Strange images

Q: What do the following images have in common?

A: They were all shown on the front page of the WFMU website — still our favorite free-form radio station. Every day a new image is featured and they most often relate in some way to music, sound, hearing, art, and technology. Sometimes the images are strange and weird, but always amusing in some way.

One day, I came across a post on the Make Blog on listening devices from the 1930s used in the pre-radar era for detection of airplanes. The photos of the acoustic equipment and the people using them are fascinating and quite ideal, I thought, for a place on the WFMU website. I recommended the images as candidates for the WFMU homepage to the WFMU webhamster — and thus you can now occasionally see photos of people wearing acoustic ‘radars’ when you go to the frontpage of WFMU (see the screen dump to the left).

UPDATE (2006-09-09): See all the WFMU images in the WFMU Picture of the Day Gallery.

Fred Frith solo concert

The concert of this summer is probably going to be the solo concert with Fred Frith, Saturday July 8, 2006 here in Copenhagen.

Fred Frith has been performing and composing music in the space between rock and jazz, avantgarde and modern composition for more than 30 years; First in the UK in the late 1960s and 1970s in the bands Henry Cow and Art Bears, and later, in the 1980s as part of the New York experimental music scene together with e.g. John Zorn, Tom Cora and Arto Lindsay.

Fred Frith’s music might be challenging to people not familiar with improvised music — and music which doesn’t easily fit into conventional musical genres — but everyone on board the MS Stubnitz, an old transport ship from East Germany now used for concerts, seemed to be astonished by the many colors of sound that came from Frith’s solo guitar performance.

It’s not conventional guitar playing: Frith uses many objects and effects to create music: drumsticks, a violin bow, a walkie talkie, various pieces of cloth, a metal chain, little metal bowls and two hands full of rice were amongst the items used to make music. It’s improvised music, music performed without a net (an approach we appreciate here at Without a Map, of course).

If you care to give the music of Fred Frith a listen, here’s a small playlist.

Supporting act for Fred Frith was Cockpit Music, a Danish free form saxophone-guitar-drum trio playing both old and new songs — all together an excellent evening of improvised music.

UPDATE (2006-08-14): Audio and video is now available for download from the MS Stubnitz webpage (direct link to media file page).

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Nothin but da P-Funk

Exploring the vast archives of free form radiostation WFMU broadcasting on the FM band from the US East Coast and live on the Interweb, I came across two three hour long programs on the “History of P-Funk“.

P-Funk has its roots in late 1950s doo-wop, but over the 1960s and 1970s morphed into funk, funk rock, and psychedelic rock. The leading figure in P-Funk through the years has been George Clinton, and a long list of bands are categorized under the label P-Funk: Parliament, Funkadelic, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley and The Horny Horns, to name a few. From the late 1980s and until today, P-Funk has had major influence on modern music from hip hop to rock and mainstream pop music. It was through the sampling of funk music by bands like Digital Underground and De La Soul that I got aware of the P-Funk and started using all my pocket money on old 1970s P-Funk records. In 1996 George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars played live in Copenhagen–What a show!! I think the concert was 6 or 7 hours long.

Hosted by the friendly host, The Good Doctor, the first show covers the period 1959 to 1974 and the second 1974 onwards. There’s not a whole lot of talking in the programs, just lots of nice P-Funk.

New noise and surreal monsters

This weeks music acquisition was Thurston Moore/Cotton Museum: Split 12″ LP (Yes, we still play vinyl :-) released on Tasty Soil Records). Side one (a very nice noise feedback/effects-piece by Thurston Moore) is playable at both 33 and 45 rpm providing two very different pieces of music. The 33 rpm version was maybe the better of the two. It’s not easy listening - but who says music has to be easy?

Not only the music of this numbered limited edition of 500 LP is great. The cover art work (shown above) was made by Chris Pottinger who is also the person behind Cotton Museum and the label Tasty Soil. I have never seen the artwork of Chris Pottinger before - but his drawings are great if you are into surreal monsters, weird creatures, and such.

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