On January 25, 2019 Cherry Red Records will release a 4-CD 60-track set titled Third Noise Principle: Formative North American Electronica 1975-1984, including tracks by Electronic Cottage community participants Chris Phinney (Mental Anguish), Leslie Singer (Girls On Fire), Rick Franecki (F/i), Al Margolis (If, Bwana), and Hal McGee (Dog As Master). Other notable artists include Problemist, Chrome, Mystery Hearsay, Philip Glass, The Residents, Suicide, Hunting Lodge, Terry Riley, Controlled Bleeding, Tuxedomoon, Ministry, Architects Office, Smegma. Instead of royalty payments Chris Phinney and I opted to receive 10 copies of the compilation, and we will both have copies to sell to anyone who is interested.
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Here is a special slideshow of EC Community members
wearing their Electronic Cottage badges! In the slideshow above click on each person's photo to visit their personal contributor page here at EC. These badges were created by Jeremiah Paddock, based on a design by Mike Nobody. Email to me a high resolution photo of yourself wearing your EC badge and I will add your photo to the slideshow. In the first photo Rafael González sports his EC badge, which he just received 6 October. I mailed 16 badges to Rafael and he will mail the badges to all of the European members of the EC Community at his own expense. I have already mailed EC badges to almost all of the USA members of the community, and next I will mail badges to our members in Canada, South America, and Asia.
In an ongoing effort to make my art and my life as close together as possible, like always, during the month of October 2018 I carried with me at all times in my pocket one of four Sony ICD-PX470 stereo digital dictaphones and recorded sounds of my day to day life.
I recorded sounds while walking my dog Stanley (including our encounters with human neighbors, squirrels, crows, and other dogs; airplanes and helicopters overhead, automobile traffic including emergency vehicles), miscellaneous sounds from my job, restaurants, grocery stores. I also recorded spontaneous and random thoughts, reflections on and readings from books and articles, plus emails I had sent to Leslie Singer. I also recorded interactions with family members. I held two Apartment Music shows during the month of October, and I recorded sounds before and after the shows, as well as in-between the performances. On October 25th two of my nephews arrived for an 8-day stay with my brother Mark, Stanley and I. During those days we spent a lot of time at my mom and dad's house, because Mark and his sons were busy constructing the yearly McGee Halloween Extravaganza. Mark transforms my parents' yard into a haunted graveyard. This year's theme was Freak Show. Lumen K joined the project as a participant, playing the part of a fortune teller. I made numerous recordings on Halloween night, which included the sounds of Halloween trick or treaters getting the bejezus scared out of them! Plus Lumen and I played iPhone synth and voice-changing apps through belt-clip amplifiers. Costumed in a black cloak with a hood I played the Korg Monotron Delay battery-operated analog synth and helped create a spooky ambience to the Freak Show.
Early on the morning of November 1st I connected the four dictaphones to a Behringer mixer and set all four on continuous playback, the mix of which I captured in a direct transcription as the event unfolded. All of the recordings that I had made during the month of October assembled themselves into simultaneously juxtaposed layered constructions that I hope would make Richard Hülsenbeck proud. I started out with no preconceived ideas, no story I wanted to tell. Letting the assemblage happen IS the story you hear here. Afterwards I divided the 75-minute assemblage into six parts for the listener's convenience to give them access points, and slapped the six parts upside the head with titles.
Most artists with any amount of good sense ALWAYS maintain a cultish MYSTERY about how they create their art. It would be anathema to many people I know to describe in this much detail how they did what they did to make their artistic creations. With me it's different. The mystery comes not from me withholding info on how I did what I did to get these results, but from your perceptions as a listener as you listen to the assemblage reveal itself to you. You create it as you listen. It is my greatest wish that these assemblages will bring you lots of amusement, happiness and fun as you experience the month of October along with me. Art like life, lifelike art.
Apartment Music #31 was held Saturday, October 20, 2018.
Apartment music is a long-running series of live sessions of experimental, electronic and improvised music and noise in Hal McGee's apartment in Gainesville, Florida, USA.
things evolve in swamps
Sunday, October 7, 2018
This Apartment Music show featured performances
by members of the Electronic Cottage Community who live in Florida.
The performers were invited to interpret the theme
"things evolve in swamps".
Apartment Music is a long-running series of concerts of improvisation, experimental and electronic music and Noise at Hal McGee's apartment in Gainesville, Florida.
All Electronic Cottage Community members — people with Personal Contributor Pages — can request by email a free download code for the album
Mister McGee's neighborhood
1. lovebugs and cowlicks 2. dead bodies cast shadows 3. I am well-traveled in my neighborhood 4. the future of assemblage starts with you simultaneist dictaphone assemblages everyday sounds and electronics audio folk art featuring Lumen K and Stanley also available on CDR for $8 postage paid worldwide by request recorded September 2018 with four Sony ICD PX-470 stereo digital dictaphones in Gainesville, Florida Hal McGee with Lumen K on Korg minilogue Yamaha Reface CS Novation Circuit Mono Station synthesizers with Moog Theremin plus Hal on Moog Filtatron Moog Model D Animoog and Noisemusick iPhone app synths played through a JBL Clip 3 belt-clip Bluetooth speaker Stanley improvised performances on Babble Ball and voice of course album cover photo by my mom, JoAn McGee
Seven years ago I recorded my album Nature Guy, while in Key West, Florida celebrating the wedding of my sister, Terri, and Einar Myklebust
Two 31-minute cassette tape noise collages of field recordings from Key West, Florida, September 30-October 2, 2011. Most of these recordings were made on Duval Street. I carried with me two identical Sony TCM-150 cassette recorders, one in either pocket of my cargo pants. I would pull one out, record certain sounds in my surroundings, put it back and pull out the other recorder and record new sounds, over and over. Sometimes I would pull out both recorders and record at the same time, with slight variations. Later, I mixed the two tapes together in an arbitrary purposely haphazard manner.
As I was recording the raw source materials I was struck by the feeling that in that hyper-detailed, over-the-top, too-much-information environment of Key West (which is as far out on the edge of the USA as possible) I was in a sense immersed or swimming in everything that is good and bad and exciting and boring about living in a mixed market Capitalist society that is teetering and tottering, collapsing and yet bursting forth...
During the same weekend I also recorded my half of a split album with Bryan Lewis Saunders, "At this spot on October 2, 2011, nothing happened". Recorded on a handheld cassette recorder during a one hour continuous walk in Key West, Florida, on Sunday morning, October 2, 2011. A prime example of a recording in which "nothing happens".
Yesterday I received my copy of "The Revised Boy Scout Manual" by William S. Burroughs, newly-published by The Ohio State University Press. I pre-ordered it several months ago when I first learned about the book from fellow Electronic Cottage Community member John M. Bennett. John edited the book with Geoffrey D. Smith and wrote one of the forewords of the book. I do not want to say too much about the book yet, because I do not want to spoil the experience for any of you who might be interested in the book. I also need time to read, savor, and absorb the book. I will say, however, that the main source text of this now authoritative version of "The Revised Boy Scout Manual" was a performance of the text recorded onto cassette tapes by Burroughs. Also, John Bennett's foreword offers a plan or scheme for understanding the themes of the book, which could well be applied to any or at least many works by WSB.
Acquire it here
Hal McGee
between coincidence and augury 1. flight patterns of birds 25:33 2. signs of things that happened 25:49 recorded August 2018 in Gainesville, Florida with three Sony ICD-PX470 stereo digital dictaphones Yamaha Reface CS and Korg Monotron synthesizers Minimoog Model D and Noisemusick iPhone apps plus circuit bent Casio SK1 and sounds of every day life artwork details from Custer's Last Stand 1967 download at Bandcamp ($1 minimum) includes PDF of CD cover so that you can print your own CD cover also available on CDR by request, for $8 postage paid worldwide
Collaboration is one of the Pillars of DIY Homemade Experimental Music!
Most of my collaborations in recent years have been conducted via postal mail -- such as the soon-to-be published dictaphone assemblage album titled microcassettera, with long-time collab partner Chris Phinney. But nothing beats collaborating in person! Phinney and I collaborated in person on numerous occasions. One of my other favorite collaborators is Brian Noring. Brian used to operate the F.D.R. Tapes label in the 1990s, and I visited him on numerous occasions in his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. Brian and I have collaborated on more than 25 albums. For your listening pleasure, here is "dada beat hippie noise punk raveup, an improvisation-based collab track in two parts from an album called Studies in Sound Archaeology, originally recorded in October 2001.
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