New Values
Beginning the 31st of December 2011, regular audio communication from Sandwell District will cease. All vinyl artifacts have been decommissioned. There is a possiblity of future, albeit irregular, print communications with audio accompaniment. However, details — and indeed content — is uncertain at this moment in time. The Sandwell experiment will exist through live actions — which will continue to expand into new sonic territory — in addition to audio / print installations as previously witnessed in New York, Los Angeles, Gdansk, Bialystok, Berlin and London.

Stasis is death.
See you on the other side.

So, you say, they’re breaking up, but they’re not stopping playing shows, and doing other ‘print communications with audio accompaniment’ — so what’s the big deal?

Well, I know we haven’t seen the last of Sandwell.

But what if we built our creative businesses, our design studios, our content companies, our  journalist’s collectives, with a set of time-based values?

What if businesses had an expiration date?

Obviously, this repels much of the capitalist ideal. Once the company reaches its peak, then is the time when it’s ripest for squeezing, a milking of profits that can continue, managed well, for some years.

If the participants were to agree to pack it in, and go their separate ways, after, say, three years, it would give no hope for investment, no hope for mechanisms of control that come with outside funding.

The best potential test case for this is a small design studio, with 3-5 partners. It is stated at the outset that this is a transient endeavor, meant to last three years, then everyone is released, the property liquidated, business cards tossed into the trash, web presence turned off.

Needless to say, it wouldn’t work as well with businesses based on making artisanal salami or high-grade thermocouples.

In the Wire story, one member of Sandwell, Karl O’Connor, says, ‘As we everything I have been involved with, it’s about creating situations – some you go with, an dsome you abort. We hate this whole ’20 years of so-and-so label’ or ’40 years of that label’. We know when things need to be killed or moved on.’

The ‘we know’ comes with a feeling of creative completeness, but a stated end point would set that feeling in stone, and force an arc higher and brighter than otherwise.

I often am able to connect the dots between people who have bonds to specific companies at specific periods, that is, they all worked at Company X during its heyday, and they all went on to places or things much more interesting than you would expect, given their relative lack of experience prior to Company X. There are a lot of factors at play here, like where Company X was in its life cycle already, or where the winds of novelty were blowing in its industry at the time, or the sort of work they were able to do  while together. But I believe companies with a stated half-life and a strong mission at the outset will create cadres of exceptional people.

There are a lot of different kinds of music on the list, but it’s all affecting. Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’ joins the entire Rage Against the Machine catalog, and USMC favorite ‘Bodies’ by Drowning Pool sits on equal footing with Nena’s ’99 Luftballons’.

The songs declared forbidden by the bigwigs at Clear Channel, deemed unfit for consumption, define an emotional range that completely saturated everything after the attacks. It was chaotic and sloppy and raw, and seemed to fill every place you could fit an interpretation. A story from The New York Times published September 19th says the list’s “intended aim is to ensure national mental health, though First Amendment supporters may point to it as the first shadowy blacklist in what President Bush says will be a war against terrorism.”

I arrived in New York City, pulling a U-Haul onto Lorillard Place in the Bronx, four weeks before September 11. Afterwards, I spent the next three months in a big, new place wandering in a strange trance. Our landlord, who was in the Coast Guard, was never around, and the house quickly turned into a haven for our confused weirdo friends to pad about like mental patients as we all tried to get our heads back together.

I’d like to think that if we had Spotify, and the ability to have access to a playlist containing the most-affecting songs from the last century of American popular music, it might have been a bit easier to snap out of it. Instead we listened to a lot of Can and G.G. Allin, which may have worked just as well.

At any rate, here’s that Spotify playlist. Enjoy the songs of sorrow and elation.

Clear Channel’s 9/11 ‘Lyrically Questionable” songs by Nick Parish

I’m incredibly saddened to learn Dan Sicko, husband, father and author of the hugely influential history/hagiography of electronic dance music Techno Rebels passed away today after fighting the vicious cancer ocular melanoma.

You can read more about Dan’s medical struggle here: http://mattsicko.blogspot.com/

Many people who knew Dan, either through his work in music or the online advertising world, only found out he was sick very recently; he faced his illness bravely, without making a public fuss about it.

Admirably, many who have had their lives touched by Dan’s work and spirit have joined together to stand by his wife Amy and daughter Anabel and help defray costs of his hospice care and other outstanding medical expenses.

You can donate to help the Sicko family here: http://www.gofundme.com/DanSicko

Dan’s book that remains, for me, the defining work on electronic music in America, and getting to know him better revealed a patient and caring guy.

I met Dan several times after coming into contact with his work very early in my career as a journalist, listening on the 313 list and trying to soak up every slice of information I could about electronic music.

When I was in town every year for DEMF, I’d get in touch with Dan and try to rendezvous and chat about music. Every time, he wasn’t the slightest bit irritated a fan would try and track him down and seek his thoughts and opinions on what was important or interesting to him.

It was only later that I learned Dan was working at Organic, coincidentally also involved in the wooly world of digital advertising. Dan’s name inevitably brought out good cheer in people who’d worked alongside him, which wasn’t surprising at all.

I last saw Dan in May, when he was hanging out in the Ghostly International tent at the festival, signing copies of the new, expanded edition of Techno Rebels. I joked I’d take a few, because, like most of my favorites they have a habit of getting pressed into friends arms with “you have to read this!” and not returning.

If you haven’t read it, it’s a must for any serious music fan. Purchase the new edition here.

Please consider helping Dan’s family; here’s the link again.

Consider how deep the void he left behind, yet how wide he spread electronic music’s message.

I got this email from them this morning, and I really hope it’s a symbol of some movement in their arrival here in the U.S. As much as I love sharing with Euro pals, I can’t wait until all my friends are on the service and jamming.

Hello from Spotify!

You are one of only a few people who has access to a Spotify promotional test account in the USA, and we hope you’re enjoying listening to Spotify through our
Premium or Unlimited service.

We are really looking forward to launching the service in full in the USA over the coming months, and hope that you will continue to use the service and be one of our key advocates.

We need to make some small system changes to our payment system for our USA launch, and so in order to make the transition for you as smooth as possible, we have credited your Spotify account with 1 month worth of FREE Spotify Premium/ Unlimited!

In return for this, we ask that you please do the following:

• Visit our website https://www.spotify.com/account/subscription/change-payment/
• Login with your username and password.
• Select a payment method (Card or Paypal) and click ‘Change’
• Click ‘I Accept/ Continue’ to accept the new product in US Dollars
• Provide us with your payment details once more, so that after your FREE month has expired you will be able to keep listening to music through Spotify.

Your next bill is due to us on  ’28/02/11′, so please provide us with your payment details before then, otherwise you will revert back to Spotify Free and if you have Premium you will lose access to Spotify on your mobile. On this date, you will then be billed in Dollars!

Thanks for your help, and please feel free to reply to us directly if you have any questions!

Kind regards

With a flyer boasting quotes from both J.G. Ballard and Colonel Kilgore of Apocalypse Now, by the time my chum Luis and I arrived at NYU a few weeks back for a special lecture we knew we’d be in for an interesting discussion.

Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, dubstep producer and owner/chief curator of the massively great Hyperdub record label, was talking about his new book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. (MIT Press)

Introduced as a “rogue academic” and member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, it wasn’t immediately clear if the talk was going to be highly abstract or grounded, but it turned out the latter–lucid, well researched and informative. Here are some notes.

Goodman started by saying he was at first interested in “taking literally the way certain currents of electronic music culture were describing themselves using military metaphor,” for example, Underground Resistance. But he found most was an outpouring of male fantasy and conspiracy theory. Then, he turned to non-lethal weaponry, which is now essential in an overexposed world with real-time televised events.

“[It's an] arms race in which the opponent is the general population,” Goodman said, noting microwave pulses that can modulate behavior without supposedly lasting effects or visible traces. In his definition of a sonic weapon, it’s something that can cause modulation of feelings and behavior, be it violence, pain, seduction, trickery (advertising!), deception, unease or fear.

Most politics of music, he said, deal with content and language, text that can be deconstructed and lyrics that can be reinterpreted. More fundamental is how sound and music affects and modulate the body and mind, but not always consciously or representationally, part of the “vibrational relationships between things, sometimes humans,” as part of a continuum of vibrational forces that have been colonized by different groups.

