Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

New music from the 4am

The latest 4am new music podcast from Warren Ellis is very good, definitely worth the download.  Some solid industrial work from Otto Defaye, gentler brooding from Holoscene and 60 Watt Kid. For the new year's spirit, there's an awesome, manic drinking song from these guys.

NIN ARG, Wired explaining Year Zero

Wired covers the history of Nine Inch Nails' alternate reality game (ARG), Year Zero, which launched early in 2007.  It's a useful case study, starting from intentions and brainstorming through the course of the game.

And there are a couple of nice little puzzles in the text, which, appropriately, lead to more content.

Electronic occulture

"An Invitation To The Electric Seance" is a fun introduction to a strand of current music, mixing together electronika, occult interests, psychogeography, and the Gothic tradition.  Lots of good haunted media work here, including projects and artists like Ghost Box, Mount Vernon Arts Lab, and Cyclobe. 

Gothic writers (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, HP Lovecraft) are referenced, along with classic film and video (Quatermass and the Pit, The Wicker Man, above all The Stone Tape).  John Coulthart also recognizes the musical ancestry of Coil, Current 93 et al.  Electronic voice phenomena should be added to the account, however.

The article notes a nice 2006 short film for Pram, "Electic Seance".  Behold the YouTubery:

Web 2.0 angles:

• Pandora isn't much help, unfortunately, knowing about and streaming very few of these artists. I had to return to the 1990s and Coil to work on it.
• Has anyone done a Google Maps mashup for haunted sites and haunted music, psychogeographically?

(via BoingBoing)

EDITED TO ADD: Ragnarok is one of the entities mentioned in the article, and they have a good site. (thank you, Jim Barrett!)

Polar music: new entry, and new wiki URL

Scott Leslie points us, via Twitter, to Antarctic Data Jam.

events where we invite you to make songs, images, videos or just plain noise from raw weather data from the Antarctic. During the day there is a workshop and in the evening a performance. If you prefer to work at home, just find any kind of Antarctic data (we have supplied some, see left) and if you create something with it, bring it along to the event. The best will find its way onto the Antarctic Data Jam CD which we will market later in the year.

I'm not sure where their polar radio project is, or how to play with their "Pure Data" device, but it looks keen.  And I like that posthuman sound idea.

Meanwhile, the wiki has moved again.  Here's the new URL: http://apps.nitle.org/wikifarm/research/index.php/Main/PolarMusic. 

The Dunwich Tapes: alternate history, alternate Lovecraftian fiction

"The Dunwich Tapes": a short story about the discovery of mysterious sounds off the New England coast.  Odd, old magnetic tapes with curious content.  The hero brings the things to August Derleth for help.

There is more album cover art.

The name recalls The Stone Tape (1972, Nigel Kneale, BBC).  And the very idea summons forth Matt Howarth's Bugtown.

...Wyard set about reassembling the morass of tapes. He purchased a second hand reel to reel recorder from an Internet auction site, fashioning a rudimentary splicing apparatus from two blocks of drift wood and a disposable razor blade. To his surprise the contents of the recordings were in relatively healthy condition... 
More disquieting yet, barely audible in the background of the recording, Wyard was sure he hear could the nervous chatter of a Geiger counter...

(via his Warren Ellis majesty)

When Musicians Play Interactive Fiction: Grand Text Auto's game

What does an interactive fiction game look like, when played by musicians?  This is a fun game to play.  Either you imagine the game as part of a well-known song, or a singer trying to play IF:

The Talking Heads

This dangerous act would achieve little...

The Rolling Stones

Satisfaction: That’s fixed in place.

John Lennon

The word ‘imagine’ isn’t in your vocabulary.
...

REM

You’re already standing.

The Velvet Underground

Time passes.
Time passes.
Time passes.
Time passes.
Time passes.
Your man arrives.

Bruce Springsteen

You will have to be more specific about which direction you want to run.

Otis Redding

That’s not something you can sit down on.

