Hi Readers,
Sorry for the slow turn out! I’m looking for more submissions.
Here’s another link dump of things that have entertained me in the past few weeks! Please send me things.
“My first experience with eki-melo was a trip to Takadanobaba on the Yamanote Line. A fan of Tezuka Osamu and an expat living in Osaka, I had attended a guest lecture on Tezuka’s works while I was in Tokyo to pick up a friend at the airport. In a Tezuka sort of mood, I travelled to Takadanobaba Station prior to the event, as I’d read somewhere that theTetsuwan Atom (known in English as Astro Boy – Tezuka’s most famous manga) theme could be heard there. It was my third visit to Tokyo, but the first time I had paid much attention to the songs that played as the train departed. It would be much longer before I knew them by the title eki-melo.
On that same trip, we stayed in a ryokan in Kamata, in the southern part of Tokyo. The melody at this station, Kamata Koshin-Kyoku (a theme from the film of the same name), was a haunting sort of song that I became attached to during our 3-day stay. It always seemed to start playing ominously before we could reach the top of the stairs, causing us to nearly fall down them trying to reach the platform before song’s end. Wanting to use Kamata Koshin-Kyoku for a ringtone but unable to find a suitable-quality recording, I ended up buying a few melody CDs from Amazon Japan, and this blog was born. I hope you can find some enjoyment from the recordings you hear here, especially if you are a visitor or resident of the city. Though I no longer live in Japan, when I hear these sounds, I am transported back to Tokyo, hurrying to catch the next train.”
120 Years of Electronic Music* is a project that outlines and analyses the history and development of electronic musical instruments from around 1880 onwards. This project defines ‘Electronic Musical Instrument’ as an instruments that generate sounds from a purely electronic source rather than electro-mechanically or electro-acoustically (However the boundaries of this definition do become blurred with, say, Tone Wheel Generators and tape manipulation of the Musique Concrète era).[…]
Helena Hauff is Just Helena Hauff!
But who can dance in step? How should that even be possible? The beautiful thing is, that everyone has his own time. […] I wasn’t at all talking about being out of time, but that you are always very concentrated while playing records, and then there is this moment where you have to let it out. You are suddenly bouncing to your music.
Oftentimes I’m quite drunk, when I’m playing records. Not always, but sometimes. It’s funny, the thing concerning time. I know this incredible Jazz drummer. Once I explained to him what DJing is all about, and how you can mix records together on the basis of 4/4 time . He immediately came up with these fantastic ideas, like how to mix a 1/360 time together with a 4/4 time, by bringing them together at the 87th place. That surely would sound like you didn’t know how to mix. I thought the idea proper, how someone who understands rhythms so much better than anyone else I know could imagine such weird stuff when dealing with records. At home I then tried to calculate how quick I had to play one record, and how slowly I had to play the other, to get the records to run parallel. Maybe then I would dance in step.
Show Report ♪?
INTERVIEW: MUYASSAR KURDI 28TH OCTOBER, 2015
“I realized I didn’t want to be hiding behind my instrument; I wanted to present a transformative experience that transcended; I wanted a cinematic experience. I knew there was so much more to it, and I didn’t want to hide from myself or others. I want to expose my soul; I want to take off my many masks. We all have them, and I am not ashamed.”
I saw Muyassar Kurdi at the Silent Barn on May 24th, 2016. I haphazardly entered the venue the first few minutes into her set. Other than the noise that was trickling out of the speakers, it was dead quiet. In the right hand corner of the room there was a small light with a diffused throw, the luminosity of the sort that you would see under your eyelids. Muyassar was standing there, making small micromovements, sometimes leaning forward, sometimes bending backwards in such a way that a tree will start to dip when there is too much snow on its branches. Interspersed with the percussive glottal constrictions and contractions, ascendant and descendant microtonal shifts in her long tones, she would introduce rich textures, overtones, flutters often in the form of controlled expirations. What really surprised me as an audience member was the integrated practice of her body performance and the music I was hearing at that moment. It appeared that the input of the instrument that she was using was a photosensitive diode. She seemed to be modulating that input (and therefore the light) through small, slow gestures that would change how the light was thrown in the room or towards her instrument. She looked absorbed in the exploration of sounds and movement . It was really entrancing! – Music Editor
Muyassar Kurdi will be playing the Ende Tymes Festival VI: Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation on June 3rd, 2016 at the Silent Barn! Please go see her!
Muyassar Kurdi is a musician, performance artist, dancer, filmmaker and educator from Chicago, Illinois. In performance, she explores the relationship between abstract sound and metaprimordial movement, obliquely confronting ideas of masculine subjugation by reappropriating and then distorting hegemonically sexualised figurative motion and juxtaposing it with random, abrasive and jarring acoustic and electronic sound components along with wordless vocalisations.