From: MHB@MITVMA.BITNET (Michael H. Bloom)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Subject: Pour me another cup of coffee
Date: 1 Oct 92 14:02:46 GMT
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU

From:         "The Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny"
              <ALEVIN@RCNVMS.RCN.MASS.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Look mummy there's an Orb up in the sky

> This is forwarded from the Pink Floyd "Echoes" mail list...
> ---------Original Message--------

> What?????  Tell the DJ to lay off the acid....The Orb is ambient
> techno, based around computers, 90's synth sounds and samples, drum
> machines, etc....I don't think I could *ever* (under any circumstances
> of reality) confuse the Orb with the Floyd.....For one thing, the
> songs that *might* sound like the Orb (Interstellar Overdrive comes to
> mind) still sound distinctly low-tech compard to the Orb.....

Did this clown never stop to think that when "Interstellar Overdrive" was
recorded, the most advanced techie equipment there was was the tape delay
echo, and Syd Barrett was the guy who made it feasible for live performance?
Just for that, Urban Ambience owes Syd a vote of thanks, and so does nearly
everybody else.

There's always been a soft spot in what serves Pink Floyd for a heart :-)
for techie stuff. They were among the first customers of the Putney VCS3
synthesizer, which may in fact be ahead of Moog as the first production
console-model synthesizer in the world-- and *everybody* in the band bought
one, not just the keyboard player. Nick Mason's fascination with the tape
recorder as a compositional tool should be obvious to anybody who's heard
"Several Species of Small Furry Animals... " Then there was a rumor going
around after _Dark Side of the Moon_ that Floyd's next album was not going
to be song form, but _musique concrete_ made from common household appliances.
Did anybody else hear that rumor? I'm sorry they scrubbed that project; I would
have loved to hear it.

In any event, the one immutable characteristic of Pink Floyd is that ambience
(oh god, not that again) of theirs-- a deep ominous echoey acoustic space,
which groups like the Orb are constantly alluding to, albeit they sometimes
retrofit it with the Eno mods. But anybody that thinks the important aspect of
Pink Floyd is their sophomoric-angst-ridden lyrics is just way out to lunch,
IMHO.

From:         woj <REWOICC@ERENJ.BITNET>
Subject:      xtc

> _nonsvch_ may not be a brilliant record and it might suffer from the
> partridge-fear-of-production (though with gus dudgeon on the board, it
> might be justified), but it's a solid pop album. and i like solid pop
> albums...

Well, they're better than gaseous pop albums, but sometimes I prefer the
liquid state :-)

I should add that there's no XTC record I don't like, just that I think there
are degrees of brilliance, and there's several more lumens to "The Everyday
Story of Smalltown" than to "Across This Antheap."

I saw MTV play "Peter Pumpkinhead" once, thought it was way cool, kept tuning
in again for weeks, and never caught it again. Bait and switch hell.

From:         "OUT,
              OUT - YOU'LL NOT FEEL THE FALL-OUT..." <OLIVOTTO@ITNCISCA.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: snakes and ladders...

> PS: or was it "Stars And Ladders"?

It was "Stars and Bars," and the artist was Neil Young. No, wait, it was "Stars
and Stripes Forever," by John Phillip Sousa and Carl Stalling...

From:         "(Calum F Benson CS90)" <cbenson@CS.STRATH.AC.UK>
Subject:      Re: electronic music

> 	But if there was no electronic music, all the avant garde post-
> impressionistic music would have been written for standard orchestra
> instruments, so it would sound fine to all concerned.

Wrong. Milton Babbitt turned to electronic music because he wanted to write
extremely serialized music with a degree of precision that human performers
simply weren't going to be capable of. Obviously this was not gonna "sound
fine" to him. It's arguable that he didn't need to go to electronic media--
Conlon Nancarrow did superlative work with his player piano technology-- but
again, by what right to we get to second guess the composer's intentions?
Allowing him to work out his ideas on electronic media at least kept him from
wasting the time of performers on conventional instruments if his ideas proved
unworkable-- or giving said performers an undeserved raft of shit if his ideas
were valid but the performers weren't inhumanly skilled, like he required.

> 	I can't agree there. Certainly, none of these would exist without
> _electronics_, but surely they have nothing to do with electronic music
> as such?

Wrong again. The earliest realizations of electronic music in Europe took place
in the broadcast studios of radio stations, largely because they had more and
better equipment than anybody else. They also commissioned seminal work by
people like Stockhausen and Pierre Henry. In this country, an awful lot of
important work happened at Bell Labs-- Charles Dodge's work in computerized
voice synthesis, for example, which benefited both the arts and the sciences.
So the electronic mass media were proximate cause for the existence of
electronic music as a field of endeavor.

> 	Yes, I think I'd go along with that. I dabble in electronic music
> myself, but I always try to include some acoustic instruments along the way.
> I always feel that people are going to think "that's all done on a computer"
> if there's not some guitar bits in it to let people know I really have
> put in the practice, and I really can play an instrument or two!

I realize in drafting my answer that I'm being a bit more hostile than usual,
but my excuse for this is here in your last paragraph: you've dumped on a
field of music that I feel strongly about, and your reason for doing so is
basically your belief that your audience doesn't think there's work in it
unless you stick a conventional instrument in there. I respectfully suggest
you work harder on educating your audience rather than imposing your
prejudices-- or your hazy notion of their prejudices-- on the list.

From:         "Leonard Watkins" <ISTS024@UABDPO.BITNET>
Subject:      Advice & observations

> I was wondering if anyone can give me some pointers on singing...

Well, this is a semi-facetious suggestion, but: you notice how a lot of the
great bluesmen sound pissed off when they sing? I'm thinking of performances
like John Lee Hooker's "Jesse James," so much of the Howlin' Wolf repertoire,
etc. Well, combine that with the notion that blues is a music of feeling, and
the solution to your problem should be obvious. Concentrate on how preposterous
you feel being the lead singer, really get into your resentment that the rest
of your band puts you in this untenable position, and then just let 'er rip.
I guarantee you'll be the most balls-out singer this side of Motorhead! Works
for me, anyway :-)

From:         AISARMSTRONG%IST%VMI@IST.VMI.EDU
Subject:      re: Re: Announcement

> Since its all over.  The CMA awards is what I was talking about.  I hope that
> all turned in to see Acky Breaky Heart get Single of the Year.

If there's any virtue to country music, it ought to lie in its rock-bottom
commonality, its populist faith in the soul of the common man. And by that
criterion, any awards show is the exact antithesis of what's good about it--
the awards celebrate the marketability of the art, the crassest commercial
features of it. I'm ashamed of you-- although I'm not a bit surprised, since
you also like disco's crudest manifestations.

Got a pretty neat record called _Rig Rock Jukebox_, a collection of singles
released by a country/trucker label out of NYC called Diesel Only Records.
There's a lot of postmodernism in there-- how many songs do you know that
celebrate Hank Williams that also throw in allusions to the Big Bopper and
Iggy Pop? But there's also some damn fine guitar pickin' and pedal steel,
and some killer backbeats. Of course, this involves rather too much irony
to be visible to the CMA.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU