War Concerto, first movement, by Wilhelm Zinc

 

 

Ah yes, Zinc's Magnum Opus.  Notice how carefully he weaves the musical threads of uncertainty and purpose, a mighty nation pulled up out of its own satiated ennui to embrace the task before it, and...oh, never mind.  It's actually from old "Victory at Sea" episodes.  

 

 Play (2:16)

 

 

 

 

 

Ike Pressed the Button

 

I didn't set out to make a current events bit this week.  If you're hearing any resonances with that, maybe it's just picking up what's in the air.  

Play (1:58) 

 

Random Rerun: MacArthur vs the Flying Saucers

Hello folks.  No new audio this week.  Things are still pretty disrupted around here, and the creative sunshine didn't make it to the petri dish.  So here's a plug for Bandcamp- three(?) volumes of Cutupsound, listening is free.  This week's offering:

Play (4:44)

Perhaps a fitting finale, for our efforts here.  Hope not.

Rommel Uber Dubbing

 Hooray, weekly posts again!  We were caught off-guard by the recent disaster. so I moved our monthly non-audio post to the first Sunday (because it's quicker to write).  

This week we look at the phenomenon of double-translation: the 2012 film Rommel, translated from German into Spanish, then re-translated by a computer into English.  Join us, won't you?

(Double-translations seem to be a promising source of Dada cutups.  Definitely want to keep exploring this...)

Still kicking

Three weeks without a post.  The internet router blew out and no one besides myself was interested in fixing it (including the ISP).  My apologies to everyone who thought they could reliably find strange and original audio here.  I'm not stopping until they pry the keyboard from my stiff, dead fingers.  But I can't guarantee it will happen.  Just like I can't guarantee I'll wake up alive every morning.  

So, with that jolly thought, let's get back to it.  Come by next Sunday and I'll post something, if I can.  

William S Burroughs birthday

 

This year's piece is a setting for excerpts from Roosevelt After Inauguration, (a reading which is considerably excerpted by the author) with other pieces collected from Ubuweb.  

 

WSB 2026 (4:26) 

 

 

 

 

The Elmer Davis News

This is an example of more or less "by rote" cut and paste, conducted on an WW2-era radio broadcast.  A five-minute commentary was chopped up into beginnings of sentences, ends, and neither beginning nor end.  The pieces were re-connected in random order, according to a "beginning-middle-end" arrangement.  (A couple minutes of content was lost because one of the sections ran out of pieces, which stopped the matching process.)  Minimal editing.

 

William S Burroughs did a lot of cutup like this, except with newspapers and scissors.  We'll be doing something for his birthday next week,  so this seemed at least like a kind of warm up.

 

 

Edit, 01.27: Elmer Davis V2, now with soothing white noise (3:18)