Your Imaginary Friend Disappears
The Voice of Doom on the air once again at
KZSU
Wed, 23 Jul 2003, 6pm-9pm PST
What I was up to
No plans to speak of, I strode into the studio with about 30
seconds to go, when the previous DJ was already wondering
aloud on the mic about what had happened to me. But I am an
experienced DJ who can cope with such situations without fail.
Coping mechanisms:
- Pull some industrial/noise 12 inch vinyl, leave it on a turntable
at all times, just in case.
- Pull some locked-groove vinyl, in this case the RRR-100 7 inch,
for some instant infinite loop samples. Leave that on another turntable.
- Broadcast in "delay", so that the "air" signal lags behind "program",
stick in a patch from "air" to one of the auxillary inputs on the board:
an instant 3 second echo loop, whenever you might need it. Don't forget to
switch your headphones to "program", the usual practice of listening to "air"
would drive you crazy.
- Bring in a bunch of your own records, so you'll have
stuff you're familiar with without having to hunt for it.
- Lean on KZSU's A-file, to get a pre-selected sample of (hopefully)
good, new music.
- Let some of the usual rules-of-thumb slide (Like,
should you play multiple tracks off the same release? Hell,
why not).
- Numerology. Track 1 is now the "sweet spot", where the
most accessible/poppy track goes. Track 6 is in the region
where the band shifts pace, throws in something unusual that
they liked a lot, but were afraid to lead with. Beware the
9 plus tracks: padding.
What you should *not* do is sound audibly out-of-breath, and babble
incessantly about how you're about to lose it. Oh well.
soundbed/mix fodder
For this show, there was this one record I was constantly
coming back to, mixing in little bits now and then:
- Panicsville/Rubber-O-Cement - "?"
- off of Pleasure Mechanism's Understudy
- label: Nihilist
(WARNING: shockwave bullshit)
- These groups are some local electronic noise artists
that I know very little about (despite the fact that I think
I've heard them perform at an odd gallery event of sorts on
Valencia St (on the north of 15th St end)...
-
I tried to enlighten myself with some web searches, but there are limits
to the web design gaffs I'm willing to put up with (shockwave, javascript
popups, bleh... ) Note to bands: consider web standards
for your promotional pages. Save the "creativity" for the music, okay?
- some Panicsville album reviews including this split 12
- Panicsville website (WARNING javascript links).
In general I also had a lot of luck repeatedly hitting some
cheap vinyl I've scored recently at thrift stores, garage sales, and so on...
that list includes:
- Egypt (U.A.R.) - ?
- off of Music and Melodies of the Arab World
- label: Arab Tunes
- A mystery double album found at the Goodwill on Fillmore Street in San Francisco.
Possibly a product of the Egyptian government, sold to tourists?
- Used this as mix fodder quite often, along with Panicsville/Rubber Cement.
- Antiqua Musica - "Edi Bethu - Anon (13th Century)"
- off of Medieval and Renaissance Songs and Dances
- label: The Everest Record Group
- Slow march rhythm, choral lyrics about being "led to victory again".
- One of the suprisingly excellent records I turned up for a buck at the
Goodwill on Fillmore Street in SF.
- Tommy Dorsey Orchestra - "Satan Takes a Holiday"
- off of Satan Takes a Holiday
- label: Decca
- A seven inch I picked up at Amoeba for a buck just recently.
- Frank Sinatra - "When We Were Young"
- off of In the Wee Small Hours
- label: Capitol
- Garage sale grab from a few months back.
The kickoff
- Imperial Teen - "Ivanka"
- off of On
- label: Merge Records
- Kihlstedt, Carla - "Empty Cupboard"
- off of 2 Foot Yard
- label: Tzadik Records
- The previous DJ, Hannah really liked the segue into this.
I wasn't so sure myself at the time, but on tape it sounds okay.
Both have a fast, bouncey quality to them, though the Imperial Teen
is poppier about it...
- Simple Minds - "Shake Off the Ghosts"
- off of Sparkle in the Rain
- label: A&M
- I am not sure why I played this track at this point.
Not that it sounded bad, but I pretty sure I was thinking about
something that I've forgotten about now.
Brace yourself
- Abstractions - "Your Eyes Taste Like Steel"
- off of Ars Vivende
- label: Edgetone
- Incredibly noisy, thrashy sax and distorted vocal screaming.
Grind core improv jazz fusion?
- Not the Abstractions track I meant to play in this slot
actually, but what the hell...
- Clock DVA - "Delta Machines"
- off of Digital Soundtracks
- label: Contempo
- The classic Clock DVA sound... computery sounding
industrial dance with slightly ominous technophilic vocal
samples... something about the rise of sentient machines
(which bring about a measurable change, i.e. "delta").
- "I have no doubt we could be engineered much -- better."
