TubularCorporation

Nerd music.

I don't really go to shows much if I'm not playing them, but not counting them I've seen Spinal Tap ('93 tour, first show I ever went to) Link Wray Scratch Acid Roky Erickson Sun City Girls Richard Bishop solo Alan Bishop solo Neil Young Bert Jansch Crispin Glover Dick Dale Philip Glass (he wasn't playing, but I got some great 7th or 8th row center tickets to a production of Akhenaten for free in college and he was sitting a few rows behind me) Terry Riley Nik Turner Omar Souleyman Sonic Youth (kind of boring) Wolf Eyes (very boring) Ghost (the Japanese one, amazing) Acid Mothers Tempel Ricky Powell (DJ set, completely by accident, didn't even know he'd be there - he played deep jazz cuts and kept everything up while he was cuing, it was ridiculous in a good way) Bevis Frond A few dozen smaller bands over the years. Most of that stuff was in the 2000s when I was living in a slightly bigger city. There isn't much going on in terms of electronic music in my part of the world, especially back then, so that has been mostly local acts and shows I've played. I guess Legowelt played a few blocks from my apartment back in 2013 or 14 but I didn't hear about it until a couple months later because it was at a venue that doesn't usually have stuff I'm interested in. Live music got kind of depressing over the last few years, and I'm not the only person I know who felt that way. It feels more like people are going for a social media photo op than to actually see the artists now. At the last show I went to before Covid the owner of the venue literally had to come out on stage after every act and tellpeople to applaud because everyone was paying more attention to their devices. That sounds ridiculous and I wouldn't believe it if I wasn't there, but it happened. The really sad thing was it was a weekend long festival with a bunch of interesting leftfield electronic and drone artists who don't play out often, and some of them had come from overseas for it.

Last week I checked Discogs to see if there was a listing for The Ultimate Box Set, but there isn't. We used to play Mark Of the Mole a lot in the back room of the grocery store where I worked when I was 15. The communal tape pile was basically a couple early 90s Melvins albums, the first couple Butthole Surfers albums, Mark Of the Mole, the first Prodigy album, a couple European grindcore albums, a couple Gwar albums and Thing-Fish. I don't think you could get away with playing Thing-Fish in a grocery store these days.

Sorry to flood the thread, but this has been my favorite sort of music since I was 10 or 11. I think it kind of turned into an "if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you" scenario, though, I've been listening to so much of this sort of stuff for so long I kind of turned in to one of them. I blame Dr. Demento. Anyhow, WATMM exclusive I just uploaded: a white rastafarian band of questionable talent recorded on a boom box in their practice space in I think 1998, maybe '97. First gen dub from the original that I borrowed from the singer who worked with me at a grocery store. The trombone is what makes it. Check out tracks #6 and #2. These people were in their 20s, keep that in mind.

I'll try to get 8 Songs of Squid (a weird drug-punk self released cassette I bought when I was a kid, on the street in front of Notre Dame Cathederal in 1995 from the main songwriter/singer/electric dulcimer player, even though I think he's actually an NYC native. The other members play an electric canoe paddle and an electric ping pong paddle and they sing songs about heroin, sex, apathy and fake anarchists ruining the scene - it's really good). I've got it on an external hard drive but I need to scan the cover and the blurry photo of him I took right before I bought it and only found again a couple weeks ago. I'll see if I can get that onto archive.org later this week.

I've got a decent stash of private press lounge records that have never made it to the Internet, at some point a friend and I are going to put out a mix tape and when we finally do I'll post some tracks here. My favorite is a full lounge set recorded from the audience in a bowling alley in New Hampshire in 1976: https://www.discogs.com/release/12490725-Chuck-Lana-Sings-Up-A-Storm I've also got a double LP audience recording (with a hand made sleeve, probably made 100 of them for students and family) of the senior concert at a small private high school, also in NH, sometime in the 70s that's notable because it has two originals by the music director in a kind of Curtis Mayfield style. Oh, and the Gloucester Public Schools Electronic Music Lab record is incredible. Musique Concrete made by middle and high school students in 1972 (despite the 1973 release date on the listing and the dates on the Youtube videos, I'm fairly certain it was '72). Got my copy in Gloucester for $7 back in the late 90s. Everything pressed by RPC is worth checking out, really.

Kawee Jongjitt has some pretty excellent, weird, muzaky-synth covers if you dig around. This is probably my favorite, it's got kind of a 90s Leonard Cohen thing going on:

I'm a fan of Glade Swope, been following for years: I'm far from the one who found him, but Nicodemus/St. Nic of Detroit was amazing. I've managed to get hold of 3 or 4 of his LPs over the years but he has a pretty deep catalog. A friend and I were talking about seeing if we could drive out and meet him the year before he died, I wish we'd done it.

Ron Howard remake of Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Sausage Party: The Series oh shit never mind.

Oh, and I'm surprised nobody posted that Charanjit Singh album yet. Proof that acid was an emergent property of the 303.

Good call on the Ray Lynch (first new age album to go gold) and Egyptian Lover, I almost posted both (although I was leaning toward Livin' On the Nile). Technically released in 1990 but that means it was most likely recorded in '88 or '89.

I usually put my stuff up for free and get a few dollars a month from people paying. It's almost always $1 or $5 per album when people pay. I don't really ask for or want money unless it's for physical media or it's going to be used in a commercial project. Sometimes I'll make the album free but chage for individual tracks if I want people to treat the whole album as a single piece.

Anyhow, just watch all 700 videos on this channel and you're good to go (even though a lot of it is actually early 90s): https://www.youtube.com/c/Caprice87

Yeah, that too. EDIT: I meant it was the linguistic counterpart, not the stylistic counterpart, but I guess synth-pop was a pretty widely used term and fits better either way. I guess the "new wave" of the 90s was probably "alternative." Anyway, if it has a direct lineage going back to underground gay dance clubs in the early 70s and isn't played by a live band, it's probably electronica, and that's a good enough definition for me.

I was debating whether to make this post while you were making it. "electronica" was jsut a music critic blanket term to describe pretty much anything that had more synths than guitars/didn't appeal to rock fans, I definitely don't recall it being a term that anyone who actually made or was involved with music took seriously or self applied until maybe lthe late 2000s. So basically the late 90s counterpart to "new wave" (another meaningless umbrella category invented by critics to describe new music they didn't understand).

Slightly OT because they didn't do much electronic stuff until the 90s but A.R. Kane is maybe the most underrated band of that era, and they were half of M|A|A|R|S so it's still relevant.

The vest/shirt combo is especially important.

If you're in the climate for it, wait a month or so, find a pond and record the ice. Early winter or early spring, when it's still thin enough that it breaks up on warm days.

I don't know, lately Ive been needing to downsample my analog synths to 12 bit 22.05kHz to make them sound more digital.

I thought about using this to make some sample material today, but I ended up just recording some mixer feedback through a Roland EF303 instead and got the results I wanted.

Like 90% of Iannis Xenakis' music.