That's 1971!
Muzyka: Eugeniusz Rudnik
This groovy chap
He looks rather like Scott Walker in that same era.
More Rudniktronica
The Poles got it going on back then - avant-electronically, and with the experimental animation and surreal / grotesque films
A motherlode of Polish concrete and electronic composers - including Rudniktronica and many other composers. Annoyingly the videos are blocked from posting here or seem impossible to convert from YouTube to MP3.
Stylo alerted me to this a while ago, describing it as the worst television program he'd ever seen, or words to that effect. It's a 1989 episode of Channel 4's experimental arts show Club X that involved the recreation of a Futurist banquet, with "annotations" in the form of clips explaining the Italian Futurists and Marinetti's epater le bourgeois / pasta-is-passé approach to avant-garde cuisine.
The peg for the program was the republication of 1932's The Futurist Cookbook. Editor Leslie Chamberlain appears at the Channel X banquet and here, 25 years later, she recalls the program and the publication of the book. (She's also the one who YouTubed the program from a faded VHS, which also captures some vintage late '80s UK commercials and a chunk of the programming that followed).
Chamberlain writes:
"... Marinetti took a fresh and funny look at food. Cooked dishes were calories, but also shape, texture and sign. Recipes on the plate were exciting, colourful and suggestive, a bit like paintings and a bit like poems. We’d call them mini-installations today. I was always fond of the little diversion Marinetti thought up instead of a sideplate: strips of velvet and sandpaper would be provided to exercise the tactile sense, while nose, palate and eye went to work on the main course. Main course? That would be food plated by a cook with a cubistic eye. Diners might expect perfume to be sprayed in the air and sounds to be relayed by a Futurist music box, to complete the multiple sense-nourishing experience....
"What made Marinetti turn to food? Sheer creativity and a desire to have fun. Turn to any of the recipes in La Cucina Futurista and watch what happens as you carve out the cylinders of meat and amass the ballbearings. This is architectonic food you’re shaping. For a colour opera in the kitchen you’ll also need food dye and interesting lighting....
".... Futurism was trying to introduce an industrial edge into the kitchen, although never with an eye to mass-production. Making Futurist Food involves a conveyor belt for one, and you work with it as if you were an artist in the studio. Just one proviso: the stress on architectonics is exactly why there’s no such thing as Futurist soup. Any guest asking for soup can go back to the nineteenth century!
"The Futurist Cookbook is only partly a collection of recipes and arguably its avant-garde inventiveness really comes to the fore in Marinetti’s food charades. The charades, or tableaux vivants, are like screenplays for chic tv ads today. They were staged who knows where. Probably in restaurants or private homes, or somewhere out in the country, or at least in the garden. Futurist actors dressed up and danced, smoozed, lunched and lounged in stylized poses."
Chamberlain does mention the Mussolini-fanboy problem, but moves swiftly on:
"Even now La Cucina Futurista is a book that evokes much more interest in the anglophone world [than in Italy] because we don’t have the awkward associations to deal with. We need to understand them though, and I’ve explained that in my introduction to the classic English-language version.... It was difficult to find a publisher for an English Cucina futurista. Penguin was less bold in those days, and one or two small publishers also said no. Copyright problems deterred them. Step up Conway Lloyd-Morgan at Trefoil, who bravely took the project on, commissioning a translation from Sue Brill and a wonderful design from Liz Mcquiston. My role was to edit the translation and write an introduction..... "
"Since that gorgeous pink and green and black and yellow volume came out in 1989 The Futurist Cookbook has become a frequent point of reference in all manner of art and history books. The edition was a great success. So now, finally, Penguin have reprinted that edition, in a sober black-and-white livery, and with a photograph on the cover from the 1930s that stresses the historical reality of the Futurist banquets blueprinted inside. Actually our 2014 edition is closer to Marinetti’s original, which looks as if it were issued in wartime, when there was a shortage of paper and not much scope for design flair.
"In 1989 we took much of our inspiration from Marinetti’s earlier books, like Mafarkar the Futurist, which were typographic fantasies closer to the Russian Futurists, and pointed the way forward to the Concrete Poetry of the 1960s."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Molecular gastronomy - with its weird foams and smokes, its deployment of industrial-style techniques involving blow torches and liquid nitrogen - seems like a modern day actualization of the Futurist culinary approach, but with a view to be tasty as well as startling and eye-catching.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Incidentally, Victor Lewis-Smith 's first work on television took place on Club X - he contributed the standalone Buygones mini-programmes (later to become a newspaper column), the focus being obsolete gadgets and quaint appliances, once-popular toys, fads, and foodstuffs, dead media and forgotten TV personalities, etc etc... Things like the Spirograph, candy cigarettes, the Stylophone, Frank Bough ...
Buygones was an early example of retro-futurism, perhaps even that conjunction of comedy and hauntology.
Stylo points to this other chunk of Lewis-Smith spoofage from Club X
Had a really stimulating conversation with Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick for their podcast The Culture Journalist - chatting about the intersection of music and science fiction, future-pop versus retro-futurism, the eternal returns of phuture-phorward rave styles like gabber and jungle as new generations discover and reinvent them, and much more besides.
It's also available at Spotify
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The future of home listening pleasure literally yellowing before our eyes.
(Who did they think had the money to buy a whole extra set of speakers and wotnot?)
That's the inner sleeve to this record
The music's futurism hasn't yellowed one bit though - hear it here uploaded from a quadraphonic 8-track tape!
I must say I am curious what this avant-electronic stuff would have sounded like in quadraphonic, through the system suggested here.
A lot of your Stockhausen / Xenakis types created works designed to be heard in the concert hall environment through multi-speaker surroundsound systems - octophonic or more. Sound-clusters panning and veering and encircling the audience...
Eno didn't go far as quad but he did suggest using a triple-speaker system to get the most out of On Land.
Now that's a record I would love to hear exactly as its creator envisaged...
Then - not exhausting the subject, by any means - there is Flaming Lips's Zaireeka. Which is meant to be played on four CD players simultaneously - four different discs, four players, presumably eight speakers in total?
Mark Richardson wrote an interesting monograph on this album, as part of the 33&third series. He has actually heard Zaireeka, more than once if I recall, in the way that Flaming Lips suggested. But I should imagine it's not something that has happened very often with this album.
Someone has attempted to squish the four-becomes-one Zaireeka into a YouTube, with I suspect, unsatisfying results, given that the listener is hearing it through just 2 speakers.
1980, from Akron
1977, from London via Minnesota / Denmark / Alabama / Tennessee / Quebec
A Red Bull Music Academy piece by Christine Kakaire on the story behind Cat Stevens's innovation-anomaly "Was Dog a Doughnut?"
"Rolling Stone considered “Was Dog a Doughnut?” to be one of the few “weaknesses” of Izitso. The album review, from July 1977, took an otherwise positive view of Cat Stevens’ second-to-last album, prior to his conversion to Islam and the subsequent abandonment of his career. Yet Cat Stevens’ least likely and most covert crossover hit was breezily dispatched with the following: “The electronics on (it) are a bit too robot like.”...
... even in the context of this relatively progressive album “Was Dog A Doughnut?” remains conspicuous. There is no trace of Cat Stevens to be found. It is entirely instrumental, and rides on a rigid, stuttering drum loop. A square wave riff repeats itself across a spectrum of layered frequencies, with parts appearing and vanishing at will. A barking dog provides occasional punctuation....
In the space of one day that summer, Stevens, and his two key collaborators – multi-instrumentalists Jean Roussel and Bruce Lynch – joyfully veered off the beaten path of folksy balladeering, with little in the way of context to steer their unexpected results. What they found by accident – a synth effect that sounded like a barking dog, a sequencer that missed a pulse and defined a groove, a wormhole into the future of electronic funk – was the first draft of the blueprint needed for electronic music to come of age.
Bruce Lynch:
I had an ARP Sequencer, and it’d had a modification done by Roger Linn, who invented the LinnDrum. The modification was called one-shot, you could put an audio sound into it and it would turn it into a trigger. Click tracks were used more often than not in the film industry, playing in orchestras to film, but sequencing was not big in those days.
So we established that we were going to do a track with all this stuff that we had, just for fun. What I brought to that was the idea of putting that pulse on tape, and it worked. The ARP Sequencer relied on 16 steps and sliders that would do the pitch, and you had a little button that had a gate that triggered a note. We could only have a bar at the start. Of course it could do drums, but on this particular bit the drums were a real kit. Yusuf played the drums to a prepared click track. That was recorded to the 24 track and we mixed it down.
We selected a bar of the drums, might have been two bars, made the loop; we took a quarter inch piece of tape and spliced it together and ran it through the deck. We had to keep this tape running for the duration of the song to get it back onto the multi-track, which was in line with this little 16th note pulse that we had.
One of the most significant bits is that sometimes the sequencer would drop a bit of information, or not read the incoming pulse, and there’s one piece where this riff is happening but it dropped a pulse, so it’s actually kind of syncopated. It was not meant to be like that, it was like, “Oh, that sounds really nice.” So it stayed in.
It was a collaborative effort, we were all diving away at buttons, manipulating sliders and voltage control oscillators and filters. We were just so interested in the way of doing something that was not sitting down with a live band. It was almost a little bit self-indulgent.
"Perhaps spurred on by the mid-’70s chart success of synth pop oddities like Hot Buttered’s “Popcorn” and Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” “Was Dog a Doughnut?” became Izitso’s second (and final) 12-inch release, in November 1977. It fell short of the Top 40 success of “(Remember The Days Of) The Old Schoolyard"” only reaching #70 on Billboard’s Top 100 Chart. However the first hints about the track’s alternate life could be seen in Billboard’s R&B Chart: “Was Dog a Doughnut?” rose to #53 in January, the only track of Cat Stevens’ to ever cross that colour line.
Questlove: "It was really just him creating a filler cut, experimenting with some electronic instruments – he fucked around, man, and created a B-boy classic"
“Was Dog A Doughnut?” [became] a signature track of John “Jellybean” Benitez’ DJ residency at seminal New York club The Funhouse in the early ’80s....he released a freestyle remix of it in 1984 under his own name
Not much information out there about Denis DeFrange
Denis DeFrange is a synthesist, keyboard player, vocalist, and songwriter from Kent Ohio. He helped to form the Progressive Rock band, Baby Sirloin, which played the rock circuit in Cleveland Ohio back in the 1970's. He also released some of his own solo electronic tracks on the Akron compilation, Bowling Balls From Hell. He now operates Synthsong Productions Studio in Hollywood Hills California
"Sector Wars" (it's a very Cybotron sort of title, isn't it?) appeared on this compilation on the Clone label - along with five other tracks by Defrange that are similarly synth-y and impressively atmospheric if not quite as techno-preemptive.
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The whole compilation
A search for a Denis DeFrange interview turned up an archive of the Daily Kent Stater, a college newspaper, and specifically a February 1980 issue that has a feature on local New Wave activity. Access blocked, unfortunately, so only this tantalising wisp was salvageable:
"In a recent interview, DeFrange explained that a synthesizer can practically play ..".
I had a great chat with Paul Rose - a/k/a Scuba a/k/a the man behind Hotflush Recordings - for his Not A Diving Podcast. We talked about Futuromania, electronic dance music, back in the day blogging, and much more besides. Dive in.
