Belm Blog

Belm Blog http://blog.belm.com Random spurious persiflage Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:37:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Random spurious persiflage no More Mellodrama http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/05/more-mellodrama/ http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/05/more-mellodrama/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:33:35 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=3413 http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/05/more-mellodrama/feed/ 0 <a class="post_image_link" href="http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/05/more-mellodrama/" title="Permanent link to More Mellodrama"><img class="post_image aligncenter" src="http://blog.belm.com/wp-content/uploads/mellodrama-logo.jpg" width="320" height="248" alt="Post image for More Mellodrama" /></a> I received a few replies following the <a href="http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/03/mellodrama/" target="_blank">Melodrama</a> post, in which you attempted to guess all 24 of the songs used in this clip, “Mash-Mello”: As promised, here is the list of clips, in Artist, Album, “Song” format: <ol> <li>King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King, “In the Court of the Crimson King”</li> <li>U2, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, “Beautiful Day”</li> <li>King Crimson, Lizard, “Cirkus”</li> <li>Matching Mole, Matching Mole, “O Caroline”</li> <li>Air, The Virgin Suicides, “Playground Love”</li> <li>The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin, “Race for the Prize”</li> <li>Opeth, Damnaton, “Windowpane” (Melotron samples played on a Clavia Nord keyboard)</li> <li>Radiohead, OK Computer, “Exit Music (For A Film)”</li> <li>Oasis, What’s the Story, Morning Glory?, “Wonderwall”</li> <li>Yes, Close to the Edge, “And You And I”</li> <li>Captain Beefheart, Doc at the Radio Station, “Ashtray Heart”</li> <li>Tangerine Dream, Phaedra, “Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares”</li> <li>Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy, “The Rain Song”</li> <li>The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour, “Flying”</li> <li>Talk Talk, The Colour of Spring, “Life’s What You Make It”</li> <li>Kraftwerk, Trans-Europe Express, “Trans-Europe Express” (Vako Orchestron, not Mellotron)</li> <li>Pink Floyd, Ummagumma, “Sysyphus, Pt. 1″</li> <li>Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Architecture and Morality, “Joan of Arc”</li> <li>Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy, “Kashmir” (The segment in the clip is actually real instruments, but the Mellotron sections also contain vocals which are too easily identified.)</li> <li>Big Star, #1 Record, “The India Song”</li> <li>Genesis, Selling England by the Pound, “Cinema Show”</li> <li>Yes, Fragile, “Heart of the Sunrise”</li> <li>David Bowie, David Bowie, “Space Oddity”</li> <li>Genesis, Foxtrot, Watcher of the Skies</li> </ol> These artists, and any more rescued the Chamberlin and Mellotron from grandma’s living room. If not, we would have had a lot more of this: <a href="http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/05/more-mellodrama/">Click here to view the embedded video.</a> <a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share_save" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.belm.com%2F2010%2F02%2F05%2Fmore-mellodrama%2F&linkname=More%20Mellodrama"><img [...] I received a few replies following the Melodrama post, in which you attempted to guess all 24 of the songs used in this clip, “Mash-Mello”: As promised, here is the list of clips, in Artist, Album, “Song” format: King Crimson, In the [...] Mellodrama http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/03/mellodrama/ http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/03/mellodrama/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:59:36 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=3367 http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/03/mellodrama/feed/ 15 <a class="post_image_link" href="http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/03/mellodrama/" title="Permanent link to Mellodrama"><img class="post_image aligncenter" src="http://blog.belm.com/wp-content/uploads/M400-Mellotronfinal.jpg" width="320" height="306" alt="Mellotron M400" /></a> The flutes that open “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Stairway to Heaven,” the strings in”Nights in White Satin” — these are sounds you know by heart. What you may not know is that they were played on a keyboard instrument called the Mellotron. When I was a high school prog music geek with a crappy band, I practiced my keyboard skills by learning parts from records, playing along with Yes, Genesis, and ELP. I only had an electric piano and organ, and was able to borrow a synthesizer every now and then, but laying my hands on a Mellotron became my Grail quest. I would show up early to help set up for the school dances in the hopes that I’d get to fiddle around with the keyboard setups from the bands we hired to play. At one dance, Larry McGowan, the keyboard player for local band Rat Race Choir, invited me to check out his latest acquisition, a huge dual-manual Mellotron. Or so I thought, until he explained that it was a custom-built Chamberlin, an instrument made in the US that competed with the UK-built Mellotron. It wasn’t until I visited Noise New Jersey – the studio where legendary producer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kramer" target="_blank">Kramer</a> recorded bands like Galaxie 500, Low, and Ween – that I finally got to play a real Mellotron, a temperamental model M400 (a similar model is pictured above). It was almost impossible to keep in tune but an absolute thrill to play. The instrument has been around for almost fifty years. Here’s a mash-up I made of some songs containing different Mellotron sounds (a mash-Mello?) that spans five decades. See how many you can name; I’ll provide the answers after I receive a few comments with your guesses): What triggered this nostalgic reverie was the recent release of <a href="http://www.bazillionpoints.com/mellodrama/about.html" target="_blank">Mellodrama</a>, a documentary by Dianna Dilworth that tracks the rise, fall, and resurrection of the world’s first sampling instrument. <a href="http://blog.belm.com/2010/02/03/mellodrama/">Click here to view the embedded video.</a> This fascinating film tells an all-too-common American technology story: home inventor creates something in his garage, the idea is stolen and commercialized by another company, the technology is eventually replaced by something newer, and only then is the inventor credited for his work. In this case, we learn about Harry Chamberlin, who created his eponymous instrument in the late 1940s as a way to have an “orchestra at your fingertips.” He recorded members of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra onto multitrack tape, then created a keyboard mechanism to play the sounds. <a href="http://blog.belm.com/wp-content/uploads/MellotronM4000_Diagram.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-3365" title="MellotronM4000_Diagram" src="http://blog.belm.com/wp-content/uploads/MellotronM4000_Diagram.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="306" /></a> When you pressed a key, a drive mechanism would move a tape loop past a playback head, playing the note you selected in one of three instrument voices. Choosing an instrument sound moved the playback head over the appropriate [...] The flutes that open “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Stairway to Heaven,” the strings in”Nights in White Satin” — these are sounds you know by heart. What you may not know is that they were played on a keyboard instrument called the [...] Can I Get an Amen? http://blog.belm.com/2009/12/11/can-i-get-an-amen/ http://blog.belm.com/2009/12/11/can-i-get-an-amen/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:37:41 +0000 David http://blog.belm.com/?p=2908 http://blog.belm.com/2009/12/11/can-i-get-an-amen/feed/ 0 <a class="post_image_link" href="http://blog.belm.com/2009/12/11/can-i-get-an-amen/" title="Permanent link to Can I Get an Amen?"><img class="post_image aligncenter" src="http://blog.belm.com/wp-content/uploads/winstonsamen.jpg" width="320" height="267" alt="Amen Brother" /></a> It began as a conversation about <a title="Apache" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo4glASbEh4" target="_blank">that awful Tommy Seebach video</a> (which I refuse to embed here – you have been warned). I told a friend that it was a cover of The Incredible Bongo Band’s cover of “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_(instrumental)" target="_blank">Apache</a>” by The Shadows. The IBB version has been called “hip-hop’s anthem” due to the frequency with which it has been sampled in other songs. When vinyl was still the source of hip-hop beats, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Breaks_and_Beats" target="_blank">Ultimate Breaks and Beats</a> series was released to provide DJs with new breaks. Most of the tracks released in the series spawned dozens of new hip-hop records, but there are three building blocks upon which the majority of hip-hop was built: “Apache,” “Funky Drummer” by James Brown, and “Amen, Brother” by the Winstons. “Amen Brother” – the B-side of “Color Him Father,” a song that earned the Winstons a Grammy award in 1969 – was an instrumental version of “Amen” from the movie “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn6w255CGkk" target="_blank">Lilies of the Field</a>” (Sidney Poitier’s voice is dubbed by Jester Hairston, the song’s composer). The drum break, performed by G.C. Coleman, was rediscovered by crate-digging DJs and released on Volume 1 of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. This is the UBB version, remixed from the original: The Amen break may be the most sampled break in the history of popular music, described by artist Nate Harrison as “a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures.” Even I couldn’t resist sampling it when I was playing with a <a title="Hello, Baby" href="http://blog.belm.com/2009/09/21/hello-baby/" target="_blank">parakeet training record</a>: <a href="http://blog.belm.com/2009/12/11/can-i-get-an-amen/">Click here to view the embedded video.</a> The drum pattern is a sped-up Amen break. Speeding up the break was the conceptual breakthrough that formed the backbone of dance subgenres jungle, breakbeat hardcore, and drum-and-bass (DnB). But rather than tell you more, I leave your further musical education to <a href="http://www.nkhstudio.com/" target="_blank">Nate Harrison</a> in his installation “Can I Get an Amen?”: <a href="http://blog.belm.com/2009/12/11/can-i-get-an-amen/">Click here to view the embedded video.</a> The current litigious musical environment created by the last of the major record labels has made it nearly impossible to create sample-based music. Hip-hop classics like De La Soul’s “Three Feet High and Rising” (the subject of one of the first sample use lawsuits), the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique,” and Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” could never be made today due to the cost of sample licensing. As Harrison puts it: <blockquote>To trace the history of the Amen break is to trace the history of a brief period of time when it [...] It began as a conversation about that awful Tommy Seebach video (which I refuse to embed here – you have been warned). I told a friend that it was a cover of The Incredible Bongo Band’s cover of “Apache” by The Shadows. The IBB version has [...] Winstons