Back in 2016, we showed you Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” getting played on a 1905 fairground organ. But now we’re stepping it up a level, and letting you behold this: organist Joshua Stafford performing the same Queen classic on a Midmer-Losh pipe organ. Built with 33,112 pipes, it’s apparently the “largest pipe organ ever constructed, the largest musical instrument ever constructed, and the loudest musical instrument ever constructed.” You can find it in the Main Auditorium of the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, NJ. Enjoy.
h/t Allie
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Back in April 2020, animator Henning M. Lederer launched his “Books & Sleeves” project where he turns abstract geometric patterns, all featured on vintage book and record covers, into mesmerizing moving images. Above, you can watch the second installment of the project, which doesn’t disappoint.
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We may have yet to develop the technology of time travel, but recorded music comes pretty close. Those who listen to it have experienced how a song or an album can, in some sense, transport them right back to the time they first heard it. But older records also have the much stranger power to conjure up eras we never experienced. You can musically send yourself as far back as the nineteen-twenties with the above Youtube playlist of digitized 78 RPM records from the George Blood collection.
George Blood is the head of the audio-visual digitization company George Blood Audio, which has been participating in the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project. “The brainchild of the Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, the project is dedicated to the preservation and discovery of 78rpm records,” writes The Vinyl Factory’s Will Pritchard.
The piece quotes Blood himself as saying that his company has been digitizing five to six thousand records per month with the ambitious goal of creating a “reference collection of sound recordings from the period of approximately 1880 to 1960.” He said that five years ago. Today, the Internet Archive’s George Blood collection contains more than 385,000 records free to stream and download.
The 78 having been the most popular recorded-music format in the first few decades of the twentieth century, George Blood L.P. and the Great 78 Project as a whole have had plenty of material to work with. In the large archive built up so far you’ll find plenty of obscurities — the Youtube playlist at the top of the post can get you acquainted with the likes of Eric Whitley and the Green Sisters, Tin Ear Tanner and His Back Room Boys, and Douglas Venable and His Bar X Ranch Hands — but also the work of musicians who remain beloved today. For the 78 was the medium through which many listeners enjoyed the big-band hit of Glenn Miller, or discovered jazz as performed by legends like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. To know their music most intimately, one would perhaps have needed to hear them in the actual nineteen-thirties, but this is surely the next best thing.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Three minutes with the minstrels / Arthur Collins, S. H. Dudley & Ancient City. Edison Record. 1899.
Long before vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs and MP3s came along, people first experienced audio recordings through another medium — through cylinders made of tin foil, wax and plastic. In recent years, we’ve featured cylinder recordings from the 19th century that allow you to hear the voices of Leo Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Walt Whitman, Otto von Bismarck and other historic figures. Those recordings were originally recorded and played on a cylinder phonograph invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. But those were obviously just a handful of the cylinder recordings produced at the beginning of the recorded sound era.
Thanks to the University of California-Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive, you can now download or stream a digital collection of more than 10,000 cylinder recordings. “This searchable database,” says UCSB, “features all types of recordings made from the late 1800s to early 1900s, including popular songs, vaudeville acts, classical and operatic music, comedic monologues, ethnic and foreign recordings, speeches and readings.” You can also find in the archive a number of “personal recordings,” or “home wax recordings,” made by everyday people at home (as opposed to by record companies).
Above, hear a recording called “Three minutes with the minstrels,” by Arthur Collins, released in 1899. Below that is “Alexander’s ragtime band medley,” featuring the banjo playing of Fred Van Eps, released in 1913.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Music changes when technology changes. Few musicians have demonstrated as keen an awareness of that fact as Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, who together as Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) burst onto the scene making sounds that most listeners of the late nineteen-seventies had never heard before — never heard in a musical context, at least. They’d never seen a band employ a computer programmer, nor bring onstage a device like Roland’s MC‑8 Microcomposer, an early musical sequencer designed strictly for studio use. That YMO didn’t hesitate to make these unconventional choices, and many others besides, won them years as the most popular band in their native Japan.
It would be unimaginable for YMO to have emerged in any other place or time. “Japan had long since remade itself as a postwar economic engine, but by the late 1970s it was becoming something else: a global emblem of techno-utopianism and futuristic cool,” writes the New York Times’ Clay Risen. “Sony released the Walkman in 1979, just as Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake were taking over Paris fashion runways with their playful, visionary designs.”
Japan had become economically, technologically, and culturally formidable on a global scale, and YMO were placed to become its ideal representatives: they had the askew hipness and the cutting-edge sounds, but it was their sense of humor, evident in the playfulness of their music, that took the rest of the world by surprise.
You’ll find no better introduction to YMO’s work than the hour-long YMO concert at the Nippon Budokan at the top of the post. It took place in 1983, not long before Hosono, Takahashi, and Sakamoto packed the band up and returned to their already well-established solo careers. As a unit they’d achieved global stardom, playing foreign venues like Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre in 1979 and, unbelievably, going on Soul Train in 1980. Their early hit “Behind the Mask” even caught the attention of Michael Jackson, who recorded his own version of the song for Thriller but left it unreleased until 2010 — by which time YMO had reunited to perform in Japan, Europe, and America, playing for new generations of listeners who had grown up immersed in their music, directly or indirectly.
Influences on YMO included the work of Brian Wilson and Giorgio Moroder, as well as music from India, China, the Caribbean, the late-fifties-early-sixties “exotica” fad, and even arcade games. But their own influence has spread out farther still, shaping not just various subgenres of electronic music but also certain formative works of hip hop. If you listen to YMO’s albums today — nearly 45 years after their commercial debut, and just a few weeks after the death of co-founder Takahashi — their music still, somehow, sounds thoroughly Japanese. Like Isao Tomita (whose assistant became their computer programmer), YMO understood not just that music changes with technology, but also that it emerges from a specific culture, and in their discography we hear those principles pushed to their thrilling limits.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
We’ve identified another opportunity to show off your creative streak, compliments of All Of It with Alison Stewart, a daily live culture program on WNYC, New York City’s public radio station.
You have until February 13 to write and record an original song inspired by a work in the public domain, and submit it toThe All Of It Public Song Project.
Amateurs are welcome to take a crack at it and any genre is cricket, including rap, spoken word, and instrumentals.
“Billy, you will see a large and ugly gentleman outside the front door. Ask him to come up.”
“If he won’t come, sir?”
“No violence, Billy. Don’t be rough with him. If you tell him that Count Sylvius wants him he will certainly come.”
“What are you going to do now?” asked the Count as Billy disappeared.
“My friend Watson was with me just now. I told him that I had a shark and a gudgeon in my net; now I am drawing the net and up they come together.”
The Count had risen from his chair, and his hand was behind his back. Holmes held something half protruding from the pocket of his dressing-gown.
“You won’t die in your bed, Holmes.”
Okay, we’re being silly, but only because we don’t want to put ideas in your head!
You could even concoct something entirely new — perhaps a ballad from the POV of To the Lighthouse’s young James Ramsay, or a ditty apologizing to Virginia Woolf for reading the Cliffs Notes instead of the actual novel when it was assigned in your college Women’s Literature class.
…we’re doing it again, aren’t we?
All right, we’ll leave you to it, with a reminder that anything outside of your public domain source material must be wholly original — no borrowing a catchy tune from Lennon and McCartney, capisci?
Winners will get a chance to discuss their works on WNYC and all qualifying entries will be posted at contest’s end for the public’s listening pleasure.
Last year, not long before Christmas, everyone on the internet received a shiny new toy in the form of ChatGPT, which by the power of artificial intelligence can near-instantaneously generate most any text one asks it to. And after a bit of experimentation, one is inclined, naturally, to turn such an impressive technological achievement to the most ridiculous possible uses. Over the past few months, pastiche has proven an especially popular use of ChatGPT: my own interest was first piqued, as I recall, by its generation of instructions for “how to remove a peanut-butter sandwich from a VCR” in the style of the King James Bible.
