Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zimmer Soundtracks: Dunkirk, Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight & Much More

in Film, Music | August 16th, 2017

No name has become more syn­ony­mous with the very con­cept of “movie music” than that of Hans Zim­mer. Begin­ning in the 1980s by com­pos­ing for such cult film­mak­ers of dis­tinc­tive vision as Jerzy Skolimows­ki, Nico Mas­torakis, and Nico­las Roeg, Zim­mer soon rose to Hol­ly­wood heights, cre­at­ing the scores for big hits like Rain Man, The Lion King, As Good as It Gets, Glad­i­a­tor, and the Pirates of the Caribbean series. In recent years, he has entered into an ongo­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion with the direc­tor Christo­pher Nolan, him­self an indie favorite turned block­buster king, scor­ing his Bat­man movies as well as Incep­tion, Inter­stel­lar, and Nolan’s new World War II pic­ture Dunkirk, whose unusu­al son­ic inten­si­ty the Vox video above explains.

“My weak­ness is that I didn’t go to music school, and that my for­mal edu­ca­tion is two weeks of piano lessons,” Zim­mer told Indiewire a cou­ple years ago, after the release of Inter­stel­lar. “My strength is that I know how to lis­ten,” and “the way Chris Nolan and I work is we lis­ten to each oth­er.”

Unlike many pro­duc­tions where “the com­pos­er is this near­ly uncon­trol­lable ele­ment that comes into the film” and to whom the direc­tor must defer, Zim­mer starts work­ing on Nolan’s movies from the begin­ning, a process he describes as a con­ver­sa­tion: “While he was writ­ing, while he was shoot­ing, I was writ­ing, and the music was hap­pen­ing sort of in a — to use an Inter­stel­lar term — par­al­lel uni­verse, real­ly.” With no need for the dread­ed “temp score,” the dra­ma of Zim­mer’s music and Nolan’s sto­ries devel­op togeth­er.

You can hear the results of Zim­mer’s process in this nine-hour playlist, which includes Zim­mer’s work for Nolan’s films up to Dunkirk–its sound based in part on the tick­ing of a watch Nolan had giv­en him–and oth­ers besides. (The playlist also includes Zim­mer’s sound­tracks for Inter­stel­lar, Incep­tion, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Ris­es, Black Hawk Down, Sher­lock Holmes, Glad­i­a­tor, and The Thin Red Line.) If it leaves you with the desire to learn a bit more about how this instinc­tive mas­ter of movie music does it, have a look at the trail­er above for “Hans Zim­mer Teach­es Film Scor­ing,” his $90 course from the online edu­ca­tion­al plat­form Mas­ter­class. The very first piece of wis­dom he offers reflects the fact that his instinct for back-and-forth col­lab­o­ra­tion extends well beyond his part­ner­ship with Nolan to his view on the craft itself: “In music, you’re basi­cal­ly hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion” — with your artis­tic col­lab­o­ra­tors, with your fel­low musi­cians, with any­one to whom you can lis­ten.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Known Uni­verse: The Hay­den Planetarium’s Tour of the Cos­mos Gets a Hans Zim­mer Sound­track

Hear 5 Hours of Ennio Morricone’s Scores for Clas­sic West­ern Films: From Ser­gio Leone’s Spaghet­ti West­erns to Tarantino’s The Hate­ful Eight

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Download 400,000 Free Classical Musical Scores & 46,000 Free Classical Recordings from the International Music Score Library Project

in Music | August 15th, 2017

The plea­sure of lis­ten­ing to clas­si­cal music, as every clas­si­cal music afi­ciona­do knows, goes well beyond lis­ten­ing to one’s favorite piece. You can’t have a favorite piece with­out hav­ing a favorite per­for­mance of that piece, played by cer­tain musi­cians, presided over by a cer­tain con­duc­tor, and record­ed in a cer­tain hall. And even so, many oth­er record­ings of that piece may well exist that you haven’t heard yet, one of which could one day usurp your per­son­al top spot. About many com­po­si­tions there also exists a near-infi­nite amount to learn and under­stand, espe­cial­ly for those of us with musi­cal train­ing or score-read­ing abil­i­ty.

This aes­thet­i­cal­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly reward­ing process of seek­ing out and com­par­ing — and indeed, the enter­prise of clas­si­cal music-lis­ten­ing itself — has become much eas­i­er with the advent of resources like the Inter­na­tion­al Music Score Library Project. Found­ed in 2006, it has by this point expand­ed to con­tain “123,134 works, 404,963 scores, 46,610 record­ings, 15,404 com­posers, and 445 per­form­ers,” all online and many free for the down­load­ing. Just search for the name of a piece or com­pos­er with the win­dow on the upper right — Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart, for instance — and the IMSP will show you all the relat­ed items it cur­rent­ly has.

Mozart’s well-known and wide­ly heard 1787 com­po­si­tion Eine kleine Nacht­musik (known numer­i­cal­ly as K.525) has its own page in the IMSP’s data­base, where you’ll find not just 29 scores and parts and 28 arrange­ments and tran­scrip­tions in the sheet music sec­tion but two com­plete per­for­mances in the record­ing sec­tion: one by the Boston cham­ber orches­tra A Far Cry and one by the Nether­lands’ Roy­al Con­cert­ge­bouw Orches­tra. You can lis­ten to them right on the site, or down­load them by first click­ing on the down arrow (↓) next to the words “com­plete per­for­mance,” then on the down arrow (↓) that appears to the right of the vol­ume con­troller when the file starts play­ing.

Or if you’re not in the mood for a lit­tle night music, per­haps the IMSP can inter­est you in Lud­wig van Beethoven’s Sym­pho­ny No. 5 or Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions. But then, as the San Fran­cis­co Sym­pho­ny’s Michael Tilson Thomas once said, “You can’t have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite com­posers. They sim­ply define what music is!” So if you’d pre­fer to go beyond the def­i­n­i­tion and hear more of the vari­a­tions clas­si­cal music has to offer — vari­a­tions being one of the prime sources of its afore­men­tioned plea­sure — the IMSP’s vast archive has plen­ty of record­ings to sat­is­fy that desire as well, with more added all the time.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Free Music from 150+ Clas­si­cal Com­posers, Cour­tesy of Musopen.org

Free: Down­load 500+ Rare Music Man­u­scripts by Mozart, Bach, Chopin & Oth­er Com­posers from the Mor­gan Library

A Big Bach Down­load: All of Bach’s Organ Works for Free

The Library of Con­gress Makes 25 Mil­lion Records From Its Cat­a­log Free to Down­load

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Stream 35 Hours of Classic Blues, Folk, & Bluegrass Recordings from Smithsonian Folkways: 837 Tracks Featuring Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie & More

in Music | August 14th, 2017

Image of Woody Guthrie by Al Aumuller, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Mar­shall McLuhan’s chest­nut “the medi­um is the mes­sage” con­tains some of the most impor­tant the­o­ry about mass media to have emerged in the past cen­tu­ry. In its hon­or, we might pro­pose anoth­er slogan—less con­cep­tu­al­ly tidy and alliterative—that brings to mind the argu­ments of crit­i­cal the­o­rists like Theodor Adorno: “the econ­o­my is the culture”—the eco­nom­ic mech­a­nisms that gov­ern the “cul­ture indus­try,” as Adorno would say, deter­mine the kinds of pro­duc­tions that sat­u­rate our shared envi­ron­ment. In a pure­ly cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ist mod­el, we con­sume culture—that which is mar­ket­ed most aggres­sive­ly and dis­trib­uted most plentifully—and often dis­card it just as quick­ly. In an econ­o­my that doesn’t make prof­it the ful­crum of its every move, things go oth­er­wise. The lines between con­sumers, cre­ators, and com­mu­ni­ties become blurred in weird and won­der­ful ways.

