A Sound Awareness is another fantastic blog that pays tribute to musical oddities as well as linking and reviewing other strange content in from the film and art world. Just to give an idea of what you might come across on this blog, I stumbled upon an old post reviewing an album called Tortura - Sounds of Pleasure and Pain, a 1965 recording of the sado-masochistic screams, yelps, and cackles of people being whipped. Even if this isn't your sort of thing, you'll appreciate the strangeness, taste, and diversity of this blog's regularly updated content as much as I have.
So, this week's show was relatively well planned out to feature a lecture by composer and sound artist Karlheinz Stockhausen at UCLA in 1966. Unfortunately, due to some unforeseen mishap with technology, I was unable to air the show I had put together and was forced to make due with some new releases from CFMU's music library. This is what happens when you are not great with technology but rely on it because it is easier than lugging a bunch of records and cds across town. Lesson learned. Part of the lecture will air on next week's show and I will post a link to the entire thing on the blog.
I will not be posting the podcast for this week since the show did not go as planned, but you can still download it from CFMU's website (and see if you can detect the irritation in my voice). This is one of the joys of live radio. Just go to the programming grid and select new directions then go to march 13/11 show date download. It will be up for a bout four weeks I think.
In the meantime, check out this film by Peter Moore of Stockhausen's live action composition - Stockhausen's Originale: Doubletakes, the Film (1964). This is part 1 from YouTube but you can watch the complete video and read more about this piece here courtesy of UbuWeb
In hopes of making my blog more interactive I've decided to try and do a blog/site of the week entry every Monday. People always ask me where I find out about or get a lot of music that I play on my show. Most of the content I play, aside from coming from my personal collection and local sounds, are things I've come across scouring the Internet.
I found the Ghost Capital blog linked from Ubuweb's twitter account, which in itself is a goldmine for any fan of rare/weird/artistically relevant sounds. Ghost Capital is devoted to rare and obscure music which for those of you that listen to New Directions, is something that I also try to bring to the airwaves on my show. A great thing about this blog is that they also share rips to a lot of the music/albums they feature along with samples, so you are not left trying to figure out where to hear more.
