Sunday 29 January 2012

Shuffling With The Music Machine & Writers Who Have Not Influenced Me

The machine will choose. I'm incapable.
Click the shuffle on...

Stop Looking At Me! - Dennis Michael Tenney
Tape Loop With Rhythm & Bass - Kid Baltan
Border Cop (Opening Titles) - Stanley Myers
We Travel The Spaceways - Sun Ra

I've written about shuffling music before, but cannot remember where. If I had a memory that good, I might be a machine.
Paul Morley writes a lot about Lou Reed's Metal machine music in Words And Music. Morley is not a writer who has influenced me. Other's writers who have not influenced me:
Lester Bangs
Julie Birchill
Richard Meltzer
David Meltzer
Philip Larkin
Nick Kent
Kevin Pearce
Alistair Fitchett
Simon Reynolds
Greg Tate
David Toop

Factors - John Baker
Chippewa - John Zorn
The Witchdoctor - Ennio Morricone & Bruno Nicolai


I return from a charity shop hunt empty-handed, saying to myself 'That's the way it goes sometimes'. Two weeks ago I found series 1 & 2 of The Wire, £3.99 each, having mentioned it to a friend at Work the day before, which either cast a lucky spell on me, or simply made me conscious of it and subconsciously on the look-out. Tomorrow I intend to discuss Pierre Henry on vinyl with a view to finding some in a charity the next day. Except, it doesn't work like that, unfortunately, and besides, he'd having nothing to say about Pierre Henry. But he could say something about Henry Winkler as The Fonze, since his heart is sprayed with American graffiti in the form of a love for The Beach Boys, Phil Spector, Springsteen, Ray Charles etc. But I don't want a copy of Happy Days on DVD, should such a thing exist.

The machine continues to choose...
Laptevinmera - Pan Sonic
Closing Crawl - Jerry Fielding
Children of the Corn - Jonathan Elias
Incredible Melting Man - Arlon Ober

Except it doesn't choose, does it? Surely there is no pondering involved; no consideration of mood, or desire to hear anything. But if the machine could ponder and decide, I suppose it could do so in a nanosecond. It plays...
Modulus - John Zorn
of the hundreds of tracks it could pick, why Zorn again? Can it really be in the mood for John Zorn?
It plays...
Klangexperimente - John Cage/David Tudor
By now I am convinced it is choosing what it knows I will enjoy, rather than one of the tracks that I've yet to delete. I'm waiting for it to pick one of those, just to have the satisfaction of erasing it and creating more space on my hard drive.

S.O.S.Z2 - Peter Hamilton...
Only the machine would put them together...electronic avant-gardism and swinging psichedelico.
The machine has yet to chose a track that I can provide a YouTube clip of - it's being elitist and awkward, and I cannot stop until it does as I wish.

Atlantic - Tom Dissevelt
Photo Injector - Dopplereffekt
Memory 45 - The Caretaker

At last...

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