“I’m not an idiot,” the artist confided in an interview. “I know that people are mostly interested in it because it’s David Bowie. But I think it’s still a valid artwork.”
In addition to positioning such influences as collaborator John Lennon, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, and former roommate Iggy Pop as atomic numbers, Robertson’s table allows for artists who came after.
“Fly My Pretties Fly (Thank You. We’ll Take It From Here)” includes Lady Gaga, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, and fellow dandy, Morrissey, while Bowie’s 90s-era costumer, designer Alexander McQueen and artist Jeff Koons hold down “History Is a Choice the Future Decides Upon.”
Fittingly, author Oscar Wilde appears in the Hydrogen slot.
Part of what makes electronic music so wide-reaching and sonically far-seeing, so to speak, is its diversity of influences—classical composition, avant-garde theory, punk and funk energy, the sounds of factories and city streets worldwide—and its range of innovative instrumentation. But foremost among those instruments, many classic analogue synthesizers of old are now found in virtual environments, where their pots, keys, patch bays, and pitch wheels get simulated on laptops and MIDI controllers. Something is lost—a certain “aura,” as Walter Benjamin might say. A certain tremulous imprecision that hovers around the edges of synthesizers like those designed by Robert Moog.
Moog’s creations, writes David McNamee “ooze character” and are “the most iconic synthesizers of all time. FACT.” For this reason, Moog’s analog creations still hold market share as modern instruments while remaining legacy items for their transformation of entire genres of popular music since the 1960s, even though the engineer-inventor had no musical training himself and no real interest at first in making particularly usable instruments.
“Massive, fragile and impossible to tune,” a function Moog initially dismissed, once the Moog was made portable and liberated from specialized, wonky domains, it became a primary compositional tool and both a lead and rhythm instrument.
The Moog’s fuzzy, wobbly, warm sounds are unmistakable; they can purr and thunder, and the breadth of their capabilities is surprising given their relative simplicity. We’ve told their story here before and followed it up with a ten-hour playlist of Moog and Moog-inspired classics. Today, we bring you the playlist above, “Moog This!” which takes a leftfield approach to the theme, and will catch even serious electronic music fans off guard with its selections of not only obscure new sounds inspired by legends like Giorgio Moroder and Vangelis—the music of Firechild, for example—but also tracks from these legends that sit just to the left of their most famous compositions.
Rather than the usual, brilliantly futuristic Donna Summer dance track “I Feel Love”—the Spotify curator here goes for the similar-sounding, but much more elaborate instrumental “Chase” (top), the only track here from Moroder. Rather than the era-defining “West End Girls”—the Pet Shop Boys’ perfect downtempo 1984 pop song—we get “Men and Maggots,” from their moody 2005 score for Sergei Eisenstein’s perfect silent film, Battleship Potemkin. That’s not to say there aren’t any vocal tracks here, but they are mostly of the abstract, highly effected variety, like those from Boards of Canada and Air.
All in all, “Moog This!” the playlist shows what the synthesizer is capable of outside the context of mainstream pop, while still capturing the qualities that make it an ideal vehicle for accessible, emotional music, a pleasing tension so well harnessed by the analog synth-obsessed Stranger Things soundtrack, which, like most of the tracks here, manages to sound both like the soundtrack of a much cooler past and of very cool future.
History has remembered John Cage as a composer, but to do justice to his legacy one has to allow that title the widest possible interpretation. He did, of course, compose music: music that strikes the ears of many listeners as quite unconventional even today, more than a quarter-century after his death, but recognizable as music nonetheless. He also composedwith silence, an artistic choice that still intrigues people enough to get them taking the plunge into his wider body of work, which also includes compositions of words, many thousands of them written and many hours of them recorded.
Ubuweb offers an impressive audio archive of Cage’s spoken word, beginning with material from the 1960s and ending with a talk (embedded at the top of the post) he gave at the San Francisco Art Institute in the penultimate year of his life. There he read a 30-minute piece called “One 7” consisting of “brief vocalizations interspersed with long periods of silence” before taking audience questions which “range from inquiries about the process by which Cage composes, his lack of interest in pleasing an audience, his love of mushrooms, Buddhism, chance operations, and whether Cage can stand on his head.”
Turn the Cage clock back 28 years from there and we can hear a spirited 1963 conversation between him and Jonathan Cott, the young music journalist later known for conducting John Lennon’s last interview. “At every turn Cott antagonizes Cage with challenging questions,” says Ubuweb, adding that he marshals “quotes from numerous sources (including Norman Mailer, Michael Steinberg, Igor Stravinsky and others) criticizing Cage and his music.”
