friends

issue 3 www.friendsofsound.com

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TONY CONRAD
What if you left your audience light-headed by only playing the violin? What if you toyed with their perception of reality melding a visual to that tripped out soundtrack? That’s been the work of Tony Conrad since the 1960s. Here’s a brief introduction to a large figure in experimental music and film.Tony Conrad, Eternal Music, and Flaming Creatures
In the 1960s, the violinist Tony Conrad had a dual career as filmmaker and musician. He worked with the filmmakers Jack Smith and Ron Rice and produced the soundtrack for Smith’s 1963 film Flaming Creatures. At the same time, Conrad played violin in the experimental Minimalist group called the Theatre of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndicate, which counted among its ranks the influential 1960s musicians La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Angus MacLise, Billy Name, and John Cale. The group created what they termed “dream music” or “eternal music;” based on mathematical principles and Indian Classical music, the drone emerged as their characteristic sound. At the same time, as is evident in his Flaming Creatures soundtrack and his personal connections with all of the future members of the legendary rock band the Velvet Underground, Conrad possessed a great proclivity for rock and roll. Conrad later embarked on a filmmaking project of his own: the 1966 film called The Flicker, now identified with the flicker film genre of the structuralist idiom. Conrad often credits Smith for his filmmaking aspirations. Although he had used the drone in recording sound for Flaming Creatures, Conrad created a pulsing drone to last the full thirty minutes of The Flicker, making his trademark sound the film’s only soundtrack.
Jack Smith historian J. Hoberman has fully documented Conrad’s musical participation in Flaming Creatures. Although Conrad and most of his Theatre of Eternal Music bandmates appear briefly in the film, Conrad was the only musician to record the soundtrack with Smith. Smith loved musicals and campy big-production films, particularly those of his muse, Maria Montez. Although he too loved rock music, Conrad did not create a solely pop music based soundtrack. Instead, he weaves an intricate mesh of sound. He uses soundtrack excerpts from campy Eastern films like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and China Nights, the atonal violin of Bèla Bartók, a spoken word piece by Jack Smith, and two memorable pop songs: Kitty Kallen’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” and the Everly Brothers’ version of “Be Bop a Lula.” The soundtrack also shows Conrad’s deepening interest in the drone. Not only does he include drone in the famous earthquake/ rape/ orgy scene, but he actually overlays it with the Kallen country hit.
Plowing into Conrad’s writings from the 1960s, one finds a musician interested in mathematical structures of music, which is not surprising considering his past as a Harvard mathematician. Conrad discusses, at length, his interest in ancient number systems in ethnic music. His electrified violin drone works off a system based on integers, prime numbers, differing harmonics, and controlled improvisation. With these systems, he felt equipped to play a musical piece for hours at a time, as he did with the Dream Syndicate and still continues to do. Conrad’s music creates an almost light-headed effect because he purposely plays within frequency and vibration ranges that affect the ears and nervous system of a listener.
This concept of frequency changes within a long duration continues with The Flicker. The film consists of black and clear frames (the clear frames appear white) that alternate at frequencies between four and forty frames per second, creating a strobic effect. According to Conrad, the human eye and brain register a flicker anywhere between these two frequencies. Instead of using looped strips of film, Conrad shot all of the frames and combined them with about six hundred splices. Interestingly, Conrad creates a synaesthesia with the strobic frames and the pulsating drone soundtrack. As he had done with the flickering frames, Conrad used several different frequencies perceived by the ear in this particular drone. The film lasts for thirty minutes. The effect, according to contemporary viewers, is that of a roller coaster ride through consciousness—like slowly going in and out of a drug-induced high. Hearing such recollections, Conrad considers his film a success._melissa warak

