Today on the Corner Pocket Radio Program is our second installment of the “Live From Murder Mountain” Series. We will be remote broadcasting LIVE from Murder Mountain headquarters from 5-7pm on todays program.
Our featured guest this week is Rooftops, Bellinghams purveyors of twinkling math-rock and calculus inspired riffs and taps! This band features veteran noodle’r Mark Dietrich of Lands Farther East fame, as well as newer hamSTAR transplants Wendelin Wohlgemuth and Drew Fitchette.
Listen online at www.hollowearthradio.com from 5-7pm TODAY! (or for the rebroadcast Thursday May 1st 2-4pm)
A straightforward mashup/screw, 50 cent’s “In da club” with Lawrence Welk’s “Bubbles in the wine”. Pitched 50 down, and fudged a few things, and voila!
This week (April 22nd 7pm PST and April 26th 3pm PST), we will be airing an amazing treasure that Jacob Smigel found: a little cassette tape he’s dubbed “Band Nerd Love”.
He explains:
This full-length break-up/love-letter-cassette is straight out of the mid-80s and steeped in the worst kind of self-absorbed, fanciful, sniffling high-school bullshit you’ve ever heard. I hope everyone can tune in to hear Martin’s last tape letter to his underclassmen sweetheart: Elizabeth. In it, Martin speaks mostly in cliches as he pleads for remembrance, gets really creepy, vividly recounts his pseudo-sexual dreams, and finally strives for the maximal emotional impact by playing (and talking over) some Lionel Richie. This find is sure to bring you back to the time when you were a young band nerd too. You’ll remember how grown up you felt, and how you hated everyone but at the same time wanted them to like you. Yes, you’ll grit your teeth, squirm, and curse Martin for this, but it’s not his fault. He was just having a bad summer.
Just to get a sense of how amazing this tape letter find is, you can listen to a sneak preview: Band Nerd Love Clip.
Jacob inspired us at Hollow Earth Radio to put together our own found sound album, so this is really special that we get to share one of his latest finds in it’s entirety! Don’t miss out! Oh, and since Lionel makes an appearance in tonight’s broadcast, I thought it appropriate to seek out this video for your viewing pleasure:
Filed under: Uncategorized — Garrett Kelly @ 1:09 pm
Suzanne from local folky punk band, Dance Music for Depressed People (aka DMFDP) is making neato monthly video podcasts that explore people doing cool things in Seattle. (Disclosure: She just interviewed us recently). This month’s topic was to learn about the Punk Rock Flea Market that Josh Okrent started in the basement of the Low Income Housing Institute downtown. Anyone have a million bucks they wanna put down to buy that building so it doesn’t ironically become condos?
Last night, I was fortunate enough to experience Daniel Johnston’s performance at Neumo’s in Seattle. Along with eight bottles of water lined up in a row, he brought two song journals on stage with him that he referenced the whole evening. He began one song with a warning that part of the lyrics were torn out of the journal so he didn’t know how far he’d make it through the song. He seemed to do just fine. The Dead Science, who was one of the opening bands, also performed as Johnston’s backup band for part of his set. In the middle of the set in order to introduce them, he had to ask them what their band name was again, and the guitar player graciously whispered in his ear to remind him. If you haven’t seen the documentary about this guy, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, you should. Here’s a bit of the show from last night:
This is the other half to the project outlined in Ambers post below. I actually prefer the unwanted one. It can be found at ubuweb
“This survey confirms the hypothesis that today’s popular music indeed provides an accurate estimate of the wishes of the vox populi. The most favored ensemble, determined from a rating by participants of their favorite instruments in combination, comprises a moderately sized group (three to ten instruments) consisting of guitar, piano, saxophone, bass, drums, violin, cello, synthesizer, with low male and female vocals singing in rock/r&b style. The favorite lyrics narrate a love story, and the favorite listening circumstance is at home. The only feature in lyric subjects that occurs in both most wanted and unwanted categories is “intellectual stimulation.” Most participants desire music of moderate duration (approximately 5 minutes), moderate pitch range, moderate tempo, and moderate to loud volume, and display a profound dislike of the alternatives. If the survey provides an accurate analysis of these factors for the population, and assuming that the preference for each factor follows a Gaussian (i.e. bell-curve) distribution, the combination of these qualities, even to the point of sensory overload and stylistic discohesion, will result in a musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably “liked” by 72 plus or minus 12% (standard deviation; Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic) of listeners.”
Russian conceptual artists recorded a song in the mid-1990s based on a survey of what the most hated kinds of music were. David Soldier, another conceptual artist based in NYC who also spearheaded the amazing Thai Elephant Orchestra, basically took the results from the survey and created a song that embodied all of the most despised elements of bad music. For instance, it was shown that people hated music about holidays, choirs, and kids singing. So there was a passage in the song that included a children’s chorus singing about Labor Day.
Here is an account of how Soldier created the song:
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and “elevator” music, and a children’s choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance–someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example–fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population would enjoy this piece.
You can listen to the Most Unwanted Music here. Enjoy. (I actually like it, but then again, I am an accordion player.)
