A Very Special Treat

I know I've neglected the blog lately but I promise that this will make up for it.

Since I've just found out about Orbitfiles.com, which will allow me 1GB of free public or private file storage, I've realized I now have a unique chance and obligation to share with the world some of the strange and rare records I have in my collection. I can't go out and share the ones that are still in print, or popular enough to be on RIAA radar, but some of these would drop off the face of the earth when I died and no one would ever hear them again. At least thats my fear at least. There are a lot of great sites with people more dedicated than I to preserving our musical landscape in a throw-away world. Heres a great guide to the LP Sharity movement:
http://www.oddiooverplay.com/ears/living.html
Digging through records like these is the kind of thing that makes a musician think about leaving something permanent behind, a legacy of some sort. I met KRS-One and Busy Bee the other day, and they had a lot to say about this. "You are already someone's ancestor." There was a really good discussion on being real and how lost they both feel that rap has gotten. Rap used to be a haven for the weird and the idea was to be as unexpected and unique as possible. My favorite quote was "The real you might have to get married." It got me thinking a lot about the internet. Its like the buffer that lets people have permission to be themselves without fear of ridicule. Like this blog- or my music, completely without any audience in mind. The whole "think about your audience" mentality has really killed a lot of good music and books. When I just write something direct and honest like this I think it ends up really connecting to somebody- even if its just one person that means a lot more than half connecting to a million.


So I'll start with a real gem. The RCA Mark II Demonstration. Believe it or not, I found this LP at a christian community outreach thrift store in Hendersonville TN. I consider this to be probably the most interesting, valuable, and important record I own. Apparently under a lot of pressure from RCA and Princeton, Milton Babbit and the Princeton crew in charge of this basement filling beast produced a record to be released on RCA red label vinyl.
Heres the Wiki on the Mark II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_Mark_II_Synthesizer
Now heres the condition of you DLing this: if I catch you putting these vocal clips in your music I KNOW where they came from, so you had better do them justice.
*The Mark II Plays, of all things, a Hillbilly Band Medley:
*The Mark II Plays Irving Berlin's Blue Skies:
*All of Side One, which consists of an RCA narrator bombastically describing the future of music, the nature of synthesis, the nature of notes and frequency, arrangements, the whole bag. Also an example of one of the first attempts at speech synthesis(other than A.G. Bell's attempts which only resulted in foam heads that screamed like babies, but thats another story.)
Part 1:
Part 2:

Enjoy!