Cage, in characteristic response, “parries Cott’s thrusts with a veritable tai chi practice of music theory.” This contrasts with the mood of Cage’s 1972 interview alongside pianist David Tudor embedded just above, presented in both English and French and featuring references to the work of Henry David Thoreau and Marcel Duchamp.
Cage has more to say about Duchamp, and other artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, in the undated lecture clip from the archives of Pacifica Radio just above. Have a listen through the rest of Ubuweb’s collection and you’ll hear the master of silence speak voluminously, if sometimes cryptically, on such subjects as Zen Buddhism, anarchism, utopia, the work of Buckminster Fuller, and “the role of art and technology in modern society.” The contexts vary, both in the sense of time and place as well as in the sense of the performative expectations placed on Cage himself. But even a sampling of the recordings here suggests that being John Cage, in whatever setting, constituted a productive artistic project all its own.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Claudio aka Doctor Mix runs a YouTube channel where he uploads tutorials on mixing and producing music, reviews of audio gear and instruments, and hawks his online mixing and mastering service. But the above video caught our attention. Using just one synthesizer, the brand new *analog* Arturia MatrixBrute (what a name!), Doctor Mix recreates the Kraftwerk hit “The Robots.” (Which, if you are a longtime reader of this site, you know we love.)
Doctor Mix builds up the song piece by piece, and while the original band used several different synths to create the track, the MatrixBrute is able to handle everything, as it has a sequencer/drum pads built in, and programmable sounds that in this supplemental video, Doctor Mix will sell to you. (He even is able to use a vocoder with the machine to intonate its Russian lyrics: “Ja tvoi sluga / Ja tvoi rabotnik”)
Along with that and electronic-drum pads (first seen on TV in 1975), the band also used the Moog Mini-Moog, the ARP Odyssey, and a Roland Space-Echo, which provided the vocoder sounds.
At the time, band member Ralf Hütter said of the making of the album: “We are playing the machines, the machines play us, it is really the exchange and the friendship we have with the musical machines which make us build a new music.”
But we’ll hand it to Doctor Mix: the Arturia MatrixBrute is a good ol’ fashioned analog machine, and a lot of the new gear reviewed on his site shows that the warm tones of analog equipment is having a renaissance. Warm up those vaccuum tubes, kids, the other sound of the ‘70s is back!
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
When you hear the phrase Art of Noise, surely you think of the sample-based avant-garde synth outfit whose instrumental hit “Moments in Love” turned the sound of quiet storm adult contemporary into a hypnagogic chill-out anthem? And when you hear about “noise music,” surely you think of the dramatic post-industrial cacophony of Einstürzende Neubauten or the deconstructed guitar rock of Lightning Bolt?
But long before “noise” became a term of art for rock critics, before the recording industry existed in any recognizably modern form, an Italian futurist painter and composer, Luigi Russolo, invented noise music, launching his creation in 1913 with a manifesto called The Art of Noises.
“In antiquity,” he writes (in Robert Filliou’s translation), “life was nothing but silence.” After presenting an almost comically brief history of sound and music coming into the world, Russolo then declares his thesis, in bold:
Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility…. Nowadays musical art aims at the shrillest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound. Thus we are approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor.
Not quite so radical as one might think, but bear in mind, this is 1913, the year Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” provoked a riot in Paris upon its debut. Russolo took an even more shocking swerve away from tradition. Pythagorean theory had stifled creativity, he alleged, “the Greeks… have limited the domain of music until now…. We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”
To accomplish his grand objective, the experimental artist created his own series of instruments, the Intonarumori, “acoustic noise generators,” writes Thereminvox, that could “create and control in dynamic and pitch several different types of noises.” Working long before digital samplers and the electronic gadgetry used by industrial and musique concrete composers, Russolo relied on purely mechanical devices, though he did make several recordings as well from 1913 to 1921. (Hear “Risveglio Di Una Città” from 1913 above, and many more original recordings as well as new Intonarumori compositions, at Ubuweb.)
Russolo’s musical contraptions, 27 different varieties, were each named “according to the sound produced: howling, thunder, crackling, crumpling, exploding, gurgling, buzzing, hissing, and so on.” (Stravinsky was apparently an admirer.) You can see reconstructions at the top of the post in a 2012 exhibition at Lisbon’s Museu Coleção Berardo. Many of his own compositions feature string orchestras as well. Russolo introduced his new instrumental music over the course of a few years, debuting an “exploder” in Modena in 1913, staging concerts in Milan, Genoa, and London the following year, and in Paris in 1921.
