DOCSLIB.ORG

The Story of ORCH5 Robert Fink, UCLA Germany Has a Very Long

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Story of ORCH5 Robert Fink, UCLA Germany Has a Very Long The Story of ORCH5 Robert Fink, UCLA Germany has a very long classical music tradition. - Ralf Hütter of Kraftwerk, 2004 The DJ plays your favorite blasts, Takes you back to the past – Music’s magic! (poof) - Afrika Bambaataa, “Planet Rock” (1982) “Tomorrow’s Music Today” - Advertising slogan for the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument, ca. 1983 1 PRELUDE: The Great Liberation, or, Is there Life after Death? The “death of (European) classical music” may seem a somewhat tired, even irrelevant trope with which to start an essay in the present venue—which is, after all, devoted to the study around the globe of (clearly quite healthy) popular music. Certainly there is no consensus among critics and scholars as to the survival of the literate, “cultivated” tradition of Western music as the twenty-first century advances, and even if there were, why should anyone doing popular music studies care, other than to register a small but real sense of satisfaction at avoiding what looks like a losing horse in the music history championship stakes? It oughtn’t matter much to the study of popular music whether, as partisans within the classical world indignantly retort, audiences for the symphony and opera are actually holding steady; whether, as classical record label executives report, the latest crossover hit has temporarily stabilized their bottom line; whether, as contemporary classical composers now has- ten to assure us, they really do care if you listen.2 And indeed, these material-cultural issues are of little import for the discussion that follows. What cannot be ignored is the fundamental epistemological crisis that besets Western music as it 1 Hütter interviewed by Sergey Chernov, St. Petersburg Times, 972, 28 May 2004; Fairlight slogan as quoted in Holmes 1996- 99; “Planet Rock” lyrics as transcribed by the author. 2 The reference here is to Milton Babbitt’s infamous article in High Fidelity, often anthologized under his preferred title, “The Composer as Specialist,” but which appeared in 1958 with the more journalistically apropos editorial title, “Who Cares if You Listen?”. For the revisionist soul-searching to which I refer above, see Ziporyn 1998. Fink The Story of ORCH5 1 heads into what more than one commentator has labeled its “post-classical” era (Horowitz 1995).3 I have argued elsewhere that the incipient collapse of our paradigmatic cultural hierarchy of music, along with its canon of “classical” masterworks, was easily discernable as European musical culture careened toward the millennium, ushering in a fundamental (and salutary) “de-centering” of its mu- sical world-view. As I pointed out then, under the somewhat whimsical rubric “Why You Need a Musicologist to Listen to Beck,” one of the most disorienting consequences, ripe for scholarly study, was the collapse of the classical canon’s segregating function, its ability not only to keep the “low” music out, but to keep the high-art classical music of the European past safely walled in, where mass culture could mostly ignore it, occasionally gesturing at it from afar, whether to resist (“Roll Over, Beethoven”), parody (“Bohemian Rhapsody”), or appropriate (“A Whiter Shade of Pale”) its snob value, along with (at times) its sounds and structures (Fink 1998, pp. 142-56). The story of ORCH5 is, accordingly, set within the de-centered world of Western music dur- ing the slow twilight of its classical canon. It will lead us from Düsseldorf to Detroit, and from avant-garde German modernism to Afro-centric hip-hop. It is a story of technology, of machines fet- ishized, appropriated, mistrusted, misused. It also turns out to be a ghost story, the story of what happens to a particular fragment of classical music after it stops being classical, when it is not quite dead, but, as Buddhists might put it, in the bardo realm halfway between death and new life. The classic description of the bardo appears in what is popularly known as “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”: the actual title, though, is (roughly) the Book of the Great Liberation, through Hearing, in the Bardo Realm. This is, accordingly a story of death—but there will also be an attempt at post- canonic hearing, and at least some intimation of the great liberation(s) to come. Reincarnation, what Pythagoras called “the transmigration of souls,” is