- Meehan, Rosenberg, Shiurba, Sperry - "Portland One"
- off of Portland & Seattle 1999
- label: Limited Sedition
- Interesting subdubed squeaks and banging...
- I got nervous about it not being enough of a "wall
of sound" to work in this set, but it builds up, fills in,
and sounds pretty good to my ears. Another triumph of
the Limited Sediton label...
- Near the end I started layering in this spoken word piece:
- Olive Tree Fire, the - "Galway Kinnell"
- off of Poems not Fit for the Whitehouse
- label: Not in Our Name
- Reading of Walt Whitman, and a piece of Galway Kinnell's own.
- Backstory: A poetry reading at the Whitehouse was
canceled when they realized the poets were planning on doing
lots of anti-war messages. So this event was put together
as an alternate venue for them to vent, and this double-CD
set commemorates the event.
- Ah, poetry with political substance to it, sounds good?
The downside is that this live event has the usual strident,
annoying tone of left-wing political rallies. It made it
hard to use these two tracks, there's all sorts of introductory
spinach and applause I was trying to trim on the fly.
- Bastien, Pierre - "Odovinyl"
- off of Musiques Paralloidres
- label: Lowlands
- Really interesting release that I keep coming back to.
Pierre Bastien does mixes of sampled loops of other music,
but does creates the loops using mechanical means: simple gadgets
that sit on top of a record, gently pick up the tone arm and move it back
a little. Doesn't usually have the skippy sound of record manipulation
music.
- War Crime - "Anne Waldman"
- off of Poems not Fit for the Whitehouse
- label: Not in Our Name
- Another reading of Walt Whitman.
It makes sense to me, really...
- Antiqua Musica - "Edi Bethu - Anon (13th Century)"
- off of Medieval and Renaissance Songs and Dances
- label: The Everest Record Group
- Slow march rhythm, choral lyrics about being "led to victory again".
- One of the suprisingly excellent records I turned up for a buck at the
Goodwill on Fillmore Street in SF.
- Fad Gadget - "Plainsong"
- off of Under the Flag
- label: Mute
- Oddball track, reminded me of David Bowie doing a
showtune, with a bit of a medieval sound.
- Lyrics sounded all too much like stuff I'm likely to say:
"I can hardly wait to leave this place, the people seem to revel in their own bad taste";
"Amplified with emptiness... glorified with mindlessness..."
- New Pornographers - "Testament to Youth in Verse"
- off of Electric Version
- label: Matador Records
- I let this kick way too loud... a lot of CDs are recorded so hot
these days, I should really stop trying to get away without a level check.
- Maybe a bit too poppy, but the subject is anti-pop, and
ties in well thematically with the previous track.
- "Keep our hands to ourselves, Keep our minds on the sun/
If you go looking for a testament to youth in verse"
- "Maybe it's not all right"
- "The bells ring: no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no"
- Antiqua Musica - "Saltarello - Anon (14th Century)"
- off of Medieval and Renaissance Songs and Dances
- label: Everest Record Group
- Eh, bit of gap there, but what the hell. No one notices the loose segues
as much as the DJ does.
- This is in fact the second half of the track that I led off with: they put
two songs in the one cut, I'm not sure why.... but it gave me an opportunity to
come back to the beginning and yet advance, and that's pretty much *the* basic
narrative structure...
- A really strange rhythm, with a chorus that almost sounds like a monkey chant.
This was a weirdly shaky mic break, not sure why. Not even the wet dog that
ran into the control room and had me start petting him helped calm me down.
I was afraid the entire show might have sounded like that from what the Dangerbabe
was telling me...
set up
- Angels of Light - "Rose of Los Angeles"
- off of Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home
- label: Young Gods Records
- Aislers Set, the - "Catherine Says"
- off of How I Learned to Write Backwards
- label: Suicide Squeeze
- Positive Knowledge - "In One Heart"
- off of Live in New York
- label: Edgetone Records 699363
yet another set
- Dengue Fever - "Lost in Laos"
- off of Dengue Fever
- label: Web of Mimicry 710244
- Greco, Juliette - "Les Feuilles Mortes"
- off of Les Plus Grandes Chansons de Juliette Greco
- label: Coppelia Olivia
- Crime & the City Solution - "The Adversary"
- off of Until the End of the World
- label: Warner Brothers (Modern) 29809
- At the end of this track I went off into a mix of...
- Panicsville/Rubber Cement - ?
- off of Pleasure Mechanism's Understud
- label: Nihilist 577649
- A split 12 inch... I think. One of those arty packages with confusing packaging.
- Egypt (U.A.R.) - ?
- off of Music and Melodies of the Arab World
- label: Arab Tunes
- A mystery double album found at the Goodwill on Fillmore Street in San Francisco.
Possibly a product of the Egyptian government, sold to tourists?
The Green Number 6 Set
What can a DJ do when they are totally losing it? This
DJ runs through the A-file and grabs CDs with green colored
spines, and plays track number 6 off of each of them.
- Hedningarna - "Ukkonen"
- off of 1989-2003
- label: Northside
- Track 6
- "a shifting cast of swedes and finns, who
have produced five albums worth of nordic delicassies"
- Pachora - "Howl"
- off of Astereotypical
- label: Winter & Winter
- Track 6
- Downtown New York klezmer band with some stellar
muscians who are largely wasted on this project, in my
opinion
- Welch, Gillian - "No One Knows My Name"
- off of Soul Journey
- label: Acony Records
- Track 6
- Lost Sounds - "Remote Control"
- off of Demos II
- label: On/On Switch
- Track 6
- Panicsville/Rubber Cement - "?"
- off of Pleasure Mechanism's Understud
- label: Nihilist
- ? - "2"
- off of RRR-100
- label: Rrrecords
- I played a large number of things, rapidly in sucession
off of this release, using the Panicsville/Rubbercement 12"
to help cover the sounds of needle drops. (Actually, I guess
I was riding the slider with my left and dropping the needle with
my right, but I wasn't always getting the slider down all the way...)
- I don't actually know that I was playing
it's close to impossible to know which track you selected on this 7", which
is a collection of 100 locked grooves.
The empty set
- Elliott, Ronny - "Poets and Scientists"
- off of Hep
- label: Blue Heart Records
- (I continued messing with Panicville and RRR-100 throughout this set....)
- Clock DVA - "Chemical"
- off of Digital Soundtracks
- label: Contempo
- Eh... this track turns out to be fairly basic technoy
dance music, not as good as most stuff on this CD. So I
started looking for other stuff to mix into it, and came
back to...
- Egypt (U.A.R.) - ?
- off of Music and Melodies of the Arab World
- label: Arab Tunes
- Frank Sinatra - "When We Were Young"
- off of In the Wee Small Hours
- label: Capitol
- Clock DVA - "Delta Machines"
- off of Digital Soundtracks
- label: Contempo
- (or at least I think I was playing Delta Machines again)
- DoomVox - ""
- out of My Pocket Notebook
- label:
- A little too quiet and indistinct, I think...
got to learn to project a little more.
- Thirteenth Floor Elevators - "Dr. Doom"
- off of Bull of the Woods
- label: Charly Records
- At least I finally played this on the air without stomping
on the introduction
"Dear Dr. Doom, Read your recent letter, Dear Dr. Doom, Hope
you're feeling better --"
- One of my favorite songs, for a lot of reasons:
"we won't join in savoirs/we are each one different/
we will join in wonders/when we are each one whole"
n minus one
- Vidna Obmana - "Duality of Passion"
- off of Spore
- label: Relapse Records
- Mixed in lots of short little tracks with this:
- Lost Sounds - "Random Signals"
- off of Demos Ii
- label: On/On Switch 707857
- and...
- Abstractions - "that hideous beauty"
- off of ars vivende
- label: edgetone
- and...
- Abstractions - "amerikia not beautiful"
- off of ars vivende
- label: edgetone
- and...
- Abstractions - "Universal fLaw"
- off of Ars Vivende
- label: Edgetone
- Tommy Dorsey Orchestra - "Satan Takes a Holiday"
- off of Satan Takes a Holiday
- label: Decca
- A seven inch I picked up at Amoeba for a buck just recently.
- Fad Gadget - "Wheels of Fortune"
- off of Under the Flag
- label: Mute
in spite of itself
- Pachora - "Push"
- off of Astereotypical
- label: Winter & Winter
- I actually don't like this band that much... I think
Chris Speed does some of the dullest, cliched klezmer clarinet
I've ever heard... on the other hand there are some great muscians
in the band, notably Skuli Sverisson on percussion and electronics.
- The KZSU review described this track as "industrial
folk", which leaves me somewhat astonished for reasons I
will not get into except that it leaves me wondering if the
reviewer was listening to my show ten years ago.
- Tracy, Jill - "just the other side of pain"
- off of diabolical streak
- label: slieght of hand particulars
- Abstractions - "heart of midnight"
- off of Ars Vivende
- label: edgetone
- Orchestra of the National Music Institute, Seoul - "Kagok"
- off of Korean Court Music
- label: Lyrichord
- Mixed with:
- Panicsville - "Happy Haunting (Taper with B"
- off of Pleasure Mechanism's Understud
- label: Nihilist 577649
- Egypt (U.A.R.) - "Kanoon"
- off of Music and Melodies of the Arab World
- label: Arab Tunes
- Movietone - "In a Marine Light"
- off of Blossom Filled Streets, the
- label: Drag City 564601
Closing track
- Pain Teens - "Living Hell"
- off of Stimulation Festival
- label: (Unknown)
doom@kzsu.stanford.edu