For us there is no better sound than Funktion One. Powering the Space Terraza since 2000 and later taking over the whole club, Funktion One are responsible for the sound of We Love… Space. Fidelity, depth of sound, power and functionality are all paramount in their design. Below, Tony Andrews, owner and designer of Funktion One airs his gripes about the slippy slope the MP3 generation is pulling audio quality down. We couldn’t agree more.
Phoney facts?
Four interesting facts you may not know about mobile phones…
1) Fuck 999 or 911, when your stranded with only your mobile for company in a wild and desolate country call 112. Calling 112 will automatically search through all available networks and can even be dialled if your keypad is locked! Try it and see.
2) One very handy feature of mobile phones is there ability to transmit radio waves. Say for example you have locked your keys in the car; providing you have remote central locking all you need do is call your partner or someone with a spare set of keys and get them to press the unlock button on their keys aiming them at their phone. The signal will be transmitted to your phone which you have cleverly held close to the car’s receiver (generally around the top left of the bonnet area), and hey presto doors are unlocked.
3) Ever wondered how your phone’s clock keeps running even when it has completely run out of battery? Well the answer is there is a reserve supply to keep certain crucial systems running when you’ve lost power. This reserve can however be got at in times of need. Key in the code *3370# and your phone will restart showing a 50% increase in battery life. Your phone will recoup the lost reserve next time it is fully charged.
4) This one everyone should do. Key in *#06# and a 15 digit code will appear on your screen. This is the phone’s individual serial number and can be used to deactivate the handset if it is ever stolen, so even if the thief changes the SIM card the phone will be rendered useless. If everyone had taken this step there would be no point in people stealing mobiles and the world would be a much happier place.
Snap out of it
Optical genius – Professor Radionov!
The marketing students started a genre of photography built around the LC-A – LOMOgraphy. They orchestrated get-togethers and happenings at trendy places. They started a website early on while the web was still fresh. They made sure every LOMOgrapher passed through their society. And all the time with cash flowing in. They currently charge €250 euros for the basic model, a large markup on what is essentially very simple technology. Similar products, with similar results (genuine Soviet cameras included) can be found for less than half the price. LOMOgraphy is a profitable business, making money on everybody’s desire to be part of the in-crowd. The LOMOgraphy company has branched out to include clothing, hip gallery stores and the aforementioned parties and get-togethers. More and more it’s encapsulating it’s customers with a prefab lifestyle of which it is the only supplier with an admission fee of €250.
The intent of LOMOgraphy is to let go the burdens of traditional photography, to capture life as it is, spontaneous and from the hip. To be wild, young and free. To translate freedom into pictures. It’s not a bad philosophy, but it can lead to pictures being shot with the least possible brains in order to impress others with said spontaneity. When a philosophy becomes less of an ideal and more of a business it inevitably loses its shine. Among some photographers, LOMOgraphy has become a byword for debasing of their craft, a synonym for bad pictures, for seeing things that are not there and labeling everything art.
In 2005 the LOMO optical factory ceased all production of the LC-A camera. Their overall production had become more specific and high-tech to optical instruments such as gunsights and microscopes. Perhaps they didn’t want the insinuation that they were associated to lo-fi, low tech photography. The LOMO LC-A+ is now made-in-China, but according to it’s makers, delivers 98% the same results as its original.
Despite the undeniable guilelessness of the photographs it can produce, as well as the product’s usability and universal intentions – everybody can be a LOMOgrapher and with some practice everybody can do it well – it’s very democratic. As much as LOMOgraphy can claim to be beyond the realm of traditional photography, it remains photography nonetheless. LOMOgraphy is special because it is very individual but it takes no specialist skill. It plays on the notion that everyone is special, even if we are all alike – selling exclusivity, but with the whole world as their market. It’s only business, after all.
Be sure to check out the galleries on the official website.
From a lions roar to the shake of a rattle snake’s tail, nature has evolved was of implementing sonics in matters of defence, dominance and survival. Early man picked up similar habits and war cries were used to strike fear into enemies. In this basic form, sounds are predominately used to express power and strength or to elicit memories of past bad experiences. A notable cinematic representation of this in recent times is Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore’s use of Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now. In the modern world sonic warfare has become much more advanced. Certain developments of this technology have even found their way into everyday life. Many pest or animal control systems will use high frequency sounds to deter rats from entering buildings or to subdue an unruly dog; doing so in a way where the frequency used will cause physical pain to its subjects. All though these technologies were originally intended for use on animals, similar systems have also been used on humans. Many police forces and militaries will use high frequency crowd control weapons to disperse groups of hooligans or protesters for example. Although these weapons are advancing from the primitive war cry they are still preying on the ears of the intended victims.
Vortex Ring Gun
Other weapons have been developed which utilise sound in very different ways. The Vortex Ring Gun fires a high speed pressurised vortex ring. In early stages of development the ring was capable of knocking over a fully grown man at a distance of 10m, with some sources now saying that the gun utilised in quick succession and hence creating a resonating wave can shatter bones and even collapse vital organs. The gun has also been used as a means of firing a localised airborne sedative and is being tested for use in hostage situations. Strangely some Japanese monks believe they have already mastered this technique and claim to be able to to level an opponent with a single shout. Other weapons which capitalise on the destabilising properties associated with natural resonance are in the development stages. Tests have already been carried out on powerful low frequency speakers capable of collapsing bridges and buildings. On a more science fiction tip developers have been working with focused ‘beams’ of sound, similar to lasers which can liquify living tissue! When researching this area we stumbled across stories of a notable club sound-system designer who during the Vietnam war was involved in the creation of a highly secretive weapons system. The device used a high frequency sound emitter and would melt the glue holding the cornea to iris of the victims eyes as it was flown over enemy territory rendering the victims completely blind and therefore neutralised. For certain reasons we feel it is best for you to do your own research into this.
Underwater, sound acts very differently and as always we are playing catch-up with nature. The Tiger Pistol Shrimp uses acoustic cavitation to focus sound waves which will stun and kill prey. Similar techniques are being researched by Navies world wide for boat protection and anti frogman techniques. Again in development stages, techniques are being investigated for using sound to disrupt enemy torpedoes and navigation systems.
Of course there are less sophisticated ways that sound has been used by the authorities in matters of policing. Certain local authorities in Britain which have been plagued by antisocial behavior from the ASBO generation have reacted to the lack of help from the police by taking matters into their own hands. Local loitering hot-spots for these youths include supermarkets, corner shops, bus stations, etc and instead of incurring the extra cost of security guards these establishments have been encouraged to play music unbefitting of today’s hoodlums. One popular choice which has shown great successes was Britney Spears which the trouble makers apparently found unlistenable and had to move on. Perhaps there is hope yet for these reprobates.
Chatty Chatty Bang Bang
Chat Roulette is a click and go web-chatting/social networking site. Think Facebook meets skype without the restriction of having to actually know the people you interact with. Visit the website, click go and your web cam is automatically activated and you’re presented with your first chatter. No screening or selection process is involved, the idea being you are presented with other random users and have a chat. If things aren’t going well simply click next and another brand new chatter will appear. Sounds like an interesting way of meeting people..? The reality is 1 in 10 of the people you are connected with will be a naked man sitting on a toilet. But don’t be put off; get through the initial barrier of onanism and countless rejections from other users deciding they don’t like the look of you and you can have some great fun and meet some real characters. Some bizarre goings on that we have encountered include a man seemingly giving cooking lessons to anyone who would watch, a romantic meal for 2 with us being the date, someone fishing in a gold fish bowl and perhaps strangest of all, what appeared to be some kind of sacrificing ritual. What better way to wile away those long afternoons in the office?
Here is the fourth and final part of a transcripted lecture Bill Drummond gave on the state of music to BBC Radio 3. You can find parts 1, 2 and 3 here.
The relationship that a listener might have with any piece of recorded music was always the same, be it a middle aged connoisseur listening to Herbert Von Carugen’s recording of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Or a 13 year old girl in 1996 listening to the first Spice Girls album. We built and bought shelves to keep our collections of vinyl and CDs on. We took pride on what these growing collections that we had, invested our money in what it said about us, in the same way that the content of bookshelves did. There was no reason that this should ever stop. By the time the new century was dawning the iPod was being launched along with iTunes and numerous file sharing sites. This changed everything. This was the biggest development in the history of music in the past 100 years. We could now download from the internet with a few clicks from the mouse any piece of music from the entire history of recorded music we thought we might want and plenty more we didn’t want. All of this could be stored on the iPod in our pocket to be listened to whenever, wherever while doing almost whatever. The album as a format was now meaningless.
A graphical representation of a bit-torrent swarm
A museum piece
The flip side of all I have just gone on about in the last few minutes means music is now in the process of being liberated from the shackles of the recorded music genre. These forward thinking music makers will not want to make music that can be downloaded off the internet or listened to at any time, any place, while doing almost any thing on a future version of the iPod. They will want to make music that is about time, place and occasion. They will want their music to reach parts of the soul that words and images have always failed to do. Nothing can commune the unknowable like music. But most importantly they will want their music to have meaning beyond sometime to fill in the background while people get on with the drudgery of life.
This is part 3 of Bill Drummond’s critique of the music industry, you can find the first 2 parts here.
Around this time the long player which we later learned to call the album was fast becoming the format that most people listened to recorded music on. On this long player up to forty minutes of music could be contained, on the old 78′s we could only get a few minutes on either side of the disc. Fast forward again, this time mid 60′s. Around about then, two incidents took place that were to symbolise yet another massive shift in our relationship with music. Each of these incidents happened on separate continents and in totally different disciplines of music. One was in Canada the other in England. In 1964 a young Canadian classical pianist who had already made a name for himself in concert halls around the world decided for various reasons to never play as a soloist in concert again, but dedicated himself to making recordings. This pianist was Glen Gould. The vast majority of music he chose to record was music composed in the pre-recorded era. 18 months later, in 1966 a young English beat group who had rapidly become the biggest thing since Stalin, the first beat group to fill sports stadiums – even Elvis did not do that – made the decision to never preform in concert again. The beat group was the Beatles. The difference between Glen Gould and the Beatles was that Glen Gould wanted to record his interpretation of old music that he considered to intimate to be exposed to the concert platform. Whereas the Beatles wanted to create new music that could only ever exist as a recording. For both of them to go out and attempt to play their music live infront of an audience would have compromised the music. Thus make null and void the complete raison d’etre of the art they were making.
Savage young Beatles
From here on in or at least until the end of the 20th century, more and more of the music performed live was only done so to promote recorded music. We now judge the careers of almost all music maker by the albums they have made. Whether it was Herbert von Karajan, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Fela Kuti or whoever the rock and roll sensation of the moment was. Thus all ambitious young music makers aspired to get recording contracts so they could be allowed to make albums. The recording of and the subsequent release of an album gave complete validation to the their ambitions. The whole of the world wide music industry was based on a business model built around the recording and selling of albums. Radio stations, music magazines, concert tours, music videos all existed for one reason, to sell more albums. It was in nobodies interest to question the restrictive elements of the album format to closely, while the business model still worked and we still loved to own them. Very few of us noticed that the physical restrictions of the album format was turning all music into almost exactly the same thing. From wherever the music on these albums came from in the world or whatever tradition be it classical, jazz, world, rock, pop, etc. it all ended up as recorded music. We could walk into a major HMV or Virgin Megastore and choose from upwards of 300,000 albums. Every type of music known to mankind would be represented. Every year there were thousands more of these albums being recorded as our tastes became more refined we stumbled across undiscovered continents of music. How could we ever tire of it all?
But this sense of limitless choice was an illusion. The reason why all this music from every corner of the world, from every musical discipline was becoming the same thing was that it was all brought to us in a roughly identical length, equalised within the same narrow band of frequencies, broadcast through the air to our ears via similar electronic speakers. Close up all this music may have sounded different but take a few steps back and you notice how similar and one-dimensional it all is. The technology that had evolved through the 20th century to record and produce music had morphed it all from just being a convenient and marketable format into one mega all encompassing genre – that of recorded music.
The final front-beard
Despite the $200,000 pricetag for a Virgin Galactic passenger seat, one may note that the rocketplanes won’t carry their customers into orbit: they are only capable of achieving a brief ballistic arc outside the atmosphere before inevitably falling back in. However, there are also drawing-board plans to use WhiteKnightTwos as launch platforms for rockets which could lob small satellites into actual orbit. Some will claim that the SS2 is really only a thrill ride for the (extremely) wealthy, and can never be anything more. But its also a good start to a fledgling industry, that will, incrementally improve performance until orbital spaceflight (immensely more difficult), becomes more common place. The WhiteKnightTwo is also being put forward as a launch platform for orbital rockets, for transport etc, so already the project is bearing fruit in other areas. It’s a good thing that the Beardy Branson has built this – it’s a start to an industry that should yield important benefits. Yes it’s an expensive toy only for the rich – but so was flying 60 years ago.
This is part 2 of a 4 part serialisation of an analysis on the current state of not just the music industry but music itself by Bill Drummond of the KLF. It is transcribed from an original radio broadcast on BBC Radio 3. You will find part 1, here.
From around the turn of the century up to the first world war there were three towering composers from the western classical school making their greatest work. These three were Sebelius, Stravinsky and Shoenberg. If you were to read the historical achievements of these three you would learn that they, in completely different ways took apart how music was made and put it back together using scales, sounds and methods never before heard by western ears. On a personal level I have been a great fan of recordings of the music that they composed in those years. The same time as Sebelius, Stravinsky and Shoenberg were being revolutionary geniuses there was an Itlaian tenor who sang no new ground breaking music, but stuck to the tried and tested cannon of popular operatic arias. Unwittingly this singer was far more revolutionary than my three heroes.
He was Enrico Caruso and between 1902 and 1921 when he died at the age of 48 he had made over 260 recordings. These recordings sold in millions around the globe. Caruso was the first superstar of the new century. What Caruso did was change of how vast swathes of the human population related to music. In every continent, people were buying Gramophones and records and listening to them in their homes, in their own homes. This was changing all the rules that music had lived by since whenever music was first created thousands and thousands of years ago. People could listen to their Caruso day and night or at least until the neighbours complained. They could take the Gramophone into any room in the house, they could even take it out into the garden if they had one. For all the revolutionary genius of Sebelius, Stravinsky or Shoenberg they changed nothing. The way their music existed and was communicated to its audience could have been done in 1876. Enrico Carruso left them all standing.
Record breaking new ground
From here on in all forms of music that existed anywhere in the world were helpless to the charms of evolving recording technology. Suddenly any music from any era could be recorded and these recordings could be played whenever the owner of the Gramophone liked. Music that previously would only be heard at coronations or marching into war or on a bandstand in the park or in a Parisian nightclub could be heard wherever. People began to collect records, to have an almost fetish like relationship with the physical objects. All around the developed world our relationship with music was completely and utterly changing. And the vast majority of us thought this was fantastic. From a political point of view, it was total democratisation of the art. We could all hear the greatest performances of the century in our front rooms. No need to be at La Scala or the Bolshoi or a whore-house in New Orleans to hear the greatest music the world had to offer. It did not seem to matter that we could never relate to music again in the way people had done only a few decades earlier.
Workin' on the chain gang
More and more people were choosing to listen to professionally performed recorded music, rather than the shoddy and amatuerish live performances of local musicians. Fast forward a couple of decades to the mid 1950′s. A teenager walks into a small recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. He wanted to have himself recorded singing some songs for his mother. This lad had only ever sung in public a few times and even then it was as an amateur. Any aspirations he had to being a professional singer would have been mere daydreams. The owner of the studio heard the boy sing and thought he had something so signed him to a recording contract. I guess, you’ve already guessed that the teenager in question was Elvis Presley arguably the most influential musician of the 20th century. The difference between Carruso and Presley was that Carruso was already a highly regarded opera singer before his voice was recorded. Before Elvis had walked into the Sun Recording Studio he was a nobody with no obvious talent.
To be continued…
Here you will find a serialisation of a transcript of a talk which Bill Drummond of 80′s multimedia art project The KLF gave to BBC Radio 3 regarding the music industry. The KLF were a pop sensation throughout the 80′s and early 90′s, but unlike their contemporaries they were deliberately repetitive and derivative in an effort to highlight the ridiculousness of pop music at the time. The talk will be serialised in 4 parts as the whole lot at once would probably be a bit much. The idea of recorded music as “product” is, he thinks, an outdated concept unique to the 20th century that spawned it. The rapid collapse in value of recorded music is, he thinks, A Good Thing. In the future, music can once again become connected with time, place and occasion. And of course with musicians. We give you, A History Of Music: Part 19…
That’s the title of this talk. What parts 1, 2, 3, 7, 11 ,13 or 17 were, or are, is almost irrelevant to this talk. That said, I want to start by reading something which I wrote almost a year ago and is taken from the history of music part 17, this is it: All recorded music that has ever meant anything to you or me or anybody else is speeding its way towards irrelevance. The whole cannon of recorded music that has been stockpiled over the past one-hundred and ten years is going rotten. Rapidly losing any meaning for anybody except historians and those that want to exploit our weakness for nostalgia. The very urge to make recorded music is a redundant and creative dead end, not even an interesting option fit only for the makers of advertising, ring tones and motion picture soundtracks. The sheer ubiquity and availability of recorded music will inspire forward looking music makers to explore different ways of creating music – away from ways which can be captured on a CD, downloaded from the internet and consumed on an MP3 player. The very making of recording music will seem an entirely two-dimensional, 20th century aspiration, for the creative music makers of the next few decades. They will want to make music that celebrates time, place, occasion. They may be those that want to keep the craft of recorded music alive, but we will look upon them as those who work with bygone art-forms – irrelevant in tomorrow’s world.
The kids today have a different perspective
In 1876 to hear music, you had to play an instrument or sing yourself. If not you could listen to other people playing or singing. All music that was written or performed was conceived to be listened to in a specific context. This could be religious songs to fit the religious calender. Or ones marked to celebrate the major milestones in life – birth, marriage, death. Or songs sung in the workplace to make the workload seem lighter and the hours speed by. Or regal music to crown a new monarch. Or marshal music to stir our sense of nationalism in times of war. This can literally be music to march into battle with. Or just music to have a good old knees up on a Saturday night. Remove the context from any of these examples I have given and the music will lose its potency and meaning and become something else altogether.
On a surface level the music stays the same but our relationship changes, it is our relationship with music that defines what music is, not what the composer dreamed up or what the musicians thought they were playing. So that was in 1876 and everything that had gone before. In 1877, the American inventor Thomas Edison invented a device he named the phonograph. It was a wax cylinder and on it he recorded himself reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb. His recording was not musical, but that technological development would have more influence on music of the 20th century than anything else that happened in the 19th century, be it the music composed by Beethoven or the music sung by cotton pickers in the slave plantations of ol’ dixie.
Ten years later an American, another American, Emille Berliner took Edison’s idea and ran with it. In 1887 Berliner patented his Gramophone – that is Gramophone with a capital “G”. On this he could play flat circular record things, that he also invented. And on these flat circular records, Berliner was having music recorded, not just himself reciting nursery rhymes. By 1892 he was selling these records and his Gramophones to play them on. This was the moment when music could be contained within a physical object that could be bought and sold. Thus the record industry was born. A small aside that I would like to make here is that within a few months of the first record and Gramophone being sold, the musicians union was formed in Manchester.
To be continued…
