I'mm puttinggg onn aaa musiccc fessstivvval.

Herrrrre's theeeee Linnnnneup:  

Nodzzz

Lovvers

Wavves

Mayyors

Seeeeeee Youuuuuu Therrrrrre!!!!!!

Mayyors @ SXSW from FFT on Vimeo.

A eulogy for for the future...

 Autotune is dead.  Long live Autotune.

T-Pain and Kanye are doing their damnedest to to take a self-aware stance in the wake of the backlash.  

Yep. It seems the musicians most associated with this particular device are the one's most aggressively committed to throwing it under the bus, Kanye having lent his self-professed genius to this coffin nail:

Damn right Jay Z, autotune is faggy, bring on the fucking oboe.

Aside from Kanye's own history of messing with the human voice (Re: chipmunk soul), the history of vocal manipulation in music that led to autotune is pretty interesting.  It all seemed to begin with his obsession with Daft Punk and other french house, a genre that is in turn hugely influenced by electro soul and prog-damaged pop of the late seventies/mid eighties.

Talkbox soul from Stevie Wonder:

G-Funk innovator Roger Troutman of Zapp & Roger:

Vocoded elctro funk from Midnight Star:

Classic Electro courtesy of Jonzun Crew:

And Jean Michel Jarre worshipers Space (Remember one post ago?):

Now, I'm as tired of Wal-Mart trance / ringtone bullshit like this as the next guy, but do we really need to revert to scowling hard talk and jazzy breaks?  No thanks.  Fucking sick awesome masculine oboe hook not withstanding, DOA: Death Of Autotune seems to be humorlessly whipping the dying horse that I'm On A Boat and Sensual Seduction already mortally elbow dropped.  

Ah well, until the Great Autotune War blows over, I'll be in my penthouse/bomb-shelter, huddle over my radio listening to this:

You have the right to go to outer space....

When I was little, my dad was known to occasionally break out his home-planetarium kit.  A tiny black orb etched with pin points through which lights shone, illuminating a beige starscape on the living room ceiling.  My dad would talk us through the various constellations, using a pointer that, working on the same principle as the bat signal, was simply a little flashlight with a red arrow stuck over the lens.  A good night's fun for a family with no TV.

I also remember the trips to local science museums, the moments of anticipation before the planetarium's dome darkened and filled with the deep resonant monotone of narrators elaborating ancient celestial dances.  In the dim light before the show, the planetarium echoed with whispering synthesizers, phasered bells, and vocoded soft jazz.  A melancholy calm enveloped my excitement, as I waited to lose myself in the darkness between the stars.

Now, in some way in homage to those evenings, I find myself drawn to the quaint futurism of the music below. Dance to the sounds of hearts beating out a rhythm into the lonesome infinity of deep space.    

Here's some evocative planetarium disco.  

Not to be confused with this.

Beeping and weeping....

Clara Rockmore could be the moniker of late 20th century B-Girl in the vein of YoYo or JJ Fad.  In actual fact, it's the name of a devastatingly talented Lithuanian-born  theremin prodigy.  So, names can be deceiving.  

Rockmore's 1976 performance of Tchaikovsky's Valse Sentimentale is a piece of music guaranteed to send you into a misty-eyed reverie.

The theremin's electronic ice flow of sound is thawed by her elegant human touch.  

And as the picture in the video attests, she was also a pioneer of electroclash fashion. 

Here you can see Rockmore at work.  Elegantly marrying Old World sentiment with Futurist technology while her circuits gently weep... 

Sexual Harassment...

Well, here's one take...

Wow.  Pretty stilted and uncomfortable, right? But if you're a person truly worthy of the name GERALD D. ALLGOOD, this is the only Sexual Harassment you need be privy to...

I get SPRUNG....

Spring has arrived, and with it light jackets, lime-infused ales, and impromptu taco cookouts.

Here in Chicago, the sun's return is met with appropriately orgiastic pagan ecstasy after the blighted winter months have all but crushed our spirits.

In short, it's time to bask in the Sound of Rimini*.  It's the musical equivalent of wine cooler.

I understand that in a way this is terrible.  Kasso's tropical, light-disco chiller wouldn't sound out place bumping out of the department store speakers in the khaki-and-teal aisles of Ross Dress For Less.  Nor would it jar you out of an afternoon reverie as you sit in a hot minivan back seat after a day of water-sliding the public pool.  That's why it's great.  It's the sound of mellow nostalgia, all wrapped up in a time capsule of TV-theme pianos and swaying palm fronds.

Here's some more deliciously sun-dazed Kasso.  

There's just something about a white piano on a beach.

*Rimini is a resort town on Italy's Adriatic coast.  We Italo like that.

Your new favorite band is your other favorite band...

I just picked up an album by the band Cybotron. You know, the pioneering Australian prog-electro band? Wait, I mean the pioneering Detroit tech-electro band. No no no no no. The AWESOME Cybotron. Wait. Which one do I mean?

It's pretty rare that two bands that knock you on your face have the exact same name. But, in a world with a finite amount of prefixes and suffixes suggesting a totally rad future, I guess there was bound to be some overlap.

The Detroit Cybotron is already enshrined within the lucite pantheon of electronic music. Vacuum-sealed, ice-cold, breakdanceable, afro-futurist bliss. Their tunes are as "classic" as anything less than 30 years old can be. Clear is the most famous song, having been homage/sampled by the likes of The Rich Man's will.i.am.

Right now though, I'm feeling Cosmic Cars.

The automobile-worship makes it a sinister Detroit auto industry counterpart to the Germanic beauty of Kraftwerk's Autobahn. (Cybotron's Juan Atkins would go back to this well again with his other band Model 500.)

Speaking of Kraftwerk, the Australian Cybotron may as well be a krautrock group. They'd be neatly filed beside Ash Ra Temple and Tangerine Dream. Instead of urban futurism of the other Cybotron, here we have a spiritual ecstatic dreamworld filled with allusions to classical mythology and Frank Herbert's Dune.

Here's Colossus. It will crush you

These guys had the name first and apparently resented the americans for using it. Let's reconcile everyone! Sometimes great minds just think alike!