It's time to play Name That Tune

[Tom Roche]

I've been away from the computer for a time, just getting back from a lot of travel.... have enjoyed all the F50 talk. I have tapes coming soon and will hear it all eventually; I just flew back and have heard none of it so far. Each year I note it is a different F50 listening experience on tape/CD than live on the FM - you can stop and back up for the good stuff and burn by the weak stuff. Sometimes I will stop and play a track over and over (the quiet track  2 years back by Broadcast for example) so it can take me weeks to get to the bitter end....

I spent the last 12 days in Northern Vermont and later Boston, with family. Got a nor'easter (AKA a big snowstorm) as we arrived, and as we left. Lovely though. Speaking of Boston... I heard a lot of excellent radio there. One non-commercial station, WMUR, played short loud fast new indie rock almost all day all the time - just an avalanche of great stuff. I'll look into whether they webcast. Another station just played reggae.

Dialing around one night I heard an amazing electronica track... a series of 3 or 4 tracks really. It was one of those rare instances where I prepared a pen and paper to write down what it was - it was so much of a "must have" track. It went on 20 minutes, no announcer. Then it ended. Then dead air. Then a LOT of dead air, but the carrier was still there. I soon realized I'd been listening to a pirate, a strong one at that. 90.25 FM. Again I was on vacation in a cabin; no way to tape it.

So allow me to describe this unique thing, maybe you can identify it? The 3 or 4 tracks all had a basic simple catchy synth riff with a basic not-too-complicated drum track driving it along. The melody however, was made up entirely of tiny tiny seemingly random music samples, none longer than a second and most closer to a half second in length. I mean really short: a vocal fragment, a bass fragment, a horn, a fragment of a word, a guitar chord, etc etc. These had all seemingly been sorted out by pitch and then were all hard cut microscopically back to back, no looping, no fading, to create an identifiable melody/riff. Once the 20 or 30 hard edits rolled by, they got out of the way for the synth/drum backing track to drive along, then the same 20 or 30 "notes/noises" so to speak would play again, giving the piece some structure. It was so weird and so funny, brilliant. Sorta like Cowcube but with 40 times the complexity.

My wife thought it to be more like annoying soulless computer music, but it was cold and organic at the same time. Maybe it was a just a pirate thing, non-released. But it clearly was a lot of work. All the samples - which seeming spanned decades of music - were clearly stolen, but the samples were so so tiny and short it would be impossible for someone to raise a legal issue.

Ideas anyone? I know it's a long shot...Maybe someone on this list could suggest a techno/electronica list I could post this query to?

That was a dangling participle, wasn't it. Sorry.

tom in atlanta



ps: in early December in was in Los Angeles on business...my brother and I ventured out to see - and it takes a real man to admit this - Harvey Sid Fisher. His performance was... well, we weren't laughing at him or with him. Just near him.