Sounds Of The American Fast Food Restaurants

As a follow-up to last months' posting of Gregg Turkington's Sounds of San Francisco Adult Bookstores is the equally silly:

The Golding Institute-Sounds Of The American Fast Food Restaurants (1996)

17 minutes of barely discernible audio recorded "in the field" in a KFC, McDonalds, Jack in the Box, etc., tho Turkington's droll, incisive, funny narration is again the star of the show.

A1	Introduction Narrator [Introduction By] – Golding Institute, The, Ryan Kerr
A2	KFC (6th Avenue & Geary Boulevard, San Francisco, CA)
A3	Jack In The Box (11th Avenue & Geary Boulevard, San Francisco, CA)
A4	Taco Bell (Highway One, Pacifica, CA)
A5	Nation's Giant Hamburger (Westlake Mall, Daly City, CA)
A6	Subway (Skyline Plaza, Daly City, CA)
B1	Hot Dog On A Stick (Stonestown Mall, San Fancisco, CA)
B2	McDonald's (Stonestown Mall, San Francisco, CA)
B3	Burger King (John Daly Boulevard, Daly City, CA)
B4	Straw Hat Pizza (Westlake Mall, Daly City, CA)
B5	Round Table Pizza (Oceana Boulevard, Pacifica, CA)

Sounds Of The San Francisco Adult Bookstores

Thirteen minutes of supreme silliness apparently recorded on location by Gregg Turkington, the nut behind the hilarious anti-comic Neil Hamburger, and the fiendishly clever Warm Voices Rearranged anagram record reviews site. The narrator, presumably Turkington, speaks in a mock David Attenborough voice. Copies of this record came with a free tissue. 

Clicking on the title will wisk you off to DivShare-land, where a wondrous world awaits!

The Golding Institute "Sounds Of The San Francisco Adult Bookstores" (1997)

SIX ACCORDIONISTS GO RIDING ON A CAROUSEL...

...No, that's not a joke set-up. It really happened on the Santa Monica Pier in 2010. Daniel Corral and his group the Free Reed Conspiracy actually sat on carousel horses that went up 'n' down, up 'n' down, playing a near-30 minute powerful drone piece - like Glenn Branca for squeezeboxes. "...the audience listened as the music spun past them." Watch it here (can't see the musicians much, unfortunately):

NEOTROPE

or download the mp3 from Corral's website if you scroll down a bit

HERE

tho it's not as densely loud. The acoustics of the 80-year-old carousel building no doubt caused much reverberation, which I prefer to the pristine studio version.

There was apparently an entire evening of music and performance on the carousel and, as I live in Los Angeles, am bummed that I wasn't there. Encore, encore!

The Conceptual Crank-Calls of "Conversations"

Brandon Locher's "Conversations 2012" is a near-20 minute tour de force that does for prank phone calls what "The Velvet Underground & Nico" did for rock 'n' roll, uncovering unexpected depth and scope in what had been dismissed as childish nonsense.

What he basically did was call a store in a Johnstown, PA shopping mall and then did not speak. The "Hello? Hello" etc. response was recorded and then played to another shopkeeper in the same mall. Then their bewildered response was recorded and played for whoever answered the phone at yet another store in the same mall, and so on, until this game of tag went throughout the mall.

It does what a crank call is supposed to do - makes ya laff! - but there's much more going on here. It's ingeniously constructed, a well-edited piece of sound-collage, if nothing else. It's also a snapshot of corporate retail culture - jeez, the long greetings they make these poor kids say when they answer the phone! 

Then there's the fact that no-one answering the phone knows that they're speaking to a recording.  Everyone thinks that they're having a real conversation.  Between guffaws, Mrs Fab said to me that this is somewhat of an illustration of the cold-reading method that con-artists use to convince suckers that they have psychic powers, based on the fact that people generally say and act in very limited, predictable ways, even tho we like to think that we are very free-thinking, unique individuals.

Best of all - it's really funny. Listen/download here:

Brandon Locher "Conversations 2012"

The Earliest Known Recorded Music in Existence

Yep, only three known copies of this Edison wax cylinder from 1888 exist, which would certainly make this one of the most historically prized recordings ever.  But it's also a good listen. 

The "song" heard here is an excerpt from classical composer Handel's "Israel In Egypt" sung by, to quote a note on the cylinder: "A chorus of 4000 voices recorded with phonograph over 100 yards away." Conducted by August Manns; recorded by Col. George Gouraud, foreign sales agent for Thomas Edison at the Crystal Palace, London, England, June 29, 1888.

A hundred yards away?!  At first I thought: 'a hundred feet away', the length of a football field, but no, it says 'yards.' Dang, that's far. So what does it sound like?  Pretty avant-garde, actually - the white-noise of the cylinder whirring around melded with the huge distant choir is a strange and haunting sound, indeed. Not too far removed from something you might hear on a Zoviet France or Nurse With Wound album. Knowing that these are actual voices from the 1800s adds a ghostly mystery to the experience.

Handel festival: "Israel In Egypt" - excerpt

(Courtesy of archive.org.)

Music Recorded In A Cave on "The Great Stalacpipe Organ"

Here's some real "underground music," har har!  Put on your lantern helmet and repel with me down into Luray Caverns, Virginia, where an engineer named Leland Sprinkle noticed that striking the cave's rock formations produced musical tones. So, in 1954, he conceived of an organ with little hammers that strike a hollow rock when the organ's keys are depressed. It's quite musical, though with a limited sonic palette. Rather then the usual pipe organ bombast, the Stalacpipe Organ ("The World's Largest Musical Instrument!") is quiet, ghostly. The reverberating splashes of dripping water in the background sounds like sporadic electronic percussion, adding to the ambient feel.


In 2001, United States Naval Academy chapel organist Monte Maxwell recorded a cd full of popular, classical, gospel, and American patriotic standards played on the Organ. Four-and-a-half years ago, when the album was still in print, I posted one song from it, but as it has apparently fallen into a deep cave, here's the whole dang deal:

Midnight In The Caverns: Music From The Great Stalacpipe Organ

Older recordings can be heard here (the original 365 Project), and Week 15 of Tape Findings.

FUN WITH SUN BOXES

Fayetteville's Craig Colorusso doesn't "compose" music so much as build gizmos that allow Mother Nature to write her own jams: "Sun Boxes are...twenty speakers operating independently, each powered by the sun via solar panels. There is a different loop set to play a guitar note in each box continuously. These guitar notes collectively make a Bb chord. Because the loops are different in length, once the piece begins they continually overlap and the piece slowly evolves over time."

The loops-of-different-lengths approach reminds me of Eno's "Music For Airports," and there is a similar meditative effect with this music. The ambient sounds of nature (the beach, insects, etc.) are a crucial component - these are, quite literally, field
recordings. I first listened to this stuff Monday morning after a crazy Thanksgiving weekend (complete with a live "Yo Gabba Gabba" concert and thousands of screaming toddlers!) and it was as nice as dipping into a warm bath. Aaaah...

Listen or buy:

Sun Boxes Seven Inch

or listen to a continuous stream.