A mighty industrial metal scraping noize devolves into a 1973 Stooges riff that sounds like it was recorded in a tin shack in 1957, cheapo drums start crashing away like The Trashmen. The only lyric you can make out is the sneered “I dunno whyyy!” at the end of every line. After 90 seconds a Faust-like dissolve through grinding, chattering zounds, creepy moog organ, analog tapes running backwards and flipping off the spindles . . . . the noise slowly fades as a chugging metal riff builds and BUILDS — with acid lead guitar flourishes and a tambourine accompaniment! The jam that follows exists somewhere between NEU! and Judas Priest. Another abrubt edit, bells & scraping, then a new trashcan beat with hyper-distorted barely audible vocals buzzing like a bee and whining like a dog. An occasional spiral circus guitar riff, miscellaneous clanking and feedback. The beat changes again into yet another funky robot trashcan groove, with new squelchy guitar interjections, still many miscellaneous strands of noise burbling in & out of the brew whenever it feels right. The vocalist is actually singing words now, strangled drunken mumbling that makes the “recorded in a dumpster behind the Qwickie-Mart” sound of the Beastie Boys most fuzzed-out vocals sound crystal clear.

You’ve just made it through the first two tracks of Half Machine Lip Moves, entitled “TV As Eyes” (one of the best song titles ever I must say) and “Zombie Warfare”. Welcome to the unique soundworld that is Chrome!

I can’t imagine what people thought of this deeply mysterious band from San Francisco in the late 1970’s, to the extent very many people were aware of them at all at the time (or even today.) But there are some artists who come along and are clearly “from another time” — not necessarily “the future” but just “not from now”, and though there is a “futuristic” vibe going on here I wouldn’t say anyone else has copped the Chrome sound these past 25 years, nor ever will again in the future. I think one of the key things that makes them so unique is that they came along right at the end of the analog era, and in some sense took the analog audio tomfoolery of your VU’s, Fausts and Zappas to the furthest extreme it would go. Then everyone went digital, so the kinds of blurry swiping tape-manipulated zounds found here are virtually unduplicatable today (unless one were to use the old analog equipment, but even then good luck figuring out what’s going on here or how to recreate all thoze noizes!)

But equally important, they don’t just fuck around with the tapes, they RAWK! Helios Creed lays down badass heavy metal rhythm guitar riffs and berzerker psychedelic leads (often backwards and/or played at the wrong speed.) Damon Edge’s drumming is a perfect balance between kraut-motorik-funky and crazy-drunk-garage-band.

So the vibe created is definitely very Sci-Fi, but no gleaming clean surfaces from Beyond The Year 2000 here. It’s a bit like in the original “Alien” movie (also from 1979 coincidentally), where the technology is “advanced” but the space ships are dank & dirty and all the equipment keeps breaking down. Science will not only bring forth smiling nuclear families with robot maids flying around in hover cars, but also ever-more-crowded metropolitan slums and squalor and new designer chemicals to help stave off (or feed?) dread and paranoia. To borrow a term coined nearly a decade later, Chrome’s is a “CYBER-PUNK” vision of the future.

And could a band possibly be more “underground”? You can’t hardly make out a single word on the whole record. The tracks all blur together, and many of the “songs” are really just a series of random riffs and interludes spliced together. Someone is even credited with “data memory” in the musicians list, presumably a purely technical function like turning the tape machine on and off and manipulating it’s speed. We may never know.

Chrome had released two LP’s before this one, the ultrarare “The Visitation” (1977) where they don’t quite have their sound together (Creed wasn’t aboard yet) and “Alien Soundtracks” (1978) which is also a classic though to me sounds like a warm-up for the dense majesty and mystery of “Half Machine Lip Moves.” The Edge-Creed team made several more obscure records through the early 1980’s, eventually embracing drum machines, more intelligible lyrics and a generally less outlandish sound (sort of goth-industrial-dance rock with a hint of metal — but still definitely mysterious and “underground.”)

“Drawing from traditions of 20th century instrumental synthesizer music, Jonas Reinhardt represents a love affair between analog electronics, sweeping atmospherics, and driving motorik beats. Combined together, these elements bring the album’s 13 pieces into focus as the soundtrack for an inner-eyelid space epic that never was.

Inspired in equal measure by the natural beauty of his California coastal surroundings, continental European art-rock experimentation, and the freewheeling punk aesthetic of contemporary home studio recording, Jonas Reinhardt’s music transcends it’s influences to bring into being a work that’s wholly new while referencing a celebrated aesthetic of the past.

Armed with a battery of analog synthesizers and vintage drum machines, Jonas writes music that is at times stark and spare and at others lush and all-encompassing; all the while keeping an underlying rhythmic pulse just beneath the surface.

Jonas describes his technique as ‘a spirited conversation between man, machines, and the ecstatic truth of the chaotic unknown.’ With this album, Jonas carefully constructs melodies and rhythmic foundations then pushes the limits of recording to the sonic fringes and beyond. The effect is a warm, hauntingly familiar sound bounded by unpredictability.”

Listen: http://rapidshare.com/files/152270549/Jonas_Reinhardt_-_Jonas_Reinhardt__2008_.rar (Password : laura35)

“Ralf und Florian is a 1973 album created and produced by the German music group Kraftwerk. It was also released under the English name of Ralf and Florian. Unlike Kraftwerk’s later albums, which featured language-specific lyrics, only the titles differ between the English and German editions.

Along with Kraftwerk’s first two albums, Ralf und Florian has, as of 2008, never been officially re-issued on compact disc. However, the album remains an influential and sought after work, and bootlegged CD’s were widely distributed in the 1990s on the Germanofon label. The band has hinted that the album may finally see a re-mastered CD release after their Der Katalog box set.

As indicated by the title (and like their previous album), all the tracks were written, performed and produced by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, with the sessions engineered by the influential Konrad “Conny” Plank. The album has a fuller and more polished sound quality than previous efforts, and this is clearly due to the use of a number of commercial recording studios in addition to Kraftwerk’s own yet-to-be-named Kling Klang. The colour photograph on the back of the cover gives a vivid impression of the bohemian state of Kraftwerk’s own facilities at the time – including egg-box trays pasted, nailed, or stuck on the walls for soundproofing.”

“The album is still almost entirely instrumental (some wordless yodelling appears in “Tanzmusik”, and “Ananas Symphonie” features the band’s first use of a machine voice created by an early prototype vocoder, a sound which would later become a Kraftwerk trademark). Instrumentation begins to show more obvious use of synthesizers (Minimoog and EMS AKS), however most melodic and harmonic keyboard parts are performed on Farfisa electronic piano/organ. Flute and guitar are still much in evidence. The band were still without a drummer, and several tracks, particularly “Tanzmusik”, make use of a preset organ rhythm machine. “Kristallo” features a striking rhythmic electronic bassline (actually created on the EMS synthesizer with the aid of the vocoder), however in general the album is much gentler and less rhythmically precise than Kraftwerk’s later electronic work.

The LP included a “musicomic” poster insert of cartoons by Emil Schult, who had been playing electric violin live with the band (although he does not feature on the album recordings). Schult remains a collaborator of Kraftwerk’s to the present day. The cartoons illustrated each track on the album, as well as the city of Düsseldorf, with the caption “In Düsseldorf am Rhein, klingt es bald!”, which translates literally in English as “In Düsseldorf on the Rhine, it will sound soon” (perhaps the phrase “the sound gets around” captures the snappy feel of the maxim better). Also note that this is kind of a reference to Kraftwerk’s Düsseldorf based Kling Klang studio.

The album was a modest success in Germany. Drummer Wolfgang Flür was recruited to play with Ralf and Florian for a subsequent promotional TV appearance in Berlin, for the German WDR TV arts show Aspekte. He became a member of the group thereafter.

This particular piece of equipment was sold at auction in July 2006 (Ebay Item 300001522431). According to the sales description, Kraftwerk’s machine was “the mother of all transistorized vocoders, an early 70s prototype custom-built for the German electronic duo.

The device was used for two studio productions, Ananas Symphonie (for synthetic vocals and the rhythm track created in conjunction with lapsteel guitar and rhythm machine) and Kristallo (with rhythm machine and EMS synthesizer). It was also later used to create the sound of the spoken intro for Autobahn. The vocoder contained 12 analysis and synthesis filter channels, 2 compressors for speech or carrier signal and excitation signal inputs, voiced /unvoiced detector and switch board for filter-matrix. It was conceived, built and constructed by electronics engineers P. Leunig (Dipl. Ing.) and K. Obermayer (Dipl. Ing.) from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Braunschweig. Later, the well known German music studio engineering and supplier company R. Barth K.G. of Hamburg, Germany, boiled down the know-how gained from this project into the so-called “Musicoder”, which was produced in small quantities.”

Listen here: http://rapidshare.com/files/74175075/KRF-RuF.rar

“Electromagnetic interference (or EMI, also called radio frequency interference or RFI) is an unwanted disturbance that affects an electrical circuit due to either electromagnetic conduction or electromagnetic radiation emitted from an external source. The disturbance may interrupt, obstruct, or otherwise degrade or limit the effective performance of the circuit. The source may be any object, artificial or natural, that carries rapidly changing electrical currents, such as an electrical circuit, the Sun or the Northern Lights.

EMI can be intentionally used for radio jamming, as in some forms of electronic warfare, or can occur unintentionally, as a result of spurious emissions for example through intermodulation products, and the like. It frequently affects the reception of AM radio in urban areas. It can also affect cell phone, FM radio and television reception, although to a lesser extent.”

“In physics, the geometrical design that results when a set of straight or curved lines is superposed onto another set; the name derives from a French word for “watered.” The effect may be seen by looking through the folds of a nylon curtain of small mesh, or two sheets of graph paper twisted 20 or 30 degrees with respect to one another. If a grating design made of parallel black and white bars of equal width is superposed on an identical grating, moiré fringes will appear as the crossing angle is varied from about one second of arc to about 45°. The pattern will consist of equidistant parallel fringes. If two gratings of slightly different spacing are superposed, “beat” fringes will appear, which shift positions much faster than does the displacement of one grating with respect to the other. This principle is used to measure small displacements in mechanical devices (e.g., comparator). Moiré patterns are useful in representing fluid flow and potential fields. Problems in optics, wave motion, stress analysis, crystallography, mathematics, and the psychology of perception may also be solved. A different kind of moiré pattern results when two families of curves of different colors are superposed: fringes of a third color are produced.”

“Wave interference is a phenomenon which occurs when two waves meet while traveling along the same medium. Wave interference can be constructive or destructive. Constructive interference occurs at locations where the two interfering waves are displaced in the same direction - either both up or both down. When constructive interference occurs at a location along a medium, the resultant displacement of the medium at that location is larger than the displacement of either of the two individual waves. A new and larger wave is constructed. Destructive interference occurs at locations where the two interfering waves are displaced in the opposite direction - one wave is displaced up and the other displaced down. When destructive interference occurs at a location along the medium, the two individual waves combine to produce a new wave which has a resultant displacement which is smaller than the displacement of either wave at the location. That is, the two waves combine to either partially or completely destroy each other.

A popular Physics demonstration involves the interference of two sound waves from two speakers. The speakers are set approximately 1 meter apart and produced identical tones. The two sound waves traveled through the air in front of the speakers, spreading our through the room in spherical fashion. A snapshot in time of the appearance of these waves is shown in the diagram below. In the diagram, the compressions of a wavefront are represented by a thick line and the rarefactions are represented by thin lines. These two waves interfere in such a manner as to produce locations of some loud sounds and other locations of no sound. Of course the loud sounds are heard at locations where compressions meet compressions or rarefactions meet rarefactions and the “no sound” locations appear wherever the compressions of one of the waves meet the rarefactions of the other wave. If you were to plug one ear and turn the other ear towards the place of the speakers and then slowly walk across the room parallel to the plane of the speakers, then you would encounter an amazing phenomenon. You would alternatively hear loud sounds as you approached anti-nodal locations and virtually no sound as you approached nodal locations. (As would commonly be observed, the nodal locations are not true nodal locations due to reflections of sound waves off the walls. These reflections tend to fill the entire room with reflected sound. Even though the sound waves which reach the nodal locations directly from the speakers destructively interfere, other waves reflecting off the walls tend to reach that same location to produce a pressure disturbance.)”

Read more: http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/mmedia/waves/ipl.html

The Wire: Issue #303 (May 09)

MM: I mean, The Germs definitely had something of interest to them. But I think The Screamers are the ones that deserved recognition as what could have been the most important band from that era. Their music was excellent. Yeah, they were good, we saw them when we were like, cos we came over really cocky cos we’d gone to New York and kind of freaked people out cos they’d watched Talking Heads and Television and all these bands form, in school, and they’d watch them trade partners around, and Blondie, everyone would swap around members and The Ramones would become who they were going to become, and they watched them develop. And Devo showed up, we showed up putting up posters all over Manhattan that we’d printed for 50 cents a piece that were big. And people were like ‘Oh, these guys are putting up like little 8 by ten’… and we had these yellow outfits and a whole vernacular and a set of songs that didn’t sound like anything else they were hearing, so we quite quickly became a phenomenon in New York, where we weren’t making any money but our guest list was always like, all the Rolling Stones, um, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp…

RH: David Bowie…

MM: John Lennon. All these people would be on our guest list. We’d have like Jack Nicholson, everybody wanted to see Devo in those days. So we left there going ‘We don’t have a record deal and we don’t have any money, but we’re doing something right’ and we felt really good about it and we thought ‘We’re going to take over Hollywood’ and we kind of in a way did really well out here, but they were the band that we were watching thinking ‘That’s it. That’s the band.’ They should have been.

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