Last Trip

 I am posting this song in memoriam of my highschool friend Markus who was laid to rest yesterday. Astral Weeks was a favorite LSD soundtrack of his and especially this song around the 8 minute mark is a perfect musical accompaniment to a peaking trip. Hadn't listened to it in years (rather decades), I'm not a big Van Morrison fan. But this album is special. 

Markus, I owe you for introducing me to various musicians back in the day I probably wouldn't have otherwise come to value. Have a good trip through the astral planes!

Elias Hirschl or When A Disappointing Baby Turns Out OK

I don't know whether it was my taller than average stature, my long hair or my hairy face with the bushy brows ... when I first met Elias Hirschl, he immediately burst out crying. That wasn't cool. 

Years passed and 17 or so years later Elias started to show promise when he got into film making and won some youth film prizes and shit. He went on to start a career in literature, performing in poetry slams and publishing books. 

2021 he put out his, I think, fourth novel and gained public attention for its capturing of the current political Zeitgeist in Austrian domestic affairs. 

He is also involved in several musical projects - the clip below "Tschuldigung" (german for "Sorry") is the latest on his Youtube channel.

I'll take this late apology for his initial off putting behaviour and declare the kid turned out alright.

 

Cambodian Music before the Khmer Rouge

In the 1970s the Pol Pot regime brutally surpressed musicians along with great parts of the population. This mini doc shows the efforts being made in documenting what was a thriving scene before the Khmer Rouge took over.

A Gem from 2014: Roboexotica by Elektroskop

One half of the Vienna electro-rock duo Elektroskop had been a regular at the annual cocktail robot festival Roboexotica, performing as "Mr. Electric", before in 2014 the band came up with this song. The music video makes good use of footage shot at the 2013 iteration of the festival, showing details from some of the awe-inspiring contraptions.

New OH-FI Video "Tiefschlaf"

Shot at Arena Wien this summer ...

Binary Drug - 1997 Session Recording

Unreleased session recording from 01-31-97.
Instead of the usual backdrop of mind-machine compositions, a series of loops derived from passages of aforementioned compositions are played in the background.
Musicians rotating between instruments (in alphabetical order): Gerhard Grasböck, Gerhard Kaltseis, Kilian Schrader, Chris Veigl, Magnus Wurzer.
Recorded on a stereo tape recording device.

F - Roddy Piper's Rowdy Hearts Club Band

Look what I found on the tube! Ah, the mix-tapes of my youth ...

In this case thanks to "Duffy" who opened my ears to US punk bands.

And in case you are wondering, I _did_ watch Mr. Rowdy Roddy Piper wrestle on Cable TV in the mid-1980s before he quit his career, maybe that is why I got so attached to this song I could do an exact search on Youtube for the otherwise unfindable band "F" ...

The Dickies - Nights In White Satin

One of the great songs in rock history. Love this version by the Dickies (you may be more familiar with the Moody Blues' version).

High in the Subway (Oh-Fi) 2014

Vienna artist Oh-Fi has produced a video for his song "High in the Subway" in cooperation with SHIFZ.
Visit Oh-Fi on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ohfi.fischer

zefrank and the Guitar

Gaahh! I'm so touched and amused and fanatisized by this special edition[*] kind of of the show with zefrank - apparently Master Ze lost a game of chess to his fabulosos and owed "me and a guitar performing 10 minutes of songs - hmmm" to his audience, which he delivered in yesterday's show.

The guitarero goes by the name of Jonathan Coulton and most of the songs seem to be original zefranks - my favorite being right the first song - Fun Winter, which Ze first performed in January 3rd's show.

[*] which seem to get more towards the end of the one-year experiment, with Ze recently having had a show from Ray's home in St. Louis, which was pretty awesome and touching too.

Loituma Girl (aka Leekspin)

Featured on mental_floss as "Viral meme all your friends already know about", Leekspin is an audiovisual braincracker of extraordinary magnitude.

Let me emphasize my belief that mentalfloss's warning "Do not, repeat, do NOT click on this link if you actually have something even slightly, vaguely important to do today, or if you are at all worried about maintaining your sanity." is putting it far too mildly!

Tell me how long you kept it spinning.

Heck No! (I'll Never Listen To Techno)

I rarely check out any of YouTube's featured videos - I think we can pretty safely assume 99% of them are crap.
But the short text for this one got me interested - and I didn't regret clicking!
"A "What if?" scenario of Robots taking over and destroying the Earth is told on a Lite Brite."

Oskar Fischer Live at Freudbot Presentation

This week Oskar Fischer entertained at WerkzeugH with musical sets before and after the presentation of Freudbot by Sergey Teterin and Magnus Wurzer.

He was supported by Kilian Schrader, which resulted in an interesting session.

In this clip they perform a roughly 30min jam inspired by Anton Karas' 3rd man theme

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)