#Grammys - Most Titanic 80s Synth Jam Ever on Video

Herbie Hancock - Yamaha KX1, Thomas Dolby & Stevie Wonder - Kurzweil 50, Howard Jones - Yamaha KX5.

After seeing some kind of Buffy musical, and the private parts of a 'lady' paraded on the awards this year, we're forced to think back to performances that have contributed to making music the innovative vehicle of expression of human excellence that it can be. Herbie Hancock, Thomas Dolby, Howard Jones and Stevie Wonder all show off together at the Grammy awards 1885, a moment that went down in history for the synthesizer. They play a kind of intense medley of all their own hits and jump from their own onto one another's keyboards (Wonder) atop a three-tiered riser, surrounded by at least fifteen keyboards. The collaboration was made possible with the posting of tapes between performers in preparation for the event.

Thanks to Rolling Stone Magazine for highlighting the event. A small dent in the mountain of hyper sexuality, clothes and exploitation that characterises music as 'entertainment' today.

"You're a DJ? Great. Get on Board" Tedious Space Race Earner Begins

"The First Black African DJ"

And of course the arts play a part in the attempt to make space alluring. After being mind-numbingly persuaded that you can make it back to earth from the edge of the atmosphere with nothing more than a cursory knowledge of Russian and pod controls with Gravity, the race is on to see who owns the moon (China wants to mine it we heard late last year), and Virgin is taking bookings for your "bored of life" flights into space as Virgin Galactic. So, if you're one of many who find it hard to sleep at night, the noise of regular holiday space flights taking off is soon going to be so loud you'd be awake anyway. Lord knows London Airport makes enough of a racket already. And so what if a rocket produces as much pollution as 80 transatlantic flights altogether? There's money to be made, and it's a new earner!

USA's fave action heroine filming the illusion safely on earth

Bullock hangs in space in comfy undies

Not a joke. Mars One is a Dutch corp trying to win contracts on Mars for "homes"

Well it's one way to deal with the much avoided issue of over population on earth. Latest news from BBC, Guardian and the like highlights that "a 25-year-old DJ from a South African township is set to become the first black African to go into space". And this depserate headline is apparently more newsworthy than the weird competition run last year by a corporation attempting to get people to accept one way (yes, one way) tickets to go and live another planet (Mars this time) in a settlement as part of their "experiment". What's that you say? Get Out clause? There's isn't one, now get in line guinea pig! No wonder this stupid idea of theirs didn't take off. Even though reportedly 850 Irish applied via Youtube to end their lives in what will no doubt be a terrible vacuum.

A DJ, rebranded as hero

Official poster for a horrible idea, where Gaga is Cruella and we are the new, pelted dalmations

As a result power-hungry corps like NASA are back to sexing up the idea of space travel as tourism, merely as a stepping stone towards getting us to sign our lives away in these entirely lethal atmospheres, just so they can market us every single part of our existence. Because in space even the air you breath costs you money. As does taking a walk and taking a piss. But don't worry! Even the alien Lady Gaga has been preparing to return to her natural habitat for a very special "first" - the first Virgin-sponsored pop concert in space! As if setting it out there would make it any better. And how has the queen of vapid drama been preparing? By doing special vocal
classes for weightless singing. How ground breaking. It would be far more dramatic, historically ground breaking if she set up an orphanage for some of Afghanistan's million orphans, complete with a nature reserve and an aquarium and a recording studio and staffed it with desperate interns from the fashion and music industry and actually paid them to work and blog from the opium centre of the world with the promise that after five years, they could all take their own goody bag complete with one orphan home.

So here in this interview the sweetly naive 23 year old DJ Mandla Maseko describes winning the one hour orbital trip as better than getting any of the jobs he's been going to interviews for and failing at. He says his mother predicted him winning a chance to become the Space Race's puppet black African DJ by telling him "don't worry something bigger will come your way" each time he was rejected. And what does his music sound like? Well, the article doesn't bother. It's not really about him and his work though is it? In case he's now happy to renounce any Djing he's done in the past, for which there seems to be no record, not even on his twitter feed, and tell the world "I can get a job as an astronaut now"!

Too right mate, space is open for business.

