"One of my friends brought his daughter round – she’s 14, and she had her iPod on. And I said to her, what are you listening to? And she said, it’s this group called Joy Division. And I had to smile a little bit."
- from an interview with Bernard Sumner

Hip Hop Game.com
Hip hop gossip.

photos of grime artists

david byrne's tour journal

top albums of the 1990s according to ilm
Good list even though there are things about it which make Hulk VERY FUCKING ANGRY.

I Love Music rough guide to...
Holy shit. The thermonuclear version of "five cds to introduce you to [60s bubblegum pop, new orleans brass bands, metal, rave, etc]".

FORWARD RIDDIM BANNED
"Lethal B's smash hit - Forward Riddim has been banned in all Essex. Apparently this is due to the fact that ravers are just going too mad for it!"

Andrew W. Pollack's "Notes On" series
Insanely detailed mini-essays on Beatles songs.

One Nation, Invisible: The Untold Story of Twin Cities Hip-Hop
For all my peeps in tha 612 - big up Victoria Crossing! Big up Dunn Bros!

update: even better - The TC Old-School Hip-Hop Page, courtesy of the author

The Making of Wire's 154 album

listen to all of beethoven's piano sonatas, with critical notes
I heart elitist socialist media monopolies.

aphex will rise again
"You probably don't remember this, but there was a time when RDJ was GOD! I mean RDJ was the most important man in the fucking universe, you thought it, your dad thought it, and every last music journalist made it a point to make sure you did not forget it. I don’t care how big of a Detroit fascist you are (and I was the biggest one this board has ever witnessed!) you knew RDJ was the dope shit, you knew, your dad knew, and every last person who knew anything about electronic music knew it. That is cool and the gang, because if you don't like Aphex you are an idiot. RDJ is definitely one of the top 5 most important producers of the last decade and Blue Calyx [sic] alone is better than your entire record collection."

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Advice for Clever Children

one should not serve any existing demands

Loops are good to dance to...

a really effing good guide to Stockhausen
Stockhausen on Hymnen

"What I am trying to do, as far as I am aware of it, is to produce models that herald the stage after destruction. I'm trying to go beyond collage, hetrogeneity and pluralism, and to find unity; to produce music that brings us to the essential ONE. And that is going to be badly needed during the time of shocks and disasters that is going to come."

It's got to be hard to be that arrogant and yet be essentially ignored by the listening public.

moments in love
bbc chillout documentary (incl link to archived version)

sounds like techno
Web-based documentary featuring Derrick May and Stacey Pullen, among others.

ishkur's guide to electronic music

So I'm listening to Planet Rock ... you know, I don't think I've ever heard this song before.

Musique Concrète Smash Hits
by Drew Daniel of The Soft Pink Truth and Matmos

museum of techno

Columbia's wake-up songs

jazz v. funk, or why bitch's brew isn't jazz

The Beatles meet Bob Dylan because of The Blacklisted Journalist
It's deeply untrustworthy gossip, not journalism, but it's entertaining.

What is truth, said jesting Tony?
Can't wait to see 24 Hour Party People. Will then return here to be set straight.

Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 17:42:44 -0400
From: Andrei
To: idm@hyperreal.org
Subject: RE: [idm] Dada / Intonarumori

For those who care about this Dada music thread:
I have a friend who specializes in Dada and Surrealist literature and here are some things he had to say about Dada music.

Enjoy.
Andrei

• -------

What I can recall are things not so much in the name of music as in the name of provocation, but as far as Picabia goes, his first wife (who had a strong influence on his ideas), Gabrielle Buffet, was a trained pianist, as was her sister, Mauguerite, who actually performed at a couple Dada performances in Paris. One piece she performed was Picabia's piece, an example of "Sodomist" music (I think that's what he called it, even though "sadist" would have made more sense), called something like "The Nanny" (or something with nanny in the title), which was essentially minimalism before its time: three notes played over and over and over. It was also her that played Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes' piece "No Curly Chicory!" at another performance, and I actually have a description of that, culled from the Dada Almanac: the piece "had been composed by choosing notes entirely at random and was played with stony-faced expertise by Marguerite Buffet, a professional concert performer. the composer was seated beside her turning the pages of his masterpiece and later recalled being swamped in an indescribable uproar in which music, the shouts, cries and whistles of the audience united into a discordant harmony like the smashing of glass: 'curiously effective,' he thought." That was March 1920. I can't find a reference to the Picabia piece right now.

Satie's "furniture music" could be conceivably fall under the Dada rubric, although it preceded his actual involvement with Picabia, and that would already be after Picabia had broken with the movement. But it is somewhat in the spirit, although its intentions were opposite. Also Varese, but you know more about him than I do: he lived with Picabia in NY for a summer, when Dada was just getting going, and Picabia referenced a piece he never actually wrote more than once: a piece written for the water faucet. There is also that Duchamp cd you probably know about, but in that case, I think it is a whole piece constructed around an idea to be found among his notes, so to describe him as contributing to a Dadaist music would be stretching things.

