Revisiting Roger Waters' Radio KAOS

There's new Pink Floyd boxset coming out. One of its selling points is a remix/rerecording of the David Gilmour's 1987 solo album A Momentary Lapse of Reason which exists because audience liked David Bowie's Never Let Me Down reimagining enough. So now AMLOR sounds less 80s bullshit and more sterile 10s shit.

So why not get back and revisit the other 1987 Pink Floyd solo album - Roger Waters' Radio KAOS.

For one reason or another, Roger Waters' solo career never really got much appreciation. Which is a damn shame because his 1984-1992 run was a worthy continuation of latter day Pink Floyd vibe with intrinsic concept albums and biting social commentary.

His official solo debut, 1984 The Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking suffered from the comparison with Pink Floyd's The Wall (just like The Final Cut the year prior). The other strike against P&CHH is that it was originally pitched to the band with the Wall and the band passed on it - this fact created a general perception that the album just wasn't good enough. Which is not true.
P&CHH is very different from The Wall and can stand on its own. This album is much more self-aware and tongue-in-cheek affair than its more celebrated relative. It is cheerfully stupid and embracing the camp of its vaudevillian overcomplicated "it is a dream" plot.
The older i get the more i can relate to its haphazard narrative and decidedly glorious lack of coherence.

Then there is 1992 Amused to Death which is Roger Waters blasting out the lost Pink Floyd album he had in himself. The Bravery of Being Out of Range and It's A Miracle stand as all-time greats. It is weirdly prophetic album about media reality warping and information oversaturation that messes the lives of simple men.

In between these two albums is 1987 Radio KAOS. The best way to explain Radio KAOS worth is by comparing it to AMLOR.

Released at the same time as David Gilmour's A Momentary Lapse of Reason, it had a strategic disadvantage of not being labelled a Pink Floyd album (unlike David Gilmour's). This resulted in lower sales, biased reviews and low tour attendance which seriously damaged Waters' career prospects.

The other problematic point of Radio KAOS is its overproduced 80s sound. Just like David Gilmour's 1987 effort, Roger Waters tried to modernize his sound with then-fancy fairlight synth aesthetic. However, Waters leaned too hard on it and instead of augmenting his sound, he made it tacky and dubious at times.

At its worst, the album production sounds like a generic boilerplate synthesizer schlock - far cry from Waters' extravagant soundscapes of The Final Cut or Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking. But the production is just one of the facets of the creative work - it is the songs that make the wheel turning.

In contast, the biggest problem with David Gilmour's A Momentary Lapse of Reason (or his other solo efforts) is its abysmal songwriting. The man can play guitar, but songwriting is far from his strengths. He can write a terrific song once in a while, but he can't carry the load all the way through.

Even though the music is mostly fine with some exceptional moments (Yet Another Movie is a great song despite some lyrical hiccups), the lyrics make your ears bleed grey goo. The Dogs of War might have been a great song by the Bad Company ten years prior, but the band called Pink Floyd could have done better any day of the week. Even album highlights like Sorrow or One Slip suffer from being littered with the most generic lyrical cliche imaginable. As if there were no cliche David Gilmour didn't liked.

On the other hand, Roger Waters knows a thing or two about writing songs and making them work on their own terms and within an album context. Radio KAOS shows Roger Waters trying to make an accessible record with a message and for the most part he succeeds.

The album is a great showcase of Waters' narrative skills. He tells a simple story about dealing with global bullshit with some extreme prejudice. Each song explores different aspect of the narrative and progresses the story. It builds to a culmination and concludes with a message of hope with so much cheese and tongue-in-cheek - you can't help but smile in the end.

Story-wise, the album is rather mean dig on The Who's Tommy. Except this time "the shit is real". It also revolves around paralyzed wheelchair-bound protagonist. But this time, his name is Billy and the boy can hear Radio Waves. And he is Welsh. He has a brother Benny, who works as a miner during the Thatcher years, so you know he's screwed into backside netherrealm.

After another pub crawl Benny gets into trouble for dropping a concrete block to an overpass which resulted in a driver's death. Benny's sent to prison while Billy goes to their uncle Dave who lives in California.

Uncle Dave is an interesting fella. Back in the 40s he worked on The Manhattan Project, and this experience made him quite matter-of-fact about life and stuff. Billy is miserable in California (probably because he happened to hear LL Cool J "Going back to Cali". This thing is a serious PTSD generator) and he is generally upset by the state the world is currently in. In other words, Billy's world weary with ennui and nonesuch sehnsucht.

During his stay at the uncle's place, Billy learns how to use a cordless phones and contacts local Radio KAOS DJ Jim Ladd who plays himself. They start to talk and Billy shares his thoughts regarding the modern world and where it is going. He is really upset about happened to Benny and what is going on in Wales. And he is really pissed off at the politicians who just go sweet fuck-all about it.

The accumulation of frustration results in Billy decided to teach a world a lesson in humility. With his new skills in manipulating cordless phones, he orchestrates a simulation of a nuclear attack. At the same time he disables all the retaliation mechanisms of the opposing forces leaving them defenseless helpless chums - so that "this time" it will be one and done waltz. Given the build-up and knowing what is going to happen, everybody shit their pants. Billy's "operation" results in a global blackout which apparently brings the world to senses and creates a semblance of hope.

That's quite a story, right?

On the other hand, the songs work well as a standalone pieces. While the production is deeply rooted in the 80s synth-laced mainstream rock, it benefits the songs with clear-cut structures with punchy rhythms and catchy hooks.

Radio Waves is punchy album opener. The story opens in medias res with Billy meeting with Jim Ladd. The song wastes no time to get to the point and its hook is really infectious. Radio Waves sets the scene and setting of the whole story. On the other hand, its sound shows how Billy perceives radio waves and what kind of excitement it brings to him.

Who needs information slows things down and starts to flesh out the narrative. It is an anthem of a working man cornered by the absence of future prospects. It gives you a sneak peek into the world Billy lives in. Narrative-wise it is a flashback to the inciting incident of the story - Benny's getting into trouble.

Me or Him is about the consequences of Benny's act. At first there is an attempt to justify his actions, then to comprehend what happened and then somber coming to terms with the state of things.

The Powers That Be is another high octane rock piece. Unlike cheeful Radio Waves, it is a rather dark song about those in power and the way they apply it to everybody. Verses of the song are constructed out of generic marketing cliche wrapped into hard boiled twang. It is like an optical illusion. Chorus goes in reverse exposes the absurdity of this mirage.   

Sunset Strip tells about Billy's stay at Uncle Dave's. It combines shiny imagery of the California with the longing for home. Billy does not belong there and he is very uncomfortable. He is trying to get a glimpse of home via radio but it is futile.

Home is an album's centerpiece. This song marks the breakdown of Billy and his decision to take action. He can't take this anymore. It starts off relatively calm mid-tempo but soon enough it starts to unravel until in the end it goes out of control and spuns into the despair of the next song.