This Week's Free Lab Radio - Piercing Brightness by Shehzad Dawood

Still from Piercing Brightness

Poster: Piercing Brightness, based on one of the film characters

Writer and musician Kirk Lake has written a radio version of artist Shezad Dawood's UK film Piercing Brightness especially for Free Lab Radio tonight 11pm.

Piercing Brightness is a 2013 science fiction set in Preston, Lancashire directed by visual artist Shezad Dawood. 

Dawood chose to set the film, inspired by the sounds of Acid Mother's temple, in Preston as it is the place where more UFO sightings are reported in the whole of the UK.

Although the film was commissioned as a public art project, its starting point was Shezad’s longstanding interest in the music and the approach of Makoto Kawabata and Acid Mothers Temple. “All of my music is sounds that I hear from the cosmos - I just tune in and reproduce them,
like a radio receiver. I don’t think about my music. My daily struggle is to become a better, more faithful receiver.”  
Dawood also states that he uses the approach of receiving’: 

"Feeling a place by listening, chatting, recording, reading, replaying, letting the brain put things in and out of order, layering, hiding and making explicit, distorting and laying bare" (Piercing Bightness sleeve notes).

The soundtrack to the film features Acid Mothers Temple, Mordant Music, Alexander Tucker and Decomposed Orchestra and Raed Yassin and Omar Dewachi. The sound Design was by Tom Drew and we feature a couple of remixes at the end of the show tonight by Acid Man, a previous guest of ours on ResonanceFM.

The album appeared in Nov '13 as a vinyl, limited at 540 copies with artwork on the inner sleeve, 40 of which had a unique signed, screen printed cover by Dawood. The Outer sleeve was 280gsm white reverse board with custom gold sticker, stamped and numbered by hand. Inner sleeve: 140gsm coated card, black and white printed with sleeve notes by Kate Parker and track listings to one side, and film stills to the other.

Listen in 11-midnight on 104.4FM across London or online otherwise

ALBUM
Side A: 18:29
Track 1.
01:13 Acid Mothers Temple and The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. ‘Nam Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo (Part 1)’ (2008) duration 02:51 (original 1:05:15)
04:21 Mordant Music ‘Ghost Ship’ (2003) duration 02:17 (Original 09:45) - Previously released as a demo only

Track 2.
00:30 Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. ‘Interplanetary Love’ (2008) duration 03:40 (original 05:54 minutes)
03:41 Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. ‘Cometary Orbital Drive Suite (A) Light My Fire Ball’ (2008) duration 06:32 (original 12:50)

Side B: 19:51
Track 1.
00:08 Alexander Tucker & Decomposed Orchestra, featuring DCW Briggs and Mark Wagner. Recored live during the filming of Piercing Brightness (2011) duration 04:13 (original 06:19) - Previously unreleased
04:59 Raed Yassin & Omar Dewachi ‘Untitled’ (2011) duration 02:09 (original 03:16) - Previously unreleased
07:05 Mordant Music ‘Smasha’ (2004) duration 03:44 (original 04:45)
14:05 Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. ‘Pink Lady Lemonade - You’re From Inner Space’ (2011) duration 05:06 (original 20:39)

SINGLE
Side A: 6:54 ‘Glorious 100 Mix’
Side B: 6:39 ‘Automatic Extrication Mix’
Two versions mixed, mastered and cut by Radioactive Man include parts of Acid Mothers Temple ‘Nam Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo’ and ‘Cometary Orbital Drive Suite (A) Light My Fire Ball’, Mordant Music ‘Smasha’ and Alexander Tucker & Decomposed Orchestra.

#FreeLabRadio Podcast - Deep White Sound

Free Lab Radio - Deep White Sound by Fari

deepwhitesound (DWS) an international online label of free experimental music, sent us the best and the breadth of their collective works for this week's show.

DWS promotes more challenging work available for free download than most sites at the moment. A community of artists working at the fringe of art, technology and society - their practices range from interdisciplinary work in new media, installation and performance to generative and web-based mediums that "expand the possibilities of how sound-based art is experienced, distributed and discussed." This way they do this is not just apparent in the audio, but many works are accompanied by imagery or feature as part of longer listening experiences, or are live takes from performances.

