bIG NeWs! — I’ll be starting a weekly radio show on WFMU this June. Expect lots of exclusive tunes & special live guests. 91.1 FM in the New York City area, with excellent internet streaming.
I’m looking for an assistant to help produce the show. I’VE GOT STRONG NEW IDEAS regarding radio’s possibilities & maybe you could help… The person must be familiar with basic audio editing and HTML-podcast-blog use, with a passion for local radio and cosmopolitan bass and (if i’m really lucky) poets/performers whose work happens in sound.
please pass the word on to any NYC-area individuals who might be down. contact: mudd.fm@gmail.com
and —
** in 2002 I did a 1-hour mix (realAudio stream) for FMU.
5 years back & it still bumps future-now.
** i’m DJing at a FREE wfmu PARTY @ Southpaw, Brooklyn this Saturday. info. Doors at 8pm, I go on at 9. and I’d recommend coming early since it’s likely to fill up, what with these bands and all…
I’ll be accompanied by Daniel Perlin on video. (we’ve performed together in Europe a bunch, this is our first thing in the US). Catch Daniel’s live audio pieces at Harvard this evening.
** Caroline Bergvall as selector! Check her ‘March selection’ of free mp3s on Ubuweb. People Like Us, Masaoka’s Ritual with Giant Hissing Madasgar Cockroaches, Caetano Veloso & more (pets).
ps. “ritual with giant hissing madagascar cockroaches” was performed by the artist Miya Masaoka with thirteen madagascar cockroaches triggering the insects’ amplified hissing while crawling over her body.
getting into the radiophonic spirit, here are my hands on John Peel’s show, live at Maida Vale. ah, the good ol’ days… no giant cockroaches, just foxes on the city streets outside (from Failme’s Flickr.)
Yeah boy,
looking forward to the shows. Nice one.
Vamanos
i went to see the masaoka performance because it sounded absurd, like an entry in a performance art one-upmanship contest. i don’t remember how long it went on for – ten minutes? it was boring pretty much immediately, but i wasn’t expecting much.
then the time was up and they removed the cockroaches. and as if in one motion she shuddered bolt upright and strode offstage, like ten minutes of restrained revulsion suddenly crystallized and directed into a few seconds of movement. and that few seconds made the previous ten minutes sort of swirl around and reinterpret itself as something far more complex and ambiguous and disturbing than i had noticed at the time.
that was ten years ago and i don’t think i’ll ever forget it. thank you miya masaoka for teaching me something about intensity.
nice description nick! did the live version have the strings & bells present ? or was it just processed bug farts? whole thing sounds like it was heavily edited + composed using raw material from the live performance (to compensate for the lack of physicality / revulsion aspect foregrounded in live version) .
it caught my attention b/c it’s not often that conceptual sound art is as strong/visceral in concept as in execution.
(those bugs are terrifying. i cant even look at them via my screen.)
that’s some very exciting news about the radio program. i’m heading over to ol’ mudd to get a clue of what those strong new ideas are by reading/downloading whitehead’s “drone tones…” and other/alternative radio experiences. i like old mudd, what great resource it has become.
summer is gonna be hottttttt! rupture in the city!
i work in youth media and have a tap on some pretty sweet young poets. hit me up if you want intros.
the live version had the strings and bells – all electronics, triggered by optical sensors. but i think she was having equipment problems the night i saw it, so i can’t really compare to the soundfile.
masaoka is also a badass koto player, big in the bay area jazz improv scene at the time anyway. not surprising that she cares about the sound…
After Miya Masaoka’s performance (it must have been in ’96?), my mother and brother came home with two of the ‘giant malagasy hissing cockroaches’. They really only hissed when poked or were otherwise harrased. We put them in a nice terrariumed fish tank, from which they promptly escaped.
Two months later we found one of them under the rubber bottom of the dish drainer. We named it spartacus, after he escaped another time or two, and discovered that the only things that spartacus would eat in our presence were orange colored foods. The other giant one we never found.
I cant recall what happened to spartacus after the shitty millenial evicition times in sf..