It’s unknowable what the author or authors of the Bible (depending on how you happen to conceive of its authorship) would think of the results. But we do know just what Nick Cave thinks of ChatGPT’s attempt to write a song in his style. You can read its lyrics at The Red Hand Files, the site of Cave’s question-and-answer newsletter (in which he has opined on these matters before). Consisting of two verses, a chorus, and an outro filled with lines about “a siren’s song,” “the blood of angels,” and “the fire of hell,” the song was sent in by a fan named Mark in New Zealand, to whom Cave writes a characteristically thoughtful reply — or at least he does after delivering his verdict: “This song sucks.”
“What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty,” Cave writes. “It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.” Genuine songs, he explains, “arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation.” But “ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”
“What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work,” he continues. “Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past.” This is the act that Cave himself has committed to over and over again throughout his half-century-long musical career. But even if that act will lie forever beyond the grasp of an artificial-intelligence system, no matter how robust, it also lies beyond the grasp of the many human musicians content to crank out the same old songs for decades on end. Perhaps it is they, not the Nick Caves of the world, who should worry about the likes of ChatGPT putting them out of work.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Note: With the passing of Jeff Beck, we’re bringing back a vintage post from our archive featuring the early years of the legendary guitarist. You can read his obituary here.
Art film and rock and roll have, since the 60s, been soulmates of a kind, with many an acclaimed director turning to musicians as actors, commissioning rock stars as soundtrack artists, and filming scenes with bands. Before Nicolas Roeg, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and other rock-loving auteurs did all of the above, there was Michelangelo Antonioni, who barreled into the English-language market, under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with a trilogy of films steeped in the sights and sounds of sixties counterculture.
Blowup, the first and by far the best of these, though scored by jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, prominently featured the Yardbirds—with both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. In the memorable scene above, Beck smashes his guitar to bits after his amp goes on the fritz. The Italian director “envisioned a scene similar to that of Pete Townshend’s famous ritual of smashing his guitar on stage,” notes Guitarworld’s Jonathan Graham. “Antonioni had even asked The Who to appear in the film,” but they refused.
In stepped the Yardbirds, during a pivotal moment in their career. The year before, they released mega-hit “For Your Love,” and said goodbye to lead guitarist Eric Clapton. Beck, his replacement, heralded a much wilder, more experimental phase for the band. Jeff Beck, it seemed, could play anything, but what he didn’t do much of onstage is emote. Next to the guitar-smashing Townshend or the fire-setting Hendrix (see both below), he was a pretty reserved performer, though no less thrilling to watch for his virtuosity and style.
But as he tells it, Antonioni wouldn’t let the band do their “most exciting thing,” a cover of “Smokestack Lightning” that “had this incredible buildup in the middle which was just pow!” That moment would have been the natural pretext for a good guitar smashing.
Instead, the set piece with the broken amp gives the introverted Beck a reason to get agitated. As Graham describes it, he also played a guitar specially designated as a prop:
Due to issues over publishing, the Yardbirds classic “Train Kept A‑Rollin’,” was reworked as “Stroll On” for the performance, and as the scene involved the destruction of an instrument, Beck’s usual choice of his iconic Esquire or Les Paul was swapped for a cheap, hollow-body stand-in that he was directed to smash at the song’s conclusion.
The scene is more a tantrum than the orgiastic onstage freak-out Townshend would probably have delivered. Its chief virtue for Yardbird’s fans lies not in the funny, out-of-character moment (which SF Gate film critic Mick LaSalle calls “one of the weirdest scenes in the movie”). Rather, it was “the chance,” as one fan tells LaSalle, “in the days before MTV and YouTube, to see the Yardbirds, with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.” Antonioni had seized the moment. In addition to firing “the opening salvo of the emerging ‘film generation,’” as Roger Ebert wrote, he gave contemporary fans a reason (in addition to explicit sex and nudity), to go see Blowupagain and again.
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