which to market and directly profit from manufactured acts.

Over the next ten years, pop decayed into the most distilled essence of artificiality.

– An outrageous and exaggerated Madonna-facsimile became a pop icon

– A sixteen year old boy said the word “Baby” fifty-six times becoming the most-watched video of all time on Youtube

– and Rebecca Black happened. (Mrs. Miller is likely upset.)

Pop Music.

In 2012, Reuters reported the results of a study which concluded, Pop Music Too Loud and All Sounds the Same: Official.

In fulfillment of The KLF’s The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way, pop has consumed hip-hop, electronic dance music, R&B, country, and everything else around it. It has stripped itself clean of substance, fidelity (thanks to the Loudness War), character, style, and any element of unique identity it once bore.

In a now-legendary article about Jamie Wednesday in the NME, written by David Quantick, David mentioned that pop music is ever-recycling its ideas and that eventually, ‘pop will eat itself’. We are witnessing the realization of this prophecy right before our culture’s eyes.

Pop is now a self-parodying, purely ironic, insubstantial, auto-cannibalistic animal. It cannot sustain itself for much longer without a supply of original material to consume.

Are we due for a spontaneous generation of classically-trained musically-educated instrumentalists, manifesting in clear defiance of the education system which has long-abandoned arts education?

Instead we are left with a millennial generation who has been carefully conditioned from their earliest years to consume pop and to be collectively uncomfortable (or even repulsed) by the cerebral sounds of polyphony, afro-inspired polyrhythms, or improvisational compositions like jazz. All they want is a hook and a four-on-the-floor synth beat.

This is the musical incarnation of the newspeak Orwell warned us about – a culture raised from birth to see and hear only vapid, formulaic, 3 minute commercials and to buy the associated line of merchandise. This is what Clear Channel tells us that “music” means today.

I implore you to play your children classical, play them jazz, opera, experimental electronic music, and the countless micro-genres from around the world. Maybe, just maybe some of them will pick up an instrument, (whether lute or laptop) and learn to make beautiful new music.

Amen. Both of my kids are well versed.

I think most people here are informed enough in their music taste to eschew the bland pop manufactured music, and as you say, classical never goes out of fashion, proof when you see how many times artistes from rap to pop to rock sample or cover classics.

More importantly though, where is the video whence coms that clip of that young lady shaking her bottom? ;) :tramp:

I always try to respect and cite my sources, Trollheart. The image was the result of a Google search for "pop music + crap" and was sourced from an article by The Guardian with the title, Iggy Azalea and J-Lo's AMA Booty show caps a banner year for the butt.

The image caption read: Jennifer Lopez, left, and Iggy Azalea share a touching moment onstage at the Hollywood Bowl. Photograph: Todd Williamson/Invision/AP

That would be Music From The Adventures of Pete & Pete by Polaris, a one-off band put together as the in-house band for the TV series.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com

Music From The Adventures of Pete & Pete is very good album in it's own right and is sought after by a lot of indie rock fans. As far as I know it's never been released on vinyl and even used CD copies of it don't come cheap.

A More Uplifting Update
 

For those longing for a classically-inspired youth culture, you need only to look east.

China produces 1 million violins a year, has 100 million people studying Western classical music instruments, Sichuan Conservatory has 10,000 students alone (Juillard has 800). For a barrage of facts and opinion about how classical music has taken China by storm, try this:

WESTERN CLASSICAL MUSIC IN CHINA | Facts and Details

http://i.imgur.com/QvjU02D.jpg

You have to wonder how many of those kids are being forced into it by their parents though.

Super-Deluxe: Marketing Physical Music Media to MP3-Enthusiasts
 

In the age of digital music, it takes a little something “extra” to entice consumers to spend their hard-earned cash on physical media. The enormous convenience and portability of high-bitrate MP3 and lossless FLAC libraries have removed the necessity for dedicating walls (or in some cases, entire rooms) to house and proudly display our favorite albums.

But the beauty of a masterfully-designed and packaged album is one characteristic with which digital audio cannot compete. The same can be said for the experiential element of removing a vinyl LP from its sleeve, placing it upon one’s turntable, and carefully dropping the needle into the groove.

Record labels are fully aware of this key advantage, and in recent years have funneled an incredible amount of energy, time and resources into developing “super-deluxe” limited editions of albums both old and new to win customers over to buying the real thing.

