July 2012 Top 10

July 2012 Top 10

Oskar T Oram - Abbey of Thelema Field Recordings (Vicmod)

Keith Fullerton Whitman- 6 hour soundcloud 

Keith Fullerton Whitman - Occlusions ( eMego)

Eric Lanham - The Sincere Interruption ( Spectrum Spools)

Robin Fox - Music For The Bionic Ear

Merzbow - Merzphysics - 10 CD box (1 Youth Inc.)

Richard Lainhart - The Course Of The River (vicmod)

Lev Kowalczwk - Tape II

Meat Beat Manifesto - Test ep (Flexidisc)

Pauline Oliverous - Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music - 1961-1970 10CD box (Important)

Worsel Strauss Unattention Economy VMDL16

Worsel Strauss
Unattention Economy
VMDL16

New VICMOD release Worsel Strauss - Unattention Economy.

A mixture of Future Industrial and Avant Electronics.

Album available here.

The idea of doing Unattention Economy as a whole album of selfgenerating music with physical music machines first came to me when I did a live performance of Douglas Leedy’s classic piece ‘Entropical Paradise (with bird call)’ from the 1968 triple album by the same name”, Strauss says. Leedy’s album featured modular analog synthesizer patches that, once set, played without further intervention by the performer. Most tracks on this classic electronic album had a length of 20 minutes, which represented one side of an LP.

While wanting to follow Leedy’s tradition, given today’s short attention span Strauss was not interested in creating long evolving soundscapes. “I was more interested in seeing whether the machines were able to do something that resembled a song in conventional structures”, Strauss is quickly to remark, “There is enough synth noise already out there”. In the classical German ‘Jam and Edit’ fashion from the Krautrock days, Strauss would set up various musical devices and do straight forward live recordings without human intervention, staying away from sequencers, later on deciding whether or not a specific take was worth it. “The effort of doing these live recordings was ridiculously high”, he laughs, ”and once the results where there they certainly could have been achieved by easier means, but I wanted to capture the moment of something that is not reproducible, in a live setting and without any overdubs. All I would do in the editing stages was to take away things”, a process he calls subtractive mixing.

Unattention Economy definitely follows the west coast esthetics and while entirely electronically generated has a very organic feel to it. This may have to do with the fact that the center piece of all the recordings was a Buchla synthesizer. Of course it seems a bit of a risk to present this type of music in the format of an album. A lot of the fascination of selfgenerating music comes from watching machines do their own sometimes unpredictable thing which seems best demonstrated in a live setting. Strauss has no illusions about this.