PS: I'm Gothic

Found in a WebMD magazine in a doctor's office several months ago. This has been on my refrigerator since then, and my wife and I still laugh about it.

WORST WEBSITE OF ALL TIME

I don't usually do this kind of thing, but my wife was looking at stupid cat websites when she called me downstairs laughing about how bad this site was. Take a look around, if you can figure it out, or you can stand it. It's the most geocities thing I have ever seen.
http://www.geocities.com/prydelande2002/

Six Days on the Road

Heres a cover I did today of a classic country song. I was going for that blurry and sore feeling you get when you've been on the road too long. I've been working on my chicken shack guitar licks, trying to go for maximum cheese in terms of tone and playing. Watching 60's biker movies will do this to you. The guitar is run through guitar rig 2, the bass is just run direct to my mixer through a DI.
And yes, I know the ending was distasteful, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Six Days on the Road

Vista and Pro Audio

I cringe every time a new Microsoft OS comes out, and I shy away for the first year as a matter of course. But Vista seems like it may be a little less buggy than say, the dreaded Windows ME. In a nutshell, heres what I've found out about whats different for multi-track, low-latency DAWs in Vista. Remember, I'm no expert.

1. Your GPU is now assigned more tasks than previously. This means that you'll be losing less CPU cycles to the flashy graphics and animations that come embedded in most DAWs, like meters, clocks, automation animations, and your GUI in general. What I hope this means is that Windows Vista will also use your GPU to run all the eye candy that comes with the OS. I always hated super-flashy OSes, like OSX and Vista, because I thought I was probably using too much of my CPU on the graphics that were there to sell the OS to general purpose users. Supposedly, Vista scales to the hardware it's installed on, meaning that slower PCs or PCs with weaker GPUs will have less animation in the OS. Personally, I could deal just fine with NO animation in my OS.

2. Finding things: easier. I probably don't have to tell you this, because its been one of the most touted features of Vista. The new native search function in Vista claims to be almost instantaneous, providing results with each keystroke, a lot like the search in the latest firefox does. The idea is, this will help people move away from the file-folder sort of logic thats dominated computing for 20 years. As hard drives get bigger and cheaper, this makes good sense, but I'll still be using plenty of folders in my audio apps at the very least.

3. Driver Hell: I don't have to tell you this either. Since computers are currently standing on the fence between 32-bit and 64-bit OSes, you'll have that many more drivers to accidentally try and install. The 32-bit driver, and the 64-bit driver(signed and unsigned). Here's what the manufacturer of my audio card has to say about the issue:

M-Audio has been keeping pace with changes to the Windows Operating System since the release of Windows 95 nearly 12 years ago. We are very excited about the opportunity to offer continued support to our Windows customers as the Windows Pro Audio community begins the gradual transition to the Vista era. Over the past year, we have worked directly with Microsoft’s Vista team to prepare for this release.

Currently, M-Audio does not offer Vista drivers or Vista software updates (beta or otherwise). As soon as Vista drivers or updates for any product are available, this FAQ and other portions of our Web site will be immediately updated to reflect this. Due to the nature of software and driver development, we are not able to provide exact dates or timeframes for when specific drivers will become available—but please rest assured that supporting Vista is a top priority for us.

Gee thanks, guys. I feel like I can really "rest assured" now. Other manufacturers have been a lot better, so I'm sure this is probably not going to be a big deal. But its going to be a hassle for the first year, like it is with every major OS change.
From what I can glean from microsoft's site, just switching to Vista is not going to improve or diminish your audio performance. But if your soundcard manufacturer does choose to release drivers that take advantage of the new Vista audio architecture, you could experience better performance.

4. You're going to approve a lot of things. UAC(User Account Control) is the default mode in Vista.

With User Account Control in the new Windows Vista operating system, you can reduce the risk of exposure by limiting administrator-level access to authorized processes.

Right! And I can click allow for about a million separate applications. I get the feeling that this is going to become a lot like firewalls are to your average user: this annoying box that just keeps popping up asking you to approve things until you just become so frustrated that you click them all the instant they come up. Whether or not these things will pop up and hang audio applications remains to be seen.

Is anybody out there using Vista for pro-audio and willing to comment on how its going?

Biotech Youtube Collection

Here's a few interesting Biotech related videos, I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. This first one has the added bonus of having the Forbidden Planet soundtrack.