Compilations, deluxe and limited editions have been an explosive trend in the last 10 years, and albums previously only available as bootlegs are resurfacing as official special releases, all in an effort to earn collector’s patronage. Official multi-volume Bootleg Series editions are now available featuring live material by Dylan, Miles Davis, and perhaps the kings of the bootleg market – The Grateful Dead, as the classic 36-volumes of Dick’s Picks are being sequentially reissued for the first time on vinyl.

Of course, the concept of deluxe and special editions is nothing new to the media industry. Deutsche Grammophon produced an impressive 16-volume library of hardbound 5LP sets celebrating Beethoven’s Bicentennial back in 1963. The complete collection of 80 records and a handsome oversize hardcover book made a perfect gift item for the classical fan in your life… though the set also burdens the recipient with the task of dedicating considerable floor space to accommodate the collection, and is a nightmare should they ever need to move.

Thankfully, the CD era granted increased portability with its more compact format. DG wasted no time and followed up the Bicentennial Collection with a 111 Year Retrospective of the label’s finest recordings. The two volumes released in 2009 and 2010 comprised a monumental 111 CDs marketed to completists and obsessive collectors of the finest classical music.

Still, even with all the conveniences of the CD, some deluxe sets take collectability a little too far. Perhaps the best example is the absurdly-overcomplete 500-disc World’s Greatest Jazz Collection – a compilation of apparently every jazz track that wasn’t nailed down.

These and countless other deluxe releases demonstrate how the market for physical music media has evolved to adapt to the convenience of digital audio. Listeners have become cultural curators, carefully selecting which recordings they will purchase in physical form to best-fit their personal collections and to tell their own stories. The act of investing in an LP or CD is now a significant and deliberate decision which serves to contribute to one’s autobiographical library.

In 2014, marketing guru Gene Simmons fully-understood this consumer desire, and produced what is one of the finest implementations of a music product designed for the collector’s market.

This is Kissteria – “The Ultimate Vinyl Road Case.” Thirty-four LPs, featuring nineteen studio albums, five Alive releases and their four solo albums pressed onto audiophile 180g vinyl. To further appeal to discerning audiophiles, each of the recordings has been newly remastered in ultra-high definition DSD. And as an added bonus, the set includes twelve archival posters, a KISS vinyl cleaning cloth, turntable mat, dominoes set, lithographs, and a certificate of authenticity – all of which is housed in an Anvil case weighing in at nearly 50 pounds.

The set was limited to 1000 copies – clearly an exclusive for KISS’ biggest mega-fans. The set symbolizes the perfect execution of a music product for the digital age. Listen up record labels – if you want to compete with the convenience of digital audio… this is how its done.

http://i.imgur.com/d4QLC2E.jpg

I created a thread in the Lounge but I realized I failed to mention it here in my journal...

Fellow Banterers - Innerspaceboy needs YOU!

I'm compiling data for an article on music and technology. I've constructed a one-question survey asking users to share how you discover new music.

I'd like to run a feature on the empowering nature of metadata and how mobile web and both public and private online communities have adopted some of the best elements of digital music - sharability and dynamic organization, and introduced them into the vinyl and other music communities.

Today, groups like The Youtube VC take advantage of YouTube and of social media networking to share crate-digging stories, reviews, and album information of otherwise rare and unique albums with fellow collectors the world over. The community turns members on to strange and wonderful sounds that they may not have discovered in the days before the web.

And while commercial streaming services limit their catalogs to license-able mass market recordings, dedicated fans with a penchant for more elusive sounds have risen to the challenge and have ripped and shared their rarest LPs via less-than-legal channels to get great music into the speakers of listeners yearning for something unique.

I want to write about the tremendous impact global-connectedness has had on both the general music consumer and on the vinyl community. This survey is where I begin.

I don't know if the mods can give me a hand but please, take the one-question survey and if you'd like, share it with your friends.


Thank you all.

Recommendation Systems
 

Fun music-related site of the day - One of the earliest examples of a music recommendation engine I can recall. Marek Gibney's Music-Map was the earliest incarnation of his Gnod (Global Network of Discovery) engine. Enter an artist and it will visually cluster related artists in a text cloud.

http://i.imgur.com/j7umvsL.jpg

Give it a try!

Gnod.com went on to expand and now includes recommendation systems for art, film, and literature, and has a fantastic visual product mapping system for users shopping for smartphones, tablets, and other devices.

http://i.imgur.com/D0CQ6sM.jpg

I'm a big fan of discovery utilities, and I'll be giving the literature engine a try this evening for classic dystopian fiction and for music non-fiction.

While I usually swear by rating aggregation systems like metacritic and rateyourmusic, Marek's project has a simple but effective interface and the interactive cell phone and hard drive maps are impressively useful.

Have at it!