This can hap­pen in decen­tral­ized envi­ron­ments like the wilds of the ear­ly inter­net. And it can hap­pen in insti­tu­tions that code it into their design. The Smith­son­ian is one of those insti­tu­tions. The pub­lic col­lec­tions in its vast net­work of muse­ums has remained, out­side of spe­cial exhibits and films, free and “open access” for every­one. And one of their key cul­tur­al con­tri­bu­tions, the Smith­son­ian Cen­ter for Folk­life and Cul­tur­al Her­itage, has devot­ed itself since its found­ing in the late six­ties to “cul­ture of, by, and for the peo­ple.”

Even if you’ve nev­er tak­en the time to delve into their cura­to­r­i­al efforts (and you should), you’ll know their work through Folk­ways Record­ings, the record label cre­at­ed in  by Moses Asch—founder of Folk­ways Records in 1949. After he passed away in 1986, Asch’s fam­i­ly donat­ed over 2,000 records, his entire discog­ra­phy, to the Smith­son­ian, with the pro­vi­so that they always remain in print, whether or not they made a buck.

This has meant that schol­ars and fans of folk from all over the world have always been able to find the work of Pete Seeger, The Carter Fam­i­ly, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Bel­ly, to name but a few of the label’s “stars.” There are many more: Bill Mon­roe, Doc Wat­son, Eliz­a­beth Cot­ten, Rev­erend Gary Davis…. So many names in the pan­theon of folk giants Robert Crumb immor­tal­ized in his col­or­ful, and unusu­al­ly taste­ful, Heroes of Blues, Jazz, and Coun­try. But Folk­ways has pre­served much more besides. Kentucky’s Old Reg­u­lar Bap­tist Church’s a capel­la hymns, Kil­by Snow’s auto­harp, Snooks English’s New Orleans street singing, Alice Ger­rard and Hazel Dick­ens’ 60s inter­pre­ta­tions of tra­di­tion­al blue­grass…. Music that appealed to small but cul­tur­al­ly rich com­mu­ni­ties in its day, and that may have dis­ap­peared along with those com­mu­ni­ties in the scrum of cul­tur­al his­to­ry, dom­i­nat­ed as it is by mass enter­tain­ments.

The small, region­al cre­ations, some tee­ter­ing on genius, some haunt­ing in their art­less­ness, are crit­i­cal doc­u­ments of old Amer­i­ca, the hollers, deserts, streets, swamps, low coun­try, back coun­try, moun­tains, val­leys….  Hear it all in the Spo­ti­fy playlist above (or access it here), 837 tracks of Folk­ways record­ings. Smith­son­ian Folk­ways is per­haps best known for its North Amer­i­can artists, but it has released record­ings from all over the world. Rather than cre­at­ing com­modi­ties, the insti­tu­tion func­tions as a repos­i­to­ry of glob­al cul­tur­al mem­o­ry, col­lect­ing and pre­serv­ing “people’s music.” Since Asch’s endow­ment, Folk­ways has cre­at­ed an addi­tion­al six labels under its umbrel­la and released over 300 new record­ings. In 2003, they part­nered with the Amer­i­can Folk­life Cen­ter for the “Save Our Sounds” project, which aims to pre­serve record­ings like those made by Thomas Edi­son on wax cylin­ders. Folk­ways opens a win­dow on an alter­nate world where cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion is not a per­pet­u­al strug­gle for rat­ings, reviews, and sales dom­i­nance.

It’s not entire­ly a utopi­an vision. There is the dan­ger of a pater­nal­iz­ing approach. Cura­tors like Asch, Har­ry Smith, John and Alan Lomax, and hun­dreds more seri­ous enthu­si­asts and ethno­g­ra­phers have their own agen­das, inter­ests, bias­es, and blind spots. What we under­stand now as tra­di­tion­al Delta blues, for exam­ple, is a prod­uct of selec­tion bias—it excludes many artists and vari­eties that didn’t catch on with col­lec­tors. Still Folk­ways reme­dies much of this short­com­ing by includ­ing work from a broad spec­trum of unknown com­posers, inter­preters, and per­form­ers. There may be no form of mod­ern folk music today that hasn’t been craft­ed and mold­ed by the music indus­try, which might mean, by def­i­n­i­tion, that there is no mod­ern folk music. For such a thing to exist—the “people’s music”—perhaps more demo­c­ra­t­ic economies and insti­tu­tions must pre­vail.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 17,000+ Tra­di­tion­al Folk & Blues Songs Curat­ed by the Great Musi­col­o­gist Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax’s Music Archive Hous­es Over 17,400 Folk Record­ings From 1946 to the 1990s

Leg­endary Folk­lorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

Woody Guthrie at 100: Cel­e­brate His Amaz­ing Life with a BBC Film

Hear Zora Neale Hurston Sing the Bawdy Prison Blues Song “Uncle Bud” (1940)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Adam Savage Takes Us Inside Jack White’s Third Man Records, the First New Record-Pressing Plant in the US in 30 Years

in Music | August 13th, 2017

Jack White, best known as the front­man of The White Stripes, launched Third Man Records in 2001, which has since posi­tioned itself as “an inno­va­tor in the world of vinyl records and a bound­ary push­er in the world of record­ed music, aim­ing to bring tan­gi­bil­i­ty and spon­tane­ity back into the record busi­ness.”

After estab­lish­ing a phys­i­cal loca­tion in Nashville in 2009, Third Man Records opened a sec­ond site in Detroit, and now a new vinyl press­ing plant in the Motor City, pro­vid­ing a home to eight Ger­man-made record press­ing machines. Jack White told CBS, “One day, I want this place to be like what I had heard about Hen­ry Ford want­ed for Ford Motor com­pa­ny. Which was you pour in raw mate­ri­als on this side and out the oth­er side of the fac­to­ry pop out cars.”

Above you can get a half hour tour of the new record plant from Myth­buster’s Adam Sav­age. Enjoy.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hand­made Ani­ma­tion Shows You “How To Make a 1930 Para­mount Record”

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

Watch A Sin­gle Life: An Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Short About How Vinyl Records Can Take Us Mag­i­cal­ly Through Time

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Rebecca Solnit Picks 13 Songs That Will Remind Us of Our Power to Change the World, Even in Seemingly Dark Times

in Books, Music, Politics | August 10th, 2017

Image by Shawn, via Flickr Com­mons

Apoc­a­lypses have always been pop­u­lar as mass belief and enter­tain­ment. Maybe it’s a col­lec­tive desire for ret­ri­bu­tion or redemp­tion, or a kind of ver­ti­go humans expe­ri­ence when star­ing into the abyss of the unknown. Bet­ter to end it all than live in neu­rot­ic uncer­tain­ty. Maybe we find it impos­si­ble to think of a future world exist­ing hun­dreds, thou­sands, mil­lions of years after our deaths. As Rebec­ca Sol­nit observes in Hope in the Dark: Untold His­to­ries, Wild Pos­si­bil­i­ties, “peo­ple have always been good at imag­in­ing the end of the world, which is much eas­i­er to pic­ture than the strange side­long paths of change in a world with­out end.” What if the world nev­er ends, but goes on for­ev­er, chang­ing and evolv­ing in unimag­in­able ways?

This is the baili­wick of sci­ence fic­tion, but also the domain of his­to­ry, a hind­sight view of cen­turies past when wars, tyran­ni­cal con­quests, famines, and dis­eases near­ly wiped out entire populations—when it seemed to them a near cer­tain­ty that noth­ing would or could sur­vive the present hor­ror. And yet it did.

This may be no con­so­la­tion to the vic­tims of vio­lence and plague, but the world has gone on for the liv­ing, peo­ple have adapt­ed and sur­vived, even under the cur­rent, very real threats of nuclear war and cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change. And through­out his­to­ry, both small and large groups of peo­ple have changed the world for the bet­ter, though it hard­ly seemed pos­si­ble at the time. Sol­nit’s book chron­i­cles these his­to­ries, and last year, she released a playlist as a com­pan­ion for the book.

Hope in the Dark makes good on its title through a col­lec­tion of essays about “every­thing,” writes Alice Gre­go­ry at The New York Times, “from the Zap­atis­tas to weath­er fore­cast­ing to the fall of the Berlin Wall.” The book is “part his­to­ry of pro­gres­sive suc­cess sto­ries, part extend­ed argu­ment for hope as a cat­a­lyst for action.” Sol­nit wrote the book in 2004, dur­ing the reelec­tion of George W. Bush—a time when pro­gres­sives despaired of ever see­ing the end of chick­en­hawk sabre-rat­tling, wars for prof­it, pri­va­ti­za­tion of the pub­lic sphere, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, theo­crat­ic polit­i­cal projects, cur­tail­ing of civ­il rights, or the dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ism the admin­is­tra­tion whole­heart­ed­ly embraced (as Nao­mi Klein’s The Shock Doc­trine detailed). Plus ça change.…

In March of last year, Hay­mar­ket Books reis­sued Hope in the Dark, and on Novem­ber 10th, Sol­nit post­ed a link to a free down­load of the book on Face­book. It was down­loaded over 30,000 times in one week. Along with oth­er pro­gres­sive intel­lec­tu­als like Klein and Richard Rorty, Solnit—who became inter­na­tion­al­ly known for the term “mansplain­ing” in her essay, then book, Men Explain Things to Me—has now been cast as a “Cas­san­dra fig­ure of the left,” Gre­go­ry writes. But she rejects the dis­as­trous futil­i­ty inher­ent in that anal­o­gy:

If you think of a kind of ecol­o­gy of ideas, there are more than enough peo­ple telling us how hor­rif­ic and ter­ri­ble and bad every­thing is, and I don’t real­ly need to join that project. There’s a whole oth­er project of try­ing to coun­ter­bal­ance that — some­times we do win and this is how it worked in the past. Change is often unpre­dictable and indi­rect. We don’t know the future. We’ve changed the world many times, and remem­ber­ing that, that his­to­ry, is real­ly a source of pow­er to con­tin­ue and it doesn’t get talked about near­ly enough.

If we don’t hear enough talk about hope, maybe we need to hear more hope­ful music, Sol­nit sug­gests in her Hope in the Dark playlist. Thir­teen songs long, it moves between Bey­on­cé and The Clash, Iggy Pop and Ste­vie Nicks, Black Flag and Big Free­dia.

While the selec­tions speak for them­selves, she offers brief com­men­tary on each of her choic­es in a post at Powell’s. Beyoncé’s “For­ma­tion,” Sol­nit writes, “refor­mu­lates, dig­ging deep into the past of sor­row and suf­fer­ing and injus­tice and pulling us all with her into a future that could be dif­fer­ent.” Pat­ti Smith’s anthem “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” feels like hope, Sol­nit says: “it’s right about the pow­er we have, which oblig­es us to act, and which many duck by pre­tend­ing we’re help­less.” Maybe that’s what apoc­a­lypses are all about—making us feel small and pow­er­less in the face of impend­ing doom. But there are oth­er kinds of reli­gion, like that of Lee Williams’ “Steal My Joy.” It’s a “gor­geous gospel song,” writes Sol­nit. “Joys­teal­ers are every­where. Nev­er sur­ren­der to them.” That sounds like an ide­al exhor­ta­tion to imag­ine and fight for a bet­ter future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

89 Essen­tial Songs from The Sum­mer of Love: A 50th Anniver­sary Playlist

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

Langston Hugh­es Cre­ates a List of His 100 Favorite Jazz Record­ings: Hear 80+ of Them in a Big Playlist

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Secret Rhythm Behind Radiohead’s “Videotape” Now Finally Revealed

in Music | August 10th, 2017

“Video­tape” ends Radiohead’s 2007 album In Rain­bows, and like many of their albums, it tends towards the fune­re­al. (Think of the drunk­en “Life in a Glasshouse” from Amne­si­ac or “Motion Pic­ture Sound­track” from Kid A). And at first, it does sound very sim­ple, four plain­tive descend­ing chords and Thom Yorke’s high melody over the top of it.

