March 2008

"Scratch Demon"

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"Scratch Demon" [mp3 removed]

Not as demonic as the title makes it sound. It's some commercial scratch samples granularized into (rather magnetic) unrecognizability, with underlying heavily delayed (simple) beats. Laptop speakers are OK as a medium.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Compromise

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One of the hobbies of this blog will henceforth be collecting self-confident-to-outright-hostile artists' statements. (See, e. g., Adolph Gottlieb's; coming soon: George Antheil). Today's entry comes from CDBaby; this is the bio of Galaxy Robot Orchestra. Cower, you worms.

Galaxy Robot Orchestra is the brainstorm of Cy Borgski, who is proud to be a drop-out from the Yale School of Music. Shunned by his peers and persecuted by his instructors, Borgski knew his days at YSM were numbered when a professor asked, “What is Arnold Schoenberg’s fatal flaw,” and he replied, “Too many notes!” The look of revulsion on the prof’s face told Borgski everything. Even here, in this supposed epicenter of musical creativity, his maverick brand of nihilistic minimalism was doomed.

Soon, Borgski left this self-righteous “tune factory” to start his own recording and composing projects. With a stack of reel-to-reel tapes under his arm, containing recordings of performances by he and his YSM classmates, he decided to take the classical sketches and “correct” them digitally until only the sheer essence of their musical power remained, and none of the ostentatious narrative piffle. He expanded upon this with his own keyboard compositions, always recording in analog format to retain the essential retro flavor of his own vision of computer music. Above all, Borgski strives to maintain a rich, otherworldly orchestral sound in even the most minimal of works.

A devoted disciple of Morton Subotnick, Borsgki considers his “Silver Apples of the Moon” the only truly successful electronic symphony ever composed. Even Subotnick’s “The Wild Bull” suffered that soft, corrupting homogenization which so soon spoiled the entire electronic music movement, turning it into latter-day elevator music from the likes of Eno and Tangerine Dream.

Borgski reveres electronic film music of the 1960s. He considers the score to the 1962 SF film CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS one of the great electronic film-score masterpieces, and finds it odd that its creator, the mysterious “I.F.M.” is not even mentioned when critics discuss this landmark cinema apocalypse. “I really don’t think anyone has ever heard this music. It’s astonishing how one can watch a film, and discuss it, and never once mention the music. It baffles me. The music hovers over the film like its guardian angel, caressing and protecting it. How can you not hear it? Sadly, no music credit appears for this film on the Internet Movie Database. How embarrassing for them!”

Another composer hero for Borgski is Frederick Charles Judd (aka F.C. Judd), who scored the avant-garde UK SF TV series SPACE PATROL (1963). Judd is famous, amongst other things, for the seminal 1961 handbook to the then-new electronic music scene, “Electronic Music and Music Concrete” (1961). Borgski admits to cribbing the term “electrosonic” from Judd. “Judd’s music was so ahead of its time, people still don’t know what to do with it. It’s dark, ironic and threatening, and it was premiered on a freakin’ kiddie TV show in 1963, for gosh sake! Now that’s avant-garde! Sadly, no music credit appears for this series on the Internet Movie Database. How embarrassing for them!”

The music is pretty good so the artist is entitled to say what sucks and what doesn't.

Marcin Ramocki's Torcito Project (Belated Thoughts)

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torcito project

Just came across a passage in Daniel Albright's book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Other Arts that rang a bell: "...John Cage, a painter-in-sound...could refigure a Japanese garden as a trombone piece--or take the outline of Marcel Duchamp's profile, turn it ninety degrees, and instruct a performer to interpret the profile as a continuously varying musical line." (see Solos for Voice nos. 65 and 70)

The bell was Marcin Ramocki's Torcito Project, which digitally updates the Cage piece. Here's how Neural.it described it:

This work is composed of seven portraits made...in the summer of 2005 using Virtual Drummer, an "old" Macintosh software. A 48x64 grid is the canvas used by Ramocki. In this grid the bitmap image of a human face becomes the score of an endless sound loop. Each horizontal line corresponds to an instrument (for a total of 48 instruments) which is activated each time the cathode ray beam hits one of the portrait's pixels. Ramocki's work brings to mind Jacquard's punched cards, but also the pianola and the automatic piano.

To clarify somewhat, imagine a vertical line sweeping the face above. Each time it encounters a darkened pixel, a note from the "general MIDI" list (shown below the portrait) is played. The sweep begins quietly and is cacophonous by the time the cursor reaches the middle of the face. The general MIDI spec is heavy on percussion, so that's a lot of timbales, cowbells, etc., firing at once. The Albright book credits George Antheil, composer of Ballet Mecanique, as a forerunner of Cage in abstracting musical notes from their normal background and function. Ramocki injects the element of kitsch through the use of outmoded software and the somewhat rigid and dated MIDI assignments of notes to sounds. He has found a way to "play" an entire face, as opposed to just a profile.