More creepy monkeys with robot arms. Note the caption in this one: "Reenactment"


The fact that heavy metal has begun to address biotech related issues is a sign of its coming relevance to everyday life.


Naturally, people who oppose the science tend to be morons and ideologues- like the morons who oppose nanotech, nuclear power, and other related spooky sciences that your average joe cannot understand. How can you tell someone who's starving or making a living on their crops that they should use crops with lower yields?


Enjoy the vitriolic comments from people arguing for the rights of cockroaches to be free and unfettered by robotics experiments.




Those roaches are enormous.

Also, heres a totally overhyped presentation of interesting video of the Braingate NI. Once again, the comments section has anxiety about robot overlords transmitting Fox News directly to your brain. Also, bionic men.


Of course, theres no shortage of people who are willing to call all of biotech the coming of an "apocalypse" or of the "end times." But tell that to the paraplegic and the starving. I love a wacko as much as the next guy, probably more, but anti-scientific thought is so potentially popular that its extremely toxic to our society.

I Am Not Dead.

For the three of you out there who may still pay attention, I have not died. I am in the middle of a busy semester of my senior year at MTSU. I really, really do not enjoy my classes, and they are sucking up all my time with stupid, silly, pointless busy work. My wife has been out of work for about 3 weeks, which means I have had no time to myself for music in almost a month now. I'm not dead, but I might be going crazy.
I can't work on music with somebody over my shoulder, or even in the house. Not that I've been a fountain of good ideas or anything- I don't think I've been able to come up with anything decent in 6 months. Its a depressing creative drought, but I've been getting a lot better at technical skills. I've been building a large sample library and listening to a ton of music.
I've almost got another mix ready, this time on a very specific theme: space race related records. A lot of crazy children's records and general cold war anxiety. Should be really fun. Going to the moon was such a big deal, and there were so many records about it.
Anyways, I just wanted to tell you all to hang in there.

45s I Have Loved

Since I had the day off today from school I made it my mission to record some of the 45s I've been ignoring for so long. There has been a little kid screaming bloody murder outside today every time anything bothers him, so I needed something to drown out the noise.
Speaking of annoyances, I registered this week for my next-to-last classroom semester. After that, its on to student teaching, and then on to trying to find a school system that will pay off my loans. Strangely enough, metro Nashville will, but metro NYC will not.
So in celebration of my seeing the ending the misery that is "undergrad," heres a few 45s I dug out. I love the sound of a 45, so crunchy and scratchy, over compressed, the fact that its only a song long. Theres some psychedelic crap in here - some of its horrible, some of its entertaining. There are a few spoken word bits, from a depressing insurance sales box set of 45-sized records, a kids science fiction advertising soundsheet. Also a little bit of surf- and let me tell you, having surf and psychedelic stuff on a 45 makes a man feel wealthy- the stuff is getting high prices if Nashville's record shops are any indicator. Mostly the only thing these songs have in common is their relative unpopularity. or sometimes, their stupidity.
I have a handful of 45s of awful country like the piece here that I bought from an entrepreneur at his garage sale outside of Nashville- apparently he used to record and press 45s for individuals who were going to sell them at shows, etc. Whats weird though, is that some of them are from the 1990s- and I have no idea what good a 45 would be then.
Anyway, enjoy another collection of gems scraped out of our culture's audio dumpster.
45s I Have Loved

Thriller

Every once and awhile I go through an agonizing drought where any attempt to make music just ends in a lot of banging my head against the wall. I try to keep a positive attitude about these phases, and just consider them developmental...and I don't think that's unrealistic at all. In reality these phases are just a continuing series of crises- what I want to make versus what I am able, what I can arrange versus what I can imagine, what I can conceptualize versus what I can make concrete, etc.
During these phases I learn a lot of new tricks by dissecting songs I really like, and with each of these phases I try and tackle songs of increasing difficulty and arrange/dissect them. Some songs are so simple that I just have to find out what it was about the production that makes them work so well. This time, Thriller is that song. It's definitely some combination of how cool LinnDrum bongos sound, and that synth bassline. I spend a lot of my listening time in headphones while my wife is asleep. I know a mix is really onto something when I take the headphones out of anxiety that perhaps I've not turned the speakers off and I've been playing Thriller at deafening volume on repeat at 5:45. That wolf-howl sound does that to me every single time. Everything about the mix is layered, compressed, and punched just right. If you take the mix apart by left and right channel you'll be surprised to find that the backing is surprisingly noodly. The only things the stereo image has in the center are the portions that are rock solid in terms of timing, and its careful to only allow one element that stage at a time. Otherwise, the mix stays busy on the outside edges. Somehow this comes out to the absolute perfect balance of funk and precision. This mix is probably only surpassed in my mind by Don't Stop Till You Get Enough. It's a real bummer that the 1979 state of the art sounds so much better than the 2006 state of the art. And don't get me started on how well the drums are recorded. I can't wait to start making a living so I can build a completely vintage hi-fi setup. The deafeningly loud 4 foot tall speakers kind that distorts when you slam it. My uncle had a pioneer rig like this in his garage when I was a kid, and I don't think I've ever heard anything sound better. When I get this, I am listening to every disco record I own.
I've also been working out an arrangement of Love's The Daily Planet by ear and recording bits and pieces of it. Some songs you just hear and you know how to play- (thinking about the Kinks here) and some songs really don't . When I started dissecting this record I immediately realized that its about ten times as simple as I thought it was, and really only relies on the use of simple fingerings and chords in really awkward combinations. I now understand a lot more about what makes this record feel so original 40 years after it was made- its got a really unique approach to guitar, and a lot of the guitar work seems to be built around the limitations of a self-taught(or at least idiosyncratic) guitarist. I had also never thought about listening for the notes that shouldn't be in a chord to inadvertently sound as a technique for trying to sort about what fingering is being used. Dissection of the record has been one epiphany after another...I never knew that the use of a major chord in the right place could sound so... exotic.
Oh yeah and then theres this annoying school in my life getting in the way of listening to records and playing guitar. Teaching a literature group to some fifth graders, its fun and I enjoy it, but I'm trying my hardest to get as good at music as possible...hoping somehow that I can pan it out into something. How does anybody make a living in that industry any more? Even Tower records is dead. Major labels are like a super-morbidly obese patient falling out of bed and screaming furiously at a nurse to pick them up. All I know is that I want to leave some good records behind me, and the way I do anything else begins with a lot of reading, writing, and listening.
I don't know where my next record is going, I don't know when I'll get my head out of this phase, but I've got that feeling I always have about music, that I'm about to do something I'm really going to love.

Genuinely Scary Halloween Compilation

deltasleep's Totally Vapid Halloween Collection
Running time: 35:27 VBR mp3, 34.16 MB
Here's a recording of a lot of things from my record collection that I find to be somewhere between creepy, brilliant, and unlikely. I focused this time on what I refer to as "light psychadelia" -records that feature strange instruments or effects in an otherwise mundane song, and that little bit is just enough to make it all feel strange. The closest this gets to stereotypes you probably hold about psychadelia(and that term is almost entirely meaningless) is the mystic moods orchestra.
You can hear the beginnings of bands like AIR, Bertrand Burgalat, and every other recent imitation thereof. Hopefully these songs will give you as much inspiration and energy as they gave me.
These are genuinely creepy records because they push things like delays and phasers in environments you don't expect to find them. They are used sparingly, and the results almost always catch the listener off guard. To top it off, they are used on a quality of recording thats completely unmatched today. The more I listen to records engineered and produced by people like Enoch Light, Arif Mardin, and Hugo Montenegro, the more I am blown away.
A lot of these songs will require your patience for a moment, but think of it as a crescendo, or a tension building device. Wait for the weird synth passage, trust me. Some of them I admit, are just so effervescent that its creepy- like the ultra rarity among rarities that sounds just like the Free Design singing "Kites are Fun" except its actually Tony Mottola's Warm Wild and Wonderful instrumental version of the song.
Featured on this record in some sort of order are the LPs: Muzak: Stimulus Progression, Mystic Moods Orchestra: Love Token, Switched on Bacharach, Les Baxter: Hell's Belles, Out of This World with the Richard Marino Orchestra, Enoch Light: Charge!, Honky Tonk and Percussion(also known as Will Someone Please Bring a Tuner to the Next Session) Hugo Montenegro: Lover's Collection, Tony Mottola: Warm, Wild, and Wonderful, Enoch Light: Spaced Out.
Luxuriamusic.com says that they have no DJ slots open, I was really bummed. That would be a great way to get my mixes like these streamed. I'll show them, though. I am hoping to do this at least monthly, hopefully way more often.
Enjoy this genuinely haunting and beautiful collection of songs that might have died if I hadn't saved them from the thrift store. One of them, "Enoch Light: Charge" is a bit tattered in one corner because a .40 cal round flew through the thrift store front window and through the glassware, through the record bin, and into a computer monitor in the back room. If that bullet had even so much as a slight change in trajectory, you would not be enjoying the first song on this mix.
Was that inches away from this record being lost forever? It's possible.

the REAL deltasleep.net

Just a quick note to those of you who may only pay attention to my RSS feed that I have officially launched a real webpage on deltasleep.net Its still a work in progress, but the progress left is just fine tuning the size of the graphics to work with a wider variety of screen resolutions, and typing up a more in depth bio since that seems to be a popular request from a few college stations that have expressed interest.
The CD should be done within a month, pending the availability of some student loans. I hate student loans, but I think I can make my money back selling the record, so it won't be quite so painful paying that portion back as it will the other portions. I'll also be investing in some stickers to spam my campus with.

More Music!

Heres another set of strange, rare, and out of print music in mp3.
Latin mix
Here's stuff to read while you listen to it:

This time focusing on music of latin origin and/or treatment. The moog record gems in here are both from a Command Records two-fer "Electronic Ececlections with Richard Hayward and Walter Sear." The record is easily my favorite moog record of all time(its nuts and hayward's drumming makes it work), and if pressured, I might divulge the entire thing since I can't even find so much as a line on the internet about the record. Esquivel makes an appearance as well, in a rare recording of "Malageuna" from the 1968 "Genius of Esquivel" that gives me chills every time. Recording quality on this particular Esquivel disc is not as noteworthy as his earlier recordings, but that spark is still there. Esquivel sounds a lot more subdued and seems to enjoy contrasting a small group with electric piano against his characteristically bombastic brass. The results are a more mature, less silly Esquivel who gives things time to play out a bit, enjoying the seduction of the listen with a soft piano passage, and then tossing the drama about on the piano. You'll have to pardon the click on Besame Mucho recording, it gives it character. Esquivel's arranging is truly some of the most brilliantly playful ever recorded, and "Genius of Esquivel" shows about as close to a dark side as Esquivel had.
Pete Terrace, "King of the Boogaloo" makes a characteristically cheesy apperance. If Mongo Santamaria and Pete Terrace got in a latin stereotype contest, who would win? I'm gonna have to say Pete Terrace, because anybody who puts obviously looped crowd noise in their record and calls it live should lose whatever contest they are in.
Howard Roberts also comes into play with a brilliantly talented and slightly cheesey arrangement of "O Barquinho." "Instrumentally speaking, he's got the newest, freshest, most exciting bossa nova sounds to swing with todays tunes since guitars hit the big time. He's wild, he's funky, he's got everybody out there listening...he's that appealing! Whats more, H. R. told this reporter, 'I'm Sincere.'" Man, jazz lost it all when it started taking itself too seriously. Go out and get yourself a copy of "Howard Roberts Guilty" and see what I mean.
Process 35 Percussion rounds out the set with the stupidly titled "Mambo Ravioli." Somehow, everything on "SPINORAMA" records comes across stupid one way or the other. At least this is a great song, fun arrangement, and a great recording with a stupid title. Typically, they get that backwards. This one feels like being chased by a marching band that is in love with you through a department store in 1965. As a bonus I threw in the track immediately following it on the record, so you could hear just how genuinely stupid this record really is. When you look at music from this era, you have to look past a lot of goofy marketting and you'll find a staggering level of musicianship.
Oh and I'd also like to add what a pleasure it is for me to hear these recordings in stereo for the first time thanks to my wonderful Torx implant!
Enjoy!

Chelsea Place Apartments of Murfreesboro

Everybody I know has apartment horror stories, so I guess mine is just one more on the pile. Let me just start out by saying: Do not ever, EVER, involve yourself with these people. Here's how my horror story goes:
Things were fine when I moved in, the complex was owned by AIMCO, the largest apartment owner in the US. I moved out of my first apartment and into a much larger one, and recieved my security deposit back at 100% with no hassles. Then at 3AM on the day after Christmas, I awoke in a panic, and looked out my window at an enormous, glowing, billowing cloud of smoke coming from the top of my building. I drag my wife out of bed, get enough clothes on to get out the door, and nearly run into a fireman who was about to axe my door in.
We set outside for a few hours while we watched the building burn out the top story while we froze. Then we were able to go back into our smoky apartments and attempt to sleep before work the next morning.
Almost immediately after the cause of the fire, I began pressing the apartment owners(which were now a newer, smaller group) to tell me what the cause of the fire was. After about a month of my hassling them, they told me that their heating unit had caused it. They couldn't tell me anything they had done to prevent another fire- no inspection, no repairs, nothing. I immediately requested release from my lease so I could move somewhere where I wasn't nervous all the time. They took 2 months to answer that request with a letter simply stating "denied." This was obnoxious, but it wasn't too unexpected for the kind of heartless car sales rejects that usually end up running apartment complexes.
The real trouble happened when I moved out. I cleaned my apartment from top to bottom, all appliances, etc. And never heard from them about my security deposit. Then suddenly I started to get obnoxious phone calls from a collections agent attempting to collect $138 for Chelsea Place!
Aparently, they billed me for $137 in addition to my security deposit, for "cleaning." After I got a lawyer and talked it out, the only real option was to pay it. I am hoping I can follow up this blog with a string of "letters to the editor", and make sure that nobody I care about ever deals with them.
But yeah, theres the venting blog that was bound to happen. I hope it gets number one in the search engines so people find out ASAP.

This is so hot.

I mean everything about this. The wardrobe, the choreography, the set design, the way the drums are recorded, the batman camera angles at the end...it all adds up to probably the greatest musical ever.

Back from Vacation

So I'm back after a week on St. George Island, Florida. Its a great, uncrowded, affordable vacation if you are interested in the beach, wildlife, and fresh seafood. Its really unlike a lot of people's florida vacations, because the town is still a real community.

While I was there I saw "Pirates of the Carribean" (WE HAD KIDS ALONG OK I AM HIPPER THAN THAT) in a single screen movie theater with a behringer stereo PA and plastic chairs on a concrete slab in a historical theater (that happens to be the only theater for miles and miles.)

Most interesting in every trip to the beach is the drive through Alabama. It was on a drive on interstate 231 just past montgomery Alabama that I learned what America really is, and I got the idea for deltasleep as it exists now. Its that dusty color of the roads, that unbelievable level of decay that you see in Alabama that inspired the degenerate Americana approach to music I now have. The empty billboards, the empty strip malls, the rest stops with no running water, the gas stations with signs that say "BOILED PNUTS WE TAKE FOODSTAMPS." The cypress swamps, the litter everywhere. And the unbelievable number of them that show serious literacy issues... Its like Alabama is the worst post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie ever. Except Alabama is real. So are Mississippi and Louisiana.
The places are so full of sad faced people, all I see are looks of dread everywhere I go. And the trailers! Church trailers, water department trailers, strip club trailers, hotel trailers, trailers welded together, trailers under carport roofs, city hall trailers, and mostly crappy slum trailers with 4 cars, at least 3 grills, and bud light bottles everywhere. And not a lawnmower in sight. It's just really amazing to me that such a large portion of the country is so damned ugly and unkept. I would have a ton of pictures of it, but I had to drive and my wife can't figure out why anybody would want to see the stuff I usually take pictures of. Of course, thats exactly WHY I want to take pictures of it.
Here's your rescued obscure audio for the moment. This is a portion of a demo cassette produced at a friend of the family's small demo studio on the north side of nashville. This guy goes by Hank Conway. The tape is labelled "Hank's Still Alive." I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and I think it only reiterates all the points I'm trying to make with this entry.
Hank Conway- Hank's Still Alive

now presenting www.deltasleep.net

Well, I have a design team nearly up and running- yes thats right a design team. The internet is a great thing...I ask around for some help online, and I can't afford to pay anybody, I was just hoping that they could use it in their portfolio as a low hassle way to boost it. So yeah now I have 7-8 graphic designers in my email who want to do it. Also, yesterday I purchased the domain "www.deltasleep.net" because I needed something for the CD and possibly for a run of cheap stickers. For now(until I get a proper website/hosting up) the domain is simply linked to this site. Things are coming together, but getting a half decent promotional machine up and running is way way more work than I thought it would be.

I took the ipod back.

My wife got a small bonus at work and she decided to spend it at the Apple store near where she works. She bought an ipod nano, 1GB. I can't tell you how excited she was, and we set down after work and plugged the thing up, and were instantly disappointed. We had to install drivers for an mp3 player, silly enough on its own, and we had to reboot twice to do that. Then we get it all together only to find out that it doesn't work with windows the way that regular mp3 players do, it only interfaces with itunes. iTunes is quite probably the single most frustrating piece of bloatware I have ever used- it uses 60MB of RAM to play mp3s, and it insists on grouping all my mp3s by "genre" instead by the FOLDERS THEY ARE ALREADY IN. So I set up the ipod to just drag and drop files like a normal mp3 player. It would not recognize them as songs. So: she had an "mp3 player", designed to play mp3s, and it would not recognize that the mp3s on it were meant to be "played"- they were just data until itunes magically tells the ipod that they are "songs."
Victoria and I agreed that we can't stand to spend money on products that limit how we can use them after we buy them- that's the same reason we refuse to spend excessive amounts on cell phones: they're chained to one company, and leave you slave to only option. itunes had way to much control of my music collection- it made my 11gb of mp3s into 22gb by copying EVERY SINGLE MP3 on my computer! Because I never know when I'll need a second copy. Unless I "purchase" the file on itunes, then of course I CAN'T copy it.
So I took it back to the store, where the customer service took 20 minutes to get around to me, and then had the audacity to tell me that they "normally do not accept returns, but would make an exception" and were so good as to accept my not 24hr old ipod with a $15 return fee, thereby guaranteeing that I never buy another product from them. They asked me why I wanted to return it and I told them i really didn't like itunes, and was unable to get it to work with about 3 hours of work and looking over the support documentation(it kept trying to convert all my wma's to aac after i told it not to, and refused to let me just drag and drop files, only "synchronize" my whole music collection to the ipod) and they just said "yes, itunes compresses all the files." And I said "my files are already compressed, and i don't want software that does anything without my telling it to." Reception was totally cold, and I was severely dissappointed with the attitude of the staff(this is the Green Hills Mall Apple/Mac Store in Nashville, TN- a mall notorious for obnoxious staff who won't help anyone who looks like they don't have unlimited money anyways) and most of all, dissappointed at the unneccessary restriction of the unit itself.
I'll be going to newegg.com today and buying a unit with double the capacity for half the price from someone like samsung or sandisk that has been good to me in the past, and I don't think I'll regret it.

a quick DJ set

Heres a quick set of songs mixed together that are all without exception junk I dug out of thrift stores that ended up being a huge influence on me. The focus of this particular set is electrofunk/disco/classic hip hop and it runs the gamut from less popular electro to generic pop disco cannon fodder. Some of it was too goofy to leave out, some of it was too good. Most of it is treading that line right inbetween the two.Because the releases span about a 20 year period of musical history(from 1977 to 1984) its pretty hard to effectively master or mix these tracks. Earlier recordings lack the bass to the ones from the 1980s, but they respond really well to a multiband compressor with a little bass emphasis. Each track was handled individually to ensure that I thoroughly slammed it for your house party this summer. I used soundforge and a turntable to record, then PSPVintagewarmer to massage the audio.
If you ever want tips on remastering from vinyl, let me know, its become sort of an obsession for me.
In a lot of the hip hop stuff you'll notice that sampling ethics hadn't really been sorted out, and the records were never popular enough to come onto radar and get sued. Its a pleasure to hear such obvious party music, made with zero anxiety about how much of something gets sampled.

disco-electrofunk megamix!

my next project will be the much requested bhangra megamix I've been working on, but i'm having a hard time finding my bhangra stuff from an old hard drive. oh yes, and I am back to box.net for this one, so that you can stream this direct instead of expecting you to download it. also, YET ANOTHER file storage service has folded, fileupyours.com yields a 404 now.

