Yes, I am aware how long its been since I put one of these podcasts on the air. But there is so much music to create and splice and dice, mix and remix. You know how it goes. First up on this show is a piece off of John Oswalds 2 Disc 69Plunderphonics96 Box set. "Don't" is the name of the piece and we are treated to a sublime mix of Elvis, copious overdubs and a Spector like wall of sound. Oswald was and is ahead of the curve when it comes to the plundering of sound. The set also comes with a 60 page booklet that describes the elements present and motivations behind each piece. Fascinating stuff.

Following that fun time with sounds we have a character currently in development? Morpho Genex is the name of the Cd and it features the sound of Inkxpotter himself on vocalisation. Or as some may call him "Insane Inkxpotter". Recorded a few years back but recently mixed by Kyron we have the piece "Slalom". I am currently working on pieces for the next Morpho Genex CD which will feature pieces mixed by Kyron and I. Buy this one!

Closing out the set we've got Alan Sondheim and Ritual All 770 off of the debut recording done in 1967. I spied this one at the Amoeba records in San Francisco and decided to give it a shot. It definitely qualifies as strange music and worth a few listens. It was recently considered a rarity until Fire Museum Records  in SF re-released it.

Before there was Inkxpotter. There was Vergot.
Read the history of VERGOT!

Listenability Rating: Moderately advanced - if you can get past the abrasive violins, the random assemblage there awaits a funky orchestra at the end.

In a modern classical mood we have The Kronos Quartet playing the first movement from composer George Crumb's "Black Angels," a vivdly descriptiive work inspired by the Vietnam war. Composed in 1970 it pushes the limits of the staunchy string quartet, and does it with a bit of humor too.  Crumb describes this work as "a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world."

Sometimes the links between these pieces only become apparent to me as I am forced to verbalize a descriptive rational behind my motives. So what I see is this fusing of the old, recognizable sounds of the orchestra and the string quartet and the more extended, modern, electric, out there sounds of the now. Since this filters thru me I find myself, Inkxpotter, mixing together both in my own piece, "Visual Clues." There is the ever present neutral flavors of noise along with the classical guitar, the synth squeeks and blips alongside my own nylon string imaginings.

The sounds of Jimi Tenor bring us the " Night in Loimaa" from his 2000 release "Out of nowhere". For this album he's joins with the Orchestra of the Great Theatre of Lodz in Poland. The result is an orchestra with a distinctive soulful groove. Tenor says his greatest talent is faking, making people believe he has a talent even if he doesn't. Well, whatever he says, he makes great music, cleverly combining elements from jazz, funk, soul and techno into an enjoyable experience.

Listenability Rating:  Intoxicating: One may find that the crackles and pops on this podcast go much farther than Rice Krispies ever intended.

This weeks show starts off with Akinori and his piece, "Red Field." I like the piece but wasn't able to locate a link to the artist. Maybe someone, somewhere can locate a link to Akinori. I found a few things but they didn't seem right.

In the ongoing series of collages I've mixed together with material I've recorded with my Ipod this weeks selection is titled "Somber Slumber.'" The recording quality is sub standard but I like the flexibility I get with the Ipod and the Ilisten attatchment, the two minute intervals when the hard drive starts spinning gets recorded so accurately. Anyway the sounds get sequenced through Sonar and out comes another something or other.

Ryuchi Sakamoto closes out our slightly Japanese foray into the strange. He has experimented with many different musical styles throughout his career and has made a name for himself in popular, classical and, film music. We listened to a few short pieces from his soundtrack to "Love is the Devil."

a spiral light comes forth from the cosmos...

Listenability Rating:  Challenging (this cast contains noise, samples, and other annoying things)

On a bit of a noisy note I figured I would start rating these shows for those who happen to stumble across my site and take a listen to what we do here. For the regular listeners it's not necessary because they have come to know what to expect. Yet it probably means I need to go and add ratings to all past shows, maybe some other time...

The first piece we listened to is by Pita off of the Get Off cd, we heard "Resog 45". "This is his (Peter Rehberg's) fourth solo album, and in addition to solo work he has collaborated with everyone from Fennesz  to choreographers Gisele Vienne and Chris Haring. Compared to his previous efforts, Get Off may very well also be the most varied work to date from Pita. Ranging from minimal and sparse to dense and attacking, the effort is everything from ambient to noise, and sometimes a little bit of both." - almost cool music reviews

For my contribution I recorded six five minute sections on my ipod with one of those plug in mics (yes the sound quality suffers but you know I am not one to care about that.) and then mixed them together into a little collage titled "staring straight."  I think I might do a few more of these and try to keep things more minimal, most times I start out trying to do that but end up falling into the density of overlapping sound sources and succombing to their spells. Maybe next time...?

Christian Marclay closes out the show with his piece Jukebox Capriccio, it's off of my Haunted Weather compilation CD but can probably also be found elsewhere. Performer, sculptor, and sound artist Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records and turntables since 1979. As a musician, he was one of the first to use records and turntables as a medium for performance and improvisation. Mixing a wide variety of LPs on multiple turntables, fragmenting and repeating sounds, altering speeds, playing records backwards, spinning, throwing, scratching, and otherwise manipulating records to create his unique "theater of found sound,"

On an avant jazz theme we begin our show with Isotope 217 from Utonian Automatic we listened to "New Beyond." Isotope 217 on Isotope 217 "It is hard to state exactly what this band is because of the diverse influences of the participants. One might say an eclectic avant funk ensemble dedicated to the Phonometric * system of universal thought. One might also say a freewheeling trans-moleculer unit dedicated to the> betterment of all worlds.*phonometrics are, as described by Satie, the Science of measuring sound.

Inside the space between we find Inkxpotter hastily scrambling to get back on a regular track of sound designing. Hear we have a snippet from Duke Ellingtons "Ko Ko" making an appearance and reappearance amidst a noisy drone and other found sounds. My own little contribution to the avant jazz direction this weeks show has opened up for us.

Following the Inkxpotter mix we have Flanger off of their Cd /Inner Space and the cut "Le Dernier Combat." Atom Heart and Burnt Friedman, two Germans working together under the name Flanger, make a convincing argument for cut-and-paste jazz. The natural sound of musicians playing colliding with the liberal use of electronics makes this a group worth taking the time to get to know.

Inkxpotter is back from his recent bout with Podcast Fade. I was wondering myself why I had not put up a show in such a while, why I felt a bit stuck . Then listener Prent left me a recent comment describing my current malady. Sometimes knowing and naming is enough. My personal contribution this week has been gathering dust for a few weeks and is a bit of a diversion from other sound collages, but every once in a while you just need some rhythm.

The middle part of this trio is "Nice and Simple" from Colleens recent Cd - Everyone Alive Wants Answers. Lots of loops and organic sounds swirl around each other, offering up new perspectives on each listening. She hails from Paris and it is refreshing to hear something distinctively feminine in the often overloaded "male with laptop and two day stuble" genre. .

We finish up the set with The Master Musicians of Bukkake. From their CD  - The Visible Sign of the Invisible Order, we listened to "Hidden from the Hidden ones". It's all very mysterious but it does set quite a mood in place...."Siphoned from flying graveyards and fed through giant funnels of navigatory spirits to the haunted outskirts of behavior and all of its rickety platforms, an intuitive, much weirder America is on the rise."

Tonite we begin our journeys with Par Thorbjornsson off of his Genophonics CD with the piece "Wind Translation." On his site he explains his process in creating this music based on the genetic sequences in our DNA, "During millions of years our DNA has evolved into what we are today. Every little random mutation has gone through the trial of evolution, to be banished or be brought on to the next generation. I've used the information contained in our genes to create music. " Making audible the code behind this reality we see before ourselves runs thru this piece and also the piece we close our show with, in the middle we have Inkxpotter off on a tangent.

Speaking of myself once again in the third person, oh well, multiple personalities are sort of fun, especially when you ask them to make music and they comply. This week we have a mix titled "One way". You may hear the clip "..unfortunately these dreamy psychedlic trips often end up one way..." and ask yourselves which way is that? Which one way are you headed?

Okay, back to more serious and thoughtful ways of constucting music. Piece number 3 is Prospero off of his Fibonacci CD, with the quaintly titled "Track 5", I do wish he would give these pieces names, they deserve it. Maybe Prospero and his other alter egos that reside at Black Note Music are too busy creating compelling music to have the time to give them names, but there are just so many nameless offspring. About the music he writes, " The fibonacci numbers are a self creating recursive pattern. This mysterious sequence of numbers has been connected to many natural phenomena, ancient constructions, and esoteric systems. The music you hear on this CD is based on various translations and isomorphisms of the Fibonacci numbers." Heady stuff but it sounds cool.

On a bit of a hiatus I am now to be considered back. Tonights program rolls on with the sounds of Cul de sac.  "A Boston-based group of critically acclaimed practitioners of unusual instrumental music who draw inspiration from the incantatory rhythms of Indian ragas, the complexities of avant-garde folk finger-picking, the cerebral excesses of '70s prog, the bouncy reverb of surf rock, and the energy of experimental music."- epitonic. Sounds like fun to me! I chose their song Nicos Dream because of those haunting samples of the real Nico inhabiting her dream song.

