Sounds from Innerspace

**Frownland** · 03-26-2015, 10:21 AM

Nice, I'll give those a whack. One that I use is a program that uses last.fm called whatthe****shoukdilistentonow.com (you're going to have to put the url in the search and type in fuck yourself because of the forum censors).

innerspaceboy · 03-28-2015, 01:34 PM

I'm feeling incredibly inspired. It'd been a week of stagnation; I'd looked at my record collection and had said to myself, "wow... I've successfully built an autobiographical library of the greatest examples of each niche genre I love - downtempo electronic, avant-garde jazz, the Berlin School... and many others. But NOW what do I do?

With the purchase of Underworld's 20th anniversary deluxe edition of their masterwork, Dubnobasswithmyheadman, I'd come full circle to the album which first-inspired my life-long musical journey. But something was missing.

The 20th Anniversary Box Set of Dubnobasswithmyheadman

The majority of my knowledge of electronic music focuses on early revolutionaries of the genre - the tinkerers and innovators of monstrous noise machines. I've archived classic milestones from the grating clamor of Luigi Russolo to the soothing sounds of 20th century ambient music, concluding with Basinski's soundtrack to 9/11.

But I'd really lost touch with modern music, instead obsessing over the rich and vibrant sounds of 1969-1973. Thankfully, a siren sound lured me to the official website of DJ Food in the last few weeks, and, on a whim, I compiled an archive of his 35 Solid Steel Radio shows, and with the entire weekend ahead of me pledged to dedicate some serious listening time to these programs.

These would be the first "modern" recordings I'd heard since the dream pop halcyon revival of the late 90s and first years of the new millennium. And with the opening minutes of the very first set, my ears piqued and I was swept away.

His "A Weird World Reader" mix is described as a trip through the recent EP 'One Man's Weird Is Another Man's World' featuring tracks, samples and influences that make it what it is. The first track is a 17 minute tour de force collaboration with The Amorphous Androgynous - a track called, "The Illectrik Hoax." 10 minutes passed in a single breath and as the track concluded and I returned to the physical world, I leapt from my listening chair. Locating my girlfriend and fellow music junkie, I fit my studio monitors firmly upon her ears and cued the track up a second time. Her eyes closed and her head began to groove with the rhythm. I paused the track asking what she thought, but her only response was a whine of discontent translating to, "play more!"

The wonderfully weird "Weird World Reader"

Minutes later I had the full album playing in my studio and was absolutely enamored by the mysterious, sci-fi soundscapes of the record. Best-absorbed in its entirety from start to finish - this is a concept record of infectious rhythms and strange sounds which successfully transport the listener to the "Weird World" Food alluded to in the Reader mix. Long before the end of the album, I'd searched Discogs.com for a copy and phoned my local shop to order one for my library.

The Search Engine is a 4LP set of 45RPM discs housed in a magnificent quad-gatefold sleeve. True to DJ Food's usual form, it features eye-popping artwork that is best-viewed in its proper 12" format.

Discogs classifies the record as "Abstract, Breakbeat, Broken Beat, Downtempo, Experimental, Hip Hop, Leftfield music." - effectively a mishmash of all my very favorite words. Thank you, DJ Food for breaking me of my pretentious retomusical fanaticism, and for initiating me into the music of the now.

Here's the track that broke me - "The Illectrik Hoax". But again, for the full-flavor of the album, it is best taken in as a whole.

UPDATE: New findings reveal that the 17-minute mix is exclusive to the 2012 Record Store Day smokey psychedelic wax vinyl edition, limited to 1500 copies worldwide. I've just tracked down a sealed copy and it's on its way to me now.

innerspaceboy · 04-01-2015, 09:21 PM

Tonight I was privileged enough to be in attendance at a small but incredibly exciting musical event in Buffalo, NY.

At 7pm my beloved musical cohort and I braved the maddened event parking at the local university, and worked our way past the velvet ropes and bustling crowds who apparently were awaiting a performance by The Decemberists. We continued down a nondescript narrow corridor to an intimate black box theater - the locale for the REAL excitement of the evening.