not an exotic, foreign concept; it has always been deeply woven into the European musical consciousness, brought to us by the same mind to 3Kyle Gann, who once published a wicked and witty parody of the perennial “death of classical music” article (as a hard- boiled detective story) in his column at the Village Voice (Gann 1997), has titled his web log (and associated radio station) simply “Postclassic.” (The web log is hosted by www.artsjournal.com, and the (highly recommended!) radio station, winner of a Deems Taylor award, is streamed on www.live365.com.) Fink The Story of ORCH5 2 which we mythically attribute the foundational observations of Western music theory. The story I have to tell is of musical reincarnation, of the transmigration of tones. It is a tale of the afterlife of “classical music,” transmigrated through digital technology, the commodity form, and myriad fortu- nate cultural misreadings of a single famous chord. It is the story of the classical ghost in the hip-hop machine. Kastchei the (Digitized) Immortal ORCH5 is low-resolution, 8-bit digital sample, a very early one, perhaps the first one to be- come famous. It was digitized around 1979 by David Vorhaus, a computer programmer and classi- cally-trained electronic musician. The file appeared on Disk 17 of the 25-or-so eight-inch floppy disks that made up the sampled sound library shipped with each very expensive Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument. (In the United States, the going rate for a Fairlight Model IIx in the early 1980s was over $25,000; see Holmes 1996-99.) The Fairlight CMI, originally cobbled together in 1979 by two Australian inventors out of the ruins of the Quasar, a failed analog modeling synthesizer, was the first commercially available electronic musical instrument that, in addition to generating musical sounds through analog/digital synthesis, gave its owner the ability to sample pre-existing sounds into digital memory, process them, and play them back through a keyboard. It is thus the single evolu- tionary starting point for an entire phylum of ubiquitous (and much cheaper) digital samplers, in- cluding the Akai S-series (1984) and the Ensoniq Mirage (1985), so crucial to the rise of sample-based hip-hop. Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel, the inventors of the Fairlight, considered its digital sampling ca- pability a technical hack, a clever shortcut on the way to their ultimate audio workstation. Digital conversion allowed them to implement complex tools for sound synthesis while bypassing processor- intensive tasks too difficult for its parallel pair of primitive Motorola 8800-series microprocessors. Nobody really took sampling per se seriously at first: company apocrypha identifies the first sound Fink The Story of ORCH5 3 sampled for melodic playback as the barking of an employee’s dog. But early Fairlight users singled out the CMI’s sampling power as a key differentiator, and soon company brochures touted the sys- tem’s ability “to incorporate literally ANY type of sound – not only classical and modern instru- ments but sounds of the world; sounds reflecting the full spectrum of life, from the subtlety and force of nature to the sounds of civilization and synthesis” (Fairlight 1983). This is why Fairlights be- gan shipping with floppy disks full of sampled sounds. Many of these soon-to-be famous samples had been somewhat casually appropriated by an adventurous first generation of users. Vorhaus, an or- chestral double-bass player as well as founder, with members of the BBC Radiophonic workshop, of the British electronic “pop” group White Noise, was a typical early adopter of the Fairlight; he brought his classical training very much to bear as he contributed to what would become the stan- dard set of samples included with every new CMI. ORCH5 was just one of a series of ORCH samples that Vorhaus and others culled from (one assumes) a quick troll through their classical record collections. The orchestral samples provided with the Fairlight feature short snippets of full-orchestra chords from the symphonic literature, usu- ally just a single attack, often pitched (TRIAD), but also percussion-dominated (ORCHFZ1), occa- sionally looped to provide a pulsating pattern capable of sustained use (ORCH2). ORCH5, the most famous of these, is almost certainly sampled from Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird; as I have veri- fied myself using digital sound processing, the loud chord that opens the “Infernal Dance of All the Subjects of Kastchei,” pitched down a minor sixth (and also slowed down, since digital technology did not in 1979 yet allow independent manipulation of frequency and sampling rate), can be made to match with tolerable precision an iteration of ORCH5 on the pitch C4 easily obtainable from several internet websites devoted to the mysteries of the Fairlight CMI.4 It’s not hard to fathom why Vorhaus picked this spot: the piece is famous, the sound is impressive, and, crucially, in every one of Stravinsky’s three suites from the ballet, this forceful blast is neatly isolated at the beginning of a 4 Audio samples of the Fairlight’s sound library, including ORCH5 can (as of late 2004) be accessed at Holmes 1996-99. See also the larger downloads of sound banks from the Hollow Sun website (http://www.hollowsun.com/vintage/fairlight/). Fink The Story of ORCH5 4 movement, framed by complete silence on one side and only a low pianissimo rumble on the other (Example 1).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Rolling Stone Magazine's Top 500 Songs
    Rolling Stone Magazine's Top 500 Songs No. Interpret Title Year of release 1. Bob Dylan Like a Rolling Stone 1961 2. The Rolling Stones Satisfaction 1965 3. John Lennon Imagine 1971 4. Marvin Gaye What’s Going on 1971 5. Aretha Franklin Respect 1967 6. The Beach Boys Good Vibrations 1966 7. Chuck Berry Johnny B. Goode 1958 8. The Beatles Hey Jude 1968 9. Nirvana Smells Like Teen Spirit 1991 10. Ray Charles What'd I Say (part 1&2) 1959 11. The Who My Generation 1965 12. Sam Cooke A Change is Gonna Come 1964 13. The Beatles Yesterday 1965 14. Bob Dylan Blowin' in the Wind 1963 15. The Clash London Calling 1980 16. The Beatles I Want zo Hold Your Hand 1963 17. Jimmy Hendrix Purple Haze 1967 18. Chuck Berry Maybellene 1955 19. Elvis Presley Hound Dog 1956 20. The Beatles Let It Be 1970 21. Bruce Springsteen Born to Run 1975 22. The Ronettes Be My Baby 1963 23. The Beatles In my Life 1965 24. The Impressions People Get Ready 1965 25. The Beach Boys God Only Knows 1966 26. The Beatles A day in a life 1967 27. Derek and the Dominos Layla 1970 28. Otis Redding Sitting on the Dock of the Bay 1968 29. The Beatles Help 1965 30. Johnny Cash I Walk the Line 1956 31. Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven 1971 32. The Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil 1968 33. Tina Turner River Deep - Mountain High 1966 34. The Righteous Brothers You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin' 1964 35.
    [Show full text]
  • DJ Skills the Rise of the Hip-Hop DJ 3
    The Rise of the Hip-Hop DJ 1 74 The Rise of The Hip-hop DJ DJs were Hip-hop’s original architects, and remain crucial to its contin- ued development. Hip-hop is more than a style of music; it’s a culture. As with any culture, there are various artistic expressions of Hip-hop, the four principal expressions being: • visual art (graffiti) • dance (breaking, rocking, locking, and popping, collectively known in the media as “break dancing”) • literature (rap lyrics and slam poetry) • music (DJing and turntablism) Unlike the European Renaissance or the Ming Dynasty, Hip-hop is a culture that is very much alive and still evolving. Some argue that Hip-hop is the most influential cultural movement in history, point- ing to the globalization of Hip-hop music, fashion, and other forms of expression. Style has always been at the forefront of Hip-hop. Improvisation is called free styling, whether in rap, turntablism, breaking, or graf- fiti writing. Since everyone is using the essentially same tools (spray paint for graffiti writers, microphones for rappers and beat boxers, their bodies for dancers, and two turntables with a mixer for DJs), it’s the artists’ personal styles that set them apart. It’s no coincidence that two of the most authentic movies about the genesis of the move- ment are titled Wild Style and Style Wars. There are also many styles of writing the word “Hip-hop.” The mainstream media most often oscillates between “hip-hop” and “hip hop.” The Hiphop Archive at Harvard writes “Hiphop” as one word, 2 DJ Skills The Rise of the Hip-Hop DJ 3 with a capital H, embracing KRS-ONE’s line of reasoning that “Hiphop Kool DJ Herc is a culture with its own foundation narrative, history, natives, and 7 In 1955 in Jamaica, a young woman from the parish of Saint Mary mission.” After a great deal of input from many people in the Hip-hop community, I’ve decided to capitalize the word but keep the hyphen, gave birth to a son who would become the father of Hip-hop.
    [Show full text]
  • Bibliographie Stockhausen 1952-2013 Engl
    Stockhausen-Bibliography 1952-2013 [June 2013] The following bibliography alphabetically lists the authors who have written secondary literature about Karlheinz Stockhausen’s oeuvre: monographs, articles in books, periodicals and dictionaries, comprehensive works in which Stockhausen’s oeuvre is examined in detail. Reviews, contributions to concert programmes and publications in daily and weekly newspapers are only mentioned if they are considered to have reference value. Stockhausen’s own texts are not included, and conversations and interviews are only partly listed. Several works by the same author are listed consecutively in chronological order. When the name of the author was not available, the titel was listed alphabetically. This list includes the bibliographies that were published in Texte zur Musik, Vol. 6 (compiled by Chr. von Blumröder and H. Henck) and Vol. 10 (Chr. von Blumröder, R. Sengstock, D. Schwerdtfeger), and was supplemented and up-dated until 2013 (M. Luckas, I. Misch). Abkürzungen und Siglen / Abbreviations and Sigla AfMw. Archiv für Musikwissenschaft / Archive for Musicology Aufl. Auflage / printing Ausg. Ausgabe / edition Bd., Bde Band, Bände / volume, volumes Beitr. Beitrag / contribution BzAfMw. Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft / Supplementary booklets for the Archive for Musicology ders., dies. derselbe, dieselbe / the same DMT Dansk musiktidsskrift dt. deutsch / German eng. englisch / English erw. erweitert / supplemented Ffm. Frankfurt am Main / Frankfurt FP Feedback Papers frz. französisch / French H. Heft / booklet, issue Hbg Hamburg hg. herausgegeben / edited HmT Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, hg. v. H. H. Eggebrecht, Wiesbaden 1972–1983, Stuttgart 1984–2006 / Hand Dictionary of Musical Terminology Ins. Institut / Institute jap. japanisch / Japanese Ldn London 1 ML Music and Letters MR The Music Review MT The Musical Times MuB Musik und Bildung Mw.
    [Show full text]
  • Hip-Hop Education Center to Launch Campaign Asking President Obama
    For Immediate Release Press Contact: November 3, 2015 Lily Zaballos (510) 566-0814 [email protected] Hip-Hop Education Center to launch campaign asking President Obama to designate hip-hop as valuable public school education tool; hosts first annual awards for Hip-Hop Education pioneers NEW YORK — Today, the Hip-Hop Education Center (HHEC) announces that it will launch on November 11, 2015, the We The People for Hip-Hop Education in Public Schools, a petition requesting that the Obama Administration designate Hip-Hop culture as a valuable and uniquely American national treasure worthy of being taught and practiced in all K-12 public schools. “Carlos Mare and I are excited to share what we’ve been passionately working on for the past year, we know this will be game changer in education reform and will open up opportunities for millions of children.” said HHEC Founder Martha Diaz. For the past five years, HHEC has been conducting research, evaluating programs, and convening the teachers, teaching artists, scholars, researchers, activists, and music industry professionals to research and build a Hip-Hop Education movement. Research shows that Hip-Hop programing is making a difference with student engagement and academic outcomes. HHEC believes integrating Hip-Hop into public school education could help solve the U.S. education crisis: • Students are not being engaged in school. Approximately, 1.1 million American high school students drop out every year. That’s a student every 26 seconds – or 7,000 a day. • This education crisis poses direct negative consequences to poverty, crime, and economic conditions to our society.
    [Show full text]
  • Jesuit Church in G.” a Painter Per- Forms the Heroic Feat First of Constructing Perspective Under Tech- Nically Difficult Conditions
    Introduction Laurence A. Rickels “On the Genealogy of Media” invokes a tradition for thinking about technology, which passes from Nietzsche through Heidegger and Freud. As a collection on media, however, these texts gath- ered together in this special issue include few Nietzsche readings— or even Nietzsche references—in their thread count. Indeed, Nietzsche is not typically considered a thinker of media technol- ogies. But his genealogical interpretation of the Mass media as being on one uncanny continuum of valuation from Christianity to nihilism influenced, together with either Freud’s or Heidegger’s input, the media essays of Walter Benjamin as much as the media oeuvre of Friedrich Kittler. Following Nietzsche, then, a genealogy of media means, as in Heidegger’s questioning of technicity, that whatever technology may be it presupposes assumption of a certain (discursive) ready positioning for (and before) its advent as actual machines to which the understanding of technologization cannot be reduced. Freudian psychoanalysis views media technologies as prosthetically modeled after body parts and partings. A primary relationship to loss (as the always-new frontier of mourning where reality, the future, the other begin or begin again) is, on Freud’s turf and terms, the psychic ready position that is there before the event or advent of machinic externalities. In “A Mathematics of Finitude” Friedrich Kittler generates genealogies of “progress” in science, mathematics, and media span- ning centuries out of a single story by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Media machines are shown to intervene as makeshift stopgaps where the Discourse, 31.1 & 2, Winter & Spring 2009, pp. 3–8.
    [Show full text]
  • The Futurism of Hip Hop: Space, Electro and Science Fiction in Rap
    Open Cultural Studies 2018; 2: 122–135 Research Article Adam de Paor-Evans* The Futurism of Hip Hop: Space, Electro and Science Fiction in Rap https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2018-0012 Received January 27, 2018; accepted June 2, 2018 Abstract: In the early 1980s, an important facet of hip hop culture developed a style of music known as electro-rap, much of which carries narratives linked to science fiction, fantasy and references to arcade games and comic books. The aim of this article is to build a critical inquiry into the cultural and socio- political presence of these ideas as drivers for the productions of electro-rap, and subsequently through artists from Newcleus to Strange U seeks to interrogate the value of science fiction from the 1980s to the 2000s, evaluating the validity of science fiction’s place in the future of hip hop. Theoretically underpinned by the emerging theories associated with Afrofuturism and Paul Virilio’s dromosphere and picnolepsy concepts, the article reconsiders time and spatial context as a palimpsest whereby the saturation of digitalisation becomes both accelerator and obstacle and proposes a thirdspace-dromology. In conclusion, the article repositions contemporary hip hop and unearths the realities of science fiction and closes by offering specific directions for both the future within and the future of hip hop culture and its potential impact on future society. Keywords: dromosphere, dromology, Afrofuturism, electro-rap, thirdspace, fantasy, Newcleus, Strange U Introduction During the mid-1970s, the language of New York City’s pioneering hip hop practitioners brought them fame amongst their peers, yet the methods of its musical production brought heavy criticism from established musicians.
    [Show full text]
  • Eric Chasalow/Over the Edge New World Records 80440 in Art, One
    Eric Chasalow/Over the Edge New World Records 80440 In art, one and one at times make three. In art for the ear, and particularly with acoustic in combination with electronically-created sounds, the listener tends to hear rather more than a lockstep summation of parts. And it's perhaps this phantom dimension that most intrigues the listener. Again perhaps, as in a difficult love affair, a resonance arises from the antipodal aspects of seeming incompatibility and obviously compelling attraction. One is therefore given to approach music so conceived as forever newly plowed ground. Odd, then, in terms of expectation, that the first electro-acoustic compositions incorporating magnetic tape appeared (as I write) just over forty years ago: New Grove cites Bruno Maderna's aptly titled Musica su due dimensione I, for flute and tape, and Edgard Varese's Deserts of 1950-54, for orchestra and tape, as among the earliest examples. Earlier still, in 1939, before the advent of magnetic tape, John Cage composed his Imaginary Landscape No. 1, for piano, Chinese cymbal, and two variable-speed turntables. Significant music marks the way as milestones, with regard particularly to this CD. Karlheinz Stockhausen's 1959-60 version of Kontakte, for tape, piano, and percussion; Milton Babbitt's 1963-64 Philomel, for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized tape; Babbitt's 1974 Reflections, for piano and synthesized tape; Roger Reynolds's Transfigured Wind IV from 1985, for flute, computer, and tape; and Mario Davidovsky's ten Synchronisms, for a variety of solo instruments, ensemble combinations, and tape. Eric Chasalow's choice to study with Davidovsky is significant.
    [Show full text]
  • Green the Green Book
    Book # 1 THE GREEN BOOK Universal Zulu Nation Infinity Lessons Archive 1973 - 2000 FOR THE MASSES Compiled By : King Mark Luv & Malika Saphire Table of Contents Myths and Misconceptions ..................................................................................................................................................... 2 Laws and Regulations of the Universal Zulu Nation Part 1 (1 – 20) ........................................................................................ 4 Laws and Regulations of the Universal Zulu Nation Part 2 (21 – 46) ...................................................................................... 5 INFINITY LESSON ONE ............................................................................................................................................................. 6 ABOUT ZULU NATION ......................................................................................................................................................... 6 Message to the People........................................................................................................................................................ 7 INFINITY LESSON TWO ............................................................................................................................................................ 8 THE HISTORY OF AFRIKA BAMBAATAA ............................................................................................................................... 8 INFINITY LESSON THREE .......................................................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Teaching Post-Tonal Music to Twenty-First- Century Students Author(S): Miguel A
    Department of Music Theory, Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University A Pedagogical and Psychological Challenge: Teaching Post-Tonal Music to Twenty-First- Century Students Author(s): Miguel A. Roig-Francolí Source: Indiana Theory Review, Vol. 33, No. 1-2 (Summer 2017), pp. 36-68 Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the Department of Music Theory, Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/inditheorevi.33.1-2.02 Accessed: 03-09-2018 01:27 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Indiana University Press, Department of Music Theory, Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Indiana Theory Review This content downloaded from 129.74.250.206 on Mon, 03 Sep 2018 01:27:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A Pedagogical and Psychological Challenge: Teaching Post-Tonal Music to Twenty-First-Century Students Miguel A. Roig-Francolí University of Cincinnati ost-tonal music has a pr problem among young musicians, and many not-so-young ones. Anyone who has recently taught a course on the theory and analysis of post-tonal music to a general Pmusic student population mostly made up of performers, be it at the undergraduate or master’s level, will probably immediately understand what the title of this article refers to.
    [Show full text]
  • The Evolution of Hip Hop 1980’S
    The Evolution of Hip Hop 1980’s Sugar Hill Gang Rapper’s Delight Kurtis Blow The Breaks Sugar Hill Gang Apache (Jump On It) Herbie Hancock Rockit West Street Mob Let’s Dance (Make Your Body Move) Whodini Magic’s Wand Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force Renegades of Funk Royal Cash Radio Active Rockmaster Scott & the Dynamic 3 Request Line West Street Mob Break Dance Mann Parish Boogie Down Bronx Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force Looking For the Perfect Beat Newcleus Jam On It Strafe Set It Off COD In The Bottle Jonzun Crew Pack Jam (Look Out For The OVC) LA Dream Team Rockberry Jam Freestyle Don’t Stop The Rock Rockmaster Scott & the Dynamic 3 The Roof Is On Fire Divine Sounds What People Do For Money Run DMC It’s Like That UTFO Beats & Rhymes Hashim Al-Naafiysh (The Soul) Cybotron Clear Kano Holly Dolly Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force Planet Rock Planet Patrol Play At Your Own Risk Ice-T Reckless Pretty Tony Fix It In The Mix Egyptian Lover Egypt Egypt Twilight 22 Electric Kingdom Twilight 22 Siberian Nights Grandmaster Melle Mel Survival (The Message II) Quadrant Six Body Mechanic World Class Wreckin Cru Surgery Arthur Baker Breaker’s Revenge Planet Patrol I Didn’t Know You Loved Me Fat Boys Fat Boys Jonzun Crew Space Cowboy Grandmaster Flash & the Furious 5 The Message Run DMC Sucker MC’s Davy DMX One For The Treble Doug E Fresh & Slick Rick Lodi Dodi Dr Jeckyl & Mr Hyde Genius Rap Run DMC King Of Rock Whodini Freaks Come Out At Night Dana Dane Cinderfella Dana Dane Schooly D PSK… What Does It Mean? Boogie Boys Fly Girl UTFO Roxanne
    [Show full text]
  • 1 "Disco Madness: Walter Gibbons and the Legacy of Turntablism and Remixology" Tim Lawrence Journal of Popular Music S
    "Disco Madness: Walter Gibbons and the Legacy of Turntablism and Remixology" Tim Lawrence Journal of Popular Music Studies, 20, 3, 2008, 276-329 This story begins with a skinny white DJ mixing between the breaks of obscure Motown records with the ambidextrous intensity of an octopus on speed. It closes with the same man, debilitated and virtually blind, fumbling for gospel records as he spins up eternal hope in a fading dusk. In between Walter Gibbons worked as a cutting-edge discotheque DJ and remixer who, thanks to his pioneering reel-to-reel edits and contribution to the development of the twelve-inch single, revealed the immanent synergy that ran between the dance floor, the DJ booth and the recording studio. Gibbons started to mix between the breaks of disco and funk records around the same time DJ Kool Herc began to test the technique in the Bronx, and the disco spinner was as technically precise as Grandmaster Flash, even if the spinners directed their deft handiwork to differing ends. It would make sense, then, for Gibbons to be considered alongside these and other towering figures in the pantheon of turntablism, but he died in virtual anonymity in 1994, and his groundbreaking contribution to the intersecting arts of DJing and remixology has yet to register beyond disco aficionados.1 There is nothing mysterious about Gibbons's low profile. First, he operated in a culture that has been ridiculed and reviled since the "disco sucks" backlash peaked with the symbolic detonation of 40,000 disco records in the summer of 1979.
    [Show full text]
  • VAGRANT RECORDS the Lndie to Watch
    VAGRANT RECORDS The lndie To Watch ,Get Up Kids Rocket From The Crypt Alkaline Trio Face To Face RPM The Detroit Music Fest Report 130.0******ALL FOR ADC 90198 LOUD ROCK Frederick Gier KUOR -REDLANDS Talkin' Dirty With Matt Zane No Motiv 5319 Honda Ave. Unit G Atascadero, CA 93422 HIP-HOP Two Decades of Tommy Boy WEEZER HOLDS DOWN el, RADIOHEAD DOMINATES TOP ADDS AIR TAKES CORE "Tommy's one of the most creative and versatile multi-instrumentalists of our generation." _BEN HARPER HINTO THE "Geggy Tah has a sleek, pointy groove, hitching the melody to one's psyche with the keen handiness of a hat pin." _BILLBOARD AT RADIO NOW RADIO: TYSON HALLER RETAIL: ON FEDDOR BILLY ZARRO 212-253-3154 310-288-2711 201-801-9267 www.virginrecords.com [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] 2001 VIrg. Records Amence. Inc. FEATURING "LAPDFINCE" PARENTAL ADVISORY IN SEARCH OF... EXPLICIT CONTENT %sr* Jeitetyr Co owe Eve« uuwEL. oles 6/18/2001 Issue 719 • Vol 68 • No 1 FEATURES 8 Vagrant Records: become one of the preeminent punk labels The Little Inclie That Could of the new decade. But thanks to a new dis- Boasting a roster that includes the likes of tribution deal with TVT, the label's sales are the Get Up Kids, Alkaline Trio and Rocket proving it to be the indie, punk or otherwise, From The Crypt, Vagrant Records has to watch in 2001. DEPARTMENTS 4 Essential 24 New World Our picks for the best new music of the week: An obit on Cameroonian music legend Mystic, Clem Snide, Destroyer, and Even Francis Bebay, the return of the Free Reed Johansen.
    [Show full text]