The self-referential Inkxpotter impulse comes forth once again in the remix "Attack of the podcasters" . For this piece I stumbled onto a local radio program (KPFA Berkeley, CA, USA ) while driving to work and heard a segment on podcasting. Ripe with unusual comments from listeners " I hacked your URL at KPFA and now can download your radio shows to my Ipod!" , to other yammerings about the fact that "podcasting is not bound by frequency" a "worldwide audience awaits our content". This I can attest to with listeners from Scotland, Cape Town, Austin and Brazil, all rolling with the Strange Music in Small Doses. The mix behind these pieces came from an alien soundtrack to the video game Kill all Humans, but the Inkxpotter touched removed most traces but some aliens still remain.

The three cut collapse come to a conclusion with the sounds of Junkboy and his piece Shadow and Act. This is off of the latest Wire tapper collection that comes to subscribers of the Wire magazine. A great resource for strange music.

We get the ball rolling with a cut from Boards of Canada. The sound of "Pete Standing Alone", from Music has the Right to Children. I got a suggestion a few weeks back from listener deGen that Boards of Canada would fit nicely into the Strange Music format and I do agree.

Our next selection is from the ever popular host of these musical forays. This week I diced up a pseudo documentary on how the Zulu warriors destroyed a better equipped British Army (only to be later destroyed by more of this same British army). Though when you hear this mix none of that stuff really comes through. The only interesting voice in the show was an African guy talking about ritual and fusing together as one. Let me know what you think. Oh yeah and thanks to Calexico for adding twangy guitar sounds in the middle of the mix!

Our third selection comes courtesy of Thighpaulsandra. The piece is titled "Heaven lies about us in our infancy" and its from the Brain in the Wire compilation CD that came with one of my issues of The Wire. As you might have guessed I find alot of my music through this wonderful magazine and also from their "free" "Wire Tapper" compilation Cds that showcase new sounds. A mag worth every cent you pay for it.

Tonites triad begins with the sounds of Tortoise off of the 2001 album Standards and the cut "Seneca." The members of Tortoise have roots in Chicago's fertile music scene, playing in various indie rock and punk rock groups. Their music blends many styles and influences into a very unique sound.

The Inkxpotter mix gets it going with an interview featuring Les Paul telling the story of how he unlocked the riddle of the delay. Along with pioneering multi-track recording and inventing the solid body electric guitar he also found time to be one of the most popular guitar players in the world.. Inkkxpotters pays homage to the master by chopping up the interview on the delay invention (with delay, of course), layering some acoustic and electric guitar noises using the multitrack technology and leaving it up to you to interpret as you wish.  All hail to the master.

The final piece comes from San Francisco based group Deerhoof with the title cut off of their latest CD Milk Man. Last week I was fortunate enough to see them play live and they were great. They opened a show for Electrelane and in my humble opinion 'blew them off the stage." Their unique blend of nelody and noise and superb musicianship really came through in the live xhow. Don't miss them if they find their way to your neck of the woods.

Forgetting the obvious we enter the world of Prefuse 73 and his battle with Pedro. This cut, "Gratis", is off of a Cd that gave an overview of the ten day Domino Music Festival in Europe. Prefuse 73's latest album is "Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives" and is out on Warp records. He has his hand in many projects but he claims that the Prefuse 73 work is more a "kick in the head" than the others. I agree.

Bridging the gap between these two cuts is a brief detour into the world of baseball. Taking a few choice sounds from a game Inkxpotter layers and collages these into the excitement of almost being there. The sound of the ball hitting the bat. The crowd cheering. The announcers showing extreme amounts of excitement for small things. Priceless.

Mouse on Mars rounds out the trio with the piece Distroia from Niun Ninggung. Their fourth album shows off their evolution toward Mars and beyond. Percolating beats ascend to the surface only to pop like soap bubbles, while tacked-together melodies are as likely to disintegrate midsong as they are to wobble to the conclusion

Forgetting the obvious we enter the world of Prefuse 73 and his battle with Pedro. This cut, "Gratis", is off of a Cd that gave an overview of the ten day Domino Music Festival in Europe. Prefuse 73's latest album is "Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives" and is out on Warp records. He has his hand in many projects but he claims that the Prefuse 73 work is more a "kick in the head" than the others. I agree.

Bridging the gap between these two cuts is a brief detour into the world of baseball. Taking a few choice sounds from a game Inkxpotter layers and collages these into the excitement of almost being there. The sound of the ball hitting the bat. The crowd cheering. The announcers showing extreme amounts of excitement for small things. Priceless.

