I’m dead tired… it was nice to do nothing and just relax. I’m putting off the parts list / shopping list project for Saturday.

I found this video series by accident… I was searching the Web for something totally unrelated. This guy’s name is Cameron Paul and he apparently had a big hand in creating the dance DJ aesthetic as we know it today. He’s also a native San Franciscan.

Here’s my favorite clip. He gives a no-nonsense intro that I think most people can follow. I like it when people break things down into really simple concepts.

Dig the outfit. He did the official mix of Salt N Pepa’s “Push It” – it was actually a remix of an earlier recording.

… And here’s a quick noise piece that I’m going to use between sections of a larger piece I’m working on. It’ll probably be edited for length.

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Direct link: Here

Calistoga wishes and M&M dreams.

It’s really amazing what I find on YouTube by sheer accident.

I began watching this BBC documentary on Harry Partch. I was hooked when the narrator described Partch’s contempt and disgust for the mainstream and his never-ending search for musical “truth” by way of his inventions, the most significant of them being his 43-tone scale.

Just the fact that this guy was a musical genius, and that he was so totally alienated from society (intellectually and by the fact that he was a gay man in pre-war America), makes this guy incredibly fascinating to me.

I highly recommend you watch this video. It’s in six parts at a total of 50-ish minutes.

Read the full article for the YouTube videos.

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This loop will be featured – heavily modified – in a piece that I am currently working on.

While out and about on Friday evening I picked up a promotional postcard for “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector”, which begins 10 September at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.

I’m obsessed with Phil Spector because he is / was such an unusual character. The man was a genius and it’s so amazing to me that he got his start in the music business as a teenager. It’s amazing how different the music business was then compared to today: it was still an exploitative industry but the players had (I think) better musical taste and the musicians were typically better and more creative. His tenacity and decisiveness were bold and his work is amazing.

He’s also TOTALLY NUTS, but we’ll overlook that for now.

I looked around the Web for videos on his life and found a film from the 1980s called “Phil Spector: He’s a Rebel”. I’ve been watching this over the past few days and I’m really enjoying it. Here are the videos from the series, split into 10 minute segments as per YouTube’s content length requirements.

(View the full post to see the videos)

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Just a quick video clip of a take, from a piece I made last weekend: