Meet Peter. Peter is a 79-year-old English retiree. Back in WW II he served as a radar technician. He is now an international star.
One year ago, this would not have been possible, but the world has changed. In the past 12 months, cheap propecia thousands of ordinary people have become famous. Famous people have been embarrassed. Huge sums of money have changed hands. Lots and lots of Mentos have been dropped into Diet Coke. The rules are different now, and one website changed them: YouTube.
JANNE VANHANEN: “Neuro-transmit me these empty sounds” — Chicks On Speed: “Panasonic Rip-off”.
The above caption is from a track built on an existing Pan(a)sonic piece. The Chix are probably referring to the “empty” quality of the sounds Pan(a)sonic music consists of: sine waves, test tones, crackles & claps arranged in a strict rhythmic grid. Your question made me think of the possibility of empty sounds, especially as I’ve recently been listening to German composer Ekkehard Ehlers’ “…plays Robert Johnson” and “…plays Albert Ayler” where he tackles the question of reference in digital music. The pieces don’t “play” their referents in the sense of having samples of their recorded work included, but try to refer to them on a more abstract level.
Ehlers states in The Wire (issue 212) that “‘Reference’ is a basic structure in digital music” and it seems he tries to subvert this referentiality. Can non-referential, “empty” sounds be produced in the context of referring machines (turntables, samplers, computers)? Of course this technology makes the concept of acousmatic music possible in the first place, “neuro-transmitting” sounds to listeners without the gesturality of a performer or awareness of the sound source.
[…] I hear no great conceptual divide between various music machines. Whatever means there are available for recording acoustic phenomena or presenting sound, no matter what the source, making sound reproducible and thus variable, all phonographic technologies have the potential to deterritorialize sound and music. Maybe the greatest singular moment in nomadic use (= an act of capturing forces, making a new machinic assemblage of existing machinic formations) of phonographic machinery has been the emergence of hip-hop DJ’ing and the misuse of vinyl records, making a pair of turntables into a nomadic war machine. For a better order flagyl online part of the last century the record remained inactive, a storage capsule of time.
4/24/2003
Common talk deserves a walk, the situation’s changed/ everything said from now on has to be rearranged.
— T La Rock
The hiphop DJ is a meta-musician, an author, a programmer, an organizer of recorded fragments and a builder of databases whose talents are uniquely suited to survival and meaningful cultural production in our emerging era of total digital cross-reference.
— David Goldberg
At the dead center of the spiraling galaxy of hiphop culture is the turntable. This is where everything starts: on the grooved surface of a record spinning on the wheels of steel. All truth is here, all meaning — everything that is hiphop…Indeed, an act of pure hiphop devotion might be to let a record play from start to end on a turntable…
In July of 2003, Jeremy Brown, a.k.a. DJ Reset, took apart a song. Using digital software, Brown isolated instrumental elements of “Debra,†a song by Beck from his 1999 album “Midnite Vultures.†Brown, who is thirty-three and has studied with Max Roach, adjusted the tempo of “Debra†and added live drums and human beat-box noises that he recorded at his small but tidy house in Long Island City. Then he sifted through countless a-cappella vocals archived on several hard drives. Some a-cappellas are on commercially released singles, specifically intended for d.j. use, while others appear on the Internet, having been leaked by people working in the studio where the song was recorded, or sometimes even by the artist.
