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It's really an obligatory post, but I must mention the Paulstretch meme that likely started the whole obsession with slowing down pop songs to epic choral majesty - Justin Bieber's "U Smile" 800% Slower from Aug 16, 2010. It was surprisingly epic and still holds up as a decent ambient piece.
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Yeah that’s it
Party in the USA was the best. |
Christmas in February – Loads of New Content from Fred Deakin! (pt 1 of 2)
Fred Deakin is best-known as half of the playfully eclectic downtempo duo Lemon Jelly, as well as one of the founders of the enormously successful and innovative design studio, Airside.
https://i.imgur.com/qiYEYxrl.jpg Airside's client base included Coca-Cola, D&AD, EMI, Greenpeace, Live Earth, Mastercard, MTV, Nike, Panasonic, Sony, Visa, Vodafone, the Pet Shop Boys and The Beatles and their iconic style is instantly recognizable. https://i.imgur.com/94gZfAxl.jpg Deakin also founded Impotent Fury, Lemon Jelly's own label, (which was also the name of an infamous club night run by Fred where the music genre was chosen by the spin of a wheel.) The label issued 46 official releases plus a few non-label deluxe custom-packaged boots due to uncleared samples issued with Fred's telltale typeface. These boots have since become highly-sought-after collectibles among Jellyheads. The first was 2001's Soft/Rock, a 7" blue vinyl single in a screenprinted modified denim sleeve constructed from pairs of jeans with a flavored condom in the pocket. The single was limited to 1,000 copies, 15 of which featured hand embroidery by Laura Lees. The singles contained uncleared samples by Chicago and Black Crowes, hence the private release. https://i.imgur.com/DJX2Yail.png Then in August of 2003, another self-release surfaced titled Rolled/Oats. The single was spray painted gold and screenprinted once again with the classic Jelly font and housed in a hessian (burlap) sleeve. "Rolled" samples "Feel Like Making Love" by Bad Company and is based on "The Curse Of Ka'zar" from their Lost Horizons double LP. "Oats" uses elements of "Closer" with a sample of George Michael's "Heal The Pain". https://i.imgur.com/0wCc4lol.jpg Lemon Jelly initially issued three EPs, later collected on the beautifully-packaged lemonjelly.ky double LP in 2000. https://i.imgur.com/NjnPzIOl.jpg This was followed by their debut full-length LP, Lost Horizons in 2002. Each album featured striking packaging design named among countless “greatest album art” lists as well as being featured in Grant Scott's book, The Greatest Album Covers of All Time. Both of these releases showcased the duo's spirited, whimsical, and ultra-chilled downtempo style. https://i.imgur.com/9GxoRNPl.jpg In 2005 a box set of four 10" LPs was issued titled '64-'95, with each track prefixed with the year of the sample incorporated into the single. The album is rather different from their previous two releases in that it has a darker sound and is influenced by more modern sounding music. To avoid confusion over the matter, the band included a sticker on the sleeve stating, "This is our new album, it's not like our old album." The album closer, "Go" featured vocals by William Shatner. https://i.imgur.com/yFxUYPWm.png Fred also produced over one hundred mixes and DJ sessions during and after his time with Lemon Jelly, many of which were featured by BBC 6 Music and the Breezeblock. Each set seamlessly wove together deep cuts and musical oddities of Balearica, funk, hip hop, soul, dub, reggae, swing, and an array of leftfield oddities which always kept the listener engaged and guessing as to what was around the next sonic corner. An official release of this nature was eventually issued in 2007 by Impotent Fury - Fred Deakin Presents: The Triptych, a three-CD set of everything from folk rock to break/broken beat, jazzdance, country, deep and Euro house, neo-soul, gospel, and more. https://i.imgur.com/fsxL1Y3l.jpg [to be continued in a moment due to forum's 10-image-per-post limit] |
Christmas in February – Loads of New Content from Fred Deakin! (pt 2 of 2)