One 1917 concert apparently provoked explosive violence, an effect Russolo seemed to anticipate and even welcome. The Art of Noise derived its influence from every sound of the industrial world, “and we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare,” he writes, quoting futurist poet Marinetti’s joyful descriptions of the “violence, ferocity, regularity, pendulum game, fatality” of battle. His noise system, which he enumerates in the treatise, also consists of “human voices: shouts, moans, screams, laughter, rattlings, sobs….” It seems that if he didn’t supply these onstage, he was happy for the audience to do so.
After Russolo’s first Art of Noise concert in 1913, Marinetti violently defended the instruments against assaults from those whom the composer called “passé-ists.” Other receptions of the strange new form were more enthusiastically positive. Nonetheless, notes a 1967 “Great Bear Pamphlet” that reprints The Art of Noises, the effects aren’t exactly what Russolo intended: “Listening to the harmonized combined pitches of the bursters, the whistlers, and the gurglers, no one remembered autos, locomotives or running waters; one rather experienced an intense emotion of futurist art, absolutely unforeseen and like nothing but itself.”
We have a tendency to regard Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music as having emerged fully formed into the world, not least because we hear it performed almost exclusively in a highly polished state of near-perfection. That makes any glimpse into the process of its creation all the more valuable, and the British Library has now provided us with much more than such a glimpse: at its site you can now read Mozart’s own thirty-page musical diary, a record of “his compositions in the last seven years of his life” and thus “a uniquely important document” in the history of classical music.
The British Library notes that, during the period from February 1784 until December 1791 that the diary covers, Mozart “composed many of his best-known works, including his five mature operas, several of his most beautiful piano sonatas, and his last three great symphonies, as well as several famous lesser works.”
The pages you see above and below this paragraph come from his comic opera The Marriage of Figaro. “It was a turbulent time of his life, with financial crises, family tragedy, and his ongoing unsuccessful search for a permanent court position.” Enthusiasts will have taken notice that those years also constituted the last seven of his life, before his early death at age 35.
But the flame that burns twice as bright, to coin a phrase, burns half as long, and we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture some of the formidable musicalaccomplishments Mozart attained before even reaching adolescence. But it somehow feels even more of a wonder to see writings in the actual hand of the mature Mozart, at the height of his compositional powers. You can read the musical diary he wrote in two different formats: as a standard web site with details about the viewed pages and historical context from Mozart’s life provided below each set of pages, and a zoomable, page-flippable browser with optional audio notes. If you’d like a soundtrack to go with the reading experience, a certain 127-hour playlist of Mozart’s music suggests itself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“Is your teen gothic?” Don’t laugh, it’s a serious question. If your teen is a goth, there are a few paths available to you, and not all of them good. Let’s consider some, shall we? You might, in the course of some research, come across a resource called the Parents Universal Resource Experts—or P.U.R.E.—which is not a parody Evangelical band invented by DEVO. You will learn things like “the predominant color of gothic clothing is black” and “the gothic attitude is one of sadness and depression.” So far, so totally unhelpful. This much is obvious, but what should you do?
Surprisingly, P.U.R.E. goes high when others go low, and counsels that parents should accept their teen’s goth lifestyle, “especially if it is not harming them.” Good advice. Even Oprah took the high road, sort of, in 1993, letting goth teen guest Jim calmly “shut down haters” who called him “depressing and weird,” one of the haters in question being his mom. Don’t try to change your goth teen, get to know them by learning about the history of goth yourself. Reach back to the historical and literary origins with this video, dig deep in the crates with this underground playlist…
…or just get a quirky general outline of the basics in the Pitchfork animated video above, which covers the genre from its beginnings before the internet, when it had a very specific set of references unlike such later iterations as “90s Talk Show Goth,” “Mall Goth” and “Cybergoth” (a subset which, on second thought, probably warrants an intervention on the grounds of aesthetic abuse). In the seventies and early eighties, goth meant Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Bauhaus, The Damned, Joy Division—the biggest but by no means only names at the beginning of a disparate movement that arose naturally from punk.
The Pitchfork playlist above offers a thorough musical overview of those origins, reaching back to a true original, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, whose campy horror schtick in “I Put a Spell on You” opened doors for Peter Murphy’s vamping in “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” Lux Interior’s spooky psychobilly delivery, and former gravedigger Dave Vanian’s theatrical persona. (The deadpan teens in the video at the top cite Siouxsie Sioux and her band as the first goths, but many a fan will tell you it was The Damned). Without the next cuts from the Doors and the Velvet Underground, we might not have had the Cure or Joy Division, among a few hundred other goth and goth-like bands.
