RIP Maryanne Amacher

1943 - 2009

Maryanne Amacher sadly passed away today. She had suffered a series of strokes caused by a hematoma after falling down at a Bard faculty party in July. Known for her work with dissonance tones, notably her Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear) disc, Maryanne studied the phenomenon of additional tones created by the acoustics of your actual ears, which creates the illusion that your hearing the sounds coming from inside your head. Personally I never really had the right stereo system to have the full experience, but if you do, throw on Sound Characters at the right volume level and things get weird.

You will be missed.

Portland Screwed

DJ Yo Yo Dieting - Dormant Mirrors/Drum Cassette 2009

It's a know fact that people in Portland Oregon smoke a lot of weed. They also smoke a lot of meth, but that's not the case here. Local Noise dude Glamorous Pat aka Glamburger Patty aka Sisprum Vish combines broken electronics and Stoner-Rap to create screw soundscapes that sound even more fucked up than even the most warn-out Screw tape. Lots of Rap, distortion and delay pedal.

I promise to put up more Portland music soon, there are some weird things going on out there.

From Cage to Cam'ron

Recently discovered that the great UBU Web archive has merged with Continuo, an experimental music blog that I was unaware of till now. This meeting has caused for a huge collection of 20th Century Classical, Music Concret, Sound Poetry, and so on, available for you to download for free. Many (maybe all?) of the recordings are out of print, mostly ripped from vinyl or cassette, or are open source. There is even a category on the site called "incredibly strange music", which surprisingly Milovan Srdenovic doesn't seem to be filed under (his albums are on the site under something else). I thought I'd refresh my memory on what the archive holds and spit a little game in the direction of a few notable recordings that changed my life in high school. UBU Web's content is more educational-use open source material, while much of Continuo is a bit more on the outsider tip. Each side has their gems, and lucky for us a lot of this important work has been made available to us for free.


Mick Jagger - Invocation Of My Demon Brother OST 1969

Jagger made this laboratory sounding piece on a Moog for Kenneth Anger's film comprised of outtake footage from the then stolen Lucifer Rising reels. A really static soundtrack Jagger probably made while he was balling groupies in a white coat inside the Cal Tech sound studios. A hypnotizing composition that sounds ether like a broken tape loop or a data tape played through a stereo. It's conceptual worth won't buy much, but it's simplistic Crowleyite eeriness makes one of Anger's least interesting films worth watching (hear also: Lucifer Rising, Scorpio Rising OSTs).


Robert Ashley - The Wolfman 1964

Before Rob Ashley got really into Opera and started making goofy self-help records, he was the fucking man. It's no mistake that Michigan is the Noise state, for back in 1964 this Ann Arbor native already had a microphone down his throat (no homo?). A pretty terrifying record that predates Whitehouse, Masonna, and anything of it's kind. I heard he almost replaced John Brannon in Negative Approach once. His 1979 piece Automatic Writing is one of the best recordings ever, but I'll touch on that later.


This Heat Mario and Mario Boyer Diekuuroh/Albert Marcoeur Split Cassette 1982
I was pretty familiar with This Heat's music by the time I had heard this, but it didn't matter much for this ones not so studio oriented and composed like their other records. Ghanaian musician Mario Boyer Diekuuroh showed up to jam with the band and made up half of their split side to the tape. Fela Kuti rhythms that sound like (and actually were) recordings from a Camberwell meat freezer. Albert Marcoeur's side is pretty forgetable.


Takehisha Kosugi - Catch Wave 1975

A very important figure in not just Japanese, but experimental music in general. Kosugi founded Group Ongaku in 1960 along with Yasunao Tone, the first noted improv group in Japan. His Catch Wave LP is more in the vein of his later group, the Taj Mahal Travelers, so lots of treated instruments, oscillators, and radios. As in with Merce Cunningham's Dance Company as it is with Julian Cope's Japrocksampler.


Andy Guhl and Norbert Moslang - Voice Crack 1984

Not the first, or even the best Voice Crack recording, but a group that certainly deserves a nod. Playing together since the early 70s, Andy Guhl and Norbert Moslang formed the group for this album which was the first in a series of bent improvised electronics records spanning almost three decades. A table full of cracked battery-powered household items inspired in part by the live electronics recordings of David Tudor and co. For further listening seek out the duos collaboration with Japanese turntablist Otomo Yoshihide Bits, Bots & Signs.

Played This Game Once Before

Terry Riley - Your No Good (from Your No Good/Poppy No Good 1967/2004)

An important and rather slept on piece of music thats essential for fans of edits. A crate digger classic Latin Soul record, or rather two of them slowly distancing themselves from one another creating primitive tape echo that eventually falls in on itself. The drifting away Harvey Avern Dozen bands are born Siamese twins in the belly of a Moog and are killed off in the end in a storm of white noise. I guess a lot of people still get off to In C and Music for 18 Musicians but No Good confuses me more than all that minimal synth jargon and therefore is better to these ears.

Toshiya Tsunoda on Field Recording

Over at Erstwhile Records founder and good friend Jon Abbey's Erstwords, the focus to form a collection of great writings on experimental and more notably improvised music is really coming together. Recently Japanese field recording artist Toshiya Tsunoda contributed a great write-up on why he does what he does, and it's connections to experimental music. If you don't know his wonderful Scenery of Decalcomania from a few years back it's best you hear it. Beautiful compositions with tiny mics that basically play themselves. Imagine listening to one of those "pure moods" enviromental sounds records if you had the hearing range of an ant.

Thanks to Jon for putting this one up and his wife Yuko for translating, and the two of them for taking me to the best Thai restaurant I've ever been to out in Queens.

Modern Primitive Bedroom Music

Smegma - Beauty School (from Smell the Remains 1988)

In an effort to make sense of my love for all things bent, I can't go on without dropping a little knowledge on one of the most important bands that ever existed. Those that came to this page for booty jams might want to ignore this one, but if you like DJ Milton, Mannie Fresh, Gucci Mane, and slowed down Rap music you got to face the facts, you like weird music.

Smegma, along with the man that named this website pretty much decided my direction in life early on. Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy and the above album Smell the Remains basically destroyed music for me at age 15 and lead me on my search for the most fucked up music I could find throughout high school. It took a minute to realize that I could find much of what I was looking for in the Hip-Hop cassettes I had stolen from my art teacher prior to these discoveries, so for a good chunk of that time I was filling my head with a lot of for lack of a better word experimental and more notably improvised music, and still do today. iI might not show within the music I post about here, but I have spent a lot of time listening to mic feedback and tape loops, and I don't mean King Tubby.

Originally from Pasadena, relocated to Portland in the mid 70s, Smegma are both underground legend and another band the Wire was 30 years late to cover. Comprised of various members throughout their 36 year (!) span, the band has put out a huge discography, sometimes with gaps of over 10 years in between releases. For many, DIY means an impulse to release everything, for Smegma it means an impulse to play music with each other everyday for three decades. Contemporaries of the Butthole Surfers when they were good, and once lead by "the first rock critic"/the guy that wrote "Burnin for You" Richard Meltzer, the band members are in their 60's and still smoking tons of weed and playing shows with Portland kids 1/4th their age. They're like a Surf Rock band, if Duane Eddy had a love child with one of the Manson girls and recorded said offspring on a broken reel-to-reel. Not even Lee Perry could expell the Duppies from their tapes.

The above track is the B side 20 minute track from Smell the Remains that still sounds as fucked as it did when I first heard it.


Oh yeah did I mention one of the members plays the dental tape with almost an alto saxophone range of notes?