Nonwrestler Blog

Where the downward spiral of Wikipedia clicking ultimately leads to...

A Turducken is a dish consisting of a partially de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. The chestal cavity of the chicken and the rest of the gaps are filled with, at the very least, a highly seasoned breadcrumb mixture or sausage meat, although some versions have a different stuffing for each bird.

Labels: misc time-wasting

Posted at 10:12 PM  2 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #28: The Presets - This Boy's In Love (LifeLike Remix)

This is another free download over at RCRDLBL.com which I've been thrashing.

Ridiculously anthemic stadium house* track - a totally contemporary-sounding refinement of the genre rules as laid-out in the 90s, with the kind of repeat-one-note-a-bar basslines and chintzy chords that Italo-disco thrived on in the 80s. Nice contrasts between the verses and choruses, mood-wise - semi-shouted, moody vocals verge on Nitzer Ebb type industrial fare before launching into the stratosphere with a bit of keening disco falsetto.

The Presets are a couple of Strayns (um, Australians) from the very trendy Modular label (home to shit ol' Ladyhawke). They're classically-trained and were already established in an instrumental jazzy / post-rock / quiet band called Prop When they were starting up this dance-rock kinda thing. Mind you, LifeLike is the star here, really. He's a French producer, who had his first big track in 2002 but really blew up with 2005's Discopolis. He's almost obscenely single-minded, just mining a very narrow vein like he's trying to get this one damn track to come out right. Frankly, I'm pretty happy to listen to all the attempts, however similar they are.

* If I may borrow from the KLF.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

weekly mp3 #27: The Conet Project - tcp d1 3 counting control irdial

And now for something completely different. You can download this mysterious MP3 (and all 4 discs of The Conet Project, should you choose!) from the Irdial Discs label page. The d1 means it's off disc 1, if that's not obvious.

The Conet Project was a bunch of recordings of short wave numbers stations. If you don't know about numbers stations you're in for a bit of a trip - they're as good as any kind of tangible evidence of the ongoing activities of intelligence communities as you'll find, but they're sufficiently enigmatic that you can impose whatever paranoid fantasy you like on them. Then there's the actual character of short wave radio sound. This one is particularly sonically nice, I reckon - not too noisy, with a woman reading a repetitive series of numbers in English and the trademark impact of amplitude modulation on the pitch of her voice. Elsewhere bits sound like cut and pasted loops.

Check out the 79-page PDF file for a ridiculous amount of information about this project, each of the recordings and numbers stations more generally.

There's a nice one of a woman repeating "yankee hotel foxtrot", which put me instantly in mind of Wilco's album of that name, and, lo, Wikipedia tells me that's where they got the title.

To have something put you in mind of something else is one of English's weirdest idioms, btw.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  2 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #26: Thomas Fehlmann - Lindt

Get this tune from Download.com

Sparkly, cheery beats from one of my favourites ever ever ever.

Fehlmann has done stuff with The Orb, Sun Electric, and some great solo releases on interesting labels like Kompakt, Plug Research and R&S. He was a in a Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave) band in the 80s with Holger Hiller and Moritz Von Oswald (Maurizio, Basic Channel, Rhythm & Sound). Yay for him.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

Life, oh life. Life. (In the words of Desiree)

"A Little Fable" by Franz Kafka

"Alas," said the mouse, "The world is growing smaller every day. At first it was so big I was afraid, and I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

I read this in a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace, which makes it a bit poignant in light of his recent suicide. Still, I agree with DFW's assessment that this is a good example of how funny Kafka can be.

Labels: life

Posted at 1:36 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #25: Schneider TM featuring Kpt Michigan - The Light 3000

Can't believe I haven't lined this one up before now, it's one I've definitely pestered people about in real life on many occasions... Schneider TM makes the tune available on a pop up page on his own site.

More than a couple of years old now, this is a cover of The Smiths' 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out', done up as melancholy electronica. Vocoders, synthetic beats, surges of cracking distortion and heaps of editing. Seems like a fairly unlikely approach, but it's wonderful.

I'm assuming Erlend Øye's cover of the same song on his DJ Kicks album is inspired by this one, as he was working with Schneider TM around the same time.

Unusually, the "featuring" credit here is not the singer, kptmichigan being a producer of fairly abrasive, instrumental electronic music. I guess the distortion and some of the vocal processing were his ideas. I don't know whether it's the collaboration or the original composition that lifts the quality of 'The Light 3000', but I certainly think it's better than either of the artists' usual output.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  0 Comments Links to this post