Monday, January 18, 2010

THISISNOTANEXIT - MANIFESTO #1



Beware this forthcoming label-comp! Because it is two CDs of wildness from the TINAE roster, including Naum Gabo, Pink Stallone, The Dark Esquire, Professor Genius, Spectral Empire, Club Silencio, and also Night Plane. It will rain like fire, and burn the bridges where they stand.

new TINAE online shop!




Order a personal copy of Night Plane - Chinese Shadows 12" from the lovely new THISISNOTANEXIT online shop. Buy this twelve inch online, and then it will appear at your house! On this twelve inch, three songs have been etched onto vinyl, which can be heard according to a record player. You can like them!


Monday, January 4, 2010

Psychedelic Australia



buffalo - freedom

some lost heavy-psych wildness from Australia's Buffalo, from their 1973 LP Volcanic Rock. If "Freedom" by Buffalo off of Volcanic Rock isn't the most testosteronic-sounding song listing ever, I don't know what is. Personally my associations with Australia are that it is as if you made Texas an entire continent, which Texas already believes itself to be. Australia is like Texas' fantasy version of itself: an entire continent where you drive around in the wilderness, drink too much, and have psychedelic visions in the outback while jamming songs about "Freedom." You'll note as well that this song is a dead ringer for Soundgarden. When you hear dude sing try and not think about Chris Cornell.

Two years after Volcanic Rock, Peter Weir directed Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is also about psychedelic aussies, except instead of brawny biker types it's about boarding school girls who go into the wilderness and have a group freak-out. Here's the film's central scene.


Australia reminds me also of course of mi madre, born in Taree, New South Wales, north of Sydney. She lived there until she was nine, when her family immigrated to the United States. My mother was personally not very psychedelic, although she did have a pet kookaburra as a child. Having weird pets is kind of psychedelic, especially if it is an unusual species that only exists in one part of the world.



We visited Australia for a month when I was twelve, which was the coolest thing ever. I got to feed kangaroos and hug a koala bear. On my birthday, my father took me up in a private airplane, which he flew, over the Great Barrier Reef.


At one point we stayed at a bed & breakfast that was on a ranch. The family had a daughter about my age who took me around on a four-wheeler. At one point my father and the owner of the ranch were talking about the owner's dogs. "Yeah, they're bitches." He remarked, and because I was twelve I was like whoa can he say that?? Later the daughter explained to me and my brother about weird prepubescent Australian sex rituals, which involved wearing and then breaking a bracelet called a "nigga-band" and then "rooting" each other (not making this up).

The history of Australia's colonization involves the Brits taking all their unwanted denegerate types and then leaving them on a beautifully trippy, completely unique unexplored continent where the indigenous tribes have psychic powers. It's basically an episode of "Lost."





Sunday, January 3, 2010

Promo Mixes


(Front Club, Hamburg Germany, 1989)

promomixes.com is a new mix site focusing on historically-influential clubs. Each monthly mix will feature the sounds of a particular club mixed by a DJ who played there, someone who danced there, or someone who simply still jocks the sound.


The first mix is from Berlin's Finn Johannsen and concerns Hamburg's Front Club, one of the first European venues to start playing house music.And apparently a fun place to visit - see the pic of a young couple handcuffed while dancing. Finn has put together "a tape he'd want to slip the owners of Front Club in 1990." Consider it the inaugural offering for a site that promises to offer classic electronic satisfaction together with some important history lessons.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Omni Ciani



Omni magazine was a science/futurism publication founded by Bob Guccione Jr. that ran from the late seventies to the mid-nineties. It ushered in a new era of popular science journalism, being something like the Wired magazine of its time, but with more of a speculative bent. Omni regularly featured pieces from science-fiction luminaries including Arthur C. Clarke and William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace in Omni's pages. The speculative side also meant a predilection for new age-y and UFO-related pseudo-science. In the mid-nineties Omni was the first print publication to go entirely online. You can read an article in Slate magazine here about the history of Omni, and as well visit the online tribute site.

Here is a clip from Omni's short-lived TV incarnation, featuring the analog synth wizardress / nerd pin-up Suzanne Ciani as she composes music for a pinball game. Not only is it remarkably hypnotic to watch her program computers and synthesizers, I also love the smug goofball TV show host at the beginning, lounging by a space lamp and saying "isn't it amazing that electricity of this kind will one day be used to regrow human limbs?" in a ridiculously smug voice, summing up the sort of self-oblivious giddiness of 70s futurism.



Ciani, a student of synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla, has enjoyed a successful career as a musician and commercial composer for several decades, having composed the sound effects for the MECO disco Stars Wars record, releasing her classic Seven Waves album, and scoring numerous commercials. These included a coke commercial in which she used synthesizers to generate the satisfying PSSSHT sound of a soda can being opened.



WAV files of Ciani's designs for the Xenon pinball game shown in the Omni clip are posted on her website.


Here is Suzanne in another clip, this time from the children's tv show 3-2-1 Contact, explaining the properties of electronic sound.