Stray Landings

In this episode of Stray Landings FM, we talk to Elsa Hewitt and Derek Piotr about the human voice and its relationship to music. Tracklist: Akziendz // Legacy Support Elsa Hewitt // King of Nowhere Hafida // [unknown] Derek Piotr // Sky Shooby Taylor // Lift Every Voice and Sing Kalimankou Denkou // Yanka Rupkina

“My sole ambition as a composer is to hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future.” – Franz Liszt The term ‘Futurism’ has a curious history through the arts. Its earliest incarnations can be found in Marinetti’s description of Italian society during the early 1900s. Here, art had become transfixed by the innovations of the modern age: the racing car, the aeroplane, the industrial city. Where the Romantics held a nostalgic longing for a pre-industrial age, the Futurists embraced modernity, with all its roars and bangs. Music soon followed suite. Luigi Russolo in particular became one of the first ‘noise musicians’ in history, designing and performing with his own homemade mechanical instruments. Russolo’s first performance of futurist music – entitled ‘Awakening of a City’ – caused riots amongst the audience. Such was the shock of this movement. The Futurists worshiped technology above all and encouraged its enforcement through order, violence and industry. Little surprise that fascism also became a

The name ‘EMS’ seems to crop up a lot these days. The historic studio is famed for its pioneering work in sound art and ‘text-sound’: some of the earliest examples of experimental electronic music owe EMS for their creation. But a sizeable chunk of the most exciting music from 2017 also seems to have been made here. From Jesse Osborne-Lanthier to tuuun to Punctum, they have all seemed to have some of that EMS magic brush off on recent releases. So what is it about EMS that is so special? Well, on a superficial level, it houses some classic vintage synthesisers, most notably the Buchla. But much, much more important is the social infrastructure that underpins the space. Thanks to 100 years of Swedish Socialism, anyone can book time to use the equipment, sign up to classes, and blossom as an electronic musician. As Daniel M Karlsson wrote, the studio stands as “a monument to common ownership guarded from those who would seek to tear it down on principal”. But how did we get here from the avant-garde studio of

De La Soul’s debut masterpiece 3 Feet High and Rising includes a 12-second sample from the Turtles’ 1969 song, ‘You Showed Me’ in the interlude skit, ‘Transmitting Live From Mars’. Upon hearing the sample in 1991, Mark Volman of the Turtles successfully sued De La Soul for an eye-watering $1.7 million in a case settled outside of court. Speaking to the L.A Times, Volman said, “sampling is just a longer term for theft. Anybody who can honesty say sampling is some sort of creativity has never done anything creative.” Volman is apparently deaf to irony, since ‘You Showed Me’ is actually a cover version of a song written by Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark of the Byrds. More ironic still, is the sheer amount of creative music has been spawned since then. Even to put the Golden Age of Hip-Hip to one side, we’ve had Plunderphonics, Chopped & Screwed, Breakcore and a more recent fascination with sound collage in the Internet Age. So what do we make of sampling today? Where can it go? Is ‘originality’ important? Does it

In this week’s show, we spoke to Ewa Justka and Manni Dee about work in music: working for free, working for fees, sponsorship and precarity. Listen below: Tracklist: 1) Akzidenz // Legacy Support [Unreleased] 2) Ewa Justka // Horny 4 [Fractal Meat Cuts] 3) Manni Dee // Insurrection Erection ft. Joke Lanz [Leyla] 4) Einstürzende Neubauten // Steh Auf Berlin [Zickzak] 5) RuPaul // Supermodel (You Better Work) [Union City Recording]

There a few musical movements that have been as divisive as minimalism. In its very first incarnation, it was met with disdainful derision. ‘Going-nowhere music’ or ‘wallpaper music’ was no better than the so-called low-brow pop music of the day. Too maddeningly simple to be ‘art proper’. Yet today, the influence of minimalism is unbounded: from the locked-grooves of Krautrock to floor-filling EDM; from film soundtracks to the holy drones of Sunn O))). Given it’s sprawling history, definitions of minimalism are notoriously difficult to pin down. Repetitive, or meditative features are often singled out. But the pure tones of La Monte Young are not so much repetitive as they are monolithic; and you would need the concentration of a monk to meditate alongside some of Philip Glass’ chromatic experiments. On our second show with Resonance FM, we spoke to Lucia Chung and Martin Thompson of neo-minimalist label SM-LL to talk about minimalism today: its aesthetics, its ethics and its practice.

On April 27 we had our debut show on South London’s Resonance FM, which will be repeated on the last Thursday of every month. We will be choosing a topic for discussion on each show, this month looking at physical formats. While discussions about the merits of vinyl and the short-fallings of digital are well trodden, the question of format is nonetheless central to how we think about music. It can often seem as if digital is here for good and will eventually replace every aspect of “physical” music production, distribution and consumption. Yet despite the seeming monopoly of digital, there are producers at the peripheries of music have continued to explore format as an artist device: from hip hop releases on VHS to Alva Noto’s butchering of vinyls. To discuss these ideas and more, we were joined by Bob Bhamra of WNCL Recordings, and Nicole Mckenzie, former buyer at Sounds of the Universe and owner of MIC Records.