DWS mission statement: Female, queer and ethnic minority experimental artists comprise a woefully under-represented and under-supported demographic and thus are also of particular interest to DWS. That stated, DWS seeks and supports work from all people, everywhere, who wish to broaden the scope of what is possible.

Thanks to DB Amorin for the selection. Amorin is founder of deepwhitesound, born in Honolulu, HI USA and currently lived in Portland, OR USA. An experimental artist himself he supports a small, but evergrowing international community and, in an age when many working with digital distribution fight for copyrights Amorin works to "propagate the ideology that art should be free to access and share". 

He currently works for ProjectGrow, an art studio and urban farm for adults with developmental disabilities and The Creative Music Guild, an all-volunteer non-profit organization facilitating creatively experimental performance in Portland, OR. As a visual and sound artist, his work typically deals with perception, identity and representation, using cheap reproduction methods and DIY techniques to explore malfunction and abstraction in form. For information visit www.dbamorin.com

Playlist 

Pregnant Spore (Chicago, IL USA) is the noise/audio collage/electronics project of Justin Marc Lloyd.

Yacob (Oakland, CA USA) is the solo project of punk / noise musician and multi-instrumentalist Jacob McCann.

Talk Midway (New York, NY USA) is the tape-loop / ambient project of musician Patrick Nylen.

Dreamboat Crusaderz (New York, NY USA) is the vocal loop project of queer composer Jesse

Matthias Boss (Biel, Switzerland) is an improvisational violin and viola player.

Marcello Magliocchi (Italy) is a percussionist using non-traditional objects and surfaces, such as bronze sound sculptures.

Lomz (Belgrade, Serbia) is the solo electronic project of Vukasin Stancevic utilizing digital processing and handmade instruments.

Lezet (Pozega, Serbia) is a one-man experimental music project ranging from processed piano to purely electronic compositions.

Idol Eyes (Phoeniz, AZ USA) is the experimental sonic awareness project of Andrew Craze.

Tomas Tello (Lima, Peru) is a DIY electronic performer and composer utilizing cassettes, radios and altered electronic devices.

New Fast (Oakland, CA USA) is a solo ambient / drone / r&b / tape music influenced project.

George Christian (Bahia, Brazil) is a self-taught guitarist and composer of works that push the boundaries of form and textures.

Colon Apostrophe Semicolon is a DIY sound artist experimenting in home-recorded loops for tape and electronics.

City Dragon (Paris, France) is the solo electronic noise project of Max Kaario.

Andrew and the TV Cowboys (Boston, MA USA) is the solo home recording project of Andrew Cosentino using field recordings and live instrumentations.

DAITSE (Antwerp, Belgium) is the moniker of self-taught pianist and generative sound artist Pieter Van de Walle.

Portland Bike Ensemble (Portland OR USA) is a decade-old loose collective of improvisational musicians using their bicycles as instruments.

Consumer (Portland, OR USA) is the moniker of Matt Palenske who creates abrasive, lo-fi, improvisational beats using his voice and DIY electronics.

Mason Butler (Minneapolis, MN USA) is a multi-instrumentalist and all-over experimental musician using found sound, electronics, lo-fi recording and non-traditional media for musical exploration.

Tonight's Free Lab Radio - Deep White Sound

11-midnight tonight we host sounds from a wonderful collective across the pond.

deepwhitesound (DWS) is an international online label of free, experimental music founded in 2005 based in USA. Born in Hawaii DB Amorin, DWS's founder, lives in living in Portland, Oregan.

DWS say their mission is bi-fold: to create challenging, experimental work and make it available via digital download for free - and to support and foster a community for artists working at the fringes of art, technology and society. 

DWS gives special attention to interdisciplinary work in new media, installation, performance as well as generative and web-based mediums that "expand the possibilities of how sound-based art is experienced, distributed and discussed". While female, queer and ethnic minority experimental artists comprise a woefully under-represented and under-supported demographic, they are of particular interest to DWS who champion the margins. However DWS state clearly that they "seek out and support work from all people, everywhere, who wish to broaden the scope of what is possible".

