I can haz emancipayshn uv dizzoninz?

I always thought Cory Arcangel was alright, you know? He had some good ideas about technology and so on and so forth, but nothing I'd really recommend. But as time goes on (and the non-sequitur-ish qualities of the internet don't go away), I'm beginning to accept that he has pretty much hit the nail on the head, consistently prodding that little sensitive spot in your brain that wonders "what if that was all the culture we're ever going to have achieved?".

Whether or not that question is just the same old snobbery, misanthropy and melancholia, it doesn't matter, but I can't help but marvel at the utterly abject quality of his rendition of Gould's recording of Schönberg's Drei Klavierstücke, as played by a bunch of cats.


Here's Gould's own recording, to which the cats have been matched by computer. In fact, it's worth going here, not just to understand the method he used, but also to listen to the two recordings being played side by side...

Naughty Shelving

It was with no small pleasure that I slid Sch
önberg's Structural Functions of Harmony onto the shelf alongside Cage's Silence, especially as they fit beside each other so snugly. We're not anti-Cage by any means, but there's something infinitely cloying about his quasi-naiveté, the innumerable anecdotes about mushrooms, and of course the incessant eulogisation (which is of course ironic, considering that's partly the genesis of his rebellion against Schönberg). I suppose also that one needn't be forced to choose - Schönberg represents the ultimate in mastery, demanding of the complete assimilation of the Classical tradition before smashing it up, and Cage is the epitome of aleatoric submissiveness (although of course this angle drifts a little close to a certain diet-buddhism of which Cage is so guilty).

Anyway, it's worth noting that as far back as the 1890's Mahler, Schönberg's greatest inspiration, specified that a five minute silence be observed between the first two movements of his second symphony. All he needed to come up with that idea was an insatiable thanatological obsession, rather than consultations of an ancient text on divination.



This is Mahler playing his own Das Himmlische Leben, recorded onto piano roll. Lo and behold, it's the source of Susumu Yokota's Card Nation:



ps- The phrase 'insatiable thanatological obsession' has just struck me as a bit stupid. Surely a thanotological obsession is the only obsession guaranteed to not be insatiable?

When I'm Cleaning Irregularly Shaped Windows

George Formby meets Schönberg. The 6 Kleine Klavierstuck are on the E&V; transcriptions-to-do-list, coming soon, perhaps, possibly...
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Nearly there...

This is about as good as the internet gets. It seems that the more 'content' there is available to you, the less likely you are to stumble across things. I am totally in thrall to the idea that there might have been a time one could have randomly switched on the television to find something like this on...