Black Box 2015 was presented by The Lejaren Hiller Computer Music Studios at The University at Buffalo. The annual multi-channel electroacoustic event was hosted by the Studio’s director, Professor Lippe. Lippe's compositions have received numerous international prizes, and he studied under composers including Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis - some of the most prominent figures of 20th century electronic sound.

Below is a brief summary of the featured works of the evening.

Lippe's Ivocean (1978) was created using early analog synthesizers (Moog IIIP, Buchla, et al.), using these instruments to craft new timbres which still sound exciting and undated nearly 40 years after their recording.

Maggie Payne's Crystal (1982) consists of muti-tracked shimmering tones which slowly washed over and around the theater much in the same way that light plays upon a crystalline prism.

Gayle Young's Avalon Shorelines (2015) is a multi-channel soundscape which uses recordings of the titular waterfront toward the construction of an elaborate and multi-dimensional sonic landscape. Field recordings of crashing waves were accompanied by her performance on an Amaranth - an instrument of her invention played with two bows and reminiscent of a Japanese koto. The instrument produced a range of sounds all of which conjured images of a steel ship groaning and rollocking against the waves of an angry sea.

Brett Masteller’s electro-acoustic work, Trio of Duets was a modern drone piece built from instrumental sound samples, enveloping the theater in an impenetrable fog somewhere between high-volume broadcast static and moving through a gale in slow motion.

John Chowning’s Phoné (1981) was an exciting experience. Chowning is best-known for having discovered the FM synthesis algorithm in 1967, which allowed for the synthesis of simple but rich sounding timbres. The sounds experienced in Phoné calls to memory many of the pivotal recordings of electronic sound. There are skittering, playful melodic fragments, sudden bursts of white noise, and microtonal runs much like those employed by Stockhausen, Subotnick, Louis and Bebe Barron, Perrey & Kingsley, and Beaver & Krause during the 1960s and 70s. There is even a delightful and mischievous touch of Raymond Scott a la his adverts for the Bendix Corporation.

But the crowd-favorite of the evening was the Ethan Hayden's "…ce dangereux supplément…" (2015), a dynamic and engaging piece for live and recorded voices. Hayden stepped up to a podium with several sheets of what appeared to be a random spilling of pronunciation symbols and odd scribblings. They were, in fact, intricate experimental notation in the classic form of musique concrete. For the next eight minutes, he stood, wearing a headset microphone, and produced a captivating performance of furious jabberwock-speech, tongue clicks, grunts and pops. Both his energy and skill were truly mesmerizing, and for nearly ten minutes he made an incredible amount of noise without once venturing near what anyone could call a coherent sound. His performance ended with thunderous applause - surely one to be remembered.

I spoke briefly with each of the performers about their work and was excited to learn that much of the professors’ sound catalogs are available to the public at the University library. I’m planning the first of many visits this summer for further research.

My readers should also take note that Hayden published a book on Sigur Rós's ( ) for the famous +33⅓ series in August of 2014. I’ll certainly be securing a copy for my library.

Gayle Young's Amaranth

innerspaceboy · 04-04-2015, 01:44 PM

From data scientist David McCandless, published by informationisbeautiful.com. This is incredibly well-executed.

A newly-updated visual map of how much (or little) artists earn per song/album played/sold from each of the major distribution networks.

Absolutely stunning.

I would love to hear input from the artists and composers of MB - what are your feelings about the state of the music industry and of modern distribution systems?

Check out the mind-blowing infographic here.

innerspaceboy · 04-06-2015, 05:37 PM

This evening I found myself feeling emotionally and intellectually nostalgic for 1984-1994 ethereal wave / jangle-pop / neo-psychedelia / slowcore / art punk music which I’d only superficially explored in my college days.

This was music I emotionally-associate with the new-found independence and freedom (before the crushing reality of student loan debt sank in.)

As I’m never one to take on a task lightly, I charged full-speed to RYM, building custom charts of heroin-inspired jangle-pop and dreamy drone music of the late eighties and early nineties.

I consider these years sacred, before the industry latched on to the budding “alternative” rock scene and everything went to hell. These are the years before grunge hit full-swing, before megastars like Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, and Gavin Rossdale were featured every three songs on every commercial radio station in the US.

The free-form college rock scene was instead dominated by unlikely and reclusive rockers like J Spaceman and Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins.

Now armed with a roster of essential recordings, I’ll begin compiling the necessary albums for what will fill many evenings with the music from artists such as:

Spacemen 3
Spiritualized
Belly
Cocteau Twins
Curve
Galaxy 500
The Jesus & Mary Chain
Lush
Medicine
My Bloody Valentine
Sisters of Mercy
Slowdive
Sparklehorse
Suicide
The Church
Throwing Muses

…and a score of other essential artists of the dreamy early-alternative and pre-grunge scene.

I also count among these artists American Analog Set for their whisper-core indie music which came after the heyday of the shoegaze genre.

Spacemen 3 so adequately summarized the entire scene – “Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To.”

innerspaceboy · 04-11-2015, 06:35 PM

I took on an intriguing project this weekend. My new coworker is a wonderful addition to my team - she's highly-skilled, and we collaborate well together, but her musical interests are... well... a bit sheltered.

A twenty-something who "doesn't really use the internet much", her musical exposure is limited to what she sees on The Voice. Her favorite artists/genres include Whitney Houston, Nickelback, country pop, and crunk.

But she claims she is always willing to learn new things, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

Now this isn't the part where I throw on 30 minutes of Metal Machine Music or "Pena" from Trout Mask Replica. I genuinely wanted to open her mind to consider music beyond the I IV V, verse-chorus-verse world of NOW! THAT'S WHAT I CALL MUSIC!

I pored over my library, selecting historically-significant recordings, genre-defining works, and pieces which are unique but accessible. Some selections push the envelope further, like the example of musique concrete tape music, while others, like "An Ending (Ascent)" are amicable to even the most close-minded of listeners.

My coworker agreed to an open-minded listen for 3-4 minutes of new music. I mixed highlights from fourteen quality tracks and will be presenting them the next time she stops by The Manor.

The short, 3-minute mix breezes through the following recordings:

01 Tom Dissvelt & Kid Baltan - Pianoforte
02 Kalheinz Stockhausen - Kontakt
03 Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians - Section I
04 Fripp & Eno - Heavenly Music Corporation
05 Terry Riley - In C
06 Telefon Tel Aviv - Fahrenheit Fair Enough
07 Sun Ra - Space is the Place
08 Moondog - Symphonique #6
09 Iannis Xenakis - Orient-Occident
10 Charles Dodge - Earth's Magnetic Field
11 Salvador Dali - Oberture Et PremiŠre Entr‚e (from Etre Dieu)
12 Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto - Microon I
13 William Basinski - Disintegration Loops 1-1
14 Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent)

The excerpt from Dali's lost opera was a selection made with her in mind, as both my coworker and her boyfriend are fans of Dali's paintings. The opening and closing pieces are critical to a mix, so I open with the highly-avant-garde "pianoforte" and I believe the Eno piece is a solid closing sample for the project.

While the general focus is on electro-acoustic music, process music, chance, music for mathematics, minimalism, frippertronics, ambient, drone, noise, free jazz, third stream, and glitch musics are each touched upon in the 3-minute easily-digestible capsule of sound I've prepared.

If I can open her mind to appreciate even a single one of these pieces, I will consider the effort a success.

Happy Saturday everyone!

innerspaceboy · 04-12-2015, 10:14 AM

The results are in for the Innerspace Labs Music Discovery Survey! A huge thank-you to all who offered their input.