More on "The Sounds and Music of the RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer"

Since my posting on the RCA Mark II has drawn so much public interest(I can only guess I got picked up by a more popular blog, and one of the editors of Keyboards magazine germany contacted me from a googling) I've decided to take some pictures of the record and do what little research on it that I can. Here are some images in a Flickr set of details from the jacket of the record. The record jacket is essentially the same thing that the announcer said-almost exactly in most parts. But the graphics are too cool to pass up showing off.
link the Flickr set: here
I did a little bit of digging for information on Harry Olson, the director of the project. Turns out he's also the man behind the ill-fated RCA Picture disc format, which you may have seen put in record bins by confused thrift store workers. He's also the man pictured pointing and directing the guy in the jumpsuit(i love that) to "turn that black knob, no not that one, the other identical black knob in a bank of 30 unlabelled knobs!" Heres some quick info on Harry Olson
Also, turns out that the great sounding narratOR on the record is just John Preston, one of the engineers! Man people used to sound so much cooler.
You'll also notice that all the frequencies are listed in cycles per second(CPS) instead of hertz. Hertz as a unit of measurement had not yet become standard- this record was made 5 years before that fact, if that gives you any idea of how old this record really is. Its also interesting to note in the routing diagram that the synth actually used octavers like an organ, which highlights the interesting and little discussed topic(I have no friends) of just what is an organ and what is a synthesizer? A lot of organs have had pitch bends, effects built in, and "solo sections" which were essentially monosynths of sorts.
I've also went ahead and uploaded the entire record to a new server. Every new solution presents some new hassles, but bear with me and I'll sort it out. I have zipped and uploaded the record to here. It's about 50MB so if you don't have broadband...sorry(for so many reasons).
Got big plans for the blog this week, school let out and I've got a lot of time while I sit around and wait for returned calls from my waste of time completely worthless university, Middle Tennessee State University. Trust me, don't go there. I'll be doing a write up on a couple more stupid records, including some modular synth porn(and I mean that in a VERY literal sense, not in the silly internet misuse of the word). I'm also contemplating releasing a record of my own stuff that is almost complete.

Couple of Songs for your Friday

The way I see records like this happening is as follows:
kid: Dad, I really need a hot disco record by somebody like Peter Brown
dad: if you're good i'll get you one on the way home from work this friday.

Dad goes to the store, and finds that he can get this GREAT compilation of a bajillion disco hits for $3.99 and jumps on it. Then he gives it to the kid who immediately finds out that its not the original artists, its some pretty average 4 piece cover band with an upright piano.
So, without further ado, I present to you, a Friday double feature from Disco Dancin' Fever from Pickwick records-notorious maker of children's story and haunted house records.
Dance with Me, and Risky Changes.

If there was really such a thing as "disco standards" then this record covers them. I really like records like this, because since most of them were made right as disco was waining a little bit(1978) they illustrate the disco-house transition in a way that we seldom see done. Listen to that little bit of compression on Risky Changes as it cuts through the cheesy piano lines-thats house in the making. Records like these are a much more effective tool at looking at music history than the ones by the artists themselves because they've cut all the artistic quality out of the record and made it entirely as generic as possible. So I guess if you wanted the most generic possible distillation of what dance music looked like in 78, this would be a better place to look than an "original" band who is going to fill their record with "personality" - although I really can't give disco too much credit for that.

If you want more of this record, let me know and i'll record some more. I just bought a phono preamp and I am ready to go!

(you'll still need a box.net account but its quick and easy)

Recordings of My Supposed Great Uncle

While digging through my desk I bumped into a tape I'd been looking for for ages. This tape was recorded in Blackey, KY (there's a Wiki) in 1979 and features my great uncle, Clyde Caudill. By far my favorite of the songs is "Hitler Called the Devil on the Telephone." All titles are mine, by the way. The tape represents an interesting bit of ephemera, and features two songs written about Blackey itself, one telling the story of how Blackey got burnt down by fire, unincorporated and then reincorporated when someone discovered that the corporation records were stored in Frankfurt Kentucky. Tragically, when Clyde finally gets talking(in true hillbilly fashion it's a depressing speech) in the file I named Epilogue, the tape ends in mid sentence. On the other side someone has recorded a Hank Williams record by setting the tape player up to a speaker. I don't really know if anything was dubbed over on the other side or not. You'll notice in one of the songs you can hear a clock chiming in the background, and its 3 o'clock. Also note you'll have to create a login and pass at box.net, but its quick and easy, doesn't even require an email.
Here they are, in no order:
Hitler Called the Devil on the Telephone
He Was in Heaven
A City Called Heaven
A Rose that Will Never Fade
I Woke Up this Morning
Jesus Walked On this Earth
Untitled Gospel
The Story of Blackey
Mabel
Epilogue
Also, I've had to scrap hosting at Orbitfiles.net after they inexplicably locked my account and will not respond to my emails. I am using box.net with these files, let me know if you have any problem.