Showing posts with label David Tudor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Tudor. Show all posts

Tuesday, 4 February 2020

David Tudor ‎– "Pulsers / Untitled" (Lovely Music, Ltd. ‎– VR 1601) 1984


Tudor's circuit bending classic was the future from the past,now!Finally captured on tape and released at a time when electronic music meant trying to make your synth sound like a trumpet. If you want to sound like a trumpet, get a Trumpet.....better still, don't sound like a Trumpet,unless your name is Miles davis,its awful!Make your electronic instrument sound like electronics? Now there's a novel idea?
This album sounds like fizzing frying pulsing electronic circuitary being made to do something they'd rather not,if they had a personality that is? Which ,of course, electrical circuits don't have...yet.
That's where humans come in,and its another pointer towards both a future,and the present. Together we could achieve greatness,apart we are just a biological machine with a limited lifespan, and a bunch of silicon based hardware that needs its mummy.
Nowadays, this solid state chicanery is common place,as der yoof have finally realised that electronics should sound like electronics, unstable and full of cliches barely beyond our control.
In the future we won't just be downloading illegal sound files onto a laptop,we'll probably be downloading our personalities onto a distant machine or circuitboard, to either escape death, or travel to distant stars as a stream of data.But,if you do this in the future,DO NOT forget to back up your files!!! 
This idea horrifies most humans,but that's denying evolution,which often produces horrific answers to specific problems. Like denying David Tudor the right to evolve music in the fifties when he,and a handful of others started making this ground-reinventing method of alien sounding music production.
As an unknown yoof commented on a well known music listing site :
"This album is sick. Way before its time. Love the circuit bent flavor." (Unknown Youth 2014)

Tracklist:

A Pulsers (1970) 20:29
B Untitled (1972) 19:45


DOWNLOAD from ye olde tudor times HERE!


Monday, 3 February 2020

John Cage / David Tudor ‎– "Indeterminacy: New Aspect Of Form In Instrumental And Electronic Music" (Folkways Records ‎– FT 3704) 1959


So we have this pair to thank for Cornelius Cardew's first big reactionary tantrum do we?
The first recorded showcase for the musical theory of "Indeterminacy",as dreamed up, nay made up by avant-garde experimentalist numero uno, John Cage.
Which is a composing approach in which some aspects of a musical work are left open to chance or to the interpreter's free choice. John Cage, a pioneer of indeterminacy, defined it as "the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways". Not quite 'free' music, but a substantial step in that direction.
Basically this is a spoken word piece backed up by the sparse electronics,voice processing and piano of David Tudor doing the random parts. I could listen to stuff like this all day.
I'm certain that such works have little trouble getting the desired reaction from the 'ordinary' average joe upon encountering this music from outer-space, as it would have seemed in 1959.Rather challenging,and would most likely end in bursts of anger,or troubled incomprehension. This is what ,dare I say, Art(?) should achieve,and this stuff would probably gain the same reaction if played to the same Henry and Henrietta Normals of today,as we have now passed the peak of the new enlightenment and a speedy dumbing down of the world populous is continuing apace.
Averaged out, we really haven't advanced intellectually at all in the ensuing 60 years.We're leaving all that thinking stuff to machines,which of course have little intellectual sophistication,and the glaring illogic of any of John Cage's works would send their A.I. into spasms of sparks and fumes as their lithium batteries burst into flames,screaming in a robot voice, "Illogical,Illogical,must self-destruct,must sterilize,does not compute,Error,Error!".....like the hybrid robot which uses the advanced dangling on a string drive to move in that Star Trek episode called 'Nomad'.(Click here to learn how to handle rogue robots)!Nomad also had the same problem understanding the concept of 'music',which he handles by wiping the mind of Uhura....(Click Here to see how Nomad deals with 'Music'....our future lies here!)
Meanwhile, Henry and Henrietta indulge themselves in their version of Technology,watching pornography,online dating and gossiping on social media.....in many cases talking 'dirty' with an online 'Bot'.
We're Fucked!

Tracklist:

1. Part One (23:06)
2. Part Two (23:03)
3. Part Three (22:14)