Twittering Machines

Audio Journalist Michael Steward wrote on his website that he heard an improvement in music playback when he swapped out the SATA cable on his Network-attached storage (NAS):

I realise that the opinion I expressed in it was contentious but the reaction from some individuals was way too extreme. I think that wishing death upon someone because they wrote how they witnessed a change in the way their hi-fi sounded when they swapped a cable in a NAS is a bit of an over-reaction.

An overreaction – you think? While receiving death threats is no laughing matter, especially if you have a family, Steward pulled the offending article which on one level is understandable but on another sets a dangerous precedent.

Here are some actual emails Steward received:

Hi, you’re a bloody stupid twat.

Christopher Anderson [dopperpod@gmail.com]

If you’re wondering why you are, it’s because of your SATA cable article. Hope you die.

————

Hi Malcom,

With reference to the article “Super SATA Cables on Sale Soon”, you are either:

1) A fraudster, or

2) A fucking idiot.

Choose one, and let me know.

Thanks,
Michael.

The Happy Moog!

Listen to “March of the Martians”
(it’s excellent, perky and o-so-moogie!)

Reader Greg Moon tells us about finding the fun between the cracks:

Life was tough for me as a kid, circa 1972; my allowance was only 75 cents a week, and the records on sale in the local department stores went for $6.99 ($7.99 for the cassettes and 8-track tapes). I knew (and I mean KNEW) that what I really wanted was to build up a great music library. I’d seen photos of people with thousands of records in magazines and was sure that one day that would be me. (Actually, now I’m the guy with thousands of CDs instead, which is still pretty great, but it’s not the same) So I had to rely on getting relatives to buy records for me. With visions of finally being able to hear what bands like The Mothers Of Invention and Pink Floyd and Yes and King Crimson actually sounded like (we only had an AM radio, so I had no direct exposure beyond fetishizing the album covers in the stores) I let it be known that what I needed for birthday and Christmas presents were records and lots of ‘em.

Unfortunately, I was (and still am) the only one in my family with ANY interest in music. So, instead of the “real” albums I so coveted, what I began to receive over the next few years was bargain-basement junk. Nothing by anyone I had ever heard of or on any record labels I had ever heard of, but anything they could find in corner stores with a price tag of $0.99 or less. If there’s a 9-year old kid out there who really wants to listen to “CHFI Presents The Luxury Sound Of Candlelight And Wine” or “The Groovy Hits Of Today Played By The 101 Strings” I don’t want to meet him. But hidden amongst the depressing dross was ‘The Happy Moog!’ – I was fascinated by this one, if only because there was no artist credit; it actually had original songs but was only marketed by the instrument, not by a band name or even a person. Was this a real album by actual people or was it some kind of promotional item to sell the Moog through music stores?

By 1975 I’d talked my parents into raising my allowance to a whopping $2, which meant that I could save up and start buying real albums for myself. Especially once I discovered that there were better record stores downtown. (and thank the good lord for the growing popularity of cutout bins as the decade progressed) I didn’t have to rely on the record “section” of department stores. Kraftwerk, at first. And that led to more hardcore stuff like Stockhausen and Xenakis. Then Ferrari and Henri and Parmegiani. Then onto Braxton and John Cage and Evan Parker and Miles. You can just imagine how popular I was in junior high.

At the tender age of 9, my worldview was pretty narrow. ‘The Happy Moog!’ (was that exclamation point really necessary?) was an unexpected surprise. I began to rethink my assumptions about “real” records and started to find the fun between the cracks. I don’t recall the album being all THAT great, to be honest, but it lit the spark that would cause me to search out albums that were not for sale in major record stores, or on major labels, or were promoted on the radio or through popular magazines. It put me on a far more interesting path and, for that, it’ll always have some emotional resonance.

~ Greg Moon

Share your childhood vinyl memories by sending me an email with the record title, a description and anything you’d like to say about it and I’ll post it here as part of the Childhood Vinyl Memories series.

My grandparents on my father’s side had a summer home at, and eventually retired to, the Jersey Shore. This was before its most recent incarnation as a pen for mindless, self-absorbed nitwits whose raison d’être appears to be too much hair product and tanning. This was also back when working-class people, my grandfather was a carpenter, could actually afford a summer home.

My grandfather along with a bunch of ‘cousins’ (we called actual cousins cousins no matter the distance from 1st as well as close family friends) bought up nearly one block of vacant land, imagine when there was such a thing at the Jersey Shore, on 1st Avenue in Ortley Beach and together they built their summer homes.

this isn’t the actual block but I took this picture years later because it reminded me of that time

When we weren’t on the beach, we were always on the beach unless it was raining, we would hang out behind the row of cousin’s homes in the strip of adjacent sandy backyards and play. Some of the kids were older – I was probably around 6 or 7 playing with teenagers – so their form of play was different from mine. One rainy day one of the Rogers boys had setup his portable record player on their sightly raised cement deck and was giving a concert. He was recruiting for an all-boy band and the pickings were slim so I ended up as the guitar player – my guitar was a mop. The Roger’s boy, I thought he was so cool mainly because he was a teenager, put on a record and we played along as if we were Herman’s Hermits playing “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter”.

I remember initially feeling nervous and kinda confused – I was given strict instructions on how to pretend-play the mop convincingly but why would I want to? I wondered – and then feeling elated as the girls watched the boys play but they cheered for real. I loved that jangly muted rag-stuffed guitar sound and the heavily accented Peter Noone singing out to Mrs Brown about her lovely daughter. I don’t recall how many times we repeated that 45 (many is my best guess) but I do recall feeling the stirrings of something I didn’t yet understand but I did understand that music was its soundtrack.

To this day I can play a mean mop (here’s a taste of my summers at the beach when I got a bit older).

Share your childhood vinyl memories by sending me an email with the record title, a description and anything you’d like to say about it and I’ll post it here as part of the Childhood Vinyl Memories series.

Thanks to Robert for the heads up on this one too!

Listen to Shipwrecked on Planet X
(it’s excellent!)

Twittering Machines reader Robert Browne recently sent me a very interesting and thought-provoking email (this being one of many from Robert):

The attached zip file is an audio file and image file of one of my childhood favorite pieces of vinyl. It’s Rocky Jones, Space Ranger – Shipwrecked on Planet X. Found it on an internet search. Originally 78 rpm it’s only 6:31 long. My copy is long gone but I remember it well.

Perhaps a piece in Twittering Machines on childhood vinyl memories would be a nice addition?

I think this is a wonderful idea and I love Robert’s inaugural entry. Please share your childhood vinyl memories by sending me an email with the record title, a description and anything you’d like to say about it and I’ll post it here as part of the Childhood Vinyl Memories series.

Here’s some more from Robert:

I think the Rocky Jones record came to me due to my father’s interest in Sci-Fi writing. My early musical memories via my father were Coleman Hawkins (he owned just about every recording the Hawk played on), Prez Prado and Raymond Scott.

Rocket ships, cocktails, jazz and mambo! Sounds like a great childhood and a great adulthood. Thanks Robert!

Reinhold Friedl
Inside Piano

A Simon Says™ recommendation, Reinhold Friedl (of the zeitkratzer ensemble) turns a ‘prepared’ Steinway D into an industrial orchestra. Mind and expectation-expanding even for the Cageiest critic. Recorded at Philharmonie Luxembourg, July 8-9, 2010 (Microphones: Neumann U87, Neumann KM184!) released on hrönir.

reinhold friedl – inside piano (album preview) by experimedia

Sharron Kraus & Michael Tanner
In The Rheidol Valley

Another Simon Says™ recommendation, folk-inspired music with field sounds recorded on Sharron and Michael’s walk . . . in the valley.  Gentle and peaceful fare on Morc Records.

sharron kraus & michael tanner – in the rheidol valley (album preview) by experimedia

Oren Ambarchi & Robbie Avenaim
Dream Request

Let’s make this an all Simon Says™ day – a wild and wooly live recording pairing Ambarchi’s guitar-sourced storms with Avenaim’s percussive thunder. From Bo’Weavil Records limited to 350 copies.

oren ambarchi & robbie avenaim – dream request (album preview) by experimedia

Starving Weirdos
Rolled In The Midst Of Never Ceasing Currents Flowing Without A Rest

Yes, another Simon Says™ record and another from Bo’Weavil, Merrick McKinlay and Brian Pyle are Starving Weirdos and they put a lot of words in their titles. Rolled In The Midst Of Never Ceasing Currents Flowing Without A Rest sounds wonderfully restless and menacing mixing drone, noise, found sounds and instruments into a throbbing “deep-forest-ghetto-musique-concrète”. Yum!

starving weirdos – rolled in the midst of never-ceasing currents flowing… (album preview) by experimedia

Seval
I Know You

Simon Says™ “sounds pretty cool”. It sure does. Lovely, genre-defying mashup from Seval featuring Sofia Jernberg (voice), Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), David Stakenas (guitar), Emil Standberg (trumpet), Patric Thorman (bass). Fred Lonberg-Holm tels us, “The members of this group are all active in the Swedish new music/improvising scene,” says Lonberg-Holm, “and this project – with its fixed melodies and more traditional harmonies – is more of an anomaly for all of us. In spite of the restrictions placed on us by the material, we find a way to re-build and invent the music differently each time.” From 482 Music. Listen to a track here.

The Black Keys
Brothers
2011 Grammy Award winner for Best Packaging

In Friday’s New York Times, David Browne talks about how size matters in “The Incredible, Inevitable Shrinking Album Cover” subtitled, “As Record Sales Shrink, So Does Album Cover Art”:

Art directors and designers say they’ve never been given blunt directives to be more elementary. Yet they admit the transition to easily grasped images is an inevitable part of the move from 12-inch discs to MP3s. “The album cover has become just a pictographic button, some little thing on a Web site that you can click on to listen to or purchase some music,” said Frank Olinsky, a designer who has worked on covers for Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth. “A thumbnail-size image can’t replace an LP or even a CD cover, but these days I’m not sure that matters to people. It’s what people are used to, and they’re getting more used to it all the time.”

Red Hot Chili Peppers
I’m With You
designed by Damien Hirst

While Browne admits that simple, visually arresting album cover designs are nothing new, he fears we may be losing something bigger:

Yet pared-down album cover art also feels of a piece with another unfortunate digital trend: the inferior sound quality produced by MP3s compared with their analog counterparts. In their respective ways each diminishes some aspect of the listening experience. And to future generations of fans who’ll be accustomed to listening to songs on something other than a home stereo while staring at its accompanying artwork, neither may eventually matter.

Designers point to a few hopeful signs for the survival of elaborate album covers. On the iTunes LP section of Apple’s online iTunes Store, fans can view album artwork in something close to CD-format size. Thanks to the revival of vinyl, many new releases are available in limited-edition LP versions, restoring covers to their former glory. According to Nielsen SoundScan, 3.6 million LPs were sold in the first half of this year. While that figure represents a 37 percent increase from the same period in 2010, it remains a niche market.

It’s worth pointing out, again, that those oft-quoted Nielsen SoundScan numbers do not represent total LP sales. First off, they are restricted to US & Canadian sales and they do not even track LP sales of everyone selling records in the US and Canada. They also do not mention which online stores they do and don’t cover but with single record pressing plants reporting pressing multiples of the yearly SoundScan numbers back before the vinyl revival really took off, we can pretty much be assured that SoundScan’s LP-sales figures are at best a trend indicator*.

Broken Bells
s/t

“I’ve definitely noticed this shift,” said Donny Phillips, an art director at Warner Brothers Records. “I’ve heard a lot of marketing people and managers say, ‘You have to make it simple because of iTunes.’ People are conscious of this.”

If we couple this bleak outlook for album cover art with the sorry state of metadata (which is what album cover art is from your music management software’s perspective), I’d say that size looks to be the smaller part of our problems.

Steve Jobs at home (a long time ago)

Like it or not, Apple and iTunes are prime-music-market-movers so the market has to move them back to a place that values old-fashioned things like sound quality and art. I hold out hope.

* United Record Pressing of Nashville, Tennessee reported pressing between 20,000 to 40,000 records a day back in 2007

Bill Dixon
Berlin Abbozzi

Bill Dixon’s only recording for über-free-jazz German label FMP is back in print (sort of*)! Recorded live by Holger Scheuermann and Jost Gebers on November 8th, 1999, during 10 Jahre Mauerfall at the Podewil in Berlin to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the fall of the Wall, Berlin Abbozzi features Bill Dixon: trumpet, flugelhorn, Matthias Bauer: double bass, Klaus Koch: double bass, and Tony Oxley: drums.

You can listen to Berlin Abbozzi for free and see what you think. I think it helps not to think about free jazz or FMP or any labels of any kind. You know, just listen.

Berlin Abbozzi
BILL DIXON

Download Share

* Available from Destination Out in “MP3 320, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire” along with a whole bunch of FMP classics. (I think this is a sign)

directed by Jonathan Glazer
(spotted on Dangerous Minds)

Jonathan Glazer’s next project is taking on directorial duties for a film adaptation of Michel Faber’s sci-fi-cannibal-tale Under The Skin. And according to the Hollywood Reporter -  “Scarlett Johansson to Play Alien Seductress in ‘Under the Skin’” and “Johansson plays an alien on earth, disguised as the perfect aesthetic form of a mesmerizing woman. She scours remote highways and desolate scenery looking to use her greatest weapon to snare human prey — her voracious sexuality.”

Indeed!

From the 2011 SxSW Festival “Music & Metadata: Do Songs Remain The Same?” panel discussion (from Billboard):

The lack of focus on the financial implications behind the aggregation and availability of music metadata did indeed manage to get a representative of SoundExchange in the audience to voice his organization’s concerns. “Several millions of dollars are sitting in the bank today, waiting to be redistributed to ‘Track 6 various artist label unknown’ due to the absence of clean metadata and aggregated database,” he said. “There are 117 different spellings of INXS in our database.”

I was thinking about metadata this morning and I thought to make a joke about how I rearranged my LPs and somehow the metadata got screwed up: A Love Supreme ended up in The Velvet Underground and Nico and I have no idea where that record is...As more and more people turn to downloads as their musical source of choice, the details pertaining to exactly what they’re listening to (year recorded/released, musicians, original cover art, what other music was on the original recording, etc…) may very well become difficult or impossible to discover due to crappy or nonexistent metadata. And then I thought that’s not very funny but it is one unfortunate side-effect when you turn things into data.

Bill Dixon
photo credit: Stephen Haynes

Rev. Charlie Jackson
You Got to Move: Live Recordings, Vol. 1

You can pre-order your very own copy of this a-punch-in-your-soul of a record directly from 50 Miles of Elbow Room today! Read more about it at the Wall Street Journal (really).

Warning: to listen is to love:

Filson Cape Coat

It’s as if they read my post-industrial mind. Filson now offers their classics in classic black.

Mackinaw Vest

Perfect for night hunting on the Lower East Side.

Cicciolina Holocaust | Sermonizer
Albeit Albeit | Sibelius Spiders

Is it too soon to love record label Forced Nostalgia? After just two releases? For me and my tastes the answer is clearly no.

Side A performed by Florim Prishtina and Rezart Veseli. Recorded 1984, Firenze (Italy).
Instrumentation: guitar, Korg Poly 61, Korg KPR 77, cornet, self-built machines, Tascam Portastudio (4-Track), effect pedals, tapes.
Previously released as private cassette edition. Digitally remastered directly from analogue tapes.

Side B recorded and mixed at Agucchi Home Studios 1983-1986 on 4-track tape recorder.
Instrumentation: synthesizer, guitar, violin, drum machines, electric shaver and other found objects.
Guest vocals on Copulator by Meana Rozzi. Guest aura by Aurelium Spitty.
Compiled by Fré De Vos.

Cicciolina Holocaust takes us on a ride in the belly of the beast (are we Jonah?), a constant gurgling drone the only indication we are in fact moving through some dark, very dark, place infested with Luigi Russolo‘s machine-music nightmare sounds. And coronet…Sermonizer kicks up the sound-diversity-ometer and adds some very nice analog (read: human) treats amid their wowing and fluttering Russolo machine. Meana Rozzi’s guest vocals on “Copulator” are, um, inspired and inspiring.

Incessant (both sides), great-sounding (both sides esp. considering the sources), great band names, ambient post-industrial yada yada yada, all adding up to what is for me a nostalgic trip that is in no way forced.

More, please.

Cicciolina Holocaust – Silent Killing by Forced Nostalgia

Sermonizer – Mystery by Forced Nostalgia

Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

From The Guardian (Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Tim Jonze and Helienne Lindvall. Tuesday 9 August 2011):

Numerous independent record labels fear they have lost a catastrophic amount of stock in a fire at a distribution warehouse in north London during the riots in the capital on Monday night. A three-storey, 20,000 square-metre building in Enfield, owned by Sony DADC and holding stock to be distributed by the Pias Group, was burned to the ground.

The fire will potentially impact labels such as Domino, as well as film production companies with DVD stock. Pias is the UK’s largest independent sales, marketing and distribution company.

Other labels that may be affected include 4AD, Warp and Beggars Banquet…

Damn. Read the rest including a full list of the labels impacted.