Then it’s the usual catechism of classic goth rock any educated goth teen can rattle off at a moment’s notice: The Birthday Party, Soft Cell, Swans, Killing Joke, This Mortal Coil, Diamanda Galas, Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, Coil. But perhaps your teen has only picked up the baton where the playlist leaves off, with latecomers (and arguably not-goth-at-all-but-ew-emo band) My Chemical Romance, or with the post-goth (if you will) Karin Driejer’s project Fever Ray? If so, consider immediately sitting your teen down and playing all of these key tracks. They may hate you in the moment, but will surely thank you later. (Missing here is Nico’s Marble Index, an album so bleak, most goths can’t even sit through it).
But perhaps you are yourself an elder (I kid) goth parent of a budding goth teen? If “suddenly”—as Electronic Beats’ Daniel Jones writes in “Finding the Right Albums for Your Goth Teen”—“there’s this horrible, weird version of you who’s slightly taller and displays enough of your own particular quirks that you can never quite tell if you’re being subtly made fun of”? Well, first, let me just say to you, happy 42nd anniversary of goth! You’re welcome. Next, you should follow Jones’ advice. Bypass the 80s and 90s, he says: “Just give that teen some Cocteau Twins and Coil and tell them never to be like Morrissey.” We’ve got it covered above (no Morrissey to be found).
Then you must introduce your teen to contemporary goth art like the sinister dada cabaret work of former 60’s heartthrob Scott Walker, the harrowing noise of Prurient, doomy, sludgy metal of Neurosis or Sunn O))), and the cavernously scary riffage of Ash Borer (“Can you imagine being a teen and hearing the beauty of ‘Rest, You Are the Lightning’ at the exact same time you get your period or first pubic? Probably you’d grow up to be a pro-skater.”) Go on, embrace your goth teen, but probably not with your arms. Do it with Walker’s “The Day the ‘Conducator’ Died (An Xmas Song).” Show your teen you mean business, and, as one YouTube commenter suggests, “put this on next time you have a dinner party and just stare at your guests.”
I’m not a lyric writer. I get all my inspiration from looking at the written page. — Elton John
Inspiration is one thing. Acting on it is another. Sir Elton’s output seems to go beyond his magical combination of talent, work ethic, and training. He claims to have taken all of 30 minutes to complete “Your Song.” In his 2005 appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio, excerpted above, he passed his genius off as something akin to a party trick, calling on the audience to pass up a book—any book—as source material for an insta-song.
Given the number of student actors in the audience, it’s really not so surprising that the first volume to hit the stage was Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 verse play Peer Gynt.
Magicians heighten the drama by demanding absolute silence prior to a difficult trick.
John swings the other way. The resulting improvised tune is all the more impressive for his off the cuff, raunchy text-based patter. It’s hard to imagine Ibsen playing so fast and loose with lines like:
Everything spites me with a vengeance
Sky and water and those wicked mountains
Fog pouring out of the sky to confound him
The water hurling in to drown him
The mountains pointing their rocks to fall-
And those people, all of them out for the kill!
Oh no, not to die!
I mustn’t lose him. The lout!
Why’s the devil have to tease him?
What might Metallica or Iron Maiden have conjured from such material? In John’s hands, it becomes a lush, emotionally charged ballad, the mountains and fog apt metaphors.
In a 2012 interview with NPR, John went into the nature of his collaboration with his longtime word man, Bernie Taupin. Unlike other lyricists, Taupin does not think in terms of verse and chorus, leaving it to John to free the song from a wall of text:
It’s just a blank—well, not a blank, but it’s a piece of paper. In the old days, it was handwritten. Then it got typed. Then it got faxed. Now it gets emailed. And it’s no suggestions, nothing. And we’ve never written in the same room. I don’t know if people know that. But he gives me the lyric, and I go away and write the song, and then come back and play it to him. And I’ve never lost the enjoyment or the thrill of playing him the song that I’ve just written to his lyric.
If you’d like to finish what John started by further musicalizing Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the complete script can be read here. Or listen to the 1946 radio adaptation starring Ralph Richardson as Peer Gynt and Laurence Olivier as the Troll King and a button-moulder, below. Also above, you can watch John turn instructions for using an oven (yes, that daily appliance) into song.
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