Mouse on Mars rounds out the trio with the piece Distroia from Niun Ninggung. Their fourth album shows off their evolution toward Mars and beyond. Percolating beats ascend to the surface only to pop like soap bubbles, while tacked-together melodies are as likely to disintegrate midsong as they are to wobble to the conclusion

Tonights three act episode begins with a cut from Four Tet off of the Pause CD, "No More Mosquitoes". A sentiment I am sure we all can agree on. "Four Tet's combination of acoustic and electronic elements sounds fresh and unique, particularly at a time when so much electronic music is conceived and produced without ever leaving the digital realm. With its extensive use of field recordings and acoustic samples, Four Tet's music sounds truly organic and alive. " (Epitonic)

Act two was cultivated from the seeds of this years national spelling bee (cutting up the voices of the young spellers was more tedious than I had imagined), a cool docu on Patty Hearst (those audio messages sent to her parents and broadcast to the world when she was kidnapped are sure to reappear in future pieces), and a card drawn from the Oblique Strategies deck that read - "Children - speaking - singing". Take a listen and see what Inkxpotter has come up with in the new mix titled "Fustian."

For the final act we meet up with Max Nagl. An Austrian saxophonist whose inspiration for his 2001 cd The Evil Garden was cult American writer and illustrator Edward Gorey who in 2000.  Gorey's delicate and detailed black ink drawings inhabit a sinister world of amoebic monsters, elderly Victorians and deformed babies depicted with razor sharp wit and delicious dark humour. We listened to the piece "The Disrespectful Summons."

 

UBUWEB The extensive Mp3 archive is a mixers paradise. Imagine cutting up the words, phrases and thoughts of former heroes of avant thought! Claiming over a terabyte of Film, sound, and image. You know who will be splicing and dicing away. Trolling through the site I wasn't able to clarify the what of the project but it went on for ten years and created an amazing catalog of clickable gems. Alas a recent check of UBU reveals that they are off the web until fall. But soon will have a permanent home where I can cut up whenever I want to!

This weeks trio of audio artifacts gets a shot in the arm from David Toop via his recent book Haunted Weather - Music, Silence and Memory (and the CD he compiled to supplement the book). His book covers a wide range of current music, but it also delves deeper into the implications of technology on modern music and other more philosophical ideas. Well worth a read, and a listen.

Autechre starts off tonites excursion with Parhelic Triangle from the 2001 album "Confeild". The rhythmic pattern that guides us thru this piece slowly evolves (or devolves) and revolves around itself until it is barely recognizable, until it's memory is all that we have to hold on to. The title may be a pun on "parhelic circle", a luminous circle or halo parallel to the horizon at the altitude of the sun. Who can say for sure.

This weeks Inkxpotter mix reclaims "Language" warping the sounds of James Joyce reading Ulysses (circa 1929), John Cage reading from Finnegans Wake (circa 1960's) and Terence McKenna (circa 1990's) reminding us that the world is made of words. How these disjointed times are unified into a cohesive sound sculpture can only be experienced by listening multiple times with full attention.

Toshiya Tsunoda closes off this weeks installment with Bottle at Park. from the album "The Air Vibration Inside a Hollow". The sound work of Toshiya Tsunoda represents a radical rethinking of the concept of field recordings. As he explains his method: "To render the vibration of objects audible, a piezo-ceramic sensor with a weak current is used to generate pressure. The vibration transmitted inside a solid is then changed into voltage, which can be recorded". The words that stand out to me are "render the vibration of objects audible", keep this fragment in mind as this weeks show flows into your brain.

We begin tonites three cut collision with John Zorn and Naked City playing "Punk China Doll." Zorn explains,  " My musical world is like a little prism. You look through it and it goes off in a million different directions. Since every genre is the same, all musicians should be equally respected. It doesn't matter if it's jazz, blues or classical. They're all the same." Naked City is but one of Zorns numerous musical endevours. The link above is a great resource for entering the world of this musical genius. 

 

In the following piece we are brought thru a piece of recycled history and current quagmire via the Iraq wars (v1 and v2). I've assembled a mass of noise and other musical elements on top of a piece by comedien Bill Hicks on the first Iraq war. Hicks died in 1994 but his commentary rings eerily true today. Did we really do this war once before?

 

Closing out the day on a quiet and rather rhythmic note we have " Organ in the attic sings the blues," by Deadbeat. This glitchy rumbling dub seemed the only way to ease out of this evenings festivities.

"Any barrier between music and noise has seemed artificial to me. Many of my compositions explore the inherent beauty of non musical sounds and are inspired by such diverse sources as machines, destroyed pianos, warped 78 records, and detuned radios." Annie Gosfield

Heres a taste of the sounds.