Four Minutes depicts Billy's fit of rage and desire to right the wrongs of the world. It is less of a song and more of a happening - it ebbs and flows with the impeding doom getting closer. The highlight of the song is the end part where Claire Torry sings "Goodbye, little spy in the sky". It is really tearjerking despite being an eulogy for spy satellite.

Despite the promise of burning the world down in flames, the story ends with the fake out. The Tide is Turning was born out of Waters' change of heart after he saw the social impact of Live Aid. For a moment even such cynic as him started to believe there is still some good left in the world. In the context of an album this song works a sticking out tongue and saying "nyah nyah".

Radio KAOS is a product of its time. The production values are somewhat detrimental to its perception, but the songwriting is solid and the tunes are catchy to get through the 80s plastic dirge.

If anything, Radio KAOS encapsulates the tone of the 1980s with its fear of nuclear war, fascination with computers, overproduced sound and celebrities trying to save the world while marketing themselves.

Random notes on DNA songs

Back in the day i used to take extensive notes while listening to music. The thing is - my brain generates a lot of thoughts and when they just float around my head starts to boil and having it hot is no good.
And when you write it down - the pressure's off and you can keep your head fresh.

I stopped doing that due to work-related burnout. But why not try it again?

Here are some of my notes on songs by seminal New York No Wave band DNA.

The thing you need to know about DNA is that this was the band that wasn't in the whole music thing. They were doing a thing of their own that just happened to be expressed with sounds. Also - this is how Sonic Youth would have sounded like if all the articles about them were accurate.

Christian Morgenstern - BIM BAM BUM poem

Heavy emphasis on the images is one of the great things symbolist poetry brought back to the spotlight in the latter half of XIX century. After years of being buried in the verbosity of romantic poetry, symbolism cut the fat and tried to get straight to the point. 

Despite that, symbolist approach managed to overstay its welcome and become a passe by the time XX century rolled in. Part of the problem was plain and simple misuse of images, they became nothing more than a mere garnish of the text, an outlet for the flowery language, the one used for furbishing instead of actually serving a thematic or narrative purpose in the text.

But it wasn't necessary a bad thing. Case in point - BIM BAM BUM.

Why procedural text generation is the best?

Here's an article from LIFE magazine from March 3 1961 about a text generator that does some form of beatnik poetry and it is almost as good as a real thing. At least for the disinterested and uninitiated. 

The tone of the piece is a mix of tongue-in-cheek amazement and goodhearted irony. But nevertheless it is really curious piece of history. 1961 was the very infancy of the Natural Language Processing - but even then there was this semi-mocking tone regarding what NLP is capable of.  And the poem is decent enough. 

I think Lew Welch would have been a fan of this thing - there is this smoky blur of similarity of his cadences and of the generated poem.

Anyway. As a writer, text generation is one of my areas of interest. It is a tool worth exploring. And not because it can do job for you. 

The poem itself is the representative of the procedural text generation variety. In essence, it is a cookie-cutter template-based way of producing text out of available elements without taking context or semantics into consideration. It is as blunt and unelegant as it gets. Usually, the results are clumsy and borderline demented. But only if you expect it to do text writing the right way. If not - it can be incredibly efficient at its job if you know how to use it.

I can go even further and claim that of all its types, procedural text generation is probably the greatest application of natural language processing ever.

Here's why - it is a simulacrum1 operating with a simulacrum2 based on a simulacrum3 to do simulacrum4.

Cue Inception BRAAAAAM.

Let's unpack this.

3 Procedural Text Generation is based on an assumption that grammar rules and vocabulary is all there is for language. Such vital parts of the language as onthological and aesthetic contexts or semantics are left out of the picture for sake of keeping things simple. In other words, PTG assumes that "map IS territory". 

1 Then there the generative infrastructure - it is more or less a Rube Goldberg machine. Eerily futile, blunt instrument. 

It is a structure marked by placeholders and there is an inventory out of which the result is constructed. In fact, this structure is the text, except it is not, but it shapes the result. 

There can also be some rules that affect the choice of words, but it is optional. It can run at random just fine.

2 Traditionally, the formation of text is bound by narrative. Its intention is to transmit some sort of information.

On the other hand, the intention of PTG is to generate a text entity, not narrative or evoke imagery. Thus, the central element of PTG mechanism is more or less doing snapshots of the indeterminacy.

From the existential standpoint, the choice is rooted in numerous factors. But what if we take out factors completely and leave it blank - what kind of choice it will be? It won't be because it is a completely different thing now. It just operates similarly. That's where procedural text generation magic kicks in.

4 Basically, what happens is - a bunch of stuff is being thrown together and by accident it generates sense to the reader because the reader bears the baggage of experience and context and is able to embalm a piece of text with meaning. The text itself remains empty. It was made to be made.

This is substantially different approach that explores other facets of perception and cognition. 

On the other hand, because the text in this set-up is not actually the text but the template and its inventory - it turns the creative process the inside out.  Instead of conveying meaning - the spotlight is on the framework and its potential to generate combinations. 

The sum of parts generates new entity that contains information shaped in a certain way that is not really saying anything but can be interpreted if necessary. 

As a result, procedural text generation allows us to peek at the strange parallel dimension where things look mostly the same but function differently. The whole method opens up different creative possibilities in terms of interaction with the text and constructing narratives.

FreddieMeter - Queen + voice recognition bullshit

Here's a little singing contest variation dedicated to one and only Freddie Mercury. It is called "FreddieMeter" because you know - it meters the Freddieness.

Why? Because he was sooooo great, you know? And he had such a great voice, do you know about that? Can you sing like Freddie Mercury? How close is your timbre and melody? Let's find out!

Give me a break.

While Freddie Mercury was great-ish (probably) and stuff (for sure), i don't think this posthumous celebration of his talent is all that necessary. The man has a body of work and it is literally everywhere and if you want to celebrate him - just listen to his music and stop looking for a reason to shove it down the throats under some new pretense via marketing effort. It doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation

Seriously, it is dumb experience marketing gimmick cringe. You take a hyped-up topic like Machine Learning and combine it with mildly promising idea of voice comparison. Then you need to make it broadly available so you regress it to the simplest form. And then you tack your brand on it so that it would "matter" more and generate that special kind of "engagement".

The reality is a bit different. Here's what FreddieMeter really is - it is a throwaway piece used to momentarily spike the interest in the brand and then go away without notice because no one will care about it beyond the inital splash. There is just nothingness all around.

Also - with this service you can compare Freddie's voice with Paul Rodgers via some audio input tweaks. Paul Rodgers is cool too (and he's probably a Chtulhu who got Doug-Quaid'd with some plastic surgery, hypnosis and Revolver Ocelot-level of mindrewiring), and did a Queen album too. It is probably the most useful thing you can do with it.

The other part of the problem is that it was created by the Google aka "the big tech company". Which is a kind of a red flag, you know? The thing about big tech is that they are infovore - they feed on information, and they want their information diverse and they will go a distance to get it. Case in point - this thing. It is a ploy to get more data. And brands go for it because of "whatever works" mentality.

I mean - this service will likely generate some audio-visual data of people singing or lipsyncing. This data will likely go down into some facial and voice recognition and transcription research stuff - and at some point down the line it will be commodified as some service.

The fact that there is a statement "Your audio doesn’t get uploaded to servers to be analyzed, so your vocals stay private" doesn't really mean anything - you need to know what to check in order to find out whether it is really true, and most of the people just don't care and follow the impulse. It is foolproof because it seems harmless.

Then there is a problem of purpose - what kind of endgame this project expects? What is the end goal? Just to have some fun and "celebrate the icon"? So, you can record your voice singing some Queen songs and compare with the way Freddie Mercury sang it. And that's it. This use case is flimsy to say the least.

What kind of insight does it really offer? That your voice is more or less reminiscent of Freddie Mercury's according to some broad criteria and lots of hidden parameters? OK, what is the benefit of having this kind of information? What it is good for? It's not a white elephant artistic technical achievement, so why bother spending resources on that? Because Queen brand paid for it so that they can raise awareness and celebrate? Do you really need to do it that way? There are so many questions left and somebody got paid for this.

The idea itself is fine. But that's not how you can use it and find out something interesting. One of the problems with these kinds of projects is that their mechanics allows much more than the business need requires. Which makes the case for the thing known as "the waste of effort". And this begs the question "why bother?". And the answer is - 'cause it generates data that can be used elsewhere. Period.

But how you can use it more productively?

One of the ways this idea can be applied for the common good is language learning. Speaking practice is one of the integral elements of the process and it is not really available for everyone. This kind of service can bridge gap and help people learn foreign languages in a less complicated way.

On the other hand, this kind of approach can be used to study the chrological changes of the way people speak througout the years and time periods. You can trace the evolution of speech patterns, tone, timbre of the voice of a specific individual or a group or community. And that is going to tell you a lot of things about how the way of verbal communication permutates and adapts to the surrounding world.

You can also singalong with Chuck Shuldiner. He's dead too and deserves to be celebrated.

How OpenAI sells GPT-2 as NLP killer app?

So, the thing we've been waiting for a better half of the year just happened - OpenAI had released a full unabridged version of their infamous Natural Language Processing model GPT-2. 

You know, the one known for being capable of generating texts that look and read just like the ones written by actual human beings. The one OpenAI deemed to be "too dangerous" for the public release. The "Pandora's Box" that, if misused, would probably flood the world with fake news and otherwise manipulative synthetic content. The one that would make regular copywriters and journalists utterly obsolete. The one that birthed AI Weirdness blog, after all. You know, that one. 

Well, it is back again and it is a good reason to talk about one of its lesser-known aspects. 

One of OpenAI's competitive advantages is that it is "capped-profit" limited partnership, which means that OpenAI doesn't have to generate profit per se, but their sponsors (in limited partnership - folks like Microsoft) can use OpenAI's research for their own purposes (products or solutions within products). At the same time, OpenAI's primary performance indicators are more or less spread of their technological solution and maintaining its notoriety. 

Let's talk about the latter. 

The thing you need to know about OpenAI GPT-2 is that its marketing campaign was pitch-perfect. This is how you market the technological product to the unwitting masses. This is how you present a value proposition to those in the know. 

The secret is that you mostly don't really talk about the product itself but instead concentrate on its impending impact, the way it will shake things up, "make a difference," and so on. Hence "too dangerous" narrative. 

This approach creates a mild case of hysteria perpetuated by an eerie mystery, which is mostly based on a bunch of "um"'s and "uh"'s and whole lotta sweet technobabble. The goal is to exemplify what the thing is capable of subtly - leaving enough space for speculation. On the one hand, this approach created a stir in the media, thus guaranteed a higher degree of visibility than competing products. On the other hand, it signaled to the right people that there is a multi-faceted solution waiting for proper implementation.

Just look at the launch sequence and how it establishes the product. It kicked off with the press release that stated, "oh well, we guess we just made some kind of doomsday device. And we are really concerned about it. And we're definitely not going to do anything with it, because it would be ridiculous to put it out in the open just like that. So we are just going to keep under wraps for now". 

What happened next is the tortsunadomi of news pieces that retold the story over and over again and also added a few meandering thoughts full of piss and vinegar to the conversation. It is then quickly incorporated into the "fake news" and "deep fake" narratives and firmly contextualized as something definitely "threatening." As a result, the burning mystery is perpetuated and elaborated. 

The next step was to provide a proper showcase of the model capabilities while avoiding spoiling the big thing. It is a great sleight of hand. The whole thing is out in the open, but you claim it isn't. The showcase is made by an abridged version of the product presented as a technical paper and a tool for researchers. 

It played out perfectly - the presentation of expanded and diversified by multiple points of view on the model. As a result, - more opportunities became apparent.

There were a couple of NLP projects that provided GPT-2 a lot of publicity. For example, Talk to Transformer presented the original use case of GPT-2 - text prediction. The way it was presented neutralized any emerging criticism regarding its clumsiness (for example, it couldn't predict Austin 3:16). It was simply freestyling a bunch of stuff - sometimes it was more coherent, sometimes it wasn't. 

Then there was the Giant Language Testing Room that visualized the text analytics and showed the mechanics behind computer-generated and human-generated texts. And then there was Allen Institute's Grover than was designed to expose deepfake texts and also showcase how easily the model can recreate the text with a couple of settings tweaked (except when you ask it to write an essay on Tawny Kitaen for some reason). 

Also, there were numerous blogs that applied GPT-2 for creative purposes, like writing unicorn fiction or generating incongruous names. Blogs like AI Weirdness that basically celebrated model's bumbling nature.

In a way, this kind of presentation operates on a similar framework to Marvel Comics' built-up the arrival of Galactus back in 1966. First, The Watcher shows up and warns about the coming "doom." And everybody go "ah, we've gotta do something!" Then you get a harbinger in the form of Silver Surfer, who wreaks havoc but at the same time continually reminds us that "the worst is yet to come." The heat is right around the corner now. 

And then we get the main event - Galactus, who was just another supervillain in the long line of "ultimate threats" just ten times bigger and because of that characterized as ten times more imposing and menacing and dangerous because authors of the comic said so. 

And that's what happened. After months of build-up and speculations, in early November, the big 40GB 1,5 billion parameters version of GPT-2 was released to the public. And it was exactly what it said on the tin from the very start, just ten times bigger. However, the momentum generated by the build-up made it seem less apparent. But there is a catch which makes things even more interesting.

The thing is that "ten times bigger" doesn't translate into "ten times better" because the technology doesn't really work that way. What matters is how it manages to accomplish specific use cases and how does it correlate with the solutions for actual practical needs. 

GPT-2 is presented as a tool that generates texts that seem natural as if an actual human being wrote it. It is cool, but you need to understand that the model operates on the finite dataset, and all it really does is derives the text out of probabilities and context approximations. Text generation is not really generation. It is more of regurgitation in sophisticated combinations. GPT-2 output looks and reads just like a real thing in a way that the real thing can be bland and passable and not really saying anything, just like loads and loads of content on the internet, especially, its corporate parts. 

What GPT-2 really does is creating a serviceable text product that serves a specific well-defined function. But you can't really market that because it is not really unappealing beyond those in the know (say hi to BERT). However, that's the absolute peak of practical NLP. 

A perfect example is a conversational interface. You say "hi," and it says, "hello, how are you?" because that how conversations usually go. The other example is a verbal interpretation of data like stats in Mailchimp where you can get reports like "22% opened your newsletter, 5% of which clicked on the link, and 1% gave it a thumbs up", but it is beyond current GPT-2 use case. 

That's why the "fake news" narrative is so beneficial for GPT-2. 

On the surface, fake news seems to be a natural avenue for that kind of thing. That game is all about quantity, not quality, and the NLP generator can help with that. It was hammered over and over again in the press releases and subsequent news pieces. And the use case seems legit. Technically, the goal is to generate derivative content that will reinforce and possibly perpetuate prerequisite beliefs of the target audience. Just what GPT-2 is good at.

Except, that's not really the message of the narrative. The real message all along was, "this thing can be used like that if YOU won't use it." And that leaves an intriguing mystery of what is going to happen next, which in turn engages the target audience more than the product itself.  

Count off, sampling and Kirk Pearson's unpersoned "Going Up"

Last Sunday, I was talking with my friend about De La Soul intense sampling style and at some point the conversation veered further into conceptual art territory of supercuts and Youtube Poop. In particular, I was asked whether there were any pieces that combined counting and sampling that weren't DJ Shadow's "The Number Song". And I remembered one - i saw it a few years back. I just couldn't remember its title.

So i've spent over 5 hours trying to find this particular plunderphonic mashup. What a nice way of spending Sunday evening. For some reason it was way harder than i thought. 

Here's what i remembered: the piece featured a countdown from one to one hundred culled together from various songs. Plain, simple and to the point. The best supercuts are always like that - they just blast through and leave you contemplating.

I first saw this piece mentioned in one of the Rate Your Music lists back in the early 2010s. After that, i saw it featured on one of the topical wikipedia pages, either Sampling or Mashup. I also vaguely remember it being on Free Music Archive. The only things i couldn't pin down was who made it and what was the title.

At first, i checked rate your music and couldn't find anything resembling that particular piece. But i have found a list with many-many unusual types of count off in pop songs. It was insightful and ultmately pointless.

Then i have checked whether the piece was still referenced on the aforementioned "sampling" and "mashup" wikipedia pages. None. I also checked "plunderphonics" page. If there were any mentions of this composition - they were long gone. Or they were still there and i just couldn't identify it correctly due to my recollection of the piece being incorrect or misrepresentative.

Then i went further down the wiki wormhole and checked pages like "Count Off" and "Counting (Music)". Once again - nothing. 

Then i went all guns blazing on google and typed every imaginable description of the composition i could think of - "plunderphonic counting off/count off/countdown composition", "countdown out of samples from different songs", "count off sound collage" and so on. There were three types of search results: 1 - DJ Shadow "The Number Song" (obviously); 2 - every children counting song ever (predictable outcome); 3 - general references to respective concepts (because there was nothing else relevant).

It felt really awkward - i was certain that i heard that piece but i just could not find any trace of it. At some point i even thought that it was some kind of Mandela effect thing or that i just imagined that piece and then forgot about it and now thought about it again but as something else. It was really confusing.

Then it hit me - if i can't find anything on the current web - why not peek at the past? After a thorough raid on Wayback Machine on every available lead - i was able to identify the track.

The name of the composition was "Going Up". It was made by Kirk Pearson. The composition was released in 2011 on an album "Please Don't Sue Me". "Going up" is made out of unaltered soundbite samples from different songs that together create a count from one to ninety-nine. The selection of samples is eclectic - among other things you get obvious Doors reference and less obvious Zager and Evans reference.

Here's what is interesting - it is scrubbed from existence. I've looked through every available Kirk Pearson release and couldn't find it. Not even the slightest mention. There were lots of stuff but not "Going Up". Why? Guess what - there is only a few things that can make things un-exist on the internet. In case creative works - it is mostly commonly a copyright violation.

The thing is - the whole "Please Don't Sue Me" album was a giant lament configuration of plunderphonics - it was a detournement of other people's stuff - culture jamming in action. The thing that propels the culture forwards and opens up new possibilities and explores new aesthetics. 

And naturally at some point the representatives of these people took action. Because we can't have conceptual art that transforms other pieces and recontextualizes them to explore certain themes and ideas - it is disrespectful and detrimental to the sources. 

It is very sad, but i'm glad i took this journey. It made me think about how unsafe and fleeting is culture jamming. But at the same, it encouraged me to move on. It is an act of defiance, and that's what art is all about.

Now, let's perpetuate the legend of "Going Up".

Funny thing with the cover Hail to the Thief

Back in mid-00s i was trying to unsolve mystery - why people like Radiohead? I just couldn't get it - they were too boring to me. And still are. I find their music to be full of interesting ideas buried under nonplus performances and generic songs. That's my opinion. You don't have to agree.

The only thing i really liked about them was their visual presentation from 2000 to 2003-04, in particular the cover for their 2003 album Hail to the Thief. (I will write about Kid A blips someday). There was just something endearing about. It promised something else. 

Made by Stanley Donwood, the cover was a roadmap of sorts covered in advertising buzzwords mashed together in colorful blocks.

If you separate the cover from the album and look at it as a thing of its own - it is pretty good piece of conceptual writing.
This cover is all about plunder and recontextualization, hijacking of aesthetics and making it interesting again. While it definitely tried to replicate and multiply the vibe of Ed Ruscha spliced with opaque statements of Lawrence Wiener - it works as a statement on commodification of language.

The words are stacked in several columns, they represent commercial products and concepts in no particular order - just a whole bunch of stuff. It is kinda like listicles Roger Waters used to do in the latter days of Pink Floyd.

The sheer volume and density of content make it an open-ended piece. You can read it any way you like and construct your image sequence of the moment.

***
But i did something else. I like to OCR things that are usually not fit for OCR. My original intention was to shortcut typing down the words so that i could make some kind of a generative piece. However, the result was exceeded that.

Here's what i have got instead:

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Bg Ue eee ok EEE SEE PEE ae a eal Te Aaa] ysoes 4 Peete eee Oa | oh, Pay he ea eae EE pe ge Ad Sa a EA BE
std eg shee a ee cosh SD deo Sie ie ie 4 ef i HA Ss
bee GS a a wfo* eee Ly eae 1 oe eas ee gh EAT 2g Bee we A ek aes Pe OD Fae ee BERS PEPE P, wpe Ps he BSS
Be get ai tie! aie La VEEL ES ostaen aaeee es aoe aoe Ba AU ki Up coe Oe
PS ee Oe Bee Ee up SE Regt eye | see Signe! gabe Aeg ASCos
bo La) gery: “pee CHR peers Scitee pee heey sil epREE eR Sas ce SMR AE
ett Tee Stay ee Be 1 PEE woe i MOE pee Wee as aN aoe ‘ SOG REGS in . SY
POR AS Ege gre ee ea ot OPA Cae Bo teeter re Gof res ES ae he Ss as BS
eR ere ¥ | ob eae ee Be Ry eee a KO ees
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***
One of the curious things that happens with OCR is that it requires keeping the input images straight in order to do the job right. Even the slightest presence of an artifact throws a wrench into the operation. The more artifacts or otherwise odd document features - less accurate the result.
That's what happened with the cover of Hail to the Thief.

There are bits and pieces of the original words sprinked here and there but the majority of words are mangled, sliced, chopped and screwed. At times, it looks like computer-generated madlib. Other parts looks like they were transcribed from a backwards speech.

But it made me think about the texts hidden underneath the texts on the images, the ones only an OCR algorithm can extract. I know why it happens that way, it is a side effect of the algorithm specification. But what does it means from the conceptual point of view?

Money is not our god...

More of the same song and dance. I've been talking with a friend of mine who is project manager about the role of poetry in life.

She said it is whole lotta bollocks rolling in the back end. I think she's right even though she doesn't get it.

The thing - it is all about breaking through, fighting the conditioning of the establishment.
Of course it is bullshit. how else would pure distillation of language be perceived by grounded and continuously pounded folks who operate on templates and act on cut and paste, who are numbed out to the point of incompatability with the thing? Seriously, would you expect anything else?
And then she said "well, i'm making more than all of your poets combined". Yeah, for sure. Let me tell you something.

Back in the day, i was paid for an article in low nominal banknotes - ones and twos and some fives. There were like two hundred of them - really big pack. and most of them were worn out real bad.
Some of them were rejected at stores. It was frustrating. And then i remembered about spocking technique, took a marker and wrote some texts on these wornout bills. Because what else you can do?
The early ones were right in the "obey" alley. But it got old on the third bill. Quoting Barbara Krueger in ukrainian is like brushing teeth - nothing special, except it still stinks pretence.Then i went for zen koans, it was fun while it lasted. after i ran out of wise-sounding words, i've dropped some random words and exclamations. It was some henry rollins reads ee cummings stuff - vagabond weasel kazoo abbattoir and so on.

After i was done - i had a hundred or so defaced bills. It looked like a brick going undercover and pretending to be a piece of sliced bread.

I stapled it together and dropped at the nearby coffeeshop. I've bought a largest cup of tea imaginable and went to the corner. The reaction was weird.

A group of hipsters decided to find who did it because it was disrespectful. They were freaking out because of some barely intact defaced cash. You couldn't even buy a good coffee for that sum in that coffeeshop. But they were furious.

They attracted a lot of people to the thing - they were showing what an atrocity it was, how tasteless and witless it was and people were like yeah whatever moving on. After a while they cooled off and started to feel awkward. They couldn't do anything with those bills. Eventually, they left it alone. But it took them like three hours and they looked shellshocked .

It felt like victory.

BSPH: The Deviants - I'm Coming Home

"I'm Coming Home" is the song by seminal british psychedelic garage rock band The Deviants. It was written by Mick Farren and released on the band's 1968 album titled "Ptooff!".

The song is built around an increasingly menacing, baleful and ominous lyrics that fantasise on the topic of homecoming and rejoining with the loved one. It is an interesting take on a "lovelorn longing / coming back home" cliche that sprawls all over rock music (even "Louie Louie" is about that). In a way it exposes that cliche as being a good blanket to cover hapless glorification of an unhealthy obsessive behaviour in sweet flowery speech figures.

"I'm Coming Home" tells a story of a protagonist proclaiming that he is getting back "home", probably as a pep talk to himself. The description of his path is very meticulous and rich with details - he describes his journey step by step, gradually building tension and increasing the notion of impending threat.

He spells out how exactly he is going to get "home" and what he is going to do "there". The ultimate intent of the protagonist is to rejoin with his "lady", who, judging, from his words is not expecting this visit and probably even not suspecting it is going to happen at all. What he going to do is quite obvious - attempt a forceful but passionate swive, jump and knob to know.

From the musical standpoint, the song is basic four note stomping vamp waltz that ebbs and flows as the story goes, a kind of stretched out and meaner sibling of The Troggs' songs.

"I'm coming home" starts with the persistent tenacious march with a waltzy sweep at the end of the bar. It is plucky and cheerful. Gradually the march devolves into a sluggish chug, the beat intensifies and turns the whole thing into a manic rave-up Yardbirds-style.

The tension reaches to the point of combustion and the song explodes with fuzz-infested burst of two guitar soloing at the same time. They cancel each other out and make a lot of directionless noise.
The double solo transitions into the next section of the song where music calms down and takes a backseat so that Mick Farren could chillingly recite what he is going to do with the object of desire.

Then the song explodes with the sweeping solo that reiterate what was just said. It falls apart into a mindless shredding over a drum avalanche. And then things get back to an opening march, except now it is sloppier and it almost instantly devolves into a haphazard outbreak that falls off the cliff into outer space and dies out.

What makes the song particularly disturbing is that the whole song is a first-person fantasy scenario playing out in the protagonist's head - a disturbing narrative of the sickened mind trying to express itself. That's why a level of detail is so high.
And it goes a distance to prove its point. Mick Farren sings it with such a conviction you just can't help but get repulsed by his performance. He hams it up quite a bit but keeps things at reasonable level - his performance retains the plausibility of the scenario.

Overall, the song is a great example how to spin a familiar narrative into something more sinister and unfortunately relatable.

(As a sidenote, I'm Coming Home and We Will Fall sound really good back-to-back, i had a chance to listen to it that way once when i hit shuffle on my Winamp player.)

Sam Kinison - Homosexual Necrophilia

Spinning a stupid, obnoxious and annoying things is a lost art. It is one thing to write sonnets and paint landscapes - making a cohesive, comprehensible narrative out of one-note dead end braindead silly joke is an accomplishment worth including on your CV.

Sam Kinison was a master of doing such things. He could come up with a joke about dust particles in the air and turn it into an apocalyptic mayhem, a god's ultimate judgement Antonin Artaud style.

Just check out this routine.

In it Sam Kinison takes a stupid dead end premise and goes full-on "let me work it". He talks casual homophobia, institutional corruption, fear of death, life after death and other things while remaining in the pink part of outrage spectrum just to irritate everybody with the fact that he doesn't really go overboard.

There are so many ways you can botch this time of the joke and he manages to make it just right.




He starts by setting up the premise - a recount of how he read a story about homosexual perverts doing necrophiliac stuff. The story goes - homosexual necrophiliacs go to the morgues and mortuaries and pay money to managers in order to quality spend time with fresh corpses. Important to note - he recounts not the story itself, just how he read it and how initially reacted to it. This approach gives him a considerable distance from the subject matter. He can't take a hit for making this joke because he just shares his experiences. Neat.

After establishing the narrative - he bounces off the predictable audience reaction and takes off any responsibility for the outrageousness of the story by insisting that he only read about it in the paper and that in this case he is in the same position as the audience.

Then, instead of elaborating on the story, he starts to mock around the premise. At first he states his position on the subject matter in an extremely exaggerated matter. Then he starts to tear the thing apart as outrageous and obnoxious.

The joke culminates with Kinison reenacting the way this whole thing might have happened.

He lays down on the floor face down and pretends to be a corpse. He imitates its internal monologue and then switches the role to homosexual necrophiliac doing his dirty business while keeping the corpses internal monologue intact right when he starts to freak out because of the penetration. And it ends there.

As a result, you have a sentence spinned out into a routine.

The Chimney Sweep and The Miller (1902)

Early cinema was functioning similarly to early YouTube or modern TikTok. It was mostly some short skits that were adapted from various vaudeville routines with a hacksaw and fish hook.
As time went by, it was regurgitated over and over again until the lineage was blurred enough to be forgotten so that the neverending loop of regurgitated tropes seemed fresh.

Nevertheless, the documentation of vaudeville routine from early XX century is pure bliss.

This particular bit is one of my faves. 

It is a story of a somewhat unfortunate but nevertheless hilarious encounter between two professionals - The Chimney Sweep and The Miller. Both of whom are dedicated workers who just want to do their own thing and not messed with.

The narrative of the routine is the most basic "versus" scenario based on slapstick misunderstanding that escalated into the uppermost absurdity.

Two sides have their own designated colours - The Chimney Sweep is covered in black sooth, The Miller wears white uniform.

The story goes - both guys are going somewhere, minding their own business. Up until this point the day was just like it was the day before and the day after.

Because of deep occupation by the fleeting thoughts - they don't notice each other moving on the collision course. Eventually, this causes them to stumble into each other and as a result brutally break their concentration.

None of them considers this encounter to be by any means pleasant. The chimney sweep's sooth dirties the millers uniform and its source of great frustration for him. At the same time, the sweep's clothes are covered

So the whole thing instantly goes off the rails and rapidly escalates into a fight. At first they mouth words and name names at each other. Then, for a moment or so, they consider to tackle each other, but soon enough (a matter of Planck time unit or so) they realise that hitting each other with their bags is a much better option in terms of functional efficiency and physical impact.

So they hit each other with their bags. The hits are coming in bursts. It takes a bit of an effort to pick up the bag high enough and direct the hit towards the opponent's upper body. Black soot spots white clothes, white flour covers the sweeps black clothing. They give their all with each hit and soon the action starts to slow down because of exhaustion.

The skirmish creates a black and white cloud in which both of them disappear leaving audience to gaze at the bi-colour cloud of soot and flour. Probably until it dissipates leaving empty stage.

Nothing spectacular, but it works on a visceral level. 

Also - take a look at the backdrop - that lake and forest look somewhat uncanny. I wonder what that might mean.

***
Now, with the vaudeville tradition gone far and away - there is a lot more of detachment that makes viewing of such shorts a very different kind of experience, especially for the uninitiated.

You kinda grasp the basic idea, but still lacking much of the cultural context. So instead of laughing at the juxtaposition of social classes, their manners and worldviews, modern viewer laughs at the action itself. 

WCW The Red Wheelbarrow but not really

Some time ago Amanda Earl had posted that WCW poem and said that everyone likes to riff off it. That’s true. So i thought it would be a good idea to make my own version. 

But i didn’t wanted to leave it intact. And so i chopped and screwed the thing and made something completely different.

There is no wheelbarrow. And chicken is a verb. Yey…

BBC Newsnight Sirens Sing-Scream 2014

Taking things out of context is one of the most effective creative techniques out there. Sure, there is an element of vandalism and appropriation at play, but creativity was never about keeping the contextual sanctity of the original. Context is for IP-holders. Things are much more interesting when you go beyond and try something different. Even if it is just taking one element out of the whole and presenting it on its own.

Case in point - this thing.


This is an excerpt from the conclusion of an episode of BBC Newsnight from December 2014. In it we're shown a scene from the play Sirens by Ontroerend Goed theater company. They were staging this play around that time at Soho Theater, so it was pretty sweet promotional plug. You can't ask for a better way of exposing your play to the wider audience.

The bit is prefaced by clumsy and somewhat awkward explanation from the presenter. He attempts to prepare the viewer for what they are about to experience. He describes the whole thing as "short taste" His tongue is firmly in cheek but he keeps a straight face. That was classy.

The excerpt itself is a bunch of women screaming, crying, hollering, screeching, shouting, shrieking, squalling, roaring, yelling, bawling, yawping, yawling. The presenter describes it as Sing-Screaming. It is the beginning of the play so it makes sense to make a bang from the get go. The whole thing is a kind of "irreverent feminist manifesto for the 21st century" that captures the spirit of the age. The problem is that this bit is taken out of context and put through an ironic filter.

In the context of this particular bit - the play and what it is about - doesn't really matter. There is not enough information to make a point and the excerpt itself is pretty self-contained and self-explanatory. What you experience instead - is the video that features two parts - the preface and the exceprt. Lack of cohesion between the two and the fact that both are torn out of their respective products makes them an odd pair.

Funny thing is - it works that way.

The many faces of DC Comics' Joker

Joker is one of the most versatile characters on the DC Comics villain roster. While this often results in the character being overexposed and overused, there is a reason for that.

Joker is a shorthand of a perfect comic book villain. You can do many things with him without bending over backwards. The basics of the character always stay the same - green-haired, purple-suited permanently grinning, tenaciously laughing psychopath with a knack for theatrics.

However, the characterization itself changes with the time and the attitude of the author.

Since there's a movie coming out soon, let's look at the most prominent iterations of the character.

1
The original Joker was a thug with a gimmick. He was a sociopath with no remorse whatsoever regarding his actions.

He was killing people left and right. Sometimes bluntly with no excessive theatrics. Sometimes exuberantly elaborately.

He was unhinged and somewhat reckless but not going overboard with the bombastic theatrical swoosh. He had a distinct style that differentiated him from the rest of the Gotham's crooks - a brand of sorts. But it wasn't his defining feature, just a coat of arms.

2
Later on, he morphed into a bizarre Clown Prince of Crime as seen in Silver Age comics.

Comics Code of Authority put a kibosh on the visceral violent antic, so the character needed a reinvention.

The characterization became much more cartoony, but if you think about it - the theatrics and the attitude of Silver Age Joker is rather chilling, to say the least.

All of his zany antics act as a symbolism taken to the extreme. It is weird, and you can't really tell when it is just a joke and whether it is going to be just a joke.

However, because of that, the gimmick became the personality. And that is how the character was presented from then on. It's not like it was detrimental to the concept. Quite the opposite, it helped to solidify the essence of the character.

3
On the other hand, O'Neil/ Adams Joker is a combination of the previous two iterations.

This Joker had the theatrics of the Silver Age, and at the same time, he retains the danger of a rabid dog. I think this is the definitive version of the Joker in terms of consistent characterization.

It had the right balance of nasty and odd. O'Neil/Adams' stories were showcasing Joker as an unpredictable psychopath with a knack for theatrics and quite practical managing skills in terms of maintaining a gang of crooks and planning his elaborate crimes to a tee.

This reinvention of the Joker reinvigorated the popularity of the character, and this led to Joker's most odd and random hour. He received his own solo series.

4
Solo series Joker is a very odd interpretation of the character. It is kind of O'Neil/ Adams iteration that devolved into Silver Age zany because it gagged and bound by the CCA guidelines.

In other words, Joker had to do Joker stuff, but it wasn't allowed to be anything but goofing around. 

The series depicts Joker as a master criminal who a taste for the show and some blunt and nasty attitude all while channeling Silver Age goofiness and slapstick. This combination creates some intense cognitive dissonance.

There is an issue where Joker taunts an actor who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes. If you pass through the clumsy scripting - the whole thing is downright cruel.

5
Frank Miller's Joker is O'Neil/ Adams version amplified up to eleven. This Joker means trouble and when he actually means it - this is some terrible, awful, horrible news.

In terms of showcasing what Joker in action really means - this is the most striking example. He kills people left and right with no apparent reason apart from causing the commotion and enacting chaos. He is unpredictable because he got no endgame, just the process.

In addition to that, Miller's Joker got very distinct death drive. Unlike any other interpretation of the character, this Joker wants to go to the absolute extreme.

6
Alan Moore's Joker is a rather strange take on the character. His iteration is more or less inverted Batman, and that was the whole point of the story in a way (among other things).

Moore fleshed out the character to the point of dissipating the initial mystery of the character and instead of creating another mystery of Joker's train of thought. However, it did a big disservice for the character. Fleshing out the character's journey turned him into something else that is based on the concept but not really represents it.

Since the whole story was ambiguous all the way anyway - the entire thing was impressionist padding for the sake of pareidoliastic fleshing out.

With that being said - this version of the character is downright nasty. The whole Barbara Gordon episode is disturbing, and the way he attempts to break Commissioner Gordon is vile and sickening.

7
Grant Morrison's Serious House Joker had an emphasis on being a really-really violent fellow with some weird, cruel, and manipulative tints.

He was a psychopath with lapses of character and distorted perception of reality. It was a great spin on the concept - it avoided overexplaining things while retaining a nondescript but definitely unambiguous sense of threat.

On the other hand, Morrison's latter regular continuity Joker was more traditional take primarily based on O'Neil/ Adams version. It had some splashes of Silver Age zaniness, but the core character was rooted in the 70s iteration and offered no new insights.

8
The Man Who Laughs Joker takes on the original concept of the character and amps it up to eleven. There is a resonance with the O'Neil/ Adams version, but it is distinctly a thing of its own.

This Joker is a career criminal with a gimmick. He is deranged and utterly nihilistic. Nevertheless, he's a little bit improvisational here and can have a laugh for laugh's sake just because why not in the end. There also this maddening completely spontaneous streak in expressing his thoughts.

Despite that, his actions are logical and clearly planned. He's there to orchestrate mayhem that benefits him and provides with opportunities to grab what he currently wants.

This approach is further elaborated in The Devil's Advocate story. This Joker is O'Neil/ Adams version updated to the current times and a little bit intensified.

He's the man with the plan who can pretend to be absolutely mental when necessary but otherwise he is the guy who knocks. And smiles.

9
Elseworlds' Batman: Nosferatu got an interesting take on the character. In this story - he is murderous cyborg, which is an interesting direction to explore.

There is a slight reference to T-1000 with a more sadistic twist and horrifying self-awareness. It is not well-developed in the narrative, but the concept is fascinating.

10
Flashpoint version of Joker is a u-turn. For instance, instead of being an enigmatic character, the origin of this iteration is more than well-known.

In this case, the Joker is Martha Wayne, who went mad after her son was killed in a random mugging incident.

This version of Joker is implied to be a really nasty one. The comments of her misdeeds are peppered throughout the stories. But we have only glimpsed what she is capable of and what she had already done. There is a lot left to be explored. 

However, suggestions and implications are working better than just showing off the stuff. It gets your imagination working, and it is the right way of building up the menace of the character.
After all, when you have such a set-up for the character - there is a lot to chew regardless.

13
Brian Azzarello's Joker is probably the nastiest, most wicked and vile, and at the same time the most grounded (for the lack of the better word) take on the character.

It depicts him as a career criminal with a lot of baggage that is expressed and elaborated through his theatrical gimmick.

In a way, he is not very different from Richard Stark's Parker. Given the fact that he just moves forward from scene to scene as a knife through butter makes him really scary. He's driven by his goal and doesn't really care where it takes him because, in the end, he will get what he wants.

13
Scott Snyder's Joker is inspired by Frank Miller's take on O'Neil/ Adams version. This Joker is nasty and deranged. He does stuff that distresses. It takes Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns Joker's death drive and elaborates on it, adding new shades and figuring more setpieces to the mix.

He enjoys being bad. There is this hollowness in the characterization that makes the character unknowable, even ununderstandable. He's not much of character to speak of but a force of nature that wrecks and wrecks and wrecks.

In order to present this new and improved iteration of the character - Snyder got his cut off his face and wears it as a mask.  Then he goes on to orchestrate an increasingly chaotic spectacle that leads to literal down and dirty endgame between him and his nemesis.

***

Exploring the Joker character is an exciting journey. He was taken in many different directions and was used to represent different kinds of evil depending on the intentions of the authors and the tune of the zeitgeist. 

However, in every iteration he retained that demented vibe that kept all the disparate versions of the character consistent. 

That's a testament to the power of the Joker character concept.

The Rubber Band - Cream Songbook review

I've heard the strangest thing lately. But first a bit of backstory. During the Independence weekend i've visited Odesa for no apparent reason but to listen to some late 60s hard rock through the wall during the periods of rest in-between the night out in the city. The playlist was not very diverse. There was Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, lots of 60s Deep Purple (an odd choice, but stranger things happened) and also lots and lots of Blue Cheer and Cream. Especially the latter. I guess i've listened to their entire discography through the wall for three days in the row. Now that's something i can be proud of!

And for some reason, Cream-related content started to follow me around. First i've a guy playing "Sunshine of your love" in the subway passage, then i've head "White room" on the radio, then i saw a commercial with "Strange Brew" all over it. And then i've looked through the newsfeed of my favorite blogs and saw Cream cover album of all things.

And because i'm good at writing pointless things - i thought it would be a good idea to write a review of this album. Because The Beatles "Because".

The album in question is "Cream Songbook" by The Rubber Band.

It is one of the series of releases that reinterpreted then white hot rock music into something else. Some albums tried electronic music like Wendy Carlos "Switched-on Bach", some went into a user-fiendly muzak direction. This album is the latter. 

The albums starts with lounge version of "Deserted Cities of the Heart" with its teeth pulled out and balls busted into a soup. Now the song sounds like an Eleanor Rigby cousin with some drums tacked on its with a scotch tape. It is a James Last level of atrocity. You have Sinatra-cheese strings bumbling through the song making it nice. The main melody is handled by the obnoxious placeholder flute which makes you want to bath in acid. Drums are trying their best to drag this song to the end in a breathless run-through. 

Track 2 is "White Room". It leaves the string section to do some stuff on their own and it is actually pretty serviceable lyrical composition. 

The melody is entwined into an arrangement more naturally and it doesn't feel like a placeholder sticking its tongue. The strings move like a cloud of steam brushed by the fan, the melody swirls around feeling lost barely scratching the surface. 

Then, slowly but surely the piano starts to move from the background to the foreground and by the middle of the song it starts to take over like emotions breaking through the shell. It is really good arrangement. The piano breakout changes the flow of the string section and makes it more intense. By the end, the composition presses itself against the wall in a stalemate. There is no closure but it works so well with this cliffhanger coda.

So naturally the promise of track 2 is squandered by track 3. "Toad" is Ginger Baker's showcase composition, a drum extravaganza he pushed to the conceptual limit with his latter project "Ginger Baker's Air Force". Ginger Baker is very good at music psychology. He knows how to tell the story by playing an instrument. If you listen to "Toad" - there is so much going on - it is like a tsunami meeting a tornado and stumbling upon a volcano to have a firecracker party. None of this is present in this rendition. It is just a melody bookends and the drums playing bunch of stuff.

"Those were the days" is more of "Deserted Cities of the Heart" kitschy detournement, but this time  i is less appalling. The thing sounds like a stage end screen music in a Sonic The Hedgehog 2. The strings are doing buzzsaw seesaw and some swirls while the flutes are mostly in the background. They don't carry a melody so they are tolerable. The string arrangement of the middle section is actually quite good. It would not sound out of place on some Moody Blues record. 

"We're Going Wrong" gets back to the "White Room" format and it works incredibly well. It is probably the highlight of an album. 

I always thought the original version lacked the detail in sound design to fit its themes. The Rubber Band version pulls of the morbid tone of the song wih its superb string arrangement. It is a tone poem with an ominous vibe, eerie atmosphere and haunting sense of creeping dread. It feels like a lost theme from some Hammer Studios production. 

You can almost feel the fog coming down and getting thicker while the light starts to crack from the horizon lighting up some nondescript vague shapes and outlining the desolate landscape. The moment it hits crescendo you're dumbfounded into stillness. It is astonishing. 

Naturally, it is followed by the very worst muzak lounge rendition of "Sunshine of your Love". There is a flute cheese artillery and some zing cringe harpsichord. It is as pointless and annoying as it gets. If you This is some Abu Ghraib level of sonic torture. The guitar solo is performed on guitar and it is so out of place you think your sound system signal had an intrusion of a pirate transmission. The end is an attempt at making a psych-out rave up and it truly sounds like the end of the world, the whimper compressed into a thunderous roar version.

"Dance the night away" tries to pull off "White Room" trick but it falls flat. In fact it is so flat and featureless, you start to question the integrity of the third dimension. It is a wallpaper music. But it would sound fine backwards with tape delay and phasing.

"Sweet wine" is horrible. It is like "Toad" but with more flutes, pan flutes, oboes, recorders and other whistling instruments. It sounds like the spirit of Frank Sinatra had possessed someone and got himself into the exorcism session which ended with a binge-watch of Teletubbies. 

The last track of an album, "Strange Brew" sticks to the original, save for swingy organ replacing the organ. While it sounds just like the Cream original, it is also incredibly not punchy and oddly grooveless. It is truly a background music version of a smoking rocker tune. Unlike the other poor renditions on this album, it is not offensive, just pointless. The conclusion is another variation on the end of the world, the whimper compressed into a thunderous roar version.

So that's "The Rubber Band - Cream Songbook" album. While it is definitely a cash-in on the popular act, it is not without its merit. "White Room" is really good, while "We're Going Wrong" is a tremendous interpretation of the song that needs to be implemented into some period gothic horror. These two need a listen. The rest is mostly by-the-numbers lounge muzak.

BSPH - Re

There is a concept of "as lame as possible" piece. It is a type of a throwaway piece that somehow persists and actually works as a work of art. I've found one of mine. This one follows grand tradition of Lawrence Wiener, Art & Language and Ed Ruscha.

The piece is merely a reference to the location of the definition of the word "Re" in the Modern Ukrainian Dictionary.

It started as a joke. I was at the reading of the "Mindbending verse" (don't ask) and was called out by one of the performers.
I had a couple of minutes before my turn, and i had nothing, i wasn't expecting to do anything.

So i went online - straight to the old Modern Ukrainian Dictionary website. There was a great brainstorm feature - random page. It went straight to "Re". I was like "oh well, i'm guess i'm going to embarrass myself". But a couple of moments later it was "wait a minute, i know".

I wrote down the resulting piece on a napkin and it got torn apart by the pencil - it looked like ragged battlefield white flag.

And then i go to the mic and read the piece and there is silence.
People don't know how to react because a couple of minutes ago they were listening to sonnets and haikus about desolation, contemplaton and the reckless nulliety of the modern age and then this. It was a bit out of the leftfield.

After an awkward silent pause - the hum started. People were like "yeah, that is something". And then there was lots and lots of rustling because people went to their phones to check out whether the poem's statement was correct and they were even more Yeah! That is something!".
The dude who called me out called me a bastard afterwards. It felt earned.

Later this piece was exhibited twice in Lviv and Ternopil and both times people were offended by the piece and asked it to be taken off. Seriously. 

The problem was - none of them was able to explain why this particular piece was offending to them. They just thought it was pointless and thus should not be exhibited.