STEINSKI

Intro:
Steinski produced his first record for Tommy boy in 1983. "The Payoff", produced with his partner Double Dee, started a series of records that became known as The Lessons. Immensely influential, The Lessons records led to homage records by the likes of DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist. We caught up with him at his home to ogle his records and hear his stories…
Main Piece
FOS> Whereabouts were you born and raised?
Steinski> Money Earnin' Mt. Vernon (NY), which changes from the northern Bronx to southern Westchester as you move north through it. I lived on Lincoln Ave., one of the main east-west streets. It was an early suburban existence, although we always lived in apartment houses.
FOS> What were your early musical influences? How did they influence the music you made?
Steinski> I listened to spoken word recordings, Broadway cast recording albums from the public library, and manic top 40 radio. The three radio stations that everyone listened to were WMCA, where the jocks were called the Good Guys, WABC, and WINS. Not many people listened to WINS regularly, because the only good show they had was Murray The K, who was only on once a day. The WABC jocks all seemed corporate, in my opinion. I was a WMCA fan.
I think rather than the influence stemming from the material, the influence came the anarchic method of presentation used by top 40 stations of the 60's - lots of sound effects, wild transitions, screaming jocks with insane ravings introducing Shirley Ellis' "The Clapping Song."
FOS> You started out collecting R and B records from New Orleans... How did your tastes change as you continued to collect?
Steinski> I was buying New Orleans R & B at such a rate that I wound up in adjacent genres due to the sheer momentum of acquisition. I moved into R&B in general, mainly through blues shouters like Wynonie Harris, Joe Turner, and, of course, Jimmy Rushing. Turner pointed me to the roots of rock & roll via the Erteguns, Leiber & Stoller, and that crowd. Jimmy Rushing sang with Basie, who played at the same time as the great Ellington units, so that part of the world emerged from the fog. I lived in the Philadelphia area from 1973 to 1977, and radio there was incredibly good. The Temple University station played jazz 24/7, so I timidly began to explore Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Freddie Hubbard, and those guys. What my friends and I at that time called "black rock music" - Parliament/Funkadelic, Blackbyrds, Undisputed Truth, Bohannon - played out of radios on every block anywhere in the city, and those groups were early vinyl acquisitions.
I probably have between 9 and 10 thousand pieces of vinyl right now, along with perhaps 2500 cassettes (mostly spoken word), and 3 or 4 thousand CD's.
FOS> Do you have a favorite record store, past or present?
Steinski> Philadelphia's Third Street Jazz & Rock, owned by Jerry Gordon and staffed with my friends Ken & Bruce, was the first store that became a refuge, a library, and a school. Between the staff, the customers, and the stock, a chump like me couldn't fail to have some science dropped on him. Case in point - one day I walked into the store and the endcap facing the door held two racks of a new LP by some group called The Wild Tchoupitoulas. The sign over the records said "Public Service Sale: 99¢ each."
FOS> When did you hook up with Douglas(Double Dee)? What was the context of your meeting?
Steinski> We met in 1982, when I booked his studio for a wild & crazy freelance job involving a nightclub owner who wanted to be the voice talent in his own radio commercials. The client arrived at the session at 6:30 PM in a chauffeured Rolls with several leggy, coked-up hotties who sat drinking beer and giggling in the corner, whilst the genial club-owner barreled through 20 takes of my script. Douglas ran the whole shebang like a pro, and we discovered (after the client left) that we had similar musical tastes. We started to hang out, and the rest is somewhat hazy.
FOS> Talk about the Roxy and its place in the "scene" and any influence it had on you.
Steinski> When Blue moved her party to the Roxy, it was, as far as I know, immediately at dead center of the downtown hiphop scene. Friday nights there you would find the Zulu Nation mingling with the I-always-dress-completely-in-black downtown crowd, with many foreign visitors and film crews thrown in to let you know something was happening. An even-handed and democratic door policy, along with a thorough full body frisk, kept hysteria to a minimum, and I can't remember even one fight there.
