March 6, 2006: Jason Freeman

March 6, 2006: Jason Freeman

Episode 95 of Some Assembly Required is on the way...
In fact, I'm trying something new this week. I uploaded the file before blogging, and about 12 hours earlier than usual. It is approaching noon, Sunday, as I type this. I usually wait until after midnight, in order to be able to say it was done on Monday, but what I'm learning is that if I want the podcast to be available by Monday at iTunes (which is its primary download location, I've found), then I need to start uploading the file earlier. This week 12 hours early, next week even earlier, if it looks like it needs even more time. We'll see...

The artist featured this week is Jason Freeman, who submitted to the SAR Q&A, very briefly, and is interviewed on the program as well. Freeman is another professor to be featured here, at the Some Assembly Required blog. I first heard about him while remodeling a basement in South Minneapolis. All Things Considered (NPR) was on the radio in the kitchen, and the owner of the house yelled down to me to come up and listen to an artist interview. She'd recently asked what I did with my spare time, and I'd told her all about Some Assembly Required. She was right to think I'd be interested in hearing that interview with Jason Freeman, and a couple of months later, I contacted him about doing my own interview, for Some Assembly Required.

The project we discuss in Episode 95, is something he calls Network Auralization for Gnutella (or N.A.G. for short). It's interactive software art, and its programmed to work with the user to create a musical sound collage. An individual types in a keyword or two, and the program looks for matches at Gnutella (an online file sharing network). After downloading matching MP3 files, the software then manipulates the audio files based on the structure of the Gnutella network itself.

I wasn't sure I understood that last part, so I went online to find more information... After reading an article about the project, at New Music Box (the Web Magazine from the American Music Center), I think I know enough to be able to explain it thusly: Audio files are prioritized by the length of time it takes them to download, so the selection of audio is first made by the program's user and then influenced by the program's design... So, files which download more quickly are heard more often, as they mix in and out, in conjunction with how many other sound files have registered, as a result of the user's selection criteria. I think...

Pretty complicated, huh? Perhaps not so difficult to try though. It sounded pretty user friendly, at least when explained to me by the man who designed it. The results are pretty noisy, but thanks to the concepts which drive them, they can be interesting to listen to. There are a couple of examples to be heard in this week's podcast of Some Assembly Required, along with an interview with Jason Freeman. Network Auralization for Gnutella was made possible with a grant from New Radio and Performing Arts, for its Turbulence website, where you can find more information about the project. And now... the very brief SAR Q&A with Jason Freeman...

***

*Name: Jason Freeman

*Tape manipulations, digital deconstructions or turntable creations: Digital deconstructions

*Location: I'm now based in Atlanta, but am originally from Miami.

*What is your creative/artistic background: I hold a doctorate in composition from Columbia University in New York and currently am a professor at Georgia Tech.

*Motivations: I see my interactive "software art" as a way to reflect about the music we listen to and the ways we listen to it. By algorithmically generating collages from existing material, I also hope to reveal new connections and relationships between them.

*Web address: http://www.jasonfreeman.net

***

Thanks to Jason Freeman, for participating in this week's SAR Q&A. He goes into far more detail in our interview, for Some Assembly Required, Episode 95 - coming up next - so be sure to check that out...

Let me know if you have any comments/suggestions about the site, the podcast, the blog, etc. We're growing quickly this year, and always working things out - so listener feedback is key! Please get in touch with me via my email address at the contact page, at the SAR website.

Thanks for listening!
Jon Nelson

www.some-assembly-required.net

Episode 96, Some Assembly Required

Episode 96, Some Assembly Required

01 Akufen – “Wet Floors”
02 DJ Riko – “Whistler's Delight (Full Version)”
03 DJ Babu – “Suckas (Sucka DJ Dis)”
04 John Oswald – “Anon“
05 Myeck Waters - “I love white things”
06 Fat Cougars – “Little ditty about superbike”
07 Jim Allenspach – “People like um”
08 People Like Us – “More Plunderblunders”
09 Eric Vessels – “Limbaugher”
10 Party Ben – “Fischervana (smells like emerge)”
11 Emergency Broadcast Network – “You Have 5 Seconds To Complete This Section”
12 Evolution Control Committee – “Nasha”
13 DJ Shadow – “You Can't Go Home Again”

Use this address, for your pod software:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/some-assembly-required/JSpD

More information about Some Assembly Required online, at:
www.some-assembly-required.net

February 27, 2006: Myeck Waters

February 27, 2006: Myeck Waters
The Some Assembly Required Podcast archive continues with Episode 96, in just a few...

I was at a party last night and bumped into someone who showed me how they use their cel phone to download the Some Assembly Required podcast. Apparently some celular phones can be used as mp3 players, and he downloads the podcast to his phone and listens on the go. So that's pretty cool. I've been curious how people listen to the podcast. I just use my computer to listen to music, these days. I don't even have a CD player anymore, let alone an mp3 player. Drop me a line and let me know how you listen to the Some Assembly Required podcast. I'm curious! My contact info is online, at the contact page at the SAR site.

Episode 96 is on the way. This was a pretty good episode, featuring a good mix of styles, including a track by Myeck Waters, who is our featured artist this week, here at the blog. I believe it was Jim Allenspach who sent me this CD, several years ago. Its called "Myeck's Big Waste o' Time."
If you listen to the show, you probably know that I'm a big fan of the manipulated spoken word. I use cut-up text a lot in my own work, and have always been a fan of rearranged speech in sound collage, in general. One of my favorite sound collage compositions is probably CNN Concatenated by Omer Fast, which is basically spoken word, acapella, pieced together from countless hours of CNN news broadcasts (accompanied by a video collage of the anchors who originally spoke the fragmented speech). Another artist I admire is Wayne Butane, who creates long-form strings of free associated spoken-word sound collage. In fact, most of my favorite sound collage compositions contain large sections of rearranged text. Myeck Water's CD, "Myeck's Big Waste o' Time" is one of those compositions...

If I remember correctly (kicking myself for not saving my email correspondence with the artist), the tracks on this disc were originally composed by Mr. Waters and a couple of siblings, as children, based on the records at their disposal, in concert with a Sony reel to reel tape recorder. He's cleaned up and perhaps even reconstructed the tracks for this CD.

The photo is of Myeck Waters, as a child, perhaps with the tape machine they used to create their original compositions?

Myeck Waters also contributed to the Dictionaraoke project, a few years back, where sound artists downloaded sound clips from a few different online dictionaries, and... Well, here - they put it best... this is from the Dictionaraoke website: "Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. The fun of karaoke meets the word power of the dictionary." I've played some dictionaraoke a couple of times on the show. That might make a good focus one of these days. Anyway, the Myeck Waters track in question, played on this week's podcast, is not a dictionaraoke track, but you can download a variety of examples of his sound collage from the official Myeck Water's website.

Without further ado, here's the SAR Q&A with Myeck Waters...

***

*Name: Myeck Waters

*Are there any additional names used to describe this project: The project is called myeck's big waste o' time, but in the past I also called it Attack of the 50-Foot Robin Hood.

*Do you use a pseudonym? Myeck is a nickname, my legal name is Michael Waters.

*Members: I work alone.

*Tape manipulations, digital deconstructions or turntable creations: "Digital Deconstructions" works for me. When my brothers and I first started messing around with this in the 1970s, of course, it was tape manipulation, or rather tape recorder manipulation.

*Location: New Jersey

*Original Location: I grew up in Wisconsin.

*What is your creative/artistic background: I have no artistic training, aside from a year or two or guitar lessons from some totally disinterested geezer in the cellar of a music store. I have always been fond of altering existing things to be funny and/or unsettling, starting when I realized I could erase the text in My Weekly Reader in grade school. In the early 1980s, an older brother, his girlfriend and I made two 3-song singles under the name Vibrant Fiasco. No use of pre-recorded materials though, just instruments and voices and a TEAC 4-track.

*History: I've been messing with recorded sounds since the early 1970s.

*Born: I was born in 1958.

*Philosophy: If there is a philosophy, it's that taking things out of their original context makes them interesting in new ways.

*How would you like to be remembered: As Angelina Jolie.

*Web address: http://home.att.net/~myeck.waters/myeck/myeck.htm

***

Thanks to Myeck Waters for being our featured artist this week. Stay tuned for Episode 96 of Some Assembly Required, featuring a track by Myeck Waters, and 12 other appropriation-based sound collage artists...

Until next week - thanks for listening!
Jon Nelson

www.some-assembly-required.net

Episode 97, Some Assembly Required

Episode 97, Some Assembly Required

01 The Kleptones – “Expose”
02 Jeff Sconce – “Sweet emo”
03 The Bran Flakes – “Autumn”
04 Art of Noise – “Kiss (Aon mix)”
05 Dummy Run – “Jolly holiday”
06 IDC – “David Byrne Was Born In Dumbarton”
07 Invisibl Skratch Piklz – “White label edit” 08 Evolution Control Committee - “By the time I get to Arizona”
09 DJ Shadow – “Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt”
10 Unknown - “Rah-Heet”
11 Idiom Creak – “Jet Anymore”
12 Elders of Zion – “Disco Communiste”
13 Avalanches – “Since I left you”

Use this address, for your pod software:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/some-assembly-required/JSpD

More information about Some Assembly Required online, at:
www.some-assembly-required.net

February 20, 2006: Jeffrey Sconce

February 20, 2006: Jeffrey Sconce

- Episode 97, on the way... stay tuned! -

Well, I believe I've decided on one thing... I'm not going to try and slip the special mixes in between the regularly scheduled podcasts anymore. My original goals be damned. From now on, there will be one episode per week, including the special mixes every two months, which means (gasp!) we'll finish uploading the second year of Some Assembly Required just a BIT after 2006 has passed. Well, quite a bit (a month or two), but I believe it's necessary.

