SKRONK!

from my bro in FL. the writer gets it wrong, tho...this was 64 minutes of "fuck you" to RCA Records so Uncle Lou could fulfill his contract obligations and jump to another label:

AN IMPOSSIBLE NOISE

- Dave Simpson on an attempt to play Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music unplugged

Friday September 7, 2007
The Guardian

Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music has been called many things. The Rolling Stone review of its original 1975 release called it "the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator" and compared listening to it to a night in a bus terminal. One reference book described the two vinyl set as "ear-wrecking electronic sludge guaranteed to clear any room of humans in record time". Reed - perhaps slightly tongue in cheek - claims it invented heavy metal. Meanwhile, biographer Victor Bockris insists that the album, which made number two in the 1991 book The Worst Records of All Time, is "the ultimate conceptual punk rock album", the logical extension of the Velvet Underground's most confrontational songs.











That's because Metal Machine Music consisted, in its original form, of four 16-minute sides of guitar feedback, the last of which ended in a locked groove, so you could have continual noise, if you so wanted. Now, however, Metal Machine Music can be described as "an acoustic score for a classical ensemble". That is because of an extraordinary adaptation of it by German 11-piece orchestra Zeitkratzer, who have reworked Metal Machine Music as an instrumental piece and released it as a CD. You might think 65 minutes of noise could not be converted into actual written music - Lou Reed didn't think it could - but the doubters have been proved wrong. "He said it would be impossible," says Ulrich Kreiger, Zeitkratzer's saxophonist, who transcribed the music. "So we sent him a demo," he explains, "and he was blown away." Though Metal Machine Music almost killed Reed's career - its crushing commercial failure forcing him to rapidly record a conventional rock album, Coney Island Baby, to placate punters and record company - Krieger suggests Reed is now delighted to hear a new generation of younger musicians taking his outermost extremes even further. For Krieger, a fan of the original, reworking the album felt like "giving something back".

When Krieger was a teenager, he listened to Metal Machine Music alongside Throbbing Gristle, free jazz, punk and composers such as Schoenberg and Stockhausen and says the idea of attempting to transcribe it as written music was natural. Metal Machine Music, he says, mirrors the modal use of sound and rhythm found in archaic ritual music and could be adapted to draw on classical instruments' ability to create "weird sounds". Specifically, wind instruments can mimic feedback, which, because it has a pitch, can actually be played. These notions delighted Reed, who became involved in rehearsals. When it was performed at MaerzMusik Haus Der Berliner Festpiele in 2002, he played an electric guitar to bridge the ensemble version with his own. Five years later - after legal, rather than sonic complications - the collaboration has finally been released as a CD/DVD where it stands not quite alone, but perhaps as the original's perhaps slightly more complex sibling. "The arrangement emphasises the orchestralness I heard in Lou's original," says Krieger, who talks of "intricate, beautiful and daring sound colours". Still, some things never change: Zeitkratzer's Metal Machine Music now causes uproar in the classical world.








[AN 8-TRACK OF MMM!]

"When we played it in Berlin some of the audience were really angry," says Reinhold Friedl, the ensemble's conductor. "Someone shouted 'This is mayhem.' Later a critic wrote that 'John Cage said everything is music. This is not music!' It does not bother us. We are provocateurs." · Lou Reed Metal Machine Music Performed by Zeitkratzer is released on CD/DVD by Asphodel Records on Monday. Further info at www.loureed.com and www.zeitkratzer.de

FLASH: roomie MB just sent me this amazing links page on the history of electronic music:

http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/

NP: "Hippie Chick"/Soho. one of my favorite tracks. used to play it with a Hoboken hippie band i was in called the Legendary Wild Ensemble (time for a reuion, b's & g's??).

PEEVE DE JOUR: 30%??? no fucking way...

JOIE DE JOUR: rashrot on my left forearm is healing.

ROSATI'S FLAVOR-OF-THE-DAY:

Pumpkin Pie

OR

Pumpkin Pecan

cb...where are you?






NEW YORK STATE - Kelder's Farm