But in this 10 minute video essay from Vox Pop: Ear­worm, the song’s struc­ture is peeled back to reveal a secret–that the chord sequence is not on the down­beat, but shift­ed a half-beat ear­li­er. Hence, it is a heav­i­ly syn­co­pat­ed song that removes all clues to its syn­co­pa­tion.

Advanced musi­cians out there might not be blown away by any of this, but for fans of Radio­head and those just com­ing to music the­o­ry, the video is a good intro­duc­tion to com­plex rhythm ideas. The fun comes from the back­wards way in which Vox and War­ren Lain–who devot­ed a whole 30 min­utes to explor­ing the song–came across the secret.

It starts with video of Thom Yorke try­ing to play a live ver­sion along to a click track, and then to Phil Selway’s drums. For some rea­son Yorke can’t do it. And that’s because his brain is want­i­ng to put the chords on the down­beat, the most nat­ur­al, obvi­ous choice. To play off beat, with­out fur­ther rhyth­mic infor­ma­tion, shows the band “fight­ing against not just their own musi­cal instincts, but their own brain­waves” as the Vox host explains.

There is much dis­cus­sion in the YouTube com­ments over whether these 10 min­utes are worth the analy­sis. It’s not that Radio­head invent­ed any­thing new here–check out the off-beat open­ing of some­thing like XTC’s “Wake Up”–but more that the band goes through the whole song (at least in the record­ed ver­sion) with­out reveal­ing the real rhythm, like play­ing in a cer­tain key and nev­er touch­ing the root note.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oiyn0_m2LZQ

To sum up: Radio­head push them­selves in the stu­dio and take those exper­i­ments into the live expe­ri­ence and chal­lenge them­selves. Which is way more than the major­i­ty of rock bands ever do. And bless ‘em, Yorke and co., for doing so.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 10 Most Depress­ing Radio­head Songs Accord­ing to Data Sci­ence: Hear the Songs That Ranked High­est in a Researcher’s “Gloom Index”

The Hid­den Secrets in “Day­dream­ing,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s New Radio­head Music Video

Eight Radio­head Albums Reimag­ined as Vin­tage Paper­back Books

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Roland TR-808, the Drum Machine That Changed Music Forever, Is Back! And It’s Now Affordable & Compact

in Music | August 9th, 2017

You don’t have to be a gear­head to instant­ly rec­og­nize the sound of the Roland TR-808. Intro­duced in 1980, the leg­endary drum machine is all over the 80s, 90s, and the retro 2000s, from dance prog­en­i­tors like Afri­ka Bambaataa’s “Plan­et Rock” to for­ma­tive Def Jam releas­es like Run DMC’s debut and the Beast­ie Boy’s Licensed to Ill (one of the orig­i­nal machines used on such clas­sics recent­ly went on sale). The 808 pro­vides the back­beat for Mar­vin Gaye’s “Sex­u­al Heal­ing,” New Order’s “Shell­shock,” and LL Cool J’s “Going Back to Cali”… track after era-defin­ing track puls­es with the icon­ic drum machine’s deep, thud­ding kick drum and com­i­cal­ly syn­thet­ic con­gas, claves, mara­cas, hand­claps, and cow­bells.

The 808 inspired a trib­ute cel­e­bra­tion around the world on August 8th (8/08) and stars in its own full-length doc­u­men­tary, “a nerdy love let­ter” to the elec­tric instru­ment, writes Slate. You can buy 808 Adi­das that actu­al­ly play beats, play with a vir­tu­al TR-808 in your brows­er, and enjoy the sounds of Kanye West’s odd­ly influ­en­tial 2008 album 808s and Heart­break. With all this renewed atten­tion, you might think it’s a good time for Japan’s Roland to bring the device back into pro­duc­tion, just as Moog briefly reis­sued its Min­i­moog Mod­el D (since dis­con­tin­ued) amidst a swirl of renewed main­stream inter­est in ana­log syn­the­siz­ers.

Roland has obvi­ous­ly felt the pop cul­tur­al winds blow­ing its way. Yes­ter­day, on 808 Day, the com­pa­ny announced a new iter­a­tion, now called the TR-08, as part of its Bou­tique line. (A pre­vi­ous revival, the TR‑8, saw Roland com­bine the 808 with the clas­sic 909, renowned in rave cir­cles.) The video at the top fea­tures some of the 808’s orig­i­nal adopters—producer Jim­my Jam, rap­per Mar­ley Marl, and DJs Jazzy Jeff and Juan Atkins—marveling over the new prod­uct. Just above, in case you’ve some­how for­got­ten, we have a demon­stra­tion of famous TR-808 beats from tracks like “Plan­et Rock” and Cybotron’s “Clear,” songs that made inno­v­a­tive use of sam­ples and which them­selves became choice mate­r­i­al for dozens of sam­ple-based pro­duc­tions.

The 808 was the choice of drum machine for tin­ker­ers. Its sound was “crowd-sourced,” writes Chris Nor­ris, “with artists build­ing on one another’s mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the device. One of the first major inno­va­tions came about in 1984,” with the “fine tun­ing of the 808’s low fre­quen­cies and fur­ther widen­ing of its bass kick drum to cre­ate the sound of an under­ground nuke test” heard on pro­duc­er Strafe’s club hit “Set it Off.” The new TR-08 has a much small­er foot­print and expands the machine’s capa­bil­i­ties with con­tem­po­rary fea­tures like an LED screen, con­trols over gain and tun­ing, bat­tery or USB pow­er, and audio or MIDI through a USB con­nec­tion.

Arguably “one of the most impact­ful pieces of mod­ern music hard­ware,” writes The Verge, upon its debut the 808 “received mixed reviews and was con­sid­ered a com­mer­cial fail­ure as its ana­log cir­cuit­ry didn’t cre­ate the ‘tra­di­tion­al’ drum sounds” most pro­duc­ers expect­ed. This meant that 808s could be picked up rel­a­tive­ly cheap­ly by bed­room pro­duc­ers and local DJs. As a result, “the trem­bling feel­ing of that sound,” Nor­ris writes, “boom­ing down boule­vards in Oak­land, the Bronx, and Detroit are part of America’s cul­tur­al DNA, the ghost of Rea­gan-era blight” and the renais­sance of cre­ativ­i­ty born in its midst. To get a sense of the breadth of the 808’s musi­cal con­tri­bu­tions, lis­ten to the playlist above, with every­one from Talk­ing Heads to 2 LIVE CREW, Phil Collins, and Whit­ney Hous­ton putting in an appear­ance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

See the First “Drum Machine,” the Rhyth­mi­con from 1931, and the Mod­ern Drum Machines That Fol­lowed Decades Lat­er

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Professionally Digitized & Streaming Online: A Treasure Trove of Early 20th Century Music

in History, Internet Archive, Music | August 9th, 2017

Every record­ing medi­um works as a metonym for its era: the term “LP” con­jures up asso­ci­a­tions with a broad musi­cal peri­od of clas­sic rock ‘n’ roll, soul, doo-wop, R&B, funk, jazz, dis­co etc.; we talk of the “CD era,” dom­i­nat­ed by dance music and hip-hop; the 45 makes us think of juke­box­es, din­ers, and sock-hops; and the cas­sette, well… at least one sub­genre of music, what John Peel called “sham­bling,” jan­g­ly, lo-fi pop, came to be known by the name “C86,” the title of an NME com­pi­la­tion, short for “Cas­sette, 1986.” (Read­ers of the mag­a­zine had to clip coupons and send mon­ey by postal mail to receive a copy of the tape.)