The Eagles

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
A sepulchral voice reverberating through the hotel says, “We are closing soon. Adventurers may check out anytime they like.”...

Leonard Cohen

Manhattan: Taken.
Berlin: Taken.

The comments section keeps this going, too.  My favorite so far:

PINK FLOYD

There is a Wall here. There are some Hammers here.

>climb wall
It’s too slippery.

>go around wall
It’s too wide.

>look wall
The bricks look like you.

>put ear against the wall
Someone’s breaking bottles in the hall.

>play guitar solo
You have become . . . well, you know.

>tear down the wall
What do you want to tear down the wall with?
>hammers
You better RUN.

Haunting the ghost box, Infocult demands music

"Music is dead! Long live hauntology!" shouts a gleeful yet brooding review of some new British music.  Covered are albums from Ghost Box and Mordant Music.

It's a terrific review, extending itself from point to diverse point, like the radical sonics of early Dr. Who to the role of public service in the modern weird tale.  And tasty prose:

'Séance at Hobs Lane' moves beyond the initial reference to Quatermass to provide what is in effect a survey of Underground London in myth, fiction, history and rumour. The music has a queasy carny quality, the London it describes is an expressionist city, its time-periods steampunk scrambled. It’s a London of Victorian sewers, forgotten crypts, subterranean theatres, secret society dens, through which Raymond MacDonald’s unquiet saxophone lurches and echoes like a raging ghost-troglodyte.

I must confess to being way, way behind in modern Goth/trance/electronic/etc music.  I am willing to mend my Coil-loving ways, put down that crusty Zoviet France CD, stop fiddling with various Deleuze collections, and take instruction from Infocult readers.  Tune and creator recommendations?

(via k-punk)

Number One expert on musical subversion

Jesse Walker blogs about pop music and paranoia, focusing on bizarre right-wing conspiracy hermeneutics applied to the Beatles.

Thus, "Magical Mystery Tour" is about drugs ("Roll up, roll up [your sleeve] for the mystery tour," he decodes), as is "Hey Jude" (cf. "let her under your skin"). And "Revolution"'s slap at Chairman Mao is "simply telling the Maoists that Fabian gradualism is working, and that the Maoists might blow it all by getting the public excited before things are ready for 'Revolution.'...In short, 'Revolution' takes the Moscow line against Trotskyites and the Progressive Labor Party, based on Lenin's Leftwing Extremism: An Infantile Disorder."

I love this tag:

trumpeter Joseph Crow, "possibly the country's Number One expert on musical subversion"

Now that's a title I could covet!  Brian Lamb, Gardner Campbell: time to rumble.

Strad in the subway

This story is a disturbing, reflective, heartbreaking one: a world-famous violinist decides to perform in a subway station, one attached to a major American city.  He plays great music on a Strad, and people generally... walk on by.

There are all sorts of elements to this story.  Something about urban life, maybe DC.  Something about government work, since many of the passersby were so employed.  Perhaps the hectic pace of life, yes.  And the fate of classical music, at least in the US.  Not to mention the dramaturgical problem of breaking the fourth wall, or intruding performance into spaces where it doesn't usually occur.

I've trained myself to pounce on modernist sneering about an audience unadvanced enough to appreciate the finer things.  But that argument is usually aimed at a different kind (i.e., modernist) of music, not what Bell played.

(via the discerning oook)

Why do you think we are nuts media?

Beware of the Blog describes the "Why Do You Think You Are Nuts?" madness.  There's the original clip, apparently from an early 1980s public access show.  It's heartrending and surreal.  Then there's a YouTube frenzy of riffs and covers, from the dark lounge version to the Saddam Hussein hanging remix.

The version I'm in love with is the Carol Channing puppet/spoken word one, a brilliant plunge into the uncanny valley.  Yes, definitely a sign of the apocalypse, a la Kleist.  (Did anyone else see that human-size Lamb Chop costume?)

 

Watching these versions along with some tv pranks brings back the weirdness of late-night tv, back in the day before cable.

(thanks to oook)