Electronic Music Documentaries

Zoe on 2012-04-02

On Saturday @lingmops tweeted:

Just spent an hour reading amount Delia Derbyshire and musique concrète thanks to @fireholly99 FACINATING THINGS I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW EXISTED

and then I lost the rest of the day watching music documentaries, so I thought I’d blog the very incomplete list to make sharing easier.

Alchemists of Sound
Looks at BBC Radiophonic Workshop from its inception, through its golden age when it was supplying music and effects for cult classics like Doctor Who, Blake’s Seven and Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and charts its fading away in 1995 when, due to budget cuts, it was no longer able to survive.

Sculptress of Sound: The Lost Works of Delia Derbyshire
The broadcaster and Doctor Who fan Matthew Sweet travels to The University of Manchester – home of Delia Derbyshire‘s private collection of audio recordings – to learn more about the wider career and working methods of the woman who realised Ron Grainer’s original theme to Doctor Who.

Synth Britannia
Following a generation of post-punk musicians who took the synthesiser from the experimental fringes to the centre of the pop stage.

Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany
Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard.

To which I would add a sideorder of Minimum Maximum by Kraftwerk

Pump Up the Volume – The History of House Music
From its early days as NY disco to the massive european (and international) scene it has become, via the major people and clubs who pushed it forward.

The Shape Of Things That Hum
From an 8 Part TV series looking at cult electronic instruments that have shaped modern music: Minimoog, Vocoder, Yamaha DX7, Fairlight, Simmons, Roland TB-303, Roland TR-808 and the Akai Sampler.

and some extra links:

Bassline Bassline
A video essay that investigates the invention, failure and subsequent resurrection of the mythic Roland TB-303 Bass Line music machine in the last two decades of the 20th century.

Can I Get An Amen?
A perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60’s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient of Drum’n’Bass.

The Hip Hop Years
Charting story of Hip Hop, from the streets of the Bronx to taking over the mainstream.

European Hacker Culture

Zoe on 2010-05-03

I just started a new Open University course, most of the first few weeks is about the history of open source, mostly the book ‘Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution‘. Which was a nice refresher on open source even if its a little dated now but I do have to take issue with ESR‘s essay, A Brief History of Hackerdom, saying Europe had no equivalent culture to the Berkeley/MIT/Stanford.

Europe didn’t have the cheap local phone calls, so BBS‘s took longer to be come popular (which are documented in Jason Scott‘s great series) but I would say the demoscene and the cracker culture it grew out of was our starting point. Lots of (especially) game developers got their start in the scene and provided that same focus mostly around the Amiga. Giving european hackers culture a different style and shape.

Still little known outside graphics geeks and old 16bit people, as hacker culture has become more global, overshadowed by the current billion dollar Silicon Valley startup’s, the demoscene is still healthy and producing some wonderful art.

Random Best of 2009

Zoe on 2009-12-31

Just a very incomplete list of cool things from a the last year in a very random order.

  • Elevated by Rgba & TBC
    I’ve been a big fan of demos for a long time but this was something special. All this in 4K, I even ended up starting a tumblr on the demoscene if you like this sort of thing.
  • Starfleet finally on DVD. It was huge when I was growing up and still stands up today.
  • Rymdreglage – 8-bit trip chiptunes and lego, lots of clever bits you only spot of the second viewing, so impressed by all the hard work they put into the video.
  • Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue another chiptune project, but really trying to push things. You could tell from the first post about it that it was going to be special. (Listen to the trailer)
  • Silhouettes Of Jazz, Love the technical way they used shadow casting to draw images combined into a nice film with a cool soundtrack, for me this was the highlight of the SIGGRAPH Bristol Animation Festival, really worth a look.
  • Pixel City In a former life I did lots of procedural generation (mostly terrain and planets), so seeing this very cool project was a really blast from the past and really got me thinking about doing some computer graphics again.
  • Bathcamp really lives up to its tagline ‘ideas and interesting people’, all credit to to Mike and the rest of the crew.
  • Like A Boss by The Lonely Island NSFW but very funny, I even ended up buying the album.

Edited to add 2010/01/06
Three more that I forgot:

  • Dropbox Just made sharing files between my desktop and laptop as easy as it always should have been. Windows, Mac and Linux, slick interface that stays out of your way until you need it.The freemium model works really well, with extra storage for referring people, discounts for paying for a whole year upfront. If you use more than one computer you need this.
  • Spotify much like dropbox, this is slick, doesn’t get in the way, and helped me listen to loads of new (to me) music since I installed the application. They still have some holes in the catalogue and yes the ads can be annoying, they don’t give a discount if you paid for a whole year but the experience of just being able to listen to pretty much any track right away is compelling.
  • DIY Masters is such a nice idea and really helped start think about a structure for all those things I want to learn and just taking the life long learn thing a little more seriously.

Online Identity

Zoe on 2009-12-13

@hayles post earlier about being anonymous online reminded me I was meaning to post some links I had:

As normal Wikipedia has a good intro to a lot of the issues with identity online.

Two from Danny O’Brien on register online, looking at the different audences public, private and secret and how this is more complex if you also talk (or can be seen to be talking) for an organisation.

Then two account of dealing with things on twitter by [mRg] and Mike Ellis

As for me, I’m not planning on going to split accounts, but I do plan to be better at connecting all the different things I do together better, after all its my portfolio.

Edited to add 2010/01/06
O’Reilly Radar posted a long series on identity called ‘Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between’ that cover the same ground:

  1. Introduction
  2. Your identity in real life: what people know
  3. Your identity online: getting down to basics
  4. Your identity to advertisers: it’s not all about you
  5. What you say about yourself, or selves
  6. Forged identities and non-identities
  7. Group identities and social network identities
  8. Conclusion: identity narratives