The new release pile on Bandcamp is more work than it looks.
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An ’80s Australian indie rock band you should have heard of: the Arctic Circles.
Australian ‘80s indie rock band the Arctic Circles never made a huge impact and remain mired in obscurity, but their two records (the single “Angel” in 1985, the mini-LP Time in 1987 featuring “Wasp”) were well-received, did okay on an indie level and you couldn’t get away from them on public radio. The style is the ‘60s garage punk stuff popular in Australia at the time. Still sounds pretty fresh in 2016.
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“They’re explaining how a record sounds better when Tiesto plays it.”
Beware the dangers of trance and the cult of the DJ. Don’t fall for … the trance cracker. An informative tract that you can give your friends copies of!
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Alixandrea Corvyn makes her deserved bid for fame.
This is Alixandrea Corvyn, of Last July and Rhombus and various previous bands. It’s a cover of “White Rabbit”, but with this grasp of imagery she’s on the right track. This video is just made to be cut up into stills and GIFs and reassembled into viral Tumblr posts.
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Synth Britannia: the synthpop surge in ’70s Britain.
A wonderful 2010 documentary from BBC Four, covering the late ’70s synthesizer bands. Interviews with the (original) Human League, Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres, Vince Clarke, Gary Numan, New Order and the Pet Shop Boys.
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A random riff generator, on the Web.
Quite a lot of music software comes with a random riff generator. This stuff isn’t hard. But now it’s convenient as well.
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Links: Nirvana, fanzines, music as violence.
Apropos to sociological conditions in the early 1990s, here’s Nirvana just after Nevermind hit big.
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Bandcamp synthpop: Tentacles, Mimus, Bestman (2016).
Severed Heads, Boxcar, Single Gun Theory and the Volition Records package tour.
I’ve seen Severed Heads three times. First time was Perth in late ‘91 on the Volition Records “An Intro To Techno” package tour. At this point “techno” still specifically referred to original Detroit techno; the pounding four-on-the-floor stuff the KLF were topping the charts with was various hyphenations of “-house”. Volition almost certainly meant something a bit more like “industrial”, but for some reason people then seemed reluctant to say that word with a straight face.
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Scattered Order are alive and well.
Scattered Order are an Australian noise band who are probably “industrial”, but you never see them in any lists of industrial bands, and that’s just wrong. They have never been popular in any sense. They remain good and important, however, and have persisted. Modulo a decade’s break here and there.
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The Laughing Clowns “Holy Joe” (1980).
An old favourite, the first track from the Laughing Clowns’ first album, just after Ed Kuepper split the original Saints.
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Whatever happened to all the sociologists, anyway? Not like the ones we had in the ’90s.
Back in the ‘90s, sociologists and students seemed desperate to find anything resembling a subculture to write about. I ran a fanzine, remember, and was fending off calls regularly. They were a plague. This was just before Nirvana hit big. It was blindingly obvious to everyone in indie rock that someone was going to hit super-big at some point.
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Where little synths come from.
No time for a proper post today, so have a silly meme image.
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Print your own violin!
Kaitlyn and Matt Hova have put up the files to 3D-print your own violin. Or you can buy parts or a fully-printed example from them. It’s still at the stage of doing it because you can, but it’s actually not terrible.
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Don’t forget the existence of My Dad Is Dead.
Back in The Day™ (1989), everyone compared My Dad Is Dead to Joy Division. Really, every review. Like they couldn’t think of anything else to say.
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J. G. Eccarius: The Last Days of Christ the Vampire (1988).
If you’re going to suffer unresolved literary trauma, you should get it from a title like that, which you will be unsurprised to hear is far and away the best thing about the book.
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Electric Dreams: The Giorgio Moroder Story on BBC Radio 2, 2013.
A marvellous BBC radio documentary in two one-hour parts on disco king Giorgio Moroder, focusing on his work in the late ’70s and early to mid-’80s.
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Reviews: Amy’s Arms, Foster Body, Uranium Club (2016).
Today we hit the Bandcamp for various recommendations of mates’ mates’ bands. Send yours in! At worst it’ll be ignored.
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New Order: Music Complete (2016).
At almost sixty-five minutes, New Order’s tenth studio album Music Complete. On vinyl it is provided as an impressive heavy-grade double album with an abstract cover design by Peter Saville, which reminds one of True Colours by Split Enz or a 1980s L’Oreal advertisement. With no sense of embarrassment, the album also includes a twelve page booklet of blank pages and uncoloured designs. This ill-considered use of the planet’s declining arboreal biomass can possibly amuse children for a couple of hours as they provide a more interesting expression of colours. As is the fashion with albums these days a digital download code is also provided.
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The enduring popularity of bishonen: the Wraeththu Trilogies by Storm Constantine.
I have unresolved literary trauma, so you can have some too. These books are “sexy gender-ambiguous goth boys ahoy” porn from Storm Constantine as early ‘80s goth girl. (Note the cover star’s hand stapled to his forehead.) Apparently originating in a short story she wrote in 1973 at age 17, so David Bowie’s in there too.
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Links.
“If you think it’s about the music, you’ve already failed.” The pop culture legacy business, and why Kurt Cobain is still a huge star.
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The vintage synthesizer petting zoo.
North Melbourne now has an interactive vintage synthesizer museum where you are actively encouraged to play with the exhibits.
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“Jolene” by Dolly Parton at 33rpm works transcendentally well.
Click the little “play” button at the top of this. That’s “Jolene” by Dolly Parton, slowed down to what the 45rpm single would have sounded like being played at 33rpm. That’s it. That’s all.
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What you need to know about Yasutaka Nakata and Capsule.
Yasutaka Nakata, of the band Capsule, is a Japanese pop producer. Connoiseurs of producer disco need to hit the Nakata. He’s all but unknown outside Japan, and that’s just wrong. See also Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Perfume.
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Death to the traitors, death to the traitors, death to the tra-ai-tors.
Canadian Cultural Worker’s Committee: “Death to the Traitors” from The Party is the Most Precious Thing, 1979.
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Mos Generator: Abyssinia (2016).
“doom heavy stoner metal band”, the press release bluntly announces.
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New Order and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Opera House, June 4, 2016
The concert hall of the Sydney Opera House is, of course, one of the world’s great venues. Filled to capacity of over two-and-half thousand the audience were displaying an enthusiasm that would continue throughout the night. Although older on average, there was a fair sprinkling of younger faces indicating that the reputation of one of the world’s great electronic and synth-pop bands was still continuing.
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Scott Walker and the freedom to go seriously weird.
Listened to Scott Walker’s 1984 comeback Climate of Hunter again recently. It’s a strange record, but Scott went strange pretty much as soon as he could. After his early pop hits with the Walker Brothers, he took the chance to make his individual vision obvious by the time of Scott 3 and Scott 4 in the late 1960s. He tried consciously mainstream records in the early ’70s that nobody bought, followed by an abortive Walker Brothers reunion, so Climate of Hunter has that “fuck it” that so often signals something good.
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Links.
Music industry prays for rain, one of Mute’s sound engineers, NEVER run iTunes on your music production computer.
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Polyphonic overtone singing explained and demonstrated.
I am frankly boggling that you can do this with a human voice. YOU MUST WATCH THIS.
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