Delicious song by Shlohmo ‘Just Us’ and a beautiful video by Arthur Chance
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=201304746601333
My work is being shown this weekend in Dave Griffith‘s and Joe Duffy’s space at Rogue Studios. Come down for a peek!
Tripped over this on the internet at the weekend….experimental analog sampling with modified vinyls.
Sectors from a vinyl record are cut and replaced by pieces with exact shape from other records. When played in a vinyl player the needle follows the grooves from both sectors creating sampled tunes or loops. Find out more here.
The tunes in the video:
Supertramp – Crisis? What Crisis?
Paul Anka – My Way
Chicago – Chicago X
Lil Jon – Kings of Crunk
I also realised that FACT mixes can be downloaded and have been enjoying Karizma and Patten‘s mixes today. Karizma is a producer but he’s also a DJ who uses one CDJ as a sampler through multiple tiny blends and dramatic tempo switches, cutting from house to hip-hop and back in the bat of an eye. I’m not sure how it’s done but I do know it sounds nice in my shell-likes! Patten has a debut album coming to look and listen out for. Apparently he’s somewhat of mystery…I’m intrigued.
This is where I am headed tonight armed with my new camera kit.
http://www.groovement.co.uk/2011/09/tonight-daedelus-x-groovement-7pm-bst-8pm-eur-2pm-ny-12pm-la/
Pretty excited about the chance to see Daedelus again…last time was a little hazy at a Future Everything night in May. The audiovisual performance tonight at Soup Kitchen encompasses Daedelus’ awesome mixing and Archimedes, an array of moving mirrors conceived by Daedelus, Hoya Hoya visual artist EMN and David Leonard. It’s 9-12pm and there are no tickets it’s just elbows at the ready in the queue!
Running off on a tape tangent, I saw VHS Head at Beatherder Festival and he was awesome! It was early on the Friday evening in a smallish tent but I made a beeline for him after reading that he makes music by sampling old videos. He has an album out called ‘Ribbons of Gold’, but I recommend seeing him live. He was even kind enough to let me have a look at his laptop while he was djing so I could see the baffling stuff he was doing. He is apparently from Blackpool, awww a northern boy as well.
I’ve just bought a documentary film by filmmaker Rollo Jackson called ‘Tape Crackers’ on DVD from Trilogy Tapes after reading an article in the Guardian Film and Music. I was instantly excited about this film, I’ve been thinking about the redundancy of tapes for a while, mainly in the context of video, as most new video cameras now hold SD card slots and mini-DV becomes less used. As part of my day job, I look after a broadcast quality video production kit, and we received a free book with the camera. Looking through the book I found some sections hilarious and fascinating…
The book is by Barry Green, published by Fiercely Independent Films inc. Texas, USA, in 2010, ‘A Guide to the Panasonic HMC150, HMC80 and HMC40 cameras’. For example, he writes:
” Replacing tape is a challenging, even daunting idea for some people to accept. After all, tape has been the default medium of recording since the dawn of the video camera era. Taking away tape makes some people uncomfortable. But just as word processors replaced typewriters, and telephones replaced telegraphs, solid state memory recording will replace tape. It’s inevitable, it’s already happening and it’s liberating. Among initial user reports from new P2 and AVCCAM owners, most reviews say something along the lines of “I never want to see a tape again.”
This film instantaneously attracts my love of changing technology and supposedly ‘obsolete’ media. Dan Hancox writes in the Guardian article that the word ‘tape cassette’ is being removed from the Oxford English Dictionary, whilst the word ‘sexting’ is a new entry. Which pretty much sums up the flavour of our supermodern digital times.
It’s what’s on the cassettes in the film ‘Tape Cracker’ which is also intriguing. The film focuses on 31 year old Mike Finch, who spent the 1990s and early 2000s recording onto tape from south London pirate radio stations as well as collecting hundreds of tape packs, semi-official from major jungle, drum’n'bass, happy hardcore, garage and grime raves. The collection is almost too vast to be accurately catalogued and many of the tapes are unlabelled, with Finch reckoning that he has around 2000+ tapes in boxes, bin liners, holdalls and a chest at his parents house.
The film links in with a campaign I ran with two other postgraduate students at Manchester Metropolitan University this summer, to save a collection of over 300,000 slides dating back nearly 60 years from basically being thrown into a skip. Find out more about this project at saveourslidelibrary.wordpress.com. We encouraged staff and students to make selections from the archive in an active protest and managed to generate enough interest to save the collection from the bin. So all in all this film seems like an instant ‘must watch’ for me, I just hope the DVD arrives in the snail mail quickly, if the film had been in a downloadable format, ironically I would have leapt at the chance of owning it in minutes and watching it tonight!
I always love finding new music and discovered these monthly mixes this week on www.factmag.com
I have pretty much had the Air France and the Shlohmo mixes on repeat the last 24 hours. Air France are a Swedish duo, I’m loving their steel drums, balearic beats, a dash of dubstep and general happy poppy juicy sounds. On the bus to uni today in the rain their delicious sonic treats cancelled out any ‘end of summer?’ weather sadness I may have usually felt.
LA based DJ Shlohmo’s mix uses old (sometimes broken) cassette tapes so it’s basically genius in my book. Check him out at http://www.myspace.com/shlomoshun
