{music} – Page 303 – { feuilleton }

From LSD to OSX

A few servings of iTunes jelly.

I’ve spent the past week or so enjoying the delights of Leopard, the 10.5 iteration of Apple’s OS X operating system, but have only just noticed the new Visualizer patterns in the latest version of iTunes. I don’t use the Visualizer much, especially since the introduction of Front Row, Apple’s home media management system, but it’s always nice to know it’s there. The original Visualizer isn’t so far removed from the graphic tricks I used to laboriously program into my old Spectrum computer in the 1980s, simple repeated shapes with coloured lines, albeit a lot faster and with far more detail and animation than a 48k Spectrum could ever manage. The latest Visualizer has been significantly supercharged, however, and the new “Jelly” setting creates some really beautiful (and it should be noted, trippy) patterns, reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters UFOs or James Cameron’s Abyss inhabitants.

I can’t help but see a direct line of continuity here from Apple’s origin in the head culture of Sixties and Seventies’ California to the present. Writer John Markoff examined some of the connections between psychedelic culture and the nascent computer scene in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry where we find Apple CEO Steve Jobs saying that “taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.” Given this, the glowing, pulsating mandalas in the new iTunes can be seen as a vestigial remnant of that era, and it seems fitting that those patterns are integrated into a music player; it was upon the Sixties’ music scene, after all, that LSD originally had its greatest cultural impact.

Update: For anyone wanting to play with iTunes Jelly, there’s a couple of undisclosed features (this is for Macs but I imagine they’d be the same in the PC version). Pressing M tells you the name of the pattern currently being displayed, pressing 1 shrinks part of the pattern, 2 zooms it out and 8, 9 and 0 cause different colours to over-saturate. It’s a full-on psychedelic light-show, in other words.

Update 2: If you press M so it shows the pattern name then press the Up or Down arrow, you can flick through the various pattern settings.

• Watch Jelly in action
• Steve Jobs drops acid in Pirates of Silicon Valley

Previously on { feuilleton }
• iTunes 7

Another playlist for Halloween

A follow-up to last year’s list. Seeing as Joy Division are very much in the news at the moment with the release of Control and the re-issue of the albums, I thought a post-punk theme would be appropriate. The period which immediately followed punk in the late Seventies saw a lot of doom being imported into what was then still a proper alternative to the mainstream of popular music. This trend quickly ossified into the distinct and far less adventurous genres of goth and post Throbbing Gristle/Cabaret Voltaire industrial but between 1978 and 1982 everything was in a state of fascinating flux.

Hamburger Lady (1978) by Throbbing Gristle.
TG’s heart-warming ode to a burns victim.

6am (1979) by Thomas Leer & Robert Rental.
Leer and Rental’s The Bridge album was originally one of the few none-Throbbing Gristle releases on TG’s Industrial label, one half songs, the other moody electronic instrumentals. 6am perfectly conjures a picture of empty streets at dawn and sounds like a precursor of Ennio Morricone’s score for The Thing.

Bela Lugosi’s Dead (1979) by Bauhaus.
The first Bauhaus single and the only song of theirs I liked. Put to great use at the beginning of the otherwise pretty risible The Hunger.

Day Of The Lords (1979) by Joy Division.
If anything shows that Ian Curtis was a Romantic in the 19th century sense, it’s this grandiose wallow in the atrocities of history. “Where will it end?”

James Whale (1980) by Tuxedomoon.
Church bells toll and a lonely violin shrieks for the director of the Universal Frankenstein films.

Halloween (1981) by Siouxsie & the Banshees.
With a title like that, how could it not be included here?

Goo Goo Muck (1981) by The Cramps.
Always superior collagists of rockabilly weirdness and early garage riffs, The Cramps started out in the horror camp (“camp” being a big part of their act) with the Gravest Hits EP. Goo Goo Muck was a cover of a great single by (I kid not) Ronnie Cook & the Gaylads. “When the sun goes down and the moon comes up / I turn into a teenage goo goo muck.”

Raising The Count (1981) by Cabaret Voltaire.
An obscure moment of resurrection originally on the Rough Trade C81 cassette compilation from the NME.

Gregouka (1982) by 23 Skidoo.
Gregorian monks meet Moroccan pipes and drums with the result sounding like a voodoo ceremony taking place in cathedral catacombs.

The Litanies Of Satan (1982) by Diamanda Galás.
The formidable Ms Galás was part of last year’s list and her first album is just as hair-raising as her later works. The second part is the marvellously titled Wild Women With Steak-knives (The Homicidal Love Song For Solo Scream).

Happy Halloween!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box

The most hated album in jazz

The most hated album in jazz
| Miles Davis’s On the Corner.

Family Dog postcards

top: William Henry (1967); Victor Moscoso (1967).
bottom: Victor Moscoso (1967); Kelley/Mouse (1967).

Marvellous. Oldhandbills.com has a lot of this stuff, loads of designs I’ve never seen before. Via Arthur.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Marian Zazeela

Boredoms in Manchester

Anyone who subscribes to the stereotype about Japanese people always being quiet and unassuming has never seen a Japanese rock band. Last time I returned from a gig with my ears ringing the way they are now was after seeing Acid Mothers Temple a few years ago. Tonight it was the turn of Boredoms who drummed up an absolute storm in a sweaty, airless dungeon under the Student’s Union. Boredoms have been active since the mid-Eighties in various shapes and sizes, more recently working under variations on their name. Early albums were always experimental but tended to be nastily noisy with it. They really caught my attention at the end of the Nineties with Super Ae (1998) and Vision Creation Newsun (2000), a pair of drum-powered albums that owe a great deal to the “kosmische” atmosphere of the best Krautrock, especially Amon Düül II circa Yeti.

Tonight we had a great deal of the thundering cross-patterns of drum rhythms amended by some of the piercing extended crescendos found on VCN. Very loud and very powerful. There was some unusual instrumentation involved as well, including what appeared to be hand-held lightbulbs triggering samples and harmonised feedback, and also a rack of guitar necks (above) with what I assume must be open tunings given the way these were used as percussion devices. It was difficult to tell who was doing what (or using what) for much of the time due to the density of the crowd. But such details are beside the point, this was a tremendous performance that was overwhelmingly intense at times. It’s rare indeed to find a band still working at this peak after 21 years. Along with the very different performance by Machinefabriek in May, best gig of the year so far.