One of the many advantages of vinyl over digital formats is the instant ability to play tunes at the wrong speed. I’ll give you a personal example of this in a moment, because this erroneous piece of music was formative for me…. but I’m sure that ‘feature’ has been the undoing of many a drunken DJ…

You know when you hear an exceptionally mind & mood altering piece of music & think to yourself I wish I had written & produced that – well with this one particular tune I did, and I have thought it for many years… And just recently (as in a week or so ago) I heard a copy from a CD and realised that all this time the tune I loved I had been playing at 33rpm, when it was intended to be heard at 45rpm!?! So here it is, Tortoises Find The One remixed by Bundy K. Brown at the wrong speed:

Tortoise – Bundy Brown mix

I simply do not want to hear it at the ‘right’ speed, it just has none of the glacial pace & resonance…. so you’ll have to go find the Tortoise Remixed CD to hear the other version…..

But what tunes have you loved, at the wrong speed?

Reminds me of the motorway rumble strips in Japan that make music

> Year of the glitch has some great degraded images eg “A white vertical line on a black background scans across the screen from left to right and back again. The resulting video is exported and re-compressed 102 times.”

> I love playing melodica, it is such a great instrument to jam with… but if I don’t have mine with me this free Kontakt library is the next best thing

> DIY: Make a tuning fork?

> While I’d love to hear the Isono 3D sound system, the chances of it being installed in a local theatre are fairly slim – some of them can’t even get 5.1 right – so the Auro-3D system seems like a better fit with their scaleable 9.1, 11.1 and 13.1 adding height speakers & offering backwards compatability…. This PDF is worth a read…

Can’t wait to see this!

Directed by Olivier Campagne & Vivien Balzi
Music by Brice Tillet

(thanks for the tip Leyton!)

When I was a kid growing up this was one of the TV shows I used to watch, and if that theme music seems strangely familiar in approach it might just be because its the same team who made Doctor Who, yes The Radiophonic Workshop! I never realised this until very recently, via a Boomkat review:

“It’s always nice to have a good story behind a record (especially if you’re writing a review) and this one has a corker of a tale. Apparently Johnny Trunk (of Trunk records and having a pornstar for a sister fame) had been looking into licensing this soundtrack for a long time and came to the conclusion that it would be too much of a pain in the proverbial bottom to track down all the pieces of music used in the classic television series. On the DVD release of the series last year, however, he discovered to his surprise that the entire soundtrack was lifted from a library record called ESL 104, featuring the anonymous work of electronic music pioneers Delia Derbyshire, Dudley Simpson and Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, as well as David Vorhaus of White Noise. All the original tracks are here, in the same order featured on the original record, with the tone set early on with a cocophany of gorgeous over-saturated tapey sounds that are very similar to the sort of atmospheric and incidental music used in classic period Doctor Who. As anyone familiar with this field knows, some of the most important and influential early electronic music was produced by this small cluster of pioneers, and some of these pieces are really as good as it gets – often short, but always sweet. It’s when you realise how long it took to create each and every sound here that you appreciate how much effort went into assembling even the shortest of tracks – something that’s explained brilliantly in the liner notes. Featuring some classic and ultra rare Delia moments such as the blip-tastic ‘Way Out’ and sub aquatic ‘Gothic Submarines’, this is just about as essential as it gets, and an absolute bargain to boot” – shame its sold out, but try this?

While I was searching for some info on this album I also came across this fascinating site: The Radiophonic Workshop – An Engineering Perspective

Also this:

“An early BBC experiment in radiophonic sound, predating the establishment of the Radiophonic Workshop, created by Frederick Bradnum and Daphne Oram (pictured) and produced by Donald McWhinnie. TX BBC Third Programme, 07/10/1957. McWhinnie’s spoken introduction first, the work starts at 4:20….