The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'outsider music'
2005/7/5
Yat-Kha are a band from the Siberian republic of Tuva who practice the Tuvan style of throat singing. They now have an album of covers of Western pop songs, including Led Zeppelin, Kraftwerk, Hank Williams, Bob Marley and Motörhead. The cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, available for downloading from the page, is the greatest thing since those Portuguese-language David Bowie covers in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.
They are also touring the UK in September and October.
(via sweepingthenation) ¶ 2
2005/1/4
While one member of the KLF, Jimmy Cauty, is now busying himself with selling terrorism-inspired art to Londoners (sort of like a more literal-minded SCHWA), the other chap, Bill Drummond, is now involved with a project called Penkiln Burn. This is a catalogue of conceptual art-related jobs proposed and/or undertaken. The jobs in question include returning a work of art to its origins, selling sledgehammers to explore their destructive potential, throwing provocative propositions into the ideosphere, protest through silence or withdrawal of art, an outsider band and a meditation on the finite number of haircuts left in your life. Oh, and if you live on a line between Belfast and Nottingham, Bill Drummond will make soup for you.
2004/7/16
2004/6/25
UbuWeb, archive of writings and MP3s by cultural figures from John Oswald to Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. Scanner), and from Guy Debord to Francis E. Dec, have now given a home to the 365 Days outsider MP3 archive.
2004/5/7
Some time around 1980, Californian prankster John Trubee took some LSD, wrote some whacked out lyrics and sent them to one of those Nashville-based song recording companies, who sent him back a record of a country-and-western version of his opus, which became the "Blind Man's Penis" song, and a favourite on college radio. Now, someone has done a Flash-animated video for it.
2004/1/19
Someone has put together a Wesley Willis tribute album. Titled, Loved Like A Milkshake, it consists of downloadable MP3s of covers of classic Willis songs, including "Rock N Roll McDonalds", "Cut The Mullet" and "The Chicken Cow", by a number of artists, none of whom I've heard of (though the first one has bagpipes). I haven't downloaded any of them yet, so I can't tell you whether or not they whip the racehorse's ass. (via MeFi)
2003/12/24
The 365 Days Project, Otis Fodder's downloadable collection of audio bulldada, kitsch, outsider music and found sound, has put up the remainder of its MP3s on its archive page. You have just under a fortnight to download them before they go offline forever, disappearing into the twilight zone of file-sharing networks. The last batch of MP3s includes, among other gems, Swing A Little, Kim A Little, a 1970s-vintage German advertising record for a brand of cigarettes (as heard on the excellent Popshopping compilation), and a somewhat disturbing Christian children's record by a big-haired woman named "Baby Lu-Lu" (after whom there's a Stereolab song named).
2003/6/16
365 Days gives you a different piece of audio bulldada each day, in convenient MP3 format. This includes gems like "Religion for Retarded", a 1970s-vintage guide to picking up girls in clothes shops, a found piece of dada titled Leper in a Tumbledryer, Louis Farrakhan singing a calypso song about a sex change operation and Elvis Casio (if there ever are two words that, when combined, promise endless ironic kitsch, they would be "Elvis" and "Casio"), as well as numerous thrift-store finds, religious recordings, vintage ads and miscellaneous bits of weird audio. Not to mention some quite doovy incidental artwork.
2003/6/13
Ill Mitch, allegedly a Russian rapper, must be the hip-hop equivalent of "my love for you is like a truck byer-zer-ker". (via bOING bOING)
2003/6/4
Something for the outsider-art fans: a list of notable music by the mentally ill and eccentric, from Joe Meek to Syd Barrett to Wesley Willis:
T. Valentine, "Hello Lucille, Are You a Lesbian?"
If a bloodline could be traced from Wesley Willis, it would lead straight to this R&B catastrophe, who in 1982 dedicated this song to his wife after she came out of the closet. "I hate all lesbians," T. Valentine emotes with a pronounced lisp (hmmm).
Richard Peterson, "New Young Fresh Fellows Theme" (PopLlama, 7-inch single)
You've probably seen the large-statured Peterson blowing his trumpet around town. Peterson, who could have played the lead in Sling Blade, has recorded four albums and this 1992 single, in which he wrote and arranged a new theme for YFF (which is musically brilliant), insisting in the lyrics that YFF should add Peterson to the fold.
2003/4/9
Someone named April Winchell has an impressive awe-inspiring collection of unbelievably bizarre MP3s; from Christian Hygienist educational recordings to Hindi covers of ABBA, from TV celebrities' ill-advised attempts at singing to outsider art.
Nice... I may have to grab some of those for my next DJ set.
The only thing she seems to be missing is the Blind Man's Penis song.
(via MeFi)
2002/7/30
Tonight at the Film Festival, I saw a documentary titled Love and Anarchy: The Wild Wild World of Jamie Leonarder. The subject of the documentary is a rather unusual person, who has lived the life of the outsider in every way. He worked in psychiatric hospitals, started a noise-rock band named The Mu-Mesons, most of whose members suffer from schizophrenia, associated with outsider artists, and more recently, ran a retro/lounge/exotica night named Sounds of Seduction in Sydney, and became a renowned collector and exhibitor of "psychotronic" cinema (i.e., all the indescribably weird stuff from prior decades, from low-budget monster movies to films from Christian groups on the evils of teenage dating to vintage sex-education films). Anyway, the documentary had some interesting thoughts on outsider art, including the assertion that outsider art is more original than art by trained or mentally normal artists (which makes sense).
2000/11/8