I created the survey out of a personal curiosity. Sadly, I have very little contact with the general public outside of the few members of my digital publishing team at the office, and I wanted to know what impact the web has had on the ways listeners discover new sounds.

I suspected listeners utilized multiple media resources in their musical explorations and that certainly proved to be the case. Contributors cited an average of 6.44 sources for new music data. The majority of the music sources I offered as options for the survey were widely-used, save for rateyourmusic.com, music subreddits, Gnoosic, and Usenet groups which each accounted for fewer than 3% of users’ musical resources. I found this particularly interesting as I visit RYM frequently as my primary ratings and review aggregator and find its information invaluable when researching artists and genres.

As expected, Youtube ranked as users’ most-used resource when sampling new sounds. I was surprised, however, to find that radio, motion pictures, television, or other forms of mass media were the third-highest ranked information resource, right behind user’s own friends. While I only see ~3 new films annually, and have no exposure to television or radio, it still appears that mass media is still a significant part of most people’s lives.

Spotify and other streaming services were the next-highest ranked source, accounting for 10% of listeners’ discoveries. While they are not a viable source for non-commercial or analog-only recordings, they still offer an incredible convenience for quick-and-easy personalized radio stations and there is no shortage of articles proclaiming streaming the new standard for mass media.

Crate digging was another significant source, as were vinyl Facebook communities and private music forums. I’m curious whether this is representative of the public at large or just for Innerspace readers, but it is exciting nonetheless.

I was similarly please by the results for music lit and other periodicals, which accounted for more than 5% of musical discovery. While 5% doesn’t sound significant on the surface, bear in mind that users cited an average of 6-7 sources for new music, so I’m considering 5% a threshold for this survey.

Other sources of note are independent music blogs and local music performances, both of which were a delight to see still holding their own in the survey. After attending the latest concert at my local university, I will certainly be visiting their music library for further research into works by their professors.

I’m also curious to see if torrenting will grow in popularity for general music research in the years ahead. Personally, torrenting is a critical step in my music purchasing process. I’ve yet to find a better system, whether for surveying the catalog of an artist or to compare various masters before investing my hard-earned cash.

I consider the survey a success as its certainly given me a better understanding of how users find new music. Thanks once again to everyone who contributed!

innerspaceboy · 04-16-2015, 07:31 PM

Recently in The Ultimate Compilation thread Nine and I were kicking about ideas for a list of essential recordings in the Ambient umbrella of musics.

Thus far we'd come up with the following:

DARK AMBIENT
Bohren & der Club of Gore - Black Earth
Deathprod - Morals and Dogma

DRONE
Fripp & Eno's (No Pussyfooting) - Side A - "The Heavenly Music Corporation"
Stars of the Lid, either The Tired Sounds of... or And the Refinement of the Decline
Robert Rich's 7-hour Somnium sleep concert DVD-audio album

AMBIENT HOUSE
Biosphere's Substrata and Microgravity LPs
The KLF's Chill Out
The Orb's 40:00 "Blue Room" single

AMBIENT DUB
The Orb's aforementioned "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain..."

AMBIENT TECHNO
Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92
Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children
Wolfgang Vogit (as Gas) - the Nah Und Fern box set
Global Communication's 76:14

TRIBAL AMBIENT
Steve Roach - Dreamtime Return
John Hassell & Brian Eno - Fourth World Vol 1: Possible Musics

AMBIENT GLITCH
Pantha du Prince - This Bliss
Telefon Tel Aviv - Fahrenheit Fair Enough

AMBIENT POP
Air - Moon Safari

BERLIN SCHOOL
Klaus Schulze - X or Timewind
Tangerine Dream's Phaedra
Edgar Froese - Epsilon in Malaysian Pale

AMBIENT CLASSICAL
Popol Vuh - Hosianna Mantra

AMBIENT JAZZ
Miles Davis - In a Silent Way

PSYBIENT
Carbon Based Lifeforms - World of Sleepers
Cell's "Audio Deepest Night"
Shpongle - Are You Shpongled?

Then today I remembered that not too long ago, I'd shot a two-part vinyl video feature as a 40-year chronology of the ambient genre. The two short videos showcased key recordings and some of my favorite records, with a few rarities thrown in for good measure.

It seemed only fitting that I dig them up and share them here for anyone interested in exploring some beautiful minimal music.

The retrospective begins with a summary of releases from 1973-2003.

Index for the impatient...

[1973] Fripp & Eno - (No Pussyfooting)
[1975] Fripp & Eno - Evening Star
[1982] Brian Eno - Music for Airports
[2010] The Black Dog - Music for Real Airports
[1980] Brian Eno - Ambient 2: Plateaux of Mirror
[1982] Brian Eno - Ambient 4: On Land
[1978] Brian Eno - Music for Films
[1975] Brian Eno - Discreet Music
[1980] Brian Eno & Jon Hassell - Fourth World Vol 1: Possible Musics
[1983] Brian Eno - Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks
[1984] Harold Budd & Brian Eno - The Pearl
[1985] Brian Eno - Thursday Afternoon VHS
[1981] Brian Eno - Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan VHS
[1982] Vangelis - Blade Runner (2007 RSD issue)
[2002] Blade Runner: Espers 5CD Retirement Edition
[1983] Mannheim Steamroller: Fresh Aire Vol 1 1974-1983 (private release)
[1990] The KLF - Chill Out
[1990] Space - Space
[1991] The Orb - The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld
[1992] The Orb - The Blue Room 40:00 edit
[2003] REFERENCE TEXT: Mark Pendergrast - The Ambient Century

And the 2nd part examines more recent developments, from 1993 to the present.

[1993-2008] Pete Namlook - Fax Records (238 disc library)
[1994] Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works Vol II
[1997] Godspeed You! Black Emperor - F#A#8
[1999] Sigur Ros - Ágætis Byrjun
[2001] Robert Rich - Somnium (DVD-Audio)
[2001] múm - Yesterday Was Dramatic Today Is Okay
[2007] Pantha du Prince - This Bliss
[2008] Wolfgang Voigt (as Gas) - Nah Und Fern Box Set
[2009] Clint Mansell - Moon OST
[2011] A Winged Victory for the Sullen - A Winged Victory for the Sullen
[2010] Black Swan - In 8 Movements
[2011] Black Swan - The Quiet Divide
[2012] William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops 9LP + 5CD + DVD Box Set
[2013] The KLF Recovered & Remastered - KLF MINUS-SIX - This Is Not What Space Is About
[2014] The KLF Recovered & Remastered - KLF MINUS-TWO - This Is Not What Chill Out Is About

If you dig just one of these albums, then I've done my job.

~~Music in a bottle~~ · 04-17-2015, 11:12 PM

Wowee! Innerspace, I thought I was quite the music addict, but as a bald headed fellow... my hats off to you sir! I'm in literal heaven right now with all this new source material to listen to. Thank you!

innerspaceboy · 04-18-2015, 06:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Music in a bottle

Wowee! Innerspace, I thought I was quite the music addict, but as a bald headed fellow... my hats off to you sir! I'm in literal heaven right now with all this new source material to listen to. Thank you!

Delighted to be of service! Please share your favorite selections once you've had time to absorb it all.

03-26-2015, 10:21 AM	#41 (permalink)
Frownland SOPHIE FOREVER Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: East of the Southern North American West Posts: 35,548	Nice, I'll give those a whack. One that I use is a program that uses last.fm called whatthe***shoukdilistentonow.com (you're going to have to put the url in the search and type in fuck yourself because of the forum censors). __________________ Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.* d e a f b o x

04-17-2015, 11:12 PM	#49 (permalink)
~~Music in a bottle~~ Account Disabled Join Date: Mar 2015 Posts: 48	Wowee! Innerspace, I thought I was quite the music addict, but as a bald headed fellow... my hats off to you sir! I'm in literal heaven right now with all this new source material to listen to. Thank you!