[continued from above due to 10-image-per-post forum limit]
And the following year, a two-CD set premiered titled Nu Balearica packed with Balearic Beat and Nu-Disco choons. https://i.imgur.com/mCEdeZSl.jpg I spent the early 2000s compiling about one hundred and ten of the various mixes and sessions Fred had touched, right down to the demo cassette he'd recorded in the late nineties when running the club Impotent Fury. And in 2011 and 12 Fred resurfaced under the pseudonym Frank Eddie (once again due to uncleared samples) and issued five limited 7" singles in geometrically designed screenprinted sleeves. https://i.imgur.com/s8oWaXql.png The complete set was issued as a CD album called, Let's Be Frank in 2012. https://i.imgur.com/dkrTX5al.jpg Fred also applied the Frank Eddie moniker to a special remix of English boy band, East 17's "Stay Another Day" for a heartwarming farewell music video to mark the retirement of their Airside design company. A gorgeous 296pp coffee table book, Airside by Airside was published by Gestalten telling the story of their evolution and is certainly on my wish list for this year. https://i.imgur.com/A3FznJml.jpg This project tapered off after the Jellyhead forum went dormant and things quieted down for a few years, until a few days ago when, on a whim, I revisited Fred's page on Rateyourmusic.com. There I noticed a curious title I'd not previously encountered - Come Dance With Me Sweetheart dated 2016. I did a little searching around and by the day’s end, (thanks to a fellow Jellyhead who has been archiving all Lemon Jelly material from the source tapes for nearly two decades), had 19 additional DJ sessions which had surfaced since I'd last stopped collecting. It was like Christmas! I quickly assembled a 25-hour playlist of all the new-to-me Jelly content and am having a blast exploring it all! And revisiting The Triptych, I began to research the deeper cuts from the mix and found one funky track, Billy Hawk's “O’ Baby (I Believe I'm Losing You)” appears on a sublabel comp of BGP (Beat Goes Public) Records. The label has issued three series that look worth a listen. https://i.imgur.com/4NtsanJm.jpg Super Breaks is a set of six double LPs and albums showcasing essential funk, soul, jazz samples, and breakbeats. There is also the SuperFunk series of twelve releases and a third set of four albums branded as Funk Soul Sisters. These might be just what I'm after for more deep cuts. https://i.imgur.com/OzDvnQVl.jpg Another of my favorite classic Jelly mixes, Breezeblock - 20th September 1999, includes the Public Enemy / Herb Alpert mashup, “Rebel Without A Pause (Whipped Cream Mix)” which a quick search revealed was by The Evolution Control Committee, Mark Gunderson's plunderphonics project. Mark collaborated with The Bran Flakes on the Raymond Scott Rewired project issued by Basta Records which I absolutely must check out, along with a deeper exploration of other related artists like Emergency Broadcast Network, Escape Mechanism, The Tape-beatles, as well as my complete archives of the works of Negativland, John Oswald, and selected works from People Like Us (who collaborated with Matmos and Wobbly). https://i.imgur.com/SsuoahLl.jpg It's truly remarkable to live in a time when a few simple Google searches yield days of rewarding listening. Here's my Lemon Jelly and related album collection to date, in addition to the 129 digital albums and DJ sessions I've collected that are so generously shared among fellow Jellyheads. https://i.imgur.com/aWOgkb1l.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rt0Cw4vl.jpg |
The Ultimate Index: The Innerspace Labs Media Exploration Master Workbook
February has been a whirlwind of productivity and I'm excited to share the results of my efforts. Thus far I've introduced five projects. First I discovered that the disk snapshot solution I'd been employing for my server would no longer work at its current scale, so I had to research and implement a new solution. Once that was a success, I set myself to the task of merging and updating two music database systems I'd created years apart on two different operating systems. That was an incredible challenge.
The next three projects were featured here at Innerspace Labs - first the Nipper RCA “His Master's Voice” project, then the six-hour drone high-fidelity ambient experiment with Eno's Music For Airports, followed by the Fred Deakin archive update. But it was the sixth subsequent undertaking which would consume countless late night hours as the latest project continuously exploded in scope and scale, each time introducing new challenges to test my problem-solving skills. For as long as I've been breathing, I've been compiling and organizing lists of all manners of subjects. I thrive creating order from chaos - chronicling and curating media of the 20th-century. As a young man, I penned lists in leather pocket journals but was frustrated by the fixed and static state of the data one committed to the page. I quickly graduated to Microsoft Office and then to LibreOffice, and by 2013 began self-publishing books of collected lists and spreadsheets to document the progress of my archive. https://i.imgur.com/y4myoCtl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/YJPlfSXl.jpg But the true game-changer came when I adopted the Google suite of apps, most notably Google Docs, Sheets, and the Google Keep task manager. These applications introduced undo history, increased accessibility, and most importantly, shareability to my list-making efforts. Still, the seamless convenience of Google Drive came with a caveat - scores of lists once generated were quickly forgotten, and the sheer number of them made Google Keep and Google Calendar reminders cumbersome and an ineffective method of managing them at this scale. What I came to realize was that dozens of quality sets of information were disappearing into the digital black void of a Google Drive overrun with lists. That's what inspired this latest project. I decided to survey my entire history of list-making, compiling databases created in a wide array of formats and constructed on multiple platforms over the years, and to merge them all into a single workbook on Google Sheets. It was an incredible challenge, as the formatting of the data varied tremendously from .M3U to .PUB to raw .TXT to .XLS to proprietary database systems built for Windows XP (OrangeCD), to web-based database systems like Discogs and Goodreads which each offered .CSV exports. To depict folder-structure-based organizational systems, (commonly employed for artists and label discographies), I utilized tree -d > list.txt for large libraries. To extract %artist% and %title% metadata from RYM toplist playlists I'd constructed, I developed a spreadsheet combining four formulas to pull nth row values and to truncate “#EXTINF:###,” expressions and file paths from .M3U lists outputting a clean list of tracks. In October of 2017 I'd authored The Innerspace Labs Journal: A Listener's Guide to Exploration in Google Docs as a contextual survey of my larger collections. It spans eighty-four pages and includes an active hyperlinked TOC with an X.XX indexing structure and served my needs well for the past two years, but for simple down-and-dirty lists a spreadsheet seemed like a more accessible format. https://i.imgur.com/I4uCBegl.png And so I constructed this latest effort - The Innerspace Labs Media Exploration Master Workbook - a cloud-based 150-tab set of spreadsheets combining all of my list data into a single, searchable, sharable index with a hyperlinked Table of Contents for easy navigation. The interface is intuitive, it loads lightning fast on even the most modest of systems and across all browsers and platforms, is mobile-friendly, and it will continue to grow as new content is introduced to my library. The TOC is segmented into four primary themes:
While a few of the tabs contain hyperlinks to lists from multi-page sites which do not send themselves well to text extraction, I've done my best to embed as much of the information as possible locally in the workbook, itself and to keep the layout consistently uniform to facilitate navigation and clarity. https://i.imgur.com/n0U8OBPl.png Unlike the self-published books or the somewhat daunting length of the Journal, this workbook is simple and localizes the data a viewer is most interested in exploring to a single, plaintext sheet for quick and easy reference. The shareability is key to aiding curious listeners/viewers in finding quality content relevant to their interests, and it is simultaneously a tool to empower me to delve into the many areas of my own library which I've yet to explore. This is a milestone for Innerspace Labs, and I will continue to refine and expand the project into the future. |
So, basically, what you've done is create a master list of your lists.
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Justified & Ancient 2019
Just a quick post in celebration of the 28th anniversary of The White Room released this day in 1991.
Decided it was as good a time as any to reshoot an updated pic of my complete KLF collection to date. Unfortunately, this required precariously balancing upon a chair, moving furniture, relocating several framed pieces, and a lot of image post-processing for lens distortion correction and glare reduction. This was further complicated when, 1 hour after I took the shot and put everything away, I realized I'd omitted two items so I reassembled, reshot, and reprocessed the whole thing. But here it is, along with 162 digital albums/releases and 92 films/interview footage/etc. "This is what the KLF is about. Over and out." https://i.imgur.com/dhTU96vh.jpg |
This afternoon, I packed up over 150 Stockhausen CDs in a box.
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Quote:
I picked up the Complete Works of Debussy last night, after reading an exhaustive comparative analysis of the Warner version vs the DG, (but of course, I went with DG regardless because f*ck Warner Records). Planning on picking up one of a few complete works for piano and orchestra for both Debussy and Satie on vinyl. I've been compiling review data from SteveHoffman and other reliable classical sources to determine the best edition in which to invest. But seriously, I have a framed portrait of Stockhausen on my wall and adore the early Berlin radio LPs. Please share more! |
It’s not really as exciting as it may seem. When I began studying with him and
subsequently becoming good friends, I decided that I should begin moving from the LPs I had of his work to the CDs on his own personally supervised label. So, I have all of his compositions and spoken word discs - many of which he would give or send to me with greetings and signatures - along with DVDs, scores, books, music boxes and other sundries. Keeping discs together of a similar nature is not natural for me, but it helped to have them together for studying purposes. Anyway, since Jan. 19, I’ve been boxing things up - especially books and audio - because we’re having some major work done here on the house soon after getting back from Knoxville. I’d just literally finished boxing up those discs last night. It’ll be kind of bare-looking around here. The sitter will probably be shocked. As for Satie, I would highly recommend the Aldo Ciccolini set. If you’re able to spring for the 56-disc set of Ciccolini’s complete EMI recordings, I’d say go for that too. |
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