wire magazine top 50

King Midas Sound - Waiting For You

hell yes

just got done reading the top 50 in the mag, kind of dissapointed they rated Hecker's release so highly. it is by far the most pisstakish buchla synthesizer music I've ever heard, maybe they chose it for it's irony?

the broadcast album was pretty good, it's hardly dissonant noise. weird to hear that coming from a boc fan

  On 12/21/2009 at 4:46 AM, Ascdi said:

Man I can't stand the Leyland Kirby album. It sounds like General MIDI wind chimes. I know all you guys like it, I just had to get that off my chest.

yeah, I kind of agree.

i have to check out the onamatrix point never album

glad to see the jim o'rourke album up there, i like it a lot,

is it just me who thinks Shackleton is way overrated. too repetitive for me.

hauntology bros

i cant believe the broadcast and focus group album is getting so much praise. it sounds pretty meh to me, and i usually love love love broadcast

yeah .. it's more of the same but less individual in the track styling, but you know people do all sorts of strange things.

  On 12/25/2009 at 8:29 AM, Awepittance said:

hauntology bros

is hauntology the fad of the moment or something bigger? i think people just feel cool saying the word and thinking of themselves as dark and wise. Is it a style? or is it a larger point of view that reflects the apocolypse pre-game show of which we are probably in?

its important, it means something

hauntology is like loose sampling and reminiscing childhood as far as i can tell

hauntology is the sense of cold war dread that suffuses ghostbox and geogaddi

hauntology is what people in the 1970s thought the future would be like (blakes 7, dr who)

hauntology is creepy public information films from the early 80s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LENDl5pHcIw

hauntology is an open university transmission from 1978 shown unchanged in 1988 at 4am because no-one discovered anything new in the field

hauntology is listening to a warped library music record from 1979 you bought for .25 in a charity shop

hauntology is housewives on mogadon oblivious to the eldritch gods leaking into their households through the television

actually hauntology is just the orientation of society toward the "ghost of the past", although i think in purely philosophical terms it refers to europe's being haunted by communism. everything you listed is just nostalgia, fetishism for old media or, i suppose, things commonly found within the hauntology genre of music, which doesn't seem to have much to do with the philosophical concept other than using films from the cold war as a basis for sampling.

  On 12/26/2009 at 4:56 AM, zaphod said:

actually hauntology is just the orientation of society toward the "ghost of the past", although i think in purely philosophical terms it refers to europe's being haunted by communism. everything you listed is just nostalgia, fetishism for old media or, i suppose, things commonly found within the hauntology genre of music, which doesn't seem to have much to do with the philosophical concept other than using films from the cold war as a basis for sampling.

100% correct, the musical definition of hauntology doesn't have a lot to do with derrida's definition

okay bradford cox of stealing awepittance's artist name is a bit of a douche but i like this quote regardless:

  Quote

5. Broadcast and the Focus Group: Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age

 

I honestly did not get this at first. It seemed tossed off. Then I toured with them. I still didn’t get it. It seemed like chaos had taken over and killed a pop band. Then halfway through the tour, it suddenly and without explanation made total sense to me. They are doing something new and fucked up. It’s not always easy to digest. It has nothing to do with now. It is ritual music. They made something that genuinely challenged me as a listener, and it’s been a long time since that’s happened. I love them for it.

( http://nuravebrainwave.com/?cat=1035 )

regarding the term 'hauntology', really recommended reading is the 'haunted audio' article in the november 06 issue of the wire, which covered trunk records, ghost box records, and some library music. well worth a read if you can find a copy - the entire set of ghost box articles on wikipedia basically have it as their foundation.

lol at thinking bradford cox stole an artist name from a watmmer

lol i know he didn't but google is where it counts innit

julian house has a very unique way of looping; everything sounds skipping and broken, but in a 'dusty, scratched library music record purchased from a charity shop' manner, not like oval or funkstorung or something. it really actually took me until we are all pan's people to really be comfortable with it, but once it clicked, everything before that became a lot more listenable and less just merely interesting.

before it clicked my favourite GB was belbury poly. it is now, without a shadow of doubt, FG.

the broadcast focus group album is really good though. maybe not best of the year but really good. there's plenty of great melodies in there, buried in the samples. i'm kind of surprised people are coming down on it in here, i'd think with so many boc fans this would be like a logical extension of that sort of mindset. guess not.

  On 12/28/2009 at 3:39 AM, zaphod said:

the broadcast focus group album is really good though. maybe not best of the year but really good. there's plenty of great melodies in there, buried in the samples. i'm kind of surprised people are coming down on it in here, i'd think with so many boc fans this would be like a logical extension of that sort of mindset. guess not.

I completely agree with this.

I did not get the album at first but on my second or third listen, it started to sink in. I think it works better if you listen to it in its entirety. This was my first introduction to The Focus Group . I need to check their stuff out.

  On 12/28/2009 at 3:39 AM, zaphod said:

i'd think with so many boc fans this would be like a logical extension of that sort of mindset. guess not.

that is, to a degree, how i see it too. if you were coming at it from a purely bocfan angle, you could see everything on gbx branching out on various vectors from geogaddi (and then, of course, boc sorta changed course). that is a way too reductive view of it, but yeah.

  On 12/28/2009 at 3:48 AM, beatfanatic said:

I completely agree with this.

I did not get the album at first but on my second or third listen, it started to sink in. I think it works better if you listen to it in its entirety. This was my first introduction to The Focus Group . I need to check their stuff out.

if you want creepy spaced out lovecraftian radiophonic (extended) jams (my favourite creepy geogaddi stuff really) check out the eric zann album : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroborindra . if you want distorted public information films, check out the advisory circle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Advisory_Circle

meh, just look at this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Ghost_Box_Music

and watch this...

i was so sure broadcast were involved in this track btw... but i was told that every instrument on it was played by mr. jupp, straight from the proverbial horse's.

also the album really isn't that out of character for broadcast. their music has always been like this, in a way, weird and sort of whimsical and inspired by sixties library music and stuff like that. this is just more like a field recording than an album of proper songs. maybe i like it because it reminds me of the wicker man, and has that summer solstice pagan feel to it which is something a lot of people forget about when paying homage to music from that era.

actually, automatically dismissing it because it's difficult and noisy is down right closed minded coming from anyone who claims to listen to idm or electronic music, since our whole scene is so wrapped up in experimenting for the sake of it.

  On 12/28/2009 at 4:08 AM, zaphod said:

reminds me of the wicker man, and has that summer solstice pagan feel to it which is something a lot of people forget about when paying homage to music from that era.

i love it so very much for that, i think i love wickerman soundtrack much more than the movie even thought there's only about six actual songs on it... about the same percentage as on yer typical ghost box release. maybe i have a vignette fetish.

LOL i just realised jim jupp directly sampled the jewsharp on bp stuff

i was gonna say, if you don't hear belbury in this...

I really love that track called "The Be Colony" on that Broadcast and Focus Group. Its sounds like a beautiful twisted lullaby. Trish Keenan has a voice of an angel.

also I dont know if this is cool or not but if you want the latest issue of The Wire as a pdf, PM me.