DB Amorin is the founder of deepwhitesound. Born in Honolulu, HI USA currently living in Portland, OR USA, Amorin runs deepwhitesound to support the vision of experimental artists, as well as to propagate the ideology that art should be free to access and share. He also currently works for ProjectGrow, an art studio and urban farm for adults with developmental disabilities and The Creative Music Guild, an all-volunteer non-profit organization facilitating experimental performance in Portland, OR. As a visual and sound artist, his work typically deals with perception, identity and representation, using cheap reproduction methods and DIY techniques to explore malfunction and abstraction in form. For more information and samples of his visual art, visit www.dbamorin.com

Free Lab Radio repeats Thursday 2am

 

Tonight's Playlist:
Yacob (Oakland, CA USA) is the solo project of punk / noise musician and multi-instrumentalist Jacob McCann.

Talk Midway (New York, NY USA) is the tape-loop / ambient project of musician Patrick Nylen.

Dreamboat Crusaderz (New York, NY USA) is the vocal loop project of queer composer Jesse

Matthias Boss (Biel, Switzerland) is an improvisational violin and viola player.

Marcello Magliocchi (Italy) is a percussionist using non-traditional objects and surfaces, such as bronze sound sculptures.

Lomz (Belgrade, Serbia) is the solo electronic project of Vukasin Stancevic utilizing digital processing and handmade instruments.

Lezet (Pozega, Serbia) is a one-man experimental music project ranging from processed piano to purely electronic compositions.

Idol Eyes (Phoeniz, AZ USA) is the experimental sonic awareness project of Andrew Craze.

Tomas Tello (Lima, Peru) is a DIY electronic performer and composer utilizing cassettes, radios and altered electronic devices.

New Fast (Oakland, CA USA) is a solo ambient / drone / r&b / tape music influenced project.

George Christian (Bahia, Brazil) is a self-taught guitarist and composer of works that push the boundaries of form and textures.

Colon Apostrophe Semicolon is a DIY sound artist experimenting in home-recorded loops for tape and electronics.

City Dragon (Paris, France) is the solo electronic noise project of Max Kaario.

Andrew and the TV Cowboys (Boston, MA USA) is the solo home recording project of Andrew Cosentino using field recordings and live instrumentations.

DAITSE (Antwerp, Belgium) is the moniker of self-taught pianist and generative sound artist Pieter Van de Walle.

Portland Bike Ensemble (Portland OR USA) is a decade-old loose collective of improvisational musicians using their bicycles as instruments.

Consumer (Portland, OR USA) is the moniker of Matt Palenske who creates abrasive, lo-fi, improvisational beats using his voice and DIY electronics.

Mason Butler (Minneapolis, MN USA) is a multi-instrumentalist and all-over experimental musician using found sound, electronics, lo-fi recording and non-traditional media for musical exploration.

From DB Amorin
www.deepwhitesound.com

We Thought We'd Hate This, But...

....JUNGLE are super smooth. JUNGLE are fiiine.
They recall everything your parents' generation were excited by in soul and frame it all in the contemporary context of DIY, tracksuit culture and pimped out ghetto while extracting nearly all of the electronica employed later by disco and even their contemporaries like Metronomy. Instead JUNGLE lay bare vocals that beckon listeners out of their hardened shells, 'til they might forget they are just urban rats struggling to survive. Suddenly the listener is both soaring and walking on the pavement at the same time. Check out Drops if you're still skeptical. And what we mistook for arrogance turns out to be a really homegrown self assurance, that is not confrontational. In fact there's a humility in Jungle's videos, real humour, mock arrogance, eye candy, delicious design and style. This below and Platoon are masterpieces featuring dance routines that are worthy of comparison to Fat Boy Slim's Weapon of Choice, delivered by arch-interpreter Christopher Walken.
We thought we'd hate it, the way it was presented by one platform, but looking across them all and hearing the tracks themselves we realise, as JUNGLE might themselves sing, we're in LURVE.

Tonight's Free Lab Radio: 11-Midnight, El Mahdy Jr

El Mahdy Jr Release on Boom Arm Nation

Bad Infinity Selektion made for Resonance104.4FM is an hour of bespoke music by producer El Mahdy Jr, Algerian based in Turkey "el-mahdy jr. is a beat producer who is always attracted by the sound and music of places not touristy nor otantic but f*cked up places aiming a story telling act by sampling the 3rd world attitude."