Soon, how­ev­er, few­er and few­er peo­ple will remem­ber the age of the 78rpm record, the pre­ferred vehi­cle for the music of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. From clas­si­cal and opera to blues, blue­grass, swing, rag­time, gospel, Hawai­ian, and hol­i­day nov­el­ties the 78 epit­o­mizes the sounds of its hey­day as much as any of the media men­tioned above.

While cas­settes recent­ly made a nos­tal­gic come­back, and turnta­bles are found in every big box store, we’re gen­er­al­ly not equipped to play back 78s. These are brit­tle records made from shel­lac, a resin secret­ed by bee­tles. They were often played on appli­ances that dou­bled as qual­i­ty par­lor fur­ni­ture.

Thanks now to the Inter­net Archive, that stal­wart of dig­i­tal cat­a­logu­ing and cura­tion, we can play twen­ty five thou­sand 78s and immerse our­selves in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, whether for research pur­pos­es or pure enjoy­ment. Pre­vi­ous efforts at preser­va­tion have “restored or remas­tered… com­mer­cial­ly viable record­ings” on LP or CD, writes The Great 78 Project, the archive’s vol­un­teer pro­gram to dig­i­tize musi­cal his­to­ry. The cur­rent effort seeks to go beyond pop­u­lar­i­ty and col­lect every­thing, from the rarest and strangest to the already his­toric. “I want to know what the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry sound­ed like,” writes Inter­net Archive founder Brew­ster Kahle, “Mid­west, dif­fer­ent coun­tries, dif­fer­ent social class­es, dif­fer­ent immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties and their loves and fears.”

You can hear sev­er­al selec­tions here, and thou­sands more at this archive of 78s uploaded by audio-visu­al preser­va­tion com­pa­ny, George Blood, L.P. Oth­er 78rpm archives from vol­un­teer col­lec­tors and the ARChive of Con­tem­po­rary Music are being dig­i­tized and uploaded as well. You’ll note the record­ings are often sub­merged in crack­le and hiss, and gen­er­al­ly lack bass and tre­ble (most play­back sys­tems of the time could not repro­duce the low­er and high­er ends of the audi­ble spec­trum). “We have pre­served the often very promi­nent sur­face noise and imper­fec­tions,” the Archive writes, “and includ­ed files gen­er­at­ed by dif­fer­ent sizes and shapes of sty­lus to facil­i­tate dif­fer­ent kinds of analy­sis.” Dif­fer­ent play­back sys­tems could pro­duce marked­ly dif­fer­ent sounds, and the record­ings were not always strict­ly 78rpm.

These con­di­tions of the trans­fer ensure that we rough­ly hear what the first audi­ences heard, though the records’ age and our pen­chant for 7 speak­er audio sys­tems intro­duce some new vari­ables. None of these record­ings were even made in stereo. The 78 peri­od, notes Yale Library, last­ed between 1898 and the late 1950s, when the 33 1/2 rpm long-play­ing record ful­ly edged out the old­er mod­el. For approx­i­mate­ly fifty years, these records car­ried record­ed music, sound, and speech into homes around the world. “What is this?” Kahle asks of this for­mi­da­ble dig­i­ti­za­tion project. “A ref­er­ence col­lec­tion? A collector’s dream? A dis­cov­ery radio sta­tion? The sound­track of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry?” All of the above. To learn more about The Great 78 Project, includ­ing the tech­ni­cal details of the trans­fer and how you can care­ful­ly pack­age up and mail in your own 78rpm records, vis­it their Preser­va­tion page.

h/t @Ferdinand77

Relat­ed Con­tent:

BBC Launch­es World Music Archive

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

DC’s Leg­endary Punk Label Dischord Records Makes Its Entire Music Cat­a­log Free to Stream Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast