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.

klf chill-out / the disappearance fugue

the klf - chill out

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ac welcomes you to post #300

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the disappearance fugue: three forms of grift

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along with the orb's first album, the klf's chill-out gave birth to ambient house.  the history of this british duo's absurdist provocations and Ubu-esque avant prankerism could fill a whole book, in fact the story of the klf seems intended for the internet, a diffuse legacy of infamous acts impossible to reconstruct.  Suffice to say that here they left the fist-pump anthem of "3AM Eternal" behind for a hallucinatory expedition across an imaginary America, much like Kafka did with his second novel. You can really talk for a long time about the singularity and impact of this record, its unique intensity is like a metaphor-generator for rapturous critics. Suffice to say it's a spare, lulling dreamscape, a futuristic collage full of spacey electronics,  field recordings, samples of elvis and steel guitar and radio interludes - culling a visionary haze, where memory and dream wisp languid in the morning light.

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introduction: in psychology, there is a rare form of amnesia that strikes without warning and strips its victim of his/her identity, leaving basic motor/social skills intact. It takes the self off-line. It's called a dissociative fugue. Aka the Bourne affliction. A fugue is also a musical term: it refers to a particular composition-style, the Bach style, of contrapuntal turning, a composition for a fixed number of instruments. In the psychological term it is meant to indicate a period or episode. Fugue is derived in part from the Italian fuga, related to fugere, to flee, and fugare, to chase. So the dissociative fugue refers to a time when the self has flown, when the person that remains goes after it, or perhaps flees on its own trajectory. The dissociative fugue is a subset of the disappearance fugue, because the disappearance fugue includes grift fugues as well. Or, perhaps it is that dissociative fugue is also a kind of grift, a kind of cosmic grift where you don't even choose it, it chooses you, it befalls you, like a curse or a blessing.

1. the klf are grifters, that much should be clear. they took all their money and burned it. they drove around in a special klf police car with a special horn. they invented a sonic weapon that sent out huge punishing frequencies across the british countryside and it made a pregnant cow misscarriage. they wrote a book about how to have a number one pop hit, a serious book. They are burroughs-era media-savvy techno-anarchists.  They have been on an extended disappearance fugue for some time now, having retreated to whatever underground multi-media pyramid they call home.  

2. The New York Times - A Life, Interrupted

Today's New York Times describes an astonishing case of dissociative fugue. 

"On Aug. 28, a Thursday, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from Hamilton Heights named Hannah Emily Upp went for a jog along Riverside Drive. That jog is the last thing that Ms. Upp says she remembers before the deckhands rescued her from the waters of New York Harbor on the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 16. Rumors and speculation abounded about what befell Ms. Upp. She disappeared the day before the start of a new school year at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a Harlem school, where she taught Spanish. She left behind her wallet, her cellphone, her ID and a host of troubling questions. It was as if the city had simply opened wide and swallowed her whole — until she was seen on a security camera at the Midtown Apple store checking her e-mail. Then she vanished again. And then reappeared, not only at the Apple store but also at a Starbucks and several New York Sports Clubs, where news reports said she went to shower. Was she suffering from bipolar disorder? Running away from an overly demanding job? Escaping from a city that can overwhelm even the most resilient?"

3. The New Yorker - The Chameleon

The New Yorker ran a fascinating article a while ago on Federic Bourdin, the master chameleon, who possesses a preternatural ability to mimic, imitate, and to transform himself, most often as a young orphan boy. In the end he was outed and taken into police custody. It was difficult, however, to charge Bourdin with any particular infraction. This is because Bourdin's acts are not of today - they are crimes of the future.  Bourdin, the wily, charismatic satyr-phantom is Hannah Upp's evil twin, he has carried out an endless series of disappearance fugues, and thus, an endless grift. 

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on that note, thanks again to everyone who came and saw our endless grift unfold at death by audio last friday. we're headed into the studio in a couple of weeks, looking forward to sharing the results. 

white noise / delia derbyshire

white noise - an electric storm

delia derbyshire - unreleased tapes (bbc link)

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white noise: late sixties rogue psychedelic-electronic mind-melter, holy grail for avant-weirdo obsessives. the first side keeps to a restrained pop framework, I guess if you consider sound-effect orgy recordings to be pop, while the second grows a beard and gets highly nasty, depicting the inner world of the spectral undead ("Visitations") and then go into a no-holds-barred abyssal freakout called "The Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell." There's later white noise records but they're basically solo Vorhaus albums. "An Electric Storm" is an unparalleled cannonball of whiplash studio effects and lysergic lasers. 

delia derbyshire: hicks sent this link, to a post about a batch of unreleased tapes recorded by derbyshire. Today if you are a male guitar player you can impossibly fantasize about nico, if you are a laptop dork you prefer delia. She worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and was a groundbreaker in electronic sound experimentation, her claim to fame being the recording of the Dr. Who theme. The tapes at this BBC link are nuts. Orbital's Hartnoll rightly observes that one of them could be coming out on Warp records next week. Delia did a bunch of sound manipulation on "an electric storm" as well, which explains alot. It makes playing with ableton live seem like monkeyshines by comparison. 

gem hunter presents: crystal bliss

///gem hunter - crystal bliss

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findings from the AC research archive unearthed in preparation

for the upcoming vena cava fashion show on Valentine's Day. 

sounds of glowing souls, white winds, angels & demons at play.

///file under: interstellar elevator music, the crystallarium

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andreas vollenweider - caverna magica
amorphous androgynous - mountain goat
harold budd - flowered knife shadows
brian eno - an ending (ascent)
linda perhacs - chimacum rain
claire hamill - sleep
cocteau twins - donimo
laurie anderson - big science
phil collins - droned
andy summers & robert fripp - bewitched
david bowie - warsawa
tangerine dream - exit
ash ra tempel - ocean of tenderness
vangelis - alpha
deuter - crystal pearls crystal

A Brief History of Ambient

A Brief History of Ambient Vol 1 - Disc One
A Brief History of Ambient Vol 2 - Disc Two

A bloody stomper of a comp. A comp stomper.

There is a well-known graffiti homage to Joe Strummer in the East Village, which you have undoubtedly passed by in a state of mild distraction, during one of your many boozy, late night perambulations, the sort that ends with the impromptu ingestion of fried dough and a gnawing predilection for dialing individuals with whom, all things considered, it is probably best you maintain no further contact. You probably should just go ahead and delete their number now, while you read this, presumably at your office, and presumably sober, during one of your daily cookie breaks. [Pret a Manger is good]. Further contact, you know in the back of your mind, will lead only to further sorrow, and quite possibly a trip to the men's health clinic.

The image depicts the Clash singer wearing sunglasses, his jacket thrown over his shoulder, accentuated only with a phrase which became one of the band's many unofficial slogans, "The Future Is Unwritten."




This shouldn't be understood to say that this is a property belonging only to the time of what has not yet taken place. Because the past is also unwritten: the steady, inexorable course of present time, in all of history's incalculable twists and inversions, is constantly rewriting the past, making the hidden sonics of its concealed treasures echo in a new key.

Re-engagement with the past is especially fun in the sort of proto-time that we love to go on about at AC, in those heady, experimental open-ended periods of artistic intensity which only retroactively become parts of a movement or can be understood as contributing a genre.

Brian Eno, as every schoolchild knows, is widely credited with coining the term 'ambient music,' and the apocryphal account of the genre's inception involves Eno in an incapacitated state, lying in bed with a broken bone of some sort, listening to a record which had been put on but at an improperly low volume, such that its sonic contents were experienced at the threshold of audibility, wavering in and out of range of the human ear. Like any good materialist, Eno saw this as a new potential to be explored. The musical revolution that followed was a fulfillment as well of Erik Satie's desire to make music "to mingle with the sounds of forks and knives at dinner," rather than something to be consciously, attentively devoured by the audience. Music became wallpaper, became sculpture, became practical, became that most deliciously minor layer of stimulation that cushions you from the harsh opacity of empirical reality.

All your usual suspects are here on this comp, Mr. Fripp, Mr. Eno, Mr. Harold Budd, Mr. Tangerine Dream. Fripp & Eno's acknowledged classic "Evening Star" is here, evidence alone of Mr. Fripp's status as the Eric Clapton of Boring Music. The whole thing is just an epic list of early ethereal compositions and bugged-out melodic drift. Get with it, it wears a beard. Homeless wizards listen to it while doing yoga. Also Harold Budd's piano playing is just sick.

BTW supposedly Eno was as well influenced by a Miles Davis track called "He Loved Him Madly," which is supposed to be some epic ambient jazz dirge tribute to Duke Ellington. Does anyone have this?

Here's a ridiculously cool interview with Eno where he explains the principles behind his "Music for Airports", in which he explains the need for having music tailored for public spaces, how it should be composed so it doesn't interfere with other sounds (human communication, announcements), and so on. Subtitled in Dutch, thank God.