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CerebralMix Episode 18: Fantastic Alternate Universes

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CerebralMix Episode 17: Intersections In Four

CerebralMix Episode 16: In The Beginning Pt. 3

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CerebralMix, Episode 10, Aug 1, 2010: Guitar World I

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Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Track Credits
• 3 Closing Notes

1 Introduction

The guitar is possibly one of the most unique instruments in music. It’s roots can be traced back approximately 3,300 years. Throughout history, there have been many names for instruments of similar construction (if not always similar in timbre and tone): oud, lute, cithara, and vihuela just to name a few.

The emergence of what could be seen as the modern acoustic (or classical) guitar occured in about the 12th century in Europe. However, after the Baroque period, the guitar seems to have fallen out of favor until it re-emerged in the 1800′s.

The electric guitar dates from the 1930′s. It’s first application was in the country swing bands of the period, allowing it to produce sound of equal volume to the rest of the band. Adoption of the electric guitar in jazz and rock assured that it was an instrument with a long road ahead of it.

This week, the first of a series of occasional shows, we present both acoustic and electric guitars in settings as diverse as progressive rock, ambient, jazz, death metal, blues, and more. So be prepared for just about anything in the world of the guitar, this week, on the CerebralMix.

2 Track Credits

For more information on the selections in this weeks show, visit the CerebralRift website.

The Facebook, identica, and last.fm CerebralMix groups. The Twitter CerebralMix user. The CerebralMix page on MySpace. And, on the CreativeCommons Network where the licenses for each episode are posted.

The CerebralMix is a member of the OggCastPlanet. More information about the OggCastPlanet shows can be found at: http://oggcastplanet.org

3 Closing Notes

Frank Zappa once said something along the lines of the electric guitar being the one instrument capable of producing truely annoying or disgusting noises.

While certainly the instrument is capable of that, it is also capable of great beauty and highly dynamic expression. The guitar has come a long way in the past 3000+ years to become one of the predominant instruments in many cultures.

I hope you have enjoyed this journey into just a few of those cultures and spaces on the CerebralMix.

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NOTE: This week’s episode has a couple of pieces that are a little more adult than normal (not that I avoid adult materials in the first place).  Caution is recommended before allowing children to listen to this episode.

Internet time doesn’t function like time in the real world.  On the internet anything that has been around for more than a few years is considered old.  (I could go into a long analysis of technology life cycles and how it relates to internet age, but we’ll save that for a different show.)

So, back in what could be considered the “early days” of internet music, one netlabel managed to make a remarkable, if less known, mark on internet music by releasing just about anything that they could find: found sounds, cheesey lounge music, highly experimental and avant-garde music, mashups and remixes (before the term “mashup” had really come about), and even a high school swing choir / glee club’s un-copyrighted recordings.

The label was called Comfort Stand Recordings — a kind of “outsider music” netlabel that grew out of the Exotica Mailing list.  Even though the Comfort Stand only existed for 2.5 years (from 2003-2006), they had 80 releases, 8 compilations and 16 singles, all of which are still available from their website (comfortstand.com).

This remains a remarkable feat by nearly any standard.  Today, most netlabels are lucky to issue a release a month. 80 releases in 30 months is astonishing.  To have as varied and wide ranging releases takes a very special group of people to put together. Not only the artists, but the staff of the label understanding the whole range of music, and not pigeon-holing the label into a single style.  More amazing is the comfort stand audience.  And, they did have an audience.  Many of their releases are top downloads on the Internet Archive, and one releases remains one of the top-downloaded netlabel releases of all time.

Here’s the thing about the Comfort Stand: many of the participants were people working in music or sound industries.  While the recordings are seriously unusual or unique, and more divergent and eclectic than most of releases you will find on the big websites today, many of the creators are still working with sounds at one level or another.  And, many of them are still releasing works commercially and for free under CreativeCommons licenses.  Many of these artists have grown and changed over the last four years, getting either more quirky or more mainstream, but still maintaining their love for the music.

So, we pay tribute to The Comfort Stand this week.  So sit back and be prepared to experience everything from humor to horror and many more emotions as we track through 24 tracks from the vaults of the Comfort Stand.

Track Credits for Episode 6:

Sunday is possibly the best day of the week: you aren’t expected to go anywhere, or do anything.  You can sit back, chill with a book or newspaper, maybe do some cleaning or chores around the house.  The pressures and expectations of the rest of the week are gone.

This weeks show is a mix of chillin’ and groovin’ tunes just right for a Sunday.  From abstract ambient, to slow-techno, to funk-groove this set will give you the space and time to recharge your batteries to be ready for the rest of the week.

Sit back and enjoy the Sunday Chill and Groove Mix, this week on The CerebralMix.

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Track Credits for Episode 4:

Update: Coax contacted me with a better / permanent URL for his site.

A lot of the podcasts that I listen to are technical in nature.  A smaller subset of them are non-technical, talk oriented podcasts.  And the smallest subset of podcasts are musical in nature…  In fact, there are only three music podcasts that I get regularly.  It’s those three podcasts that I am going to talk about today.

The first of these three is Rathole Radio produced by Dan Lynch who I first encountered listening to the Linux Outlaws podcast (but we won’t talk about that here…  I’ll save that for some other place and some other time).

Dan is a sound engineer and very accomplished musician whose musical interests seem boundless.  On Rathole Radio he has found a forum to explore an eclectic range of music, throw in a little social and political commentary, and invite other artists on to be interviewed.

Another dimension to the show: he streams it live while interacting with an audience on irc. And to make it more interesting a portion of the music that he selects for the show comes from recommendations from the audience.  (I have a small bias for this as several tracks I’ve suggested have made their way to the show…)

Overall, the live nature of the recording comes out in the podcast itself, giving the show a unique flavor that is as fun to listen to offline as it is to participate during the streaming.

The next podcast I want to talk about is The Juiced Penguin. this is a mostly randomly produced show of music.  It’s more like listening to a radio show without a lot of commercials, just an intro and an outtro.

The show has several contributors: terryf, Lord Drachen Blut and Randy (The Nose) Noseworthy.  The range of music they tend to work with is rock, hard rock, country and a little pop.

The show is a fun listen, typically about an hour with little to no overlap with music you might hear on other podcasts.  Note: this is an ogg only podcast (aka an oggcast).

The most recent addition to my podcatcher is The BugCast by Dave and Caroline Lee.  Originally Dave was the presenter of the show, with Caroline filling the role of researcher, however Caroline has moved into the role of Co-Host with her husband.

The show takes a similar approach to Rathole Radio in that Dave and Caroline frequently stream the show live as they are recording it and chat with listeners in an IRC channel.

However, where the show differs substantially is that it is not 100 percent dedicated to music.  The BugCast is a little more of a mixture of music casting with some talk mixed in.  The talk can range from opinions on topical news stories to a-day-in-the-life type stories.

The BugCast typically features music is more MOR to AOR in format, mixed with the occasional singer / songwriter, and occasional jazz piece. Aother feature of The BugCast is the inclusion of a ‘mystery’ comedy song.  They will frequently play a song without telling the audience the title or the artist to allow the punch-line(s) of the songs fresh and interesting.

And it is this mixture of chat, artist bios and music that makes the show a real joy to listen to.  I often have the feeling that most radio these days is pretty dry, but Dave and Caroline have been breathing life into a format that has been missing from the airways for a long time.

So, these are some of the shows that I listen to on a regular basis.  Hope you check them out and have fun listening to them.

I have finished listening to The Faust Cycle, but haven’t had the time to write up any further notes and thoughts.  Honestly, it is taking more time than I expected because the ending is more attention demanding than the rest of the piece.  Unfortunately, I won’t be making it to a 14 part review as I had originally planned.  At this point, I am planning to write two more pieces, for 10 in total.

I started listening to some releases from Music Trade.  I am quite impressed with the releases on this label.  They set a very different standard for Net Label releases.  I will talk a bit more about them in a few future articles.  Another label that I have started listening to is Pavillon 36 Recordings.  I already reviewed the release from Pharmacore a while back.  I will be living with the few releases I have on my system for a bit, then reviewing them.

I don’t intend to keep this site totally about music.  It’s really supposed to be about Free (Libre) Art, Culture, and Music.  Hopefully over the next couple of weeks, I will be adding more content about free literature, and other subjects.

I am also thinking about adding some of my own fiction and poetry to the site.

I am still trying to figure out what is wrong with the RSS feeds, so if you were following the site via RSS, I will be working on fixing it.  (Something has broken a couple of things, and I am still working them out…)

There’s a few more things, but it’s maybe a bit too early to talk about them…so I will leave on a little mystery note, just to say that I have a lot more ideas in mind for the site, and a lot more content that I am developing.

Please, if you have any ideas or comments, let me know either via the comments to this article, or by using the Contact Me form.

Thanks for hanging in there!

Artist: Ergo Phizmiz

Title: The Faust Cycle (or The House of Dr. Faustus)

The subtitle for this section is “The Bird Machines”.  I listened to part of this section over the weekend, and the whole thing again today.

This section starts with Ergo waking up in a hallway, observing Marcel Duchamp teaching a group of small birds.  A gramophone approaches, music playing, baboon like legs clanking against the floor.  Ergo watches from a corner, not wanting to interrupt the happenings.  He watches as the gramophone changes records via it’s fused in record changer.  The new record is “Dr. Faustus Book of Birds”.

The selection that is presented next is a musical interpretation / narrative of this selection of birds.  When the record ends, a book is extended from the bell of the gramophone.  Upon opening the book, Ergo finds himself in another hallway full of doors, with a film projected at the far end.  He looks through the peep holes in the doors, which is accompanied by a rather lengthy sound collage. There is a narrative about ducks, followed by another sound collage, before going into a song.  When the song concludes we are taken into another lengthy sound collage: first of birds, then bells, chimes and carnival music which concludes this section of the piece.

My attention to detail may not be quite as great in this section, as I said I listened to it twice, but was so lost in the collages and the musical interludes that I didn’t pay as much attention to the narrative relationships.  The  one thing that I did notice was the restoration of Ergo to the main house now, instead of being in the sewers or the ballroom.

The other thing that impresses me in this section is the emergence of the birds.  I’ve been thinking that many of the creatures and animals have some form of symbolic meaning.  Obviously, this is all the stuff that dreams are made of, but frequently dreams are a manifestation of our real lives.    No matter what, these narratives are thickly layered with all sorts of things that can be interpreted.  But the task of trying to assemble and interpret all of this would be a daunting task.

Onwards…

• Six articles on The Faust Cycle have been posted, and there will be six more of them.
• I posted my commentaries on: the Cowon iAudio 7 & 9 players, A Brief Word About Security, and the iPad & iBooks.
• I continued serveral series:  Finding Music Online, Shoestring Classical Series.
• I posted part two of my January Classical Listening article.
• I reviewed a new release by Pharmacore on the Pavillion36 label.
• And I started re-working the Links & Locations portion of the site.

I was highly encouraged this week to have had several wonderful conversations.  Ergo Phizmiz picked up on my series about The Faust Cycle and has been following it.  Embe from Netwaves noticed my site and has added it to his blogroll (with the condition that I not blog about U2 — not much of a risk there…), and I have added Netwaves to my Links & Locations.  Travis from Hiddenplace Music commented on the start of my commentaries on The Faust Cycle.

While I was out for dinner with a friend Saturday, we ended up in a coffee shop where I came across a magazine I hadn’t seen before.  The focus of the magazine is on contemporary African music.  Just a single issue of this magazine has given me a wealth of new labels,and material to start tracking down and researching.

The only other outstanding thing that I haven’t done yet is to write up something on my Droid.  Hopefully I will get around to that this week (I am still looking at music applications for it).

This next week will probably be a little slower.  I have the following things to do:

• Finish The Faust Cycle.
• Finish overhauling the Links & Locations section.
• Do some research for the Shoestring Classical series.
• Start checking on some newer independent material that I started reading about.
• Prep a new series for the site.
• And, I’m trying to find a new item to add to the site.

So, until next week, lets see what happens.

Oh, and if you are a fan of LOST – don’t forget the 3 hour start to this season on Tuesday.