The reason is that every episode is worth hearing - and I can't help but notice from looking at the stats, that episodes which get a smaller amount of time in the spotlight, get fewer downloads (thanks to the special mixes being uploaded just a few days later). Which is a crying shame, and it's not worth sticking to my original goal of getting the entire second year online by the end of 2006, if that's the cost. The real goal should be to make sure we continue to get something podcast every week - and that we will stick to. So, stay tuned.

Episode 97 is having its numbers crunched as we speak. It takes some time to convert to one file and from there to an mp3, and from there to being uploaded to the server, and etc etc. Usually just enough time to write these little blog entries. I do hope to, eventually, return to the blogging for blogging's sake, by the way, for those of you who are reading every week. I'm just real busy with a big project, and am actually feeling kind of guilty for spending time on this right now, when a major deadline is approaching... but this is a priority as well, so lets continue...

The 97th Episode of Some Assembly Required has a number of really good features, not least of which is a track by an artist by the name of Jeffrey Sconce. He's our featured artist this week, here at the blog. I got my first Jeffrey Sconce CD from an acquaintance here in Minneapolis, who got it from an acquaintance of his, who is also an acquaintance of mine, who got it from an acquaintance of his, who was acquainted with the artist... So, thank goodness for all of those degrees of separation... as it resulted in "Ludic Despair" being dubbed for the Some Assembly Required library.

I've played the disc quite a bit on the show, and about every other time I played it, did an intensive google search using every conceivable combination of words, which I felt would surely lead to some information about the artist, and ALWAYS came up completely dry. In fact, I even mentioned as much on the show, on a couple of occasions, including this episode (97), where I also said that I had downloaded the CD online... which isn't true. The fact is, I couldn't remember where I had gotten it, at the time - but, it is still true that you can't find anything about Ludic Despair on the internet, at present. There is no official website, yet.

Finally, one day I heard from the artist himself, and of course I immediately asked him to fill out the SAR Q&A - and even got him to send some of his other CDs in the mail. So, stay tuned to the regularly scheduled radio broadcasts of Some Assembly Required, in syndication, as we'll soon be playing more Jeffrey Sconce, just as soon as we get it all properly reviewed...

Jeffrey Sconce is an author, and associate professor, currently residing in Chicago. He teaches media studies at the School of Communications at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. His recorded output, to date, includes Ludic Despair (2003), Stars on High (2004) and Slumber Party Suicide (2000). All sound collage. His work is often dark, funny and occasionally quite musical. Tune in to this week's podcast, to hear one of his shorter tracks, off of Ludic Despair...

Without further ado, here's this week's SAR Q&A...

***

*Name: Jeffrey Sconce

*Another genre descriptor: I prefer "pop concrète"

*Why you use this descriptor: Drawing from musique concrète, I like the connotations of creating music by manipulating fragments from a pop music soundscape into which none of us asked to be born.

*Location: I've lived in Chicago the past 4 years... 5 years in L.A. before that... 5 years in Madison/Oshkosh before that... 9 years in Austin before that...

*Original Location: See above.

*What is your creative/artistic background: Nothing formal.

*History: Since around 1985.

*Born: 1962: Oklahoma City

*Motivations: I trace it back to discovering many years ago as a kid that pulling out the balance knob on my parents' old Motorola hi-fi somehow dramatically altered the mix, usually by blanking out the vocal track or bringing a background instrument to the front. From that point on, I've always had an interest in the mechanics of recording and the structures/textures of pop music.

*Philosophy: I don't know if there is a philosophy, really. I guess I would say I've always been interested in the usual suspects for my age/taste culture: dada, situationalists, W.S. Burroughs, Warhol, punk/post-punk, no wave, etc. Also, I've always liked the way collage art can bring out new and unexpected subtexts when unlikely fragments are collided.

*How would you like to be remembered: Being remembered at all would be quite nice, thank you...

*Web address: No web address as of yet.

***

Thanks to Jeffrey Sconce!

I think that's it for this week's entry. As always, I'd love to hear from you - it's been really nice seeing all of the new friends at Myspace, by the way. If you haven't joined us there, yet - check it out, at: www.myspace.com/soundcollage
Drop us a line from there, or from the contact page at the Some Assembly Required website. Its always good to hear from you!

Thanks for listening,
Jon Nelson

www.some-assembly-required.net