If you include Schwitters' sound poetry as music, then there is lots of that sort of thing, but I'm not sure I would label it all as music: Tzara experimented a lot with African songs, nonsense words, etc. And Scwitters' sound poetry was inspired by the output of Raoul Hausmann, who actually precedes him. There is another Ribemont-Dessaignes thing that had everybody on stage go "krii krii krii krii" (or something like that) over and (again) over and over again, which annoyed Breton so much that he had to leave the theater for a while. (He hated music, which is why there is no surrealist music).

And there was also an actual Dada-foxtrot, which was written by a Dadaist, and was actually something of a foxtrot, but they were amused by it and welcomed the publicity.

Music and dancing played a part in the early Zurich stuff/Cabaret Voltaire, but it was mostly standard music-hall stuff (although the costumes got wild): that was the background of Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings (her singing drew a lot of the audience). Varese and Satie seem to come closest to a serious idea of Dada music, and Varese seems to have his foot equally in Futurism, and Satie was never really a Dadaist. There might also be something to look at with the Laban dancing troupe,who joined in with the Cabaret Voltaire sometimes. I don't know what they were doing in terms of accompanying music, or if they were even using any, but the fact that they probably made it subordinate to their movement would be relevant, but I haven't read up on them. The Zurich Dadaists were always trying to get the Laban dancers to go out with them. But on the whole, the Zurich stuff isn't even what people generally associate with Dada (in terms of negativity, confrontation, scandal, etc.).

There could have been more of a development at one point, but things went a different way: Marinetti came to Paris to give a lecture on new sounds and futurist music, etc., which by all accounts should have interested the Dadaists, except that he preceded his arrival with the statement that Dada was a development of Futurism, so all they had on their mind was sabotaging his lecture rather than paying any attention to what he was actually saying.

• -------

Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 01:01:14 -0400
From: Marc Lowenthal
To: Lukas Bergstrom
Subject: your email to Andrei

Andrei forwarded the email you sent to him, and it is of course fine by me if you felt like doing something with the info I sent him. My only qualm is that I had been typing off the top of my head, so, English and typos aside, I also didn't bother to back everything up with actual references, but that is probably obvious from the email itself. Scanning through it quickly, though, I see I had accidentally said that the Dadatrot was written by a Dadaist, when what I had meant to write was that it wasn't. My memory of the story behind that trot, though, is fuzzy. I believe it was a minor hit. There is a series of photographs existing of Gerhard Preiss, who went by the name of "Supermusicdada", doing the "Dadatrot" ^× he was a minor character in the movement, and is all but forgotten except for those pretty amusing photos, but he was a dancer and mime by trade, and did collaborate, and was a co-signatory for something.

I also looked up that Picabia piece: it was entitled "The American Nanny", and was indeed "sodomist" music; I don't have the original French title at hand, though, but memory tells me the word used for nanny was "nounou", which I mention only because one of the various "meanings" (or translations) of "Dada" is nanny (along with hobbyhorse, etc.).

And Marguerite would also accompany some of the readings of the manifestoes on the piano. But I guess that was kind of a standard thing back then (although it doesn't always get mentioned).

All best,

Marc

I'm listening to this now. Mr. Smith has apparently swallowed the idea that modern techno is a Serious Art Form hook, line, and sinker. It's painful to listen to Basic Channel fans talk about "the space between the notes"...yeah, man...

TICK TOCK BANG:
NOISE IN MODERN ART

First broadcast January 27, 1999
CBC Radio One, 9:05 pm

Novelist Russell Smith (How Insensitive; Noise) devises a sound essay examining Futurism, minimalism, poetic collage, abstract painting, and the most listener-unfriendly music ever recorded, the style called Rotterdam, beloved of art students and disenchanted punk-rockers.

(direct to audio)

I agree with his point about how modern techno is related to earlier movements in art, but it's a pretty obvious one, and he doesn't say much else. (Update: ok, he does say some interesting things, but none of them are about techno, nor anything after about 1950. [Tunnel vision? What's that?])

Great resource on Italian Futurism.

Futurism was an international art movement founded in Italy in 1909. It was (and is) a refreshing contrast to the weepy sentimentalism of Romanticism. The Futurists loved speed, noise, machines, pollution, and cities; they embraced the exciting new world that was then upon them rather than hypocritically enjoying the modern world’s comforts while loudly denouncing the forces that made them possible. Fearing and attacking technology has become almost second nature to many people today; the Futurist manifestos show us an alternative philosophy.

Too bad they were all Fascists.

Links to a bunch of breathless manifestos, including Russolo's Art of Noises.