Antediluvian Rocking Horse
MUSIC FOR THE ODD OCCASION
1997
(SEELAND 505CD, Psy023)
Approximately 2500 copies sold.
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MAGNET(US) : Another one of those strange names - this one alluding to a nursery toy from before the Great Flood. So what do you make of it? There's the prominent Seeland sticker, an indication that Negativland finds Antediluvian Rocking Horse intriguing, so you can expect ARH to be a little...different. And the band doesn't disappoint. Ripping the stuffing out of the underground scene and borrowing cues from the irreverant humour of Coldcut, ARH is the promising new face of Australia's dance future. Paul Wain and Susan King are neither DJ as god figures nor turntable musos. They're 'multimedia conceptualists' (ahem) with a taste for tranced out electronic beats and the occasional burp. Music For the Odd Occasion is seriously whacked, frantically cutting and splicing film, television and audio samples into a swift kick in techno's lumbering behind, if their intelligent barrage of editing room sweepings and pelvis-friendly grooves can upset the clubland hegemony of disco rejects and clunky house castoffs, then wain and King - and programming magus Ollie Olsen - can join Jack Dangers in storming the studio. But they may be too clever, less interested in a dance takeover than in the pop scramblings of "Lost Sky Daffodil" and most of the material on the album's second half. ARH is a talent to watch carefully, either way.-- Gil Gershman SPLENDID EZINE(US) : Samplers can do wonderful things. Don't believe me? Crank up Music for the Odd Occasion and hear the amazing variety of rhythms and sounds that ARH have created from random vocal snippets, bits of noise and old songs. It's disarming, distracting and utterly brilliant. Antediluvian Rocking Horse are two parts Greater Than One (whose late-eighties dense, sample-driven music foreshadows this disc), one part Negativland (with whom they share a stateside label) and a little bit of Orb for good measure. The music is ear-popping, a listener's paradise of eccentric little samples that also happens to be capable of igniting any right-minded dance floor in a matter of seconds. There's something here for every portion of your oh-so-discriminating musical palate -- odd electronic squeals, eccentric breakbeats, rhythms built from the eccentricities of a looped vocal sample, insane inhuman cackling, cheesy seventies music loops, out-of-context bits of television and radio dialogue, thundering electronic beats, lengthy "voice collages" ... the list could go on for pages. You'll love "Abnormal Recovery", "Rigorous Doughnut" and "The Rhythm Sticks", thrill to the Nelson Dennified-techno of "Ratus Sapiens", be energized by "Lather, Rinse, Repeat" and drift away to "Fingerbone". As Paul of ARH puts it, "This is good bent chill out stuff", though you may be too fascinated to chill. -- george zahora WUNH 91.3 FM (NH, US): The Antediluvian Rocking Horse CD is, For lack of a better term, the balls. Dj's Here are all over the record. In fact its our #1 RPM record this week...go figure. -- Ian Fitzpatrick, Music Director, WUNH EMUSICIAN (US): The May '97 Playback Party : BEST ELECTRONIC ALBUM. Electronic sample city. Techno dance group ARH approaches the editing of samples and tape loops the same as MTV cuts videos : fast and furious. Paul Wain, Susan King, and Ollie Olsen chop up, reverse, layer, and fade in and out television and radio broadcasts, found sounds, movies, vinyl, and CD's, thereby constantly changing the aural pictures. With thought provoking rhythmic shifts, this CD is not for the casual listening : each shift requires undivided attention. But it's fun, neverthe less. If you want to find out how you can improve and extend your sampling technique, check this out. -- Diane Lowery on sounds MIXMAG (UK): Imagine techno, yet constructed with burps, old samples and rocking through a gallery of strange voices, cut-ups, '70's elevator music run backwards...the lot. On one track an ancient voice counts, "one, two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, while dinky 60s organs tinkle and synth noises abound. A crazy channel hopping mish-mash, yet it all works!-- Dom Phillips, Editor RICHMOND MUSIC JOURNAL (VA, US): Is that a snow blower in your pocket, or are you just after all my money? Get up! I feel like being the FAX MACHINE! Wanna jump, shout, work it on out, oh baby! Okee- dokee, Mr. Cartwright, Boss Man!! See Well, Buddy Holly was reincarnated as a dirigible pilot with five kids who all turned out queer...and they made this record after being locked in a room and having their privates smeared with Crisco and they were forced to watch "Bachelor Father", "Leave It to Beaver", and "The Secret Storm" for 11,000 consecutive hours while eating Mallo-Cups and saving the worthless SQUARE coupons (now, when I was a kid, you could save 5000 points and get a FREE BOX, and who couldn't use one of those?), and then the preacher's wife who taught who knows WHAT in high school smacked me on the face for using a yo-yo while I was earning value points working in the school candy store....but that's a different story. Well, no, not really, this record is just like that. This outfit are touted as the Aussie counterpart to Negativland, and it's not a big stretch. They punch like Ali and they move into your head and refuse ever to leave, and they invite all their friends in as well. NO....I got on a tangent there! THEY ARE on Seeland, Negativland's US label, but the resemblance is like Edward J. Murrow to Dan Rather ... or something. This is one sonic circus, and the highwire artists are always falling off on a spike, the Mongolian Strongman is flat drunk and on the cellular to his agent in Ulan Bator, and the elephants are too smart to parade again with sparkly Star Wars characters on their backs. A real loser's paradise. If I owned the world, I'd make EVERYBODY listen to this. Holy Almighty Christ! This is the Divine Assemblage, wherein dwellest the Beatles, Maurice Chevalir, Buddy Holly, Bertoldt Brecht, and Little Joe Cartwright as well as Pepino from "The Real Mc Coys".... with savoury backmasking, technobeatoffs all over your carpet...and....well. No need to ramble on THAT! Except the backmasked yodelling, over the breakneck technobeating... where they limn this Beezlebonanza... and I LOVE the "secret" intepretation of "A Love Supreme". With songs like "The Premier Needs Protection", " A Perry Mason Moment", and "Whatever Happened to the People With Chairs Up Their Noses?" how can you win, lose, or even play the game? Go play , chillun! -- William Burke THE SPECTRUM (NY, US): It's amazing what you can do with sound, especially found sound. What's even more amazing is when another band makes a somewhat dance-orientated album out of found sound and random samples. Yes, Antediluvian Rocking Horse have done just that, taken music and samples from various places and made a vaguely dance-type album. Small wonder that this Australian duo is on Seeland Records, run by those kings of found sound and copyright infringement, Negativland. Antediluvian Rocking Horse are great in my book simply because they use a whole bunch of backwards samples. They also use bits of radio broadcasts, television shows, and a section where they flip through radio stations and very obviously pick up a John Lennon song. Armed with a sampler, it was ARH's intent to make a more dance-oriented album instead of their normal more random soundscape type work. And while I don't like drugs, I do like the song "Lost sky Daffodil" that revolves around a sample of two men accompanied by orchestra singing about "things we couldn't buy with LSD". Fun stuff. Most of all this album is just fun dance music, with the twist you would expect from people working with found sound. If you don't believe me that they're having fun, then how do you explain song titles like, "Whatever Happened To The People With Chairs Up their Noses?" or "Lather, Rinse, Repeat"? This release is also in keeping with Negativland's anti-copyright stance, as this album has no copyright on it, so you could sample the sampled dialogue again if you were so inclined. And what's more fun than sampling anyways? --pk LIVE REVIEWS ANTEDILUVIAN ROCKING HORSE, Esplanade Hotel, St.Kilda. Entering the Gershwin Room at around 9:30pm it took me fifteen minutes to realise the first band had started. This was due to the fact that I was expecting a live act. Instead two guys spent the entire set huddled on the right hand corner of the stage, mixing tracks from the floor. The sounds that were being created ranged from groovy ambient to the simply bizarre. the use of 70's classic instrumentals combined with manufactured and distorted sound was impressive. As the set progressed, what can best be described as the sound of dolphins in acute agony began to dominate. This became extremely tiresome and tarnished what had begun as really something quite interesting. -- Annette Walsh ONE HACK OF A FIGHT Sydney Morning Herald, 3/21/98 Kirsty Needham reports on a group of people who think that copyright laws are oppressive, so they digitally vandalise songs and computer games. THEY call themselves cultural hackers and they think the digital bible Wired is a sell-out to big marketing. They say they are being oppressed by copyright laws which are restricting a mode of expression that draws its roots from the '60s "beat generation" writer William S. Burroughs and the dadaist movement. They are from a generation that has grown up on the receiving end of electronic mass media, but now has the tools to fight back. The Internet is their medium, and they are using it to distribute recycled digital culture. Last month, Beck's record company, Geffen, was told in a press release that a CD based entirely on sampled Beck songs had been launched on the Internet, and the creators would not be seeking copyright permission for the source material. The CD, Deconstructing Beck, was funded by ®TMark, a group of cultural terrorists that claims to have been behind the Barbie Liberation Organisation's 1989 action to switch the voice boxes on 300 talking Barbie and Ken dolls in the United States to protest at the gender-based stereotyping of toys. In 1996, a programmer was paid to insert kissing men in skimpy bathers into the Simcopter computer game - 78,000 copies were shipped before the games company noticed. Copyright laws are the new battle front. Contacted via e-mail, ®TMark says it is a group of academics and professionals that does not like what corporatisation is doing to the world. It went public with a Web site last year, but claims to have been around for years, matching funding with projects via electronic bulletin boards. ®TMark is polemic and publicity savvy, counting great anarchists and Karl Marx as its ideological forebears. But its understanding of the mechanics of a capitalist world saw the digital press release conveniently include the mobile phone number and e-mail address of Beck's PR man. The story, and the Geffen lawyers' enraged response, was picked up by American and British media outlets. But why rip off Beck? The creators of Deconstructing Beck say it's not simply about bootlegging in cyberspace. The Beck samples have been rearranged to create something new, like digital graffiti. The CD was published by the Illegal Arts label, whose founder is a 28-year-old American masters student specialising in electroacoustic music. He goes by the pseudonym Philo. T. Farnsworth, and he says simply: "We feel the copyright laws should be changed to allow for this type of expression. What we are doing is 'fair use'." One of the composers featured on Deconstructing Beck is Steev Hise, who also set up the www.detritus.net site that is being used to distribute the CD. Hise has a server in his home, and a very fast T1 Internet connection. "I don't have to worry about my ISP censoring me when lawyers send them scary letters," he says. Detritus.net is dedicated to recycled culture. Hise, 29, says he has been recycling music, video, painting, sculpture and performance art for the past seven years. "I think that culture has always cyclicly reiterated itself. However, this point in history is unique because of two things: technology and capitalism," he says. "Technology makes it possible to have access to and easily manipulate and store information from distant places and times. People will do what they can do. Capitalism will colonise what it can." Hise says his influences include William S. Burroughs, who said that a page of words could be cut up to create a new piece of writing, and artists who use collage or express their take on the world by appropriating icons from mainstream culture. But what if the dadaist Marcel Duchamp was slapped with a copyright suit when he put a moustache on the Mona Lisa? Sitting at the extreme edge of the Net and techno generation, musicians such as Hise protest that by failing to keep up with technology, copyright laws are outlawing their art. Hise says that even Chumbawamba, with a hit on the international music charts, was forced by copyright lawyers in the United States to amend the CD jacket for Tubthumper and delete quotes from people ranging from the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to anonymous road protesters. The band put its Internet address in its place so that American fans could go online and read them anyway. Hise says: "The Internet right now is a sort of intellectual property chaos zone. It's a test bed. And it's a place where a point can be made that will also affect the rest of the world." Susan King, a 26-year-old Melbourne DJ, stood up at a copyright symposium attended by the Federal Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, in November and described herself as a cultural mechanic. The Attorney-General's Department is reviewing copyright laws in the digital age, prompted by court action from the Australian Performing Rights Association against Telstra and OzEmail over the distribution of music down telephone lines and the Internet. Public submissions have been received and stakeholders such as the Australian record industry have been interviewed. But so far, none of the submissions has challenged proposals to extend and strengthen copyright into cyberspace. The lone voice of dissent in Australia has been King, a "music appropriator". "A lot of artists are following what is happening overseas. It's hacking, in one sense. Another word for it is cultural jamming, or appropriating media and turning it on its head and sending it back out. I saw value in presenting that viewpoint to law makers," she says. King creates music with an Akai sampler, rather than sitting down to compose with notes on paper or strumming a guitar, because "you use the tools that are available to you". Artists and musicians draw their influence from their environment. "In the '90s, the environment around you is electronic," she says. King's band, Antediluvian Rocking Horse, was the first international act to have a CD released in the US by Negativland - sort of the high priests of this stuff after writing a book on the experience of being been sued for the release of an album called U2 in 1991 which sampled the Irish rock band. In fact, King has been influenced by many of the authors and musicians that have inspired overseas groups such as Detritus. "Through practising an art form that you gradually become aware is not acceptable, you reach out to find other people who are experiencing the same things," she says. King told the copyright conference that the growth of sampling in techno music in recent years "has to do with deep stuff like media saturation and the opportunity for self-defence against media coercion". But at its heart it's just like folk, which borrowed lyrics from previous folk songs. King is in the studio with Antediluvian Rocking Horse and the Australian techno composer Ollie Olsen, recording a CD that is 100 per cent sampled. As with the first CD, they won't seek copyright permission for the samples. "Heaven forbid we are successful. That's when they [lawyers] come after us because that is when we have something to take," King says. ®TMark's list of ongoing projects, ranging from jumping the fence at Disneyland to a Phone In Sick Day on April 6, can be found at www.paranoia.com/~rtmark. www.detritus.net is a recycled art site.
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