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