Free Lab Radio Show Schedule - Sat nights til Feb 1st

Free Lab Radio
Broadcasts Sat nights 11-midnight, repeats Thursdays 2am on 104.4FM or LISTEN HERE

El Mahdy Jr. on Vinyl

 Sat 11th
No DJs - A bespoke hour of music produced for Free Lab Radio by Turkey-based Algerian producer El Mahdy Jr.  Signed to Boomarm Nation, El Mahdy Jr. has collaborated with ResonanceFM in the past, even submitting tracks for their radio presence at Art Dubai 2012. We'll certainly be taking him to Art Dubai 2014 as well. Super sounds on the very cutting edge of Middle Eastern and Pan-Arabic modern electronica.

Sat 18th
Deep White Sound - Oregan, USA-based free experimental label Deep White Sound supports a community of artists working at the fringe of art, technology and society. Hawaii-born founder DB Amorin is a sound artist and social activist, and he sent Free Lab Radio his selected playlist on request. The mission of DWS is to make challenging, experimental work available via digital download for free and to support and foster a community for artists working at the fringe of technology, the arts and society.

Sat 25th
'Piercing Brightness' - Artist Shezad Dawood and musician/writer Kirk Lake collaborate to create a special radio version of their film 'Piercing Brightness' for Resonance104.4FM. This eerie and engaging science fiction film is set in Preston, Lancashire where the highest number of UFO sightings are reported in the UK, and features an original soundtrack by Makoto Kawabata / Acid Mothers Temple (Japan).

1st February

Digital-Zouk - DJ Umb prvides an hour of Zoukesque music: "As usual recorded live on semi-ancient machinery: Pioneer CDJ’s 1000 MK2 & Pioneer DJM 600 – 1st cut/live recording." Mastered by JSTJR, "Zouk Bass" is a term coined by Portugal's Buraka som Sistema during their infamous Boiler Room session in Feb 2013 to describe updated club sounds of an Angolan genre called "Tarraxinha" or "Tarraxo".

The Music Video and Art

Labor45 - Electronic Toys

We're loving German experimental artists Labor45, who collaborate here with Spenza to create this u:ber video to Take Me To Your Leader. As nostalgically 80s and so German as it is, flashing influences of the visual aesthetic of Kraftwerk and sounding like something you couldn't quite put in a box. Following is their video and a little about them but first here are some thoughts their video has raised:

With new media art moving in a wider, yet more confluent direction and with viewing platforms diversifying all the time, the rise of MTV in the late 80s and capitalists like Lady Gaga who claim to create "art" in their music and videos has done little to influence the genre. Instead the area in which video art and the music video have blurred is one which was touched by enduring acts such as Kraftwerk and in the art world, and by the work of Nam June Paik of Fluxus in the art world who was part of a movement challenging conventions of art and music in public space. Didn't John Cage say that one way to write music was to study Duchamp? While the music video generally tends to allude to or add to the narrative, it can also transpose a music video from the realm of 'music' to 'art', and vice versa while contributing to a growing pool of work that celebrates and aesthetic driven by current trends in technology (going right back to Channel 4's The Chart Show, 1986 where videos were linked by their then state of the art computer graphics).

As the conventions of viewing video art change, moving out of the gallery online to anywhere one can fix a screen (recent 'public art' projects for London regeneration saw our own video streamed on loop in a run down estate in North London), the language of video art also changes. Yet is has never quite broken away from convention or explored the possible enough. Only new developments in technology and the occasionally brilliant directive (see Michel Gondry's video for Bjork's Declare Independence - which we post on here some years ago, who also plan to screen their new 40 minute 3D film in museums rather than any other kind of venue) push the medium of music video into the realm of art. Still, it is a blurred line that is as yet unexplored in any conclusive manner.

Labor45 are Barbara Herold, Katrin Petroschkat, both living in Munich . Their work is often about music, the reception and production of as well as where new date formats and digital advancements are heading:
"LABOR 45 is about artistic research on today's technical features and aims to find new possibilities for usage and expression from within the medium."

Spenza on the other hand are interested in sound, with limited but early work in visuals seemingly led by algorhythmic pulsing and basic visual programme coding, going back to 2010: