Checking on Oskar Fischer

What's new at Oskar Fischer's / YOLO-Music since may?

Well, as one can see, he has conquered MySpace - and he also has a new webpage under construction at his new domain www.oskarfischer.com.

Here's another clip shot at Oskar's place yesterday ... Oskar, browsing through his drawings.

Fan-art music

One of ZeFrank's fabulosos named Goose has come up with a kickwhip-ass extended remix of an audio piece originating from an unidentified Ray that has been thrown before the beasts by ZeFrank, who frequently inspires his audience to send in fan-art on varying themes.

Let's all go whip somebody's aaasss!

Collapsible Cardboard Speakers

"Muji originates in Japan and translates as “No Brand Quality Goods”. It was established in Japan in 1980 and the company’s basic principle is to develop new, simple products at reasonable prices by making the best use of materials while considering environmental issues.

Available through Muji-UK for around 20 British Pound.

(via)

Update: HOWTO make your own collapsible cardboard speakers! (via MAKE:Blog)

Engadget's Open Letter to Microsoft

Of course itune's rival services offer the same DRM-related problems as Apple's popular online music store.
For windows users FairUse4WM offers a workaround that ensures customers can play the tracks they own on all their devices.

In this Open Letter to Microsoft, tech-blog engadget is asking the software giant to keep this "hole" open:
"... please don't stop consumers from using FairUse4WM to remove copy protection from music they've downloaded. ...
We're big fans of the subscription services, here at Engadget, but let's face facts: the damn things don't work very well. It's pretty easy to download tracks, but it's a serious pain in the ass to successfully transfer them to a portable device. The only way for DRM to be successful is if it's painless and seamless, and we get tons of emails from consumers complaining about how hard it is to get Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music Unlimited, etc. tracks on to their players, or, god forbid, Macs. ...
Without a doubt you guys in Redmond are getting an earful from the record labels. You promised them a secure system, and you failed. They might already be threatening to withdraw their licenses for their music, but here's where you have to stand up and explain to the labels why they need to chill. Send Steve or Bill or J or whomever to smooth things over. We aren't assuming this is going to be an easy thing to make happen, but c'mon, you guys are /Microsoft/, if any company has the clout to make this happen and drag the entertainment industry into the 21st century, it's you. The music industry needs to accept that there is always going to be a certain amount of piracy, and then just get on with the business of selling digital. Let 'em keep the DRM in place if they want - we can all pretend that it still works -- just make it possible for anyone who really wants to get rid of it to take that extra step. ..."

Crappy Clip by Mocking Minority's Music

Mocking Minority's Music's "new" video consists of:
- a live track from a Binary Drug session with guest-musicians, from 1996
- a couple soundbytes from the 1990s, mostly electro-acoustic sounds programmed with the mindmachine-software
- and a clip I made when trying out a software to make a panoramic view out of single photos a few years ago
- and was edited in Windows Movie Maker, which further deteriorated the sound-quality

The resulting work has been named Crappy Clip for obvious reasons.

Homebuilt CrackleBox

The CrackleBox "was probably the first commercialy available portable selfpowered alternative 'keyboard' analog audio synthesizer with inbuilt loudspeaker ...
Nowadays many people refer to the The Cracklebox as the archetype of 'glitch' or 'circuit bending'.
The old Cracklebox has become a collectors item.
Since the new Cracklebox has been released in 2004 various performers are playing this instrument on stage amongst others: 'Mouse on mars' and 'Coil'."

Master-recyclist fibra has built his own CrackleBox into a cigar-box. The seven screws are touchpad-contacts, forming a V-shape convenient for both-handed play.

Krach the rocking robot

Krach the rocking robot is to be considered a regular at the annual ROBOEXOTICA Cocktailrobotics Festival.

Last year he rocked the final night at Arena's Dreiraum (which rhymes the Freiraum in MQ, where the exhibit was and will be this year).

Somehow he started falling apart from the start. Probably a main cause were his difficulties getting on stage, two guys failed lifting him, and he ended up crawling onstage on his back. At this point the audience was in tears laughing!

Here are three clips documenting his musical disassembly: One - Two - Three

Il Senor rocked Jazzfest Wien

Senor Coconut and his orchestra performed tonight at Jazzfest Wien in front of Vienna city hall. Here are clips of a laptop-solo, Smoke on the Water and Kraftwerk's Autobahn. (Thx Fra!) Update: here comes Smooth Operator - in a better sound quality as i didn't convert the avi-file ... this also means the file is bigger than the others.

3rd man composer's 100th birthday

Yesterday, Anton Karas, the composer of the famous 3rd man theme featured in Carol Reed's 3rd man, would have turned 100 years yesterday.
The 1949 movie, which takes place in post-war Vienna made the Vienna Heurigen-musician's tune immortal.
Here's a cover version by my local friend Oskar Fischer.

Why iTunes is evil

Over at boingboing Cory Doctorow takes the opportunity of an Anti-iTunes DRM demonstrations across the USA tomorrow to sum up why iTunes is evil:

"You didn't have to abandon your CDs to switch to MP3s, [...] but if you want to go from Apple's iTunes to a competing device, ever, you have to be prepared to abandon your whole investment.
Add to that Apple's willingness to remove features from iTunes Store songs in the name of "updating," the absence of any way to give away, sell or loan your iTunes Store songs, and Apple's use of blacklists and legal threats to prevent people from adding functionality to the iPod and iTunes and buying an iTunes song starts to seem like a worse and worse deal (especially since many artists report that they're seeing $0.07 or less from the sale of their music on the iTunes Store, so all your money is doing is lining the pockets of the same recording companies that are busily suing grannies, little kids and everyone else they can get their hands on)"

I have nothing to add, except that i found it pretty annoying when I was forced to download iTunes together with Quicktime (only to promptly delete it).

T-Qualizer Shirt

This T-shirt with a built in sound sensitive graphic equalizer panel is equipped "with a battery pack that snuggles discretely into a pocket inside the shirt."

Hm.

"The end result is an awesome sound sensitive music T-Shirt that commands attention."

Yes, probably.

"Each frequency of music will activate a different equalizer bar, just like the equalizer on your home stereo!"

OK, I already guessed that much!

(via)

Inflatable speakers

cebop POP Blowup-speakers claim:
The sound quality is better than conventional portable speakers, which don’t allow for much range and have a hollow, “tinny” sound. The plastic skin works as a resonating surface, allowing a richer and wider range of sound with more bass.
They're probably the only sound system that use an inflatable form to produce sound.
All that for meager $49.50 ...

(via)

The Three Sirens - A self learning robotic rock band

The Three Sirens are not conventional musical instruments but autonomous, self learning robot musicians. They are not controlled by humans. Artificial neural networks control every aspect of the robot’s activities. This means that the authorship for their music does not belong to any living being (no predefined material or musical knowledge is available to the system), all musical material is generated by self organizing learning processes in an improvising manner.

Link to Video of guitar-bot Aglaopheme's solo.

(via Autonomous Mutations)

Stairway to Heaven backwards (and reversed)

Jeroen Offerman took three months to learn to backwards-sing Stairway To Heaven and performed it *memorized*.
The video shows the reverse version reversed to give the original song.

Amazing! Crazy! Amazingcrazy!

(via)

Gas Tank Orchestra

Gas Tank Orchestra features a wide range of instruments including strings, reeds, horns, and percussion, all constructed with discarded automobile gas tanks from the streets of New Orleans by Artist/Musician/Scientist Gregory John Wildes. GTO is an orchestra improvising with improvised instruments. ...
The orchestra is self-arranging as it explores the balance (between chaos and epiphany, between conscious and unconscious, between left-brain and right-brain, between this, that, and so on) in staying/changing together.

This not only sounds like interesting instrument-tinkering, but also like an interesting approach to music-making.
Also sounds interesting!

(via)

Meet Oskar Fischer

Time to give an old friend some exposure - my acquaintance with Oskar Fischer dates back to my teenage punk days ... and since then he studiously and stolidly works on his own peculiar solo-program.
He's always played in bands too, mostly percussion (best known of those was Dr. Moreau's Creatures), but he earns my true admiration due to his very individual style he has developed, starting back then.
While his sound is still always out of the ordinary, the production standards have improved notably over time.
Oskar worked with drum machines already in the 1980s and has upgraded his electronics regularly. In his live-performances he plays the guitar and sings.
Like in these two mobile clips from his gig at last year's ROBOEXOTICA's closing event at Arena Wien: part of Carpet Crawl (mp3), a cover from Genesis, and Crazy Train (mp3), one of Ossi's own compositions.
Talking of which i must mention my favorite: High in the Subway - i'll have to rip a mp3 soon and make it available here.

Also a favourite to ask for at shows is his version of the 3rd man Theme (original by Anton Karas).
Around 1987/88 I bought my first tape put out by Ossi with his solo-program. Since then he has published a number of limited edition cds and a vinyl, i believe.

1961 synthesized speech audio, remixed

Remixer Lee Govatos has transformed that 1961 Bell Labs proto-computer voice into a funky freestyle track:
He Saw The Cat

(via, background on voice)

Clip: Bipolar Robot

wmv-movie ...
and on YouTube

Bad News of the Day: RIAA sues family that doesn't own a PC

The RIAA has filed a file-sharing suit against a family in Rockmart, GA. The family doesn't own a computer. ... link
(via)

Good News of the Day: Court throws out RIAA attempt to sue little girl

A judge in Michigan has thrown out a case where the RIAA attempted to sue a small child for file-sharing, after failing in its attempt to prosecute the child's mother. ... link
(via)