Military research into acoustic weapons tends to focus on to repelling people, dispersing crowds and essentially making a group into individuals. Seduction indicates branding, to induce consumption behaviors and to get people to buy things. In music culture and sound art insidious frequencies to attract crowds, bring people together.

So we have forces of repulsion and forces of attraction.

Goodman then moved on to the origins of sound produced in the military, as a fanfare to call to arms, and drumming to discipline the troops in time: a soundtrack to war.

He went into the Urban Funk Campaign and Operation Wandering Ghost¹, two Vietnam era projects to experiment with sound in battle, and talked about the ghost army the allies set up in World War II.

Goodman then went into his three definitions of “unsound”–that is, having suspect methods, “politically unsound”, below the threshold of hearing, or most interestingly, things you can’t hear because they haven’t been created. “The potential between the vibrational field, what futurism in music culture has always been intereted in, the shock of the new.

This leads to an interesting premise: “what a body can hear is not something that is fixed in time.”

Hearing aids let us hone in on certain frequencies, hi-tech prosthetics. “We don’t yet know what the sonic body is capable of.”

Much of the talk around sonic warfare (that isn’t waging it) consists of debunking military press releases, according to Goodman, and names Dr. Jurgen Altman as a leader.

Most effort in that field is involved in directional ultrasound, things like sonic lasers. Rather than use sub-frequencies (like Goodman and many musicians) the military tech focuses on directional devices that create hole-y space, and pockets of audition.

He talked about how military technology trickles down, as of the case of the vocoder, initially a speech encoder so Roosevelt could talk to Churchill. Then came two great quotes, that I may have mis-attributed, or under attributed in my notes; I have “Kintler”. Anyway, the quotes are (on seperate lines because they’re great):

All entertainment media is an abuse of military media.

The discoteque was a boot camp for World War 3.

The latter meaning it was subtly improving our nervous systems to function in a situation of sensory overload.

He touched a bit on the Mosquito, post-9/11 urban culture and its pelethora of sirens, the LRAD, playing Balinese gamelan on the greatest soundsystem known to man and studying the brain’s response, sonic booms and sonic warfare as war crimes, the monopolization of the means to experiment with frequencies, schizophrenia as “split voice”, Project Jericho and more.

Goodman’s keeping a blog on various topics related to the book here. You can preview it on Google Books.

UPDATE: Luis adds this. Very appropriate.

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1. From WFMU: “The Urban Funk Campaign is something much more evil. It was employed by the CIA Audio Harassment Division in Vietnam and Laos. The idea: bombard the local citizenry with sound instead of bombs. The desired effect: rouse the populace from their hideouts and destabilize their resolve.

   In 1972, 13 choppers were equipped with Sound Curdler Systems (costing $50,000 each). The Curdler is a small oscillator unit that is capable of hundreds of hours of uninterrupted operation from a simple 9v. battery. It emits a shrill pulsating shriek at 120 decibels at 10 meters. (Standing on a runway during takeoff of a 747 measures 112db, in other words, potential aural harm.)

   The system is also called a “People Repeller” when used with a hand portable US HPS1 Public Address System with a 350 watt amp and anti-feedback microphone. This system delivered intelligible speech over 2.5 miles. The system also came with an optional siren system with built-in wail/yelp audio frequency oscillator with adjustments to frequencies from 500-5000hz.

   Code-named “Wandering Soul” because the audio engineers spent weeks recording eerie sounds based on their exposure to local music, foklore, ghost stories. The eerie sounds are similar to the soundeffects employed during a radio mystery play, but transposed to live theatre of Vietnam. These sounds were intended to represent souls of the enemy dead who had failed to find the peace of a proper burial. The wailing soul cannot be put to rest until this proper burial takes place.

   The purpose of these intrusive sounds was to enhance panic instincts and facilitate crowd dispersal and the disruption of troop strategies, village chanting, rites, routines, and celebrations. The target audience (victims) are forced to drop everything to cover their ears. At night the system was at its most effective as it harassed the sleeping and preyed on the sensibilities and superstitions of the target population. It was further intended to destabilize beliefs, disorient the human targets, and enhance intra-community irritability.

   The 10,000-watt airborne systems were mounted on the choppers so as to best project sound downward in a pyramid apexing at 3,500 meters altitude. This was the technological heart of psychological warfare.

   In 1973 the Urban Funk Campaign tested super/sub-sonic and ultra/infra sound with a weapon system called a Squark Box which creates 2 simultaneously inaudible ultrasound tones at pitches of 16 and 16.002khz. These 2 ultrasonic waves of highly directional beams are aimed to coincide at the target point. This interference pattern creates a sub-beat of 2hz outside normal auditory perception and when played at immense volumes causes ars, shoulders, chest wall and buttocks to resonate. It converts the target body into a human tuning fork. Symptoms include headache, visual distortion, epidermal tinglings. the skin actually gets heated by localized ultrasound and gently cooked.” Other effects are the formation of cavities or bubbles in the body, choking, excessive salivation, testicular pain, nausea and giddiness – a technological extension of witchcraft. And when combined with rapid flickering hi-intensity lights it caused systematic disorientation, sensory destabilization. Prototype for the modern dance floor where for an admission price, revelers willingly submit the ennui of their everyday bodies to the photo/auditory-epileptic effects of intense stroboscopic light. Synchronized at between 10-30cps – photoepilepsy will occur during intense prolonged conflict exposure.”

97.9 FM in Detroit has long been home to WJLB, one of the finer R&B/’urban contemporary’ radio stations in the country. While kicking around on the excellent Detroit Radio Flashbacks I found the website featured weekly charts, “hip pocket surveys,” for much of 1984-85. These were the final years legendary DJ The Electrifying Mojo was at the station, so I thought it might be fun to take a look at what was getting played just about 25 years ago. I mostly missed the Mojo era, but JLB was a hugely influential radio station for me; it played loads of local records and was one of my first exposures to live turntablism, with a party/booty show every Friday night. So, I hope you enjoy these tunes. There are some hometown favorites here, stuff that stayed pretty local, and things from the last throes of Motown. Not surprisingly, Rochester Hills’ own Madonna is the only white performer on the list. Also not surprisingly, Prince, a Mojo favorite, appears a few times, both in his own work and through Apollonia 6 and Vanity. Pardon the dodgy embeds, Most of the record companies don’t like it enabled on their YouTube offerings…

24. You Get The Best From Me – Alicia Myers

23. We Don’t Work For Free – Grandmaster Melle Mel & The Furious Five

No video…but here’s a taste of the song.

22. The Jacksons – Torture

21. Tonight – Ready For The World

20. The Last Time I Made Love – Joyce Kennedy & Jeffrey Osborne

19. Solid – Ashford & Simpson

18. Sex Shooter – Apollonia 6

17. Set It Out – Midway

	Midway – Set It Out
	Found at Set It Out on KOhit.net

16. Pretty Mess – Vanity

15. Lucky Star – Madonna

14. Look The Other Way – Isley Jasper & Isley

Isley Jasper Isley – Look The Other Way (Official Music Video) – Funny videos are here

13. Let It All Blow – Dazz Band

12. Jungle Love – The Time

11. I’ve Been Watching You (Jamie’s Girl) – Randy Hall

10. I Promise (I Do Love You) – Dreamboy

I Promise (I Do Love You) – Dreamboy

9. I Owe It To Myself – Prime Time

8. I Feel For You – Chaka Khan

7. Friends b/w Five Minutes of Funk – Whodini

6. Fast Life – Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde

5. Erotic City b/w Let’s Go Crazy – Prince

Prince doesn’t like his songs living free on the web. I’m sure you know these by heart anyway, right?

4. Cool It Now – New Edition

3. Computer Age (Push the Button) – Newcleus

2. Centipede – Rebbie Jackson

1. AJ Scratch – Kurtis Blow

What do you think, there are six more charts to close out ’84, should we count ‘em down? Let me know in the comments.

MC Hammer, of all people who’ve mastered the dark arts of social media, wrote an Op-Ed piece for Ad Week extolling the virtues of Twitter for connecting to fans without intermediary media. (Though some have suggested it was the work of a ghost writer.)

While new social media platforms seem to pop up every day, I’m strongly behind Twitter, a micro-blogging tool that has become a game changer for me. The platform offers celebrity brands the means to build and develop relationships in an intimate and personal way. The friendly and efficient interface links to video and audio and integrates with various other social media outlets with ease. That means my brand can live on a wide variety of platforms where fans might find me.

(Emphasis mine.)

Unfortunately, ten days later, his cousin, a co-star of his reality show, is accused of raping a woman who he met via Twitter in a Livermore, CA hotel room. I will refrain from a lay-up, empty-netter of a joke out of respect for the gravity of the situation.

photos by Billy Whitfield

It’s always interesting when punks get old. That’s why my emphatic finger-point this week is towards a story in Vice by former Born Against frontman Sam McPheeters. McPheeters ventures into one of the Midwest’s  strangest regions, the wealthy suburbs of Michigan’s capital, Lansing, to profile Doc Dart, former frontman for hardcore group Crucifucks. Dart, who calls himself “26,” appears to be suffering from several forms of mental illness, and has become a suburban pariah in the Mason-Okemos area.

While that area in mid-Michigan birthed a few great bands, notably the above, the Meatmen, Negative Approach and the Fix (whose drummer, Jeff Wellman, is now a real estate salesman in my parents’ town, according to Wikipedia) it remains close to the ignorant edge of small-town Michigan and has all but purged that rebellious tic that seemed to emerge from MSU in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It was nice to see the piece open in the Tuba Museum, a strange little restaurant in the area I had forgotten about.

Though we never find out why Dart is now calling himself 26, McPheeters writes a decent profile. He’s not a bad critic, either. Decipher some of his lyrics and you can see that. But he’s done a pretty good job of refining his style (and is hopefully able to make something near a living doing it). A few years ago, when he was having a closing-down-shop sale I picked up a bunch of old zine issues, but it appears they’re still available here. Dear Jesus, Error, Shooting Space and now Clog; it makes you remember, back before we just pumped words into processors and they emerged, a sort of literary mechanically separated meat, creative and interesting people were putting together homemade things a lot more painstakingly than this stuff. Stylistically, I’d argue that was much more beneficial for developing your technique; in Sam’s case, he isn’t a bad visual artist either.

McPheeters posts regularly on his blog, Loom of Ruin (though recently has been recycling older stuff in hiatus mode) and you’d be well served to let his views into your Internet-cruising route. And, it appears, he’s in New York next week for a few readings. Go check him out.

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In other news I’ve added a Reading List page, to keep track of this year in books. As always, your recommendations are greeted like relatives from the old country, at first crowded up in the guest room but soon shirtless on the couch with legs splayed and a beer in hand.

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Back to the music, a couple of buddys’ band, Gold and Gunmetal,has their first record out. It’s exciting. Prog indie rock. You should listen to it. True students of the freeconomy, G&G’s record label, Triple Down, has the album up for you to download until January 26th–why not sample it?

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Lastly, this just in from the Solidarity Dept.: A few friends saw their jobs up and disappear this week. We’re here for you, and have eyes open. Everybody out there, if you know someone in the media who got “right-sized” (ugh!) or otherwise shitcanned give ‘em a hug and take ‘em to a movie or something.

Move D Looks Up, originally uploaded by nparish.

Here’s Move D, from his appearance earlier in the summer at Brooklyn’s best techno party on the Gowanus at The Yard. Read more about it in my Earplug review. But don’t take my word for it’s dopeness–listen to the set at the Sunday Best downloads page.

There’s only one place I’d rather be in a few hours, and that’s good old Köln for the Total 9 party. The compilation itself comes out next week, and buying it is the smart thing to do. It’s very, very good.

My good pal Jimmy told me a fun Total story from a few years ago, when his friend ran up to Wolfgang Voigt, maybe a bit intoxicated, and surely in awe of the whole affair, and told him “Wolfgang, you’re my hero.”

Wolfgang gave him a smile and calmly said “When we make a party, we are all heroes.”

Ain’t that the truth.