In the foreground we have a piece by Sigur Ros from their 1999 album Agaetis Byrjun, the cut is called Avalon. I liked the sound of it and thought it fit well with the other pieces. Their website is worth traveling to for the numerous free music downloads. Gives you a sampling of their style and also includes unreleased and live cuts

In the middle ground Inkxpotter is still feeling the pull from the depth of possibilities that sprung to mind from the Salem witch trials and the documentary on the same. He grabbed some snipets and juicy samples and squished a few electric guitars into unrecognizable mush in order to free some lost souls from the endless persecution of backwards people. Or so he tells me. We shall call this remix "Still waiting."

In the background we round out this collection of oddities with the sounds of Aesop Rock and the title cut from his latest work Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives. This Cd also includes  an 88-page book with lyrics from every Aesop Rock song from his first release, Float, to this new EP. So if you missed any of the amazing wordplay that Aesop rock laid down you know where to go.

Tonites program looks at the group mind as reflected in three differrent pieces of audio artifact. The thrilling unity, the hellish hypocrisy, all inside the one mind. Clocking in at under 29 Minutes we begin with RFCL - Radio Free Clear Light and their forays into the Black Valley. A place I have journeyed with them a fortunate few times.

Inkxpotter provides the mix for the second piece with a montage of sound samples from a documentary he saw this week on the Salem Witch trials. The subtext of the documentary is to make a tenuous connection between the bewitchment of the Salem locals and food poisoning.  Not ordinary food poisoning but ergot poisoning , and LSD is a component of ergot. Therefore we make the shaaky conclusion that the locals were having bad acid trips and the local outcasts must be behind it. Off with their heads, burn them at the stake!

The third piece is by Sunburned Hand of the Man - Gyp Hawkin off of Rare Wood. They are an improv collaborative process emerging in strangely unified pieces they create in the moment. The bottomline of Dave Alexander's bass rolls us into a tonal centre where the rest of the group can circle in orbits of whacked out activity. "The music feels like nothing you would feel comfortable trying to nail down in such literal, lunkhead fashion, but still imparts a sense of being simultaneously transcendent and elemental, loose limbed and precision tooled" (Wire 6/2004)

word

With some avant hip hop, some guitar work by yours truly, and a bit of dust sucking we begin and end somewhere in your ears. Take the journey now.

CloudDead -- Son of a Gun from Ten
IRIS -- Islands from Iris
Bark Psychosis -- The Black Meat from Codename: dust sucker

Outer atmospheres expand and a crakling fire implode, let the dictaphone jam begin.

Ascoltare  -- Crucible Process from The Wire Tapper 12
Maja Ratkje -- Dictaphone Jam from Voice
Alvin Lucier -- "Sferics" is the shortened term for "atmospherics," natural radio frequency emissions in the ionosphere, caused by electromagnetic energy radiated from nearby or distant lightning

Clocking in at under 12 minutes we take a trip with a Buffalo Demon shaking a pair of Black Dice in the middle of a Civil War. Take the journey now.

Alog -- Buffalo Demon from Miniatures
Black Dice-- Island from Creature Comforts
Matmos -- Pelt and Holler from The Civil War

Signaling an end to the rain we bring in three Sun songs. Let those guitars ring out, let the sun instument play. >take the journey now

John Fahey - What the Sun Said from The Dance Of Death & Other Plantation Favorites
John Cale - Summer Heat from Sun Blindness Music
Sunn O))) - HELL-O)))-WEEN from White Heat 2

 

From multi-instrumentalist David Coulter thru a maze of Rats and Monkeys we ask ourselves the lingering question- Whaddit I done? Take the journey now.

David Coulter  -- Shinju (Pot etude#3) from Intervention 
The Art Bears -- Rats and Monkeys from Winter Songs
Animal Collective -- Whaddit I Done from Sung Tongs

Merzbow is the starting point...you determine the end point. Maybe you will make the entire flight thru these "bird songs", maybe you won't. Take the journey now.

Merzbow  --Plasma Birds from Hybrid Noisebloom
Diamanda Galas -- Birds of Death (Live) from Defixiones, Will and Testament
COIL -- Stange Birds from Musick to Play in the Dark, Vol 1

From the extended guitar electronica of fennesz, through the dungeon of Wolf Eyes we emerge into a strange sort of Pattern Recognition via Sonic Youth. Take the journey now.

Fennesz
CD - Venice
cuts - onsra and Circassian

Wolf Eyes
CD-Burned Mind
Cut- Reapers Gong

Sonic Youth
CD - Sonic Nurse
cut- Pattern Recognition