Entries tagged with "music"
Tuesday 24 March 2009
Daphne Oram, Radiophonic Workshop founder and electronic music pioneer
This post is in honour of Ada Lovelace Day.
A big part of my fascination with electronic music is thanks to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which I was first exposed to as a kid via Tom Baker-era Doctor Who (I’ve written here previously about Delia Derbyshire’s arrangement of the theme) and the original Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series, which creator Douglas Adams conceived of in part as a radio play with the production values of a modern rock album. I learned later that they provided sound effects for The Goon Show and other BBC dramas.
But where did they come from? Who came up with the idea of a room tucked away in the Maida Vale Studios whose express purpose was to birth previously unimaginable sounds?
The answer: Daphne Oram. As a teenager she had become a studio engineer at the BBC, entering the traditionally male domain during the height of WWII. Her duties included balancing sound levels and “shadowing” broadcasts from the Albert Hall during the Blitz, keeping a disc of the same piece synchronized to allow the music to play on even if the concert was interrupted by German bombs.
Later, when audio tape recorders came to the UK, she spent nights hauling the machines together to work on projects before returning them to their various studios in the morning. Excited by the possibilities of tape and electronics as composing tools, she lobbied for a dedicated studio for such experiments, and at last in 1958 the BBC established the Radiophonic Workshop with Daphne Oram as its first studio manager.
It was her hope that the new studio would be a centre for art music, but to her disappointment, the music department regarded the Workshop merely as a source of background music and funny noises. She resigned in 1959, though her work there would be the inspiration for those who followed in her footsteps—and for generations of viewers and listeners who grew up hearing their work.
Meanwhile, Daphne Oram went freelance, setting up a studio, which she called Tower Folly, at a farm in Kent. There, she worked on soundtracks and commercial pieces as well as concert pieces, and began work devising a sound synthesis system which she called “Oramics”. It used patterns on 35mm film to generate and shape sounds—essentially an early method of creating sound graphically. (If you have RealPlayer, the BBC’s tribute has a great audio clip from 1972 of Ms Oram demonstrating her invention.)
She also wrote An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, a playful and eccentric little volume that mingles circuit diagrams, metaphysical musings, electronic music history, and design notes for the Oramics system, which she hopes is a step toward more “humanised” machine interfaces. It’s long out of print, but Dan Pope of the band Gusset has posted a scanned PDF version.
Paradigm Discs have released a two-CD set of Daphne Oram’s work called simply Oramics—the page includes a few downloadable MP3s. Her piece Four Aspects also saw release this year on the Sub Rosa compilation An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, Vol. 2. It’s currently the only piece you’ll find on iTunes. Her commercial pieces are light and blippy, perhaps a little reminiscent of her contemporary Raymond Scott’s, while some of the longer, “serious” pieces are moody and introspective, foreshadowing the ambient music of later decades. Here’s hoping for more re-releases to come.
Wednesday 27 August 2008
Arduino projects: a noisemaker and an analog-to-MIDI interface
I’m finally back to working on some electronic projects. First up, the Express, an analog-to-MIDI converter built around a Bare Bones Board, an inexpensive Arduino clone.
I’ve been making up some patches for my Evolver synth to use it as an effect on guitar or bass, and thought it’d be nice to have some sort of pedal to control it, along the lines of a wah or volume pedal. The desktop model of the Evolver lacks a pedal input, hence the Express (for “expression”, both of the musical and genetic kind - evolution, geddit?). Currently, it reads one analog pin and spits out continuous controller data. Nothing particularly spectacular there, but it did fit wonderfully into the sturdy steel case from a computer keyboard A/B switchbox. There’s room for lots more inputs, and eventually I figure it’ll sport an additional analog in and some footswitch inputs which will send things like note on/off messages.
I’m still new to making enclosures, and to working metal in particular - instead of grinding out a hole that was slightly too narrow, I used a drill, which grabbed hold of the edges and warped the heck out of the front panel. Panic set in for a moment, but I managed to bash the thing back into shape using a busted old hard drive(!) as an anvil.
Word to the wise: there are two incompatible standards for the wiring of expression pedals:
1/4” - tip to wiper / ring to +5V / sleeve to ground: Clavia, CME, Electrix, Emu, Kurzweil, Oberheim, Roland/Boss
1/4” - ring to wiper / tip to +5V / sleeve to ground: Kawai, Korg, Yamaha
The former arrangement allows you to use a standard normalling jack to connect the tip to ground by default, so the input doesn’t float if nothing’s plugged in. I’m using a Boss pedal now, but my other pedal is a Yamaha, so if I want to use it as a second input, I’ll have to wire up something to cross those connections.
Being easily distractible by possibilities - giant trackball! LED matrix! stepper motor-controlled time-lapse photography! - I’m desperately trying to focus on a couple of projects at a time. Arduino project number two at present is using it for ultra-cheap and dirty sound generation, with piezo disc speakers plugged directly into the digital outputs. A little hacked-together code, and voilà:
The Bee (MP3, 640k)
I call it the Bee, though “Mosquito” might have been more appropriate. Modulating the pulse width creates some nice motion, but there’s a lot more to do, like getting R/C filters to tame some of the harshness - it really is annoying after a while. Oh yes, and putting a switch on it to shut it up between tests. And, of course, buttons and knobs to play it with… maybe even some sort of acoustic treatment, like a resonating soundbox or a spring reverb.
Thursday 5 June 2008
Notes from the Open Everything unconference, and a proposal: the Really Open Stage
Lots of good conversations at Open Everything today. The Toronto event took place today at the Centre for Social Innovation, a community space and incubator for social entrepreneurs, and further events around the world are scheduled for the rest of this year.
It’s all about the concept of “openness” - as in open source software, as in open models of government (check out Melbourne’s city planning wiki), as in the growing movement for open science.
Among other things:
- Dr Sara Scharf spoke about modern nomenclature in biology (you know - kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) and how it came about through a process akin to open source today. I want to find out more about these parallel, failed attempts that tried to create unique names by encoding all distinguishing features of a species in the name itself, but I haven’t found anything online yet.
- Marsha Cummings is working on a documentary about Station 20 West, a community health and social services centre in Saskatoon, which includes a co-op grocery store in a neighbourhood where the last commercial grocery stores have pulled out.
- Jane Farrow spoke about Jane’s Walk, a day of self-organized neighbourhood walking tours in honour of the late Jane Jacobs. Held in May, the event has spread to other cities across Canada, and is starting to spread to the US as well.
- Mark Kuznicki told us about Metronauts, a unique experiment in civic engagement being carried out by Metrolinx, our fledgeling regional transit authority.
- Dan, one of the denizens of the Centre for Social Innovation, introduced us to the Open Salad Club. We’ve got a lunch club at my office, where several people take turns making lunch, but somehow the idea of preparing a big dish, even if it’s only every couple of weeks, seems a bit intimidating to me. But bringing in two ingredients for salad? Easy.
Perhaps most interesting of all was hearing from David Patrick about how he, a filmmaker by trade, happened to found the Linuxcaffe - to my knowledge, the world’s first “open source” coffee shop. Everything’s open - from the recipes to the software that runs the till. And naturally, there are open stage nights, not to mention DJ nights featuring Creative Commons-licensed music. But, I thought, what about a really open stage?
Some hastily scribbled notes: Collaborations of all sorts would be encouraged. Performers could share words and music, free for others to jam on, revise and rework. Recordings would be available online to listen to and remix, and on-line contributions could feed back into the open stage. There would be show and tell time for homemade musical instruments and other gear (not coincidentally, Richard Bishop has installed one of his wonderful basses in a lamppost just outside the Caffe). I’m not sure yet what structure, or how much structure, would be needed to get such an event to work well and flow. Just something to experiment with. Stay tuned…
Wednesday 24 October 2007
Wanted: self-similar audio waveform generation
I’ve been listening to a podcast from last year featuring Will Wright and Brian Eno, talking about generative art, and it gave me an interesting idea.
There have been a lot of attempts at so-called “fractal music” (here’s a bunch of links to several such projects), but all the ones I’ve heard just take a chunk of data from, say, the Mandelbrot set, and map it to one musical scale or another. It’s hard to really hear any self-similarity happening.
Which seems a lost opportunity. Think about it: sound waveforms themselves have fractal properties, because phenomena like vibration, resonance and oscillation happen on all physical scales. Speed up a thumping rhythm far enough and eventually it turns into a tone. And any waveform can theoretically be expressed as a mix of sine waves of different pitches. Fractal generation software lets you zoom in and out to see different fractals in near-infinite detail. What if we could do the same by speeding up or slowing down a piece of audio?
A big challenge, of course, would the problem of resolution. Whether you’re working with analog or digital audio, as you slow it down you’ll eventually start to lose detail in the high frequencies, until it all goes muddy. It’s akin to blowing up a photograph, until all you can see is the grain, or a bunch of great big pixels - or conversely, shrinking it until you run out of photograph. You could always pack in more data to describe a chunk of sound, but you’d end up with a gigantic file, and you’d always hit a wall somewhere. For best results the sound from our hypothetical audio-fractal would have to be computed on the fly.
Not a new idea, but as far as I know no one’s done it yet. There’s an entry for something called “All-Music-Set Player” at Halfbakery (a “communal database of original, fictitious inventions”) which is pretty close to the mark. I’m not interested in generating all music, just creating interesting sounds to explore.
Controls: speed, perhaps other parameters like density or default shape. It’d be interesting to work in some sort of “scrub” control too.
Issues: what language to write such a thing in? How do you describe the waveform? (some sort of generative grammar that sums wavelets?) How do you set up such a generator so that you can calculate a value for a sample at an arbitrary point on the time axis? Is it even possible? The fact that I can’t find any examples of fractal audio generators makes me wonder if the obstacle is simply one of processing power…
(The podcast that sparked all this, by the way, is from a seminar series put on by the Long Now Foundation: Ogg | MP3 | text summary I’m afraid of Spore. I think it might eat me.)
Friday 5 October 2007
Pine cones, glitches, and bringing video to the wilderness
Dorkbot Toronto, the local chapter of the network of “people doing strange things with electricity”, has a new slate of presentations, and last night was the first.
Patricia Rodriguez presented some of her video work using all sorts of cameras - film, video, digital - and taking advantage of each one’s unique features and most interesting ways of failing.
Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir’s work is about breaking down the perceived borders between nature and the human-made world, using electronic media installations in unexpected places. Wild Information Network, a solar-powered streaming audio server installed deep in the woods of the Catskills, plays sound pieces submitted by various artists, all with the notion of humans broadcasting to the broader environment, or vice versa. It and other pieces are catalogued on their site: EcoArtTech.net.
Stan Krzyzanowski showed his time-lapse work, ranging from handheld still camera shots, to mesmerizing animations created from successive sections of wood and other materials (notably vegetables and marbled cheese), to his recent projects involving cones from various sorts of tree. Pine cones, see, open up as they dry and fold closed again if you get them wet. And when sped up, the waving of a big pine cone’s scales takes on an eerie, almost animal aspect.
It’s beautiful stuff. Interval is a rather huge archive of all his experiments - click some of the “special sets” on the lower right. Most of the best stuff is on the “Favorites” page.
The sessions are held at InterAccess, a gallery at Queen and Ossington devoted to electronic media art. They offer a very cool series of workshops on topics like microcontroller programming, introductory electronics, pinhole photography, and hacking your bike to turn it into a mobile piece of sound art. I’m hoping to attend the ones on Pure Data and creating “resilient outdoor works”.
Tags for this entry:
animation,
art,
audio art,
dorkbot,
electronics,
food,
music,
natural structure,
nature,
physical computing,
public art,
time lapse,
toronto,
video
Tuesday 31 July 2007
Behold the two-digit display for the Box-O-Knobs (also seen here with its breadboarded ancestor). Each digit is run by one 74HC595 IC. Resistors everywhere. The reverse of the board is a bit hideous, I’m afraid, thanks to my still-amateurish soldering skills.
The vacated breadboard now sports five knobs (50k rotary pots), a MIDI socket and a photocell, which I’ve got controlling the sixth analog pin on the Arduino. A change on any input sends a MIDI controller message. The Evolver already has provision for reading in mod wheel, channel pressure (aftertouch), breath controller and foot pedal information, so I’ve got those wired in along with pitch bend and volume.
Next steps:
- figure out how to cut the appropriate slots in the top of a case
- wire up six slide pots as controls
- external input jacks that override the faders
- buttons!
- calibration and MIDI settings editable by the user, without having to recompile and upload new firmware.
Wednesday 13 June 2007
Two new toys, and no time to play with them…
One is that Evolver I mentioned. It’s the desktop version, a monosynth with no keyboard. First impressions:
Sturdy metal case. Knobs are rotary encoders, i.e. the clicky digital kind, and are a little dodgy - maybe this will improve with time? Cleverly designed interface cuts down costs and space by packing dozens of parameters into a matrix so you can adjust them all using eight knobs: hit a button to select a row, then turn the corresponding knob. It takes a little getting used to, especially since half of the parameters also require you to hit the Shift button to get at them.
It can make pretty analogue sounds, and glittering digital sounds, and frightening noise. It has two audio inputs for use as a signal processor, and it can do some wonderful spacy things to a fretless bass. Here’s one minute of me goofing around, using it as a bass synth, a ghostly lead, a crunchy bit-hacked rhythm, and some other effects. A bit of echo, reverb and compression added in Logic.
2007_0612_Evolved.mp3
The other toy: an Arduino USB board.
Essentially, it’s a little computer processor on its own board. You can program it from a Mac, Windows or Linux box using a simple language based on C. It has a whole bunch of digital input/output lines, and six analog inputs that can double as pseudo-analog outputs (pulse-width modulated and not suitable for audio, but they work fine for dimming LEDs, for example). If you don’t need the USB interface, there’s a tinier, even cuter version.
More sounds and updates to come.
Saturday 12 May 2007
I’ve been messing about with Flash and Actionscript lately, and one of my big motivations was was wanting to finish the Presonance site.
Some months ago, I started trading files with Rezo Largul, and we decided to use the name “Presonance” for our collaboration, and “Mycestene” as a name for an eventual CD. So far we’ve completed four tracks and have a couple of others in the works. The finished ones are now up, along with some pretty little visualizations (yup, there’s the Flash programming coming into play). Spacy analogue waltzes, mysterious orchestral arrangements colliding with mad electronic rhythms, a dose of Casseiopean free jazz…
Have a listen! You can download the tracks there too.
And in the acoustic world, another Toronto lamppost has been graced with its own built-in bass. Now that I’ve got a new digital audio recorder I’ll have to pay the new “Garrison Creek” bass a visit. All hail RGB for bringing more music to our parks and sidewalks!
15 minutes to a ribbon controller. Oh, rock on. I’d all but given up looking for an anti-static plastic bag with the right resistance (as suggested by the article from PAiA). Sadly I don’t have an SVHS tape to sacrifice at the moment, but I’m wondering if the tape in a DAT cassette will work.
[Edit: I tried the DAT. No dice. But graphite works! I scribbled a big black line on a piece of paper using a soft pencil, put a clip on either end, and used a bare wire as a wiper. Down side: it does get on your fingers. Go for the SVHS tape.]
Found the link on the companion blog to Make, O’Reilly’s wondrous gonzo DIY-tech magazine. Recent links include knitted fruit, the latest add-ons for your favorite microcontrollers, a gorgeous “steampunk” keyboard and a photo-gallery of some of the freakiest basses ever.
I did have a subscription to ReadyMade, the other big magazine on the DIY scene, but I won’t be renewing. Make gets a bit technical, but I like its philosophy better. It’s much more about hacking - finding out how everything works, and adapting it to your own purposes. ReadyMade is much more about household stuff, and so much of it is about cute-looking furniture that you can buy, er, ready-made. There are quite a few neat articles, and I certainly don’t mind the household angle, but I wish they’d go deeper: what sort of materials to use, designing for longevity, the philosophy behind everyday objects, that sort of thing.
Tuesday 5 December 2006
After a few weeks of non-stop construction at the new office, and every other kind of work at the old office, Sean and I took a sanity-mending holiday-in-town this weekend. I realized not long ago that these days we mostly see each other at work these days - I mean, at least we do get to see one another during the day, which I’m grateful for, but we’re seldom at our best.
Among other things, we caught up on some movie watching. Highlights: part one of a PBS series from the ‘80s about Joseph Campbell, which Sean’s mom sent him as a birthday present. Also Triplets of Belleville, which was loopy fun. I could have done without the, uh, frog scenes, but I’ll forgive those for the scenes of crazy old ladies (the Kickass Granny is one of my personal favorite archetypes) playing music on very do-it-yourself instruments…
Saturday dinner was at the Pomegranate, a lovely Persian restaurant on College St, and the food was beyond wonderful. I’m getting shivers just thinking about it. Really.
Sunday afternoon we trooped back to our office-to-be to do more drywalling and mudding. It’s turned out to be one hell of a project, this. But it’s going to rock.
And this evening J and I did some more planning for our upcoming CD, and tried out some new arrangement ideas. And I got back on the Song-a-day wagon:
Signals (1’13”)
I had iTunes pick out some tracks at random for inspiration. One was basically a bunch of random beeping by the BBC Radiophonic workshop, similar to what ended up in today’s song, and also echoed in the “signals” theme in the lyrics. The other was a folky tune by a friend of mine. The resulting song is rather similar to “Margins”, another Song-a-day from this past summer… they’d graft very neatly together.
Monday 14 August 2006
Neat project: Freqtric, a system that senses body contact and uses it to trigger MIDI drums (and presumably other instruments).
I don’t know if this is part of the device, or future plans for it, but I’d love to see a version that senses which two people have made contact - imagine a dance piece choreographed around a system like that! Ideally it’d be wireless, but that would kind of defeat the skin-resistance effect the Freqtric project uses. Maybe something using conductive gloves…
Taste of the Danforth was this weekend. Utter madness. One mile of Danforth closed while hundreds of thousands of people mill about lining up for cheap food and free samples. We caught a few minutes of music from a Cuban band, which caught my ear because I’ve been working on a new arrangement for “Catch-22”, our ostensibly Latin number. Sat up into the wee hours last night hammering out a bassline for it. It’s gonna groove.
Also, this week has been awesome for jamming. Found a very cool bunch of folks who are into free-form living room music-making. Very excited!
Also, my latest score from Active: DPDT switches, for the making of stomp boxes.
Also, I salvaged the caster “tree” from a dead swivel chair and a busted coat rack from the office, for the making of percussion stands.
I’ve rediscovered my true packrat nature. I’d been denying it for some years - partly I was paring things down, partly I was influenced by my SO’s firm belief in chucking things that don’t get used, partly it was because we move house every year or two. But now my packratting has purpose. I actually am building things with the junk I collect. Castoff things are an opportunity.
Building things from materials at hand - it’s a trait I inherited from my parents, and I think the whole attitude is one of their greatest gifts to me. Almost every piece of furniture we had was either a hand-me-down, bought used, or home-made. We just didn’t buy new things unless we really needed them.
- For much of my childhood, our couch in the living room consisted of sleeping bags laid on top of foam on a bed of old wooden microscope boxes (which were all filled with old books, or tools, or five-pound chunks of rock with embedded fossils).
- We had a little tractor/riding mower - that was bought new. But my dad built the trailer for it by sticking a box made of pegboard on top of an old lawn mower frame.
- Mum sewed stuffed toys, including a whole basket of vegetables and a completely awesome dragon. Most of my toys were homemade too.
Of course, this filtered through to me - I’ve mentioned the surplus walkman before. On the music-making front, I made use of: kitchen utensils; cassette tape loops; weird instruments my parents had collected, like a psaltery, a manjolin, an ocarina; an early PC speech synthesizer fed through a disembowelled toy spring reverb; sound effects records spun slow, fast, and backwards; an electric guitar with its signal crammed through a Commodore monitor and my mum’s walkman speakers (I toasted them, along with many other devices); and a practice chanter for learning the bagpipes. These all showed up in the recordings of the Spastic Attack Dogs (a grand high school band name if ever there was one) - who reunited after university, learned to actually play, and became Flickershow.
After I moved out, I snagged an old wooden door from Mum and Dad’s place, propped it up on a pair of cabinets, and used it as a desk. It worked well except for the layers of peeling paint on it, which got worse due to me spilling water on it and frequently using it for drum practice. When my BF and I moved into our first apartment together in Toronto, I decided it was time to strip the paint off it. It turned out there was a layer of milk paint on it that wouldn’t budge, so we gave up, sanded the bugger to a splotchy, hideous, but smooth finish, and got new legs for it at Ikea. I still get ribbed about the “Eli and his *&#$ door” incident, but it’s big enough for two monitors, a synthesizer keyboard, a printer and a mixer, and I never see the surface of it anyway.
So of course I was delighted to discover ReadyMade, which is a magazine aimed square at people like me. Looks very cool - I even tried to subscribe, but their online subscription system broke in several ways and I got fed up. Will have to let them know.
So here’s my ongoing list of electronics projects, in rough order of difficulty:
- An expression pedal (based around a fader rather than a rotary pot) - the electronics are bonehead simple; it’s the woodworking to make the rocker that’s the tricky bit. Starting with locating our hand saw.
- A box with a simple photocell circuit for use an an expression-pedal input. Controlling something like the FilterQueen will require a more complex thing with a transistor or two, but I ain’t ready for that yet.
- A ribbon controller. (All praise the late John Simonton.)
- A simple fuzzbox circuit or two, snagged off the web (there’s loads of DIY stompbox circuits out there).
- And way down the road: a “fretless” electronic instrument that feeds a signal from a piezo pickup through an analog-delay comb filter with the feedback turned way up, creating a ringing tone. The delay rate, and thus the pitch, is determined by a ribbon controller. I’m picturing two or three of these stacked together to resemble a very nerdy guitar. Left hand fingers notes on the ribbon-controller strings; right hand thumps and taps and scrapes a set of pads in which the piezo pickups are embedded. There’s another control for damping/feedback, but I don’t know how that’s handled yet. Lots of learning to go before I tackle that… but it’s one I’ve had in mind for a long while.
Wednesday 2 August 2006
It’s one of those nights. The only thing the cats are out prowling for is a spot with a decent breeze. Last night was the hottest night on record - 27 degrees.
So what the heck am I doing, sitting in the sweltering living room with a soldering iron?
It’s my first actually useful electronics project! (Well, unless you include the headphones I kept resurrecting back in high school - when the connector died, I put on a new one; when the cord itself died, I replaced it with a truly nerdy-looking one made out of black and red speaker wire, braided together. It went well with my walkman, which was ten dollars, as-is, at Active Surplus.)
Basically it’s proof-of-concept for some alternate controllers I’m thinking of making. The prototype: one 25k potentiometer soldered straight to one 1/4” tip-ring-sleeve plug. Tip goes to the wiper; ring and sleeve go to the fixed connections. (All parts came from Active Surplus - the day they close up shop is the last day I have any need to set foot on old Queen West.)
Plugged it into the volume pedal input on my Alesis keyboard, and tested it out in Cubase: worked the first time. The range is a bit broad - only about the middle 50% of the knob’s travel is useful, and it goes off the scale at either end.
But then came the test: plugging it into the expression pedal jack on my FilterQueen. And it worked like a charm. No range problems - just sweet, sweet, filter sweepin’ goodness. (Say, is the name FilterQueen a very roundabout “sweeping” -> “vacuuming” joke?)
For my next trick: two photocells wired back-to-back, also attached to a TRS plug. Tip goes to the junction between the photocells, ring and sleeve to opposite ends. My hope is that it’ll act as a resistor ladder with variable resistances on either side, and thus provide a slightly weird, wobbly and responsive controller. Onward!
Edit, 2:48am: YES. Works great on the Alesis. No go on the FilterQueen though - design tweaks are in order. But for now, I think it’s bedtime.
Saturday 22 April 2006
Bookmarked in case I ever get a little MIDI controller here: midiStroke, which will convert MIDI messages to keypresses in OS X. With a bit of work, it could be used to add some real, physical controls to Photoshop: twiddle a knob to adjust the flow on the Airbrush tool, that sort of thing. Pity there aren’t keystrokes for adjusting the current paint colour…
Also, I happened to stumble on a listing for a synth called the Dave Smith Instruments Evolver. Just reading about it makes me want to weep with joy. It really does sound like my dream synth: all sorts of modulation possibilities, external input (which can trigger or modulate in different ways), all sorts of feedback paths… And the editing software they offer lives up to the name ‘Evolver’ too, with genetic patch generation - you can generate new sounds a little like you were breeding plants.
All of which adds up to ‘lots of weird noises’ and ‘percussion processor’.
Of course, there are many other things I ought to be doing with my money: monitor speakers, a new mixer, MIDI controller, food, rent, etc. But: oooooh.
It’s not even that expensive.
*pines*
Thursday 17 March 2005
Konono No. 1 - electrified Congolese trance dance, with instruments (and microphones!) built from salvaged parts. The fuzzed-out sounds might fool you for a second into thinking it’s some bedroom electronica noodler, but the rhythms and vocals are from some place far, far funkier than that. Here’s a video clip.
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