Influence? I would have to say it formed me almost totally. Hearing those beats played at tremendous volume revealed the world. After that, everything made sense. Bambataa played there a lot of the time, and his adventurous tastes kept the mix from getting too inbred. And the 85 - 90% male mix of the crowd meant that dancing alone was completely acceptable, which made circumstances easy for a shy person who loved to dance, such as myself.
FOS> How did you become fascinated with spoken word records? Are there certain kinds that you look for, certain categories?
Steinski> I suppose I'm primarily drawn to recordings of people getting really worked up and hollering. This covers preachers and minister of all sorts, from Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan to Rev. A. A. Allen; demagogues like Joseph McCarthy and Father Coughlin; 60's radicals like Mario Savio; military drill sergeants; newscasters on the scene like the Hindenburg guy; and any real-life news broadcast or actuality that dips into genuine emotion.
I have a soft spot as well for performers that make sound effects with their voices - which includes a lot of comedians and monologists.
Great vocal talent comes from anywhere. Most authors, I find, don't read their own work as well as a pro; they usually sound flat and rushed. But occasionally a good writer will be a gifted reader as well, and that's a rare and wonderful thing. Edwin O'Connor, author of The Last Hurrah, and Eudora Welty, who wrote "Why I Live At The P.O." both come to mind in this regard.
FOS> How did your work in advertising affect your music?
Steinski> By helping establish minimum standards of communication and intelligibility. In the large agency where I worked, the creative directors were all variants on the same theme: bald, cigar-smoking pros who were men of few words. We'd submit print ads or TV storyboards to these guys after waiting in the hall for half an hour. When the door to the inner sanctum opened, we'd cross an acre of carpet and lay the work on Mr. Big's desk, step back, and await The Opinion, often only a word or two, accompanied by an explanatory wave of the cigar. "Guys, I don't understand it," he would say. "The audience has to understand it, or it's crap."
Which isn't to say that music has to be as obvious and direct as most advertising, but it helps me to remember that anything too self-referential or inside or subtle won't have much appeal outside my friends and family.
FOS> How do you work?
Steinski> In a thick fog of guilt and anxiety.
FOS> How do you find and catalogue phrases from your records to use?
Steinski> Obviously, I listen to a lot of spoken word recordings. I transfer many of them to cassette, and listen while I wash the dishes, shave, perform dental hygiene, and drive. I make notes on which phrases, when yanked out of context, will work in a record. I will often transfer dialogue from movies to cassette or computer when I hear something I think I can use at some point. As far as cataloguing goes, you give me too much credit. There's quite a lot of material I simply retain in memory and can put my hands on quickly, but it's embarrassing how much archived material I stumble across months or years after I've made a record where the bite would have made a huge difference.
FOS> What kind of technical setup do you use?
Steinski> ProTools, running on a G4 Mac. I'm not even running OSX, so I'm way behind the times technically, but I can get the job done. A generous friend sold me a pair of used Meyer HD-1 near-field monitors a few years ago, and I've done my mixing and mastering mostly by myself since then.
FOS> When you and Douglas made The Lessons could you have imagined the influence it would have on DJs around the world?
Steinski> Hell, no. And once again, hell no. The first time I went to England to DJ - about 6 years ago - I called Douglas from my hotel room in a state of shock, to tell him about the guy that came up to me during a gig, shook my hand, and told me he had driven an hour and a half to come to the club because our records had changed his life. This kind of reaction was not at all what I expected. Douglas flat-out didn't believe me. I still have trouble believing it.
FOS> What current things are you working on musically?
Steinski> I'm turning out material indiscriminately, as fast as I can. Some will end up on a solo album, some on a collaborative album with DJ Signify, and most will be performed live, I trust, in the near future. I'm working with Signify on a live act involving CD turntables and an on-stage "studio" centered around a laptop/MIDI setup. Double Dee and I are also making ready to perform with a multiple computer setup in the near future.
Check Steinski’s comprehensive article about spoken word records in the current issue of Wax Poetics and his new 12” mix Say Ho! coming out soon on Stonesthrow records.

What are the five most important things you can't live without?

1) my family
2) my glasses
3) a telephone
4) sitting on the porch listening to the birds and watching the rabbit that lives in our yard
5) caffeine
What would you take with you if you knew you were going to be stranded alone on an island?
1) a lot of pens and a whole lot of paper
2) a set of conga drums
3) a supply of Louisiana Hot Sauce (makes anything palatable)
4) duct tape
5) caffeine

J.Rocc from the Beat Junkie Crew on steinski

FOS> When did you first hear Double Dee and Steinski?
J.Rocc> I first heard the "Play That Beat" Mix on KDAY out here in L.A. and then they use to play the "Lessons" on the KACE during the weekend mixes.FOS> What was your first impression? Did it consequently impact either your own production or djing?
J.Rocc> I was just in shock by what they were doing. I was loving it. I started doing my own 4track mixes because of mixes like this and other things that were out in the West Coast around this time. I also like to use doubles of this record in my d.j. sets to this very day.FOS> What do you think is the impact of Double Dee and Steinski's music on hiphop music in general?
I think their impact is really on the d.j.s that have been exposed to these guys. I'm sure people wouldn't do mixes like they do if these guys didn't come in the game and do some ol’ crazy ish. The original funky cut up.... it’s not the first but it was the first done for the hip hop crowd.
4) Anything else you'd like to add?
Thank you Steinski & Double Dee for inspiring all of us d.j.s past, present & future and keep on doing your thing...

Slicker

John Hughes, aka Slicker, is a straight-up nice guy. He started Hefty
Records in 1995 with enthusiasm for music and a DIY spirit to release music
that reflected the level of care that musicians craft their music from the
label side of things. It has worked. Hefty has become one the most notable
and respected indie labels for left field electronic music. With the
release of "We All Have A Plan", John shifts away from the harsh sound of
IDM towards a soulful music that remains future looking. FOS sat down with
John for an interview earlier this month.
FOS> Who were some your early musical influences growing up?
JH> I first became aware of pop music through "Thriller" by Michael Jackson.
I started listening to groups like Kraftwerk, Herbie Hancock and
Grandmaster Flash. When I started listening to Run DMC I became fascinated
with samples. As far back as driving in my parent's car on the highway, I
was making beats timed to each light post we'd pass. Later, I became
fascinated with older recording of soul and jazz.
FOS> Do you collect a lot of records yourself? Do you do a lot of digging
for beats?
JH> Most definitely; in the beginning I might have dug for samples and
loops. Now I like to vibe with a whole album or artist, use it as
inspiration to create my own music.
FOS> Do you have any particular records that come to mind as inspiration for
"We All Have A Plan"?
JH> There was no particular artist or record I listened to exclusively. I
drew inspiration from many different sources. One album that I was
seriously feeling through that time was Paul McCartney‚s II.
FOS> Oh, that‚s the one with Darkroom on it right?
JH> Yeah, that‚s an amazing track. The combination of organic drum machines
and synths on the record was way ahead of its time.
FOS> You seem to be turning IDM from more of an abstract and esoteric music
form into one that incorporates melody and more palatable sounds. Was this
a conscious shift or an organic one?
JH> Definitely a conscious one; I wanted more melodies and soul, getting
back to the root of what music is all about. I didn‚t want to make a retro
sounding record at all, rather I wanted to bring back some of the feeling
from the records I had been listening to for years.
"We All Have A Plan" will be out soon. It features vocalists Dan Boadi,
Khadijah Anwar(Sugar Hill 7" on Aestuarium Records), Elzhi (Slum Village),
and Phat Kat aka Ronnie Cash. Chicago Jazz legends Wendell Harrison and
Phil Ranelin also appear on the album. Definitely one of the most unique
records of the year, one we are feeling and one to cop. For more info visit
www.heftyrecords.com.

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