Well, it’s not that new: Lay It Down was released in late May. But it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard all year. (My pal Joe Keyes is the person who tipped me off to how excellent this disc is.) If I told you it was recorded in 1976, you would believe me. Everything has a real analog feel, thanks to the spare production by James Poyser and Questlove of the Roots. Questlove also played most or all of the drums on the record.

Al Green is singing about as well as I’ve ever heard him. Here’s the second track, “Just for Me.” You can buy Lay It Down here.

I grew up in southern Indiana, where a joke circulated that “shit” could be pronounced with four or five syllables: “shee-ee-uh-it,” or some such. This pronunciation wasn’t common in the college town of Bloomington, where I grew up, but I definitely heard it from kids who lived in the more rural areas outside of town.

Imagine my surprise not long ago when I discovered that Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, one of the most trusted general dictionaries in the English language, lists the two-syllable “shee-it” as an alternate pronunciation of the word. And not only that: The software version of the dictionary, which lets you hear pronunciations of many words, even provides audio of the two-syllable pronunciation. Here it is. I’ll let you judge whether audio of the word “shit” is NSFW or not.

There’s no current hook for this post about a little-known Hollywood scandal. It’s just something I’ve been meaning to post about for a couple of years. The bare details have been mentioned online, but only in passing, and as far as I know the scandal has never been officially reported anywhere.

So here it is: Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese’s excellent 1985 film After Hours—a significant portion of the movie’s first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from “Lies,” a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who’s gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It’s possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film’s release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I’ve found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.”

The Wikipedia page for the screenwriter of After Hours, Joseph Minion, mentions that the film included some “minor details” borrowed from Joe Frank, and that Frank successfully sued over it. But the theft was far from minor. Many of the details in the film’s first half hour are similar, if not copied outright: the chance meeting of a man and a kooky but sexy woman; the woman’s offer to set the man up with some of her artist roommate’s plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights; the man’s late-night phone call to the woman; his cab ride to meet her, at the end of which his only cash flies out the window; her wearing of a loosely tied bathrobe when she answers the door; her tale of having been raped by man who came down the fire escape; and so forth.

Here’s the entire monologue so you can judge for yourself. It’s 11 minutes long. If you’ve seen the film, much of this will sound very familiar indeed:

(If you don’t see the Flash audio player, here’s a direct link to the audio file.)

Joseph Minion apparently created the script in his mid-twenties as part of his work at Columbia’s Graduate Film Program. It was later optioned by Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, who showed it to Scorsese. Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise.

There’s also a weird twist: The cabbie who drives Griffin Dunne downtown is played by an actor named Larry Block, and he’s apparently the same Larry Block who appeared on many of Joe Frank’s shows for KCRW in the 1990s. Was the plagiarism discovered during the making of the film, and the role given to Frank’s friend Block as part of the lawsuit negotiations? Whatever the reason, it’s hard to believe Block’s casting was just a coincidence.

If you have any insight into any of this, post away in the comments…

For the upcoming update to its popular Melodyne audio-processing plugin, the German company Celemony has done the impossible: It has developed technology that can analyze polyphonic audio and break it up into individual notes, which can then be pitch-shifted, time-shifted, and otherwise mucked with. What this means is that the audio of anything from a guitar chord to a full symphony orchestra can be twisted into an entirely new piece of music. It’s long been possible to pitch-shift monophonic audio, such as a singer’s voice, or to pitch-shift an entire music track. What has never been possible before—and this is truly revolutionary, in a way that will eventually have a major impact on the music you listen to, whether you ultimately know it or not—is the ability to break apart complex, polyphonic audio into its constituent parts and rebuild it into something else.

To name just one application of this technology (and I’m sure someone will do exactly this): You could take the vocals-only version of the Beatles’ “Because” from Anthology 3 and completely reharmonize it into a new piece of music (even on the fly, with a MIDI keyboard), and it would still sound very much like John Lennon and the Beatles.

Celemony’s (slightly cheesy) promotional video explains everything:

At long last: The brilliant Los Angeles-based radio artist Joe Frank finally has a podcast. A year ago today, I wrote a long post about Joe in which I talked about his amazing body of work and shared the news that he’d been sidelined by some major health problem whose details have not been disclosed. As I wrote last year, “Joe’s work might best be described as a cross between Kafka, Nietzsche, Raymond Chandler, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and David Sedaris. He’s a short-story writer, a philosopher, a comedian, a raconteur, and one of the greatest-ever purveyors of the postmodern-noir sensibility.” Read my June 2005 post for a lot more details. I think Joe Frank is simply one of the greatest American artists of the last two or three decades—in any medium.

According to reports on joefrank.com, Joe is still ill, but he’s recovering slowly and beginning to work on new shows. In the meantime, he finally has a podcast. As announced on his site last week, “Joe Frank podcasts have arrived! Twice a month, we’ll serve up either a one-hour show, or a couple of signature stories, or a half-hour show, and every now and then, some absurd extras.”

The first offering is an excellent hourlong show from 1997 called “The Other Side.” It’s a typically diverse Joe Frank episode: It opens with an actor (or is it an actor?) mangling a short passage from the Bible, then moves into an improvised phone dialogue between two actors. Later on are excerpts from a phone interview Joe conducted with an unidentified woman who is apparently a friend of his; she tells Joe about her doubts regarding her current relationship. (As he often does with his phone interviews, Joe cut out most of his side of the conversation, which gives the interviewee’s answers the flavor of a monologue.)

The rest of the episode consists of two classic Joe Frank monologues. The first is a paranoid, Raymond Chandler-ish tale of an office worker who is visited by a strange woman who forces him to accept a mysterious box. The second is a first-person story of a man who realizes, out of the blue, that he must leave his wife: He tells her calmly that he’s leaving her, then packs up his things, walks out the door, and checks into a hotel to begin a new life.

If you don’t want to listen to the entire show, you should at least listen to Joe’s two monologues—they begin at the 17:22 mark and the 46:52 mark. They’re fantastic. Otherwise, load the show onto your iPod, slip your earbuds into your ears, turn out the lights, and enjoy.

Ever since I started this site, a year and a half ago, I’ve been wanting to post about the young British musician Stuart Wyatt, a classically trained electric violinist who plays solo live shows using foot-controlled loop samplers, a technique known as live looping. Wyatt used to have a robust website with plenty of free mp3s, but health problems and financial difficulties forced him to abandon the site in 2004 or 2005, and it eventually disappeared. I was happy a few weeks ago to discover that he now has a new site up with lots and lots of his music.

I do live looping with guitars and electronics, and I first became aware of Wyatt’s music in 2000 or 2001 through his participation in the Looper’s Delight mailing list. At the time, Wyatt was living in Paris and making money by bringing a rechargeable amp out to the Place des Vosges and creating elaborately layered instrumentals with the help of a battery-powered 14-second loop sampler (the classic Line 6 DL4):

Wyatt typically starts a piece by sampling himself playing a four-, eight- or sixteen-bar melody or rhythm. As the initial phrase repeats itself over and over again, he plays melodies and harmonies over the top of the loop, occasionally tapping the record button with his foot to add new phrases to the existing loop. In the right hands (and feet), such as Wyatt’s, live looping is mesmerizing to watch: Over many minutes, you watch and listen as a single musician slowly builds a simple musical phrase or section into a fully formed piece of music, often with harmonies, rhythms, drones, and counterpoint. A lot of the time, looping is simultaneously a composition and a performance, where a musician is reacting to what he or she has just played.

Here’s an excellent track called “Thursday Piece,” which Wyatt improvised live at home in 2002 with an Electrix Repeater—one of the best music gadgets ever. I own one and am obsessed with it.

“Thursday Piece” is about 12 minutes long, and it builds and develops slowly but beautifully. A lot more mp3s are on Wyatt’s main music page. If you like what you hear, you might drop him a little money through PayPal—he’s apparently having a rough time these days.

Live looping dates back to the early 1960s, when the minimalist composer Terry Riley developed the Time Lag Accumulator, a dual reel-to-reel system that let him record and loop a simple musical idea and then overdub dozens of improvised parts. The result was a massive, hypnotic, and ever-growing wall of sound. In the early 1970s, with help from Brian Eno, Robert Fripp began experimenting with a Riley-style reel-to-reel system that he later named Frippertronics. (“There it was,” Fripp later said, describing his discovery of this technique, “a way for one person to make an awful lot of noise. Wonderful!”) After years of experimenting with looping in the studio—on albums by Peter Gabriel and Hall & Oates (!) as well as his own—Fripp took the setup on the road in the late 1970s and early 1980s for a series of solo guitar-and-tape-delay concerts. Here’s some more looping history. These days, inexpensive digital technologies—both software and hardware—give both amateurs and pros a remarkable amount of looping power: There are now tons of great cheap looping devices on the market, almost all of them much more powerful and versatile than Fripp’s 1970s reel-to-reel system.

Because looping is a technique, not a genre, it is used in a wide range of music styles. The singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur plays solo live shows using two loop samplers and a stageful of effects devices, which allow him to create the sound of an entire band: He’ll start a song by tapping and slapping a beat on the neck and body of his acoustic guitar, and then he’ll layer arpeggios, strums, and backing vocals to accompany his own voice. It’s pretty incredible to watch. (The singer-songwriter Howie Day has apparently used looping in a similar way, though I’ve never seen or heard him do it.) This guy does tight, intricate beatboxing with the help of a great software program called Ableton Live. And this fairly technical Guitar Player article explores how various prominent guitarists incorporate looping into their playing.

On my own music page, you can hear a few tracks where I use looping extensively, though not in a live, real-time way. For those tracks, I built up a bunch of loops and then remixed them in my studio.

I began playing guitar in 1984, and I’ve gone through long periods where I’ve played hours and hours every week. I’ve hardly played at all in the last six months or a year; I’ve been busy with other things. But for several years beginning in mid-1998, I spent much of my free time writing and recording music in my apartment. Thanks to the inexpensive digital-recording technologies (audio sequencers, software synthesizers, drum-loop editors) that were just then becoming available, I started working with electronic textures and elaborate song structures. Most of my music from this period involves electric and acoustic guitars combined with looped beats, atmospheric synths, and historical voice samples from people like Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and J. Edgar Hoover. (I don’t sing, so the samples were partly a way to add human voices to my recordings.) I was listening a lot to this guy and these guys at the time, and their influence on some of those tunes is pretty evident.

I finished about an album’s worth of tracks during that phase. Here are a couple of them (they’ve now been added to the other tracks on my music page):

“Zero Sum,” from 1999, is one of the more elaborate tracks from that period. I used this and this to create the swooping octave shifts in the first solo, about halfway through the track; I used this (again) and this for the growly, synthlike solo in the progtastic final section.

“Trained Assassin,” from 2001, is sort of a futuristic spy theme. My then-girlfriend lent her voice for the whispered sample at the beginning. Once again, the solo is this combined with this.

In late 2001, I got my hands on one of these awesome gadgets and a couple of these awesome gadgets. Before long, I moved away from doing intricate, highly composed studio recordings and began doing extemporaneous live looping routed through analog filters and other effects. A few tracks from that period can be found on my music page.

There’s no real current hook for this. I just want to share some innovative and challenging music with those of you who might not be familiar with it. This offering fits nicely into one of the enduring themes here at Panopticist: the twisting and contorting of media to serve alternate, and more interesting, purposes.

Akufen is the nom de disc of Marc Leclair (left), a Montreal-based computer freak who creates incredibly kinetic, and utterly digital, electronic music by splicing together tiny snippets of audio that he records randomly off the radio. Many of his tracks start out with a cascade of seemingly haphazard split-second bursts of found sound; if you’re not paying close attention, it can sometimes sound like nothing more than a scratched and battered LP. As each track evolves, however, it becomes clear that there’s something really complex going on.

Akufen is best known for his track “Deck the House,” a six-minute extravaganza of house beats, funky synth bass, and slice-and-dice digital audio techniques. It’s a perfect encapsulation of his sound and methods. Here it is:

The track opens with about half a minute of Akufen’s trademark microedited radio snippets. At around the 30-second mark, snippets begin to repeat at regular intervals, and the growing sense of order is reinforced by the introduction of a simple 4/4 percussion pattern. Then, about 1:20 in, Akufen adds a four-on-the-floor kickdrum beat, and then a funky synth bass line, and the track is propelled into dance-beat heaven. It’s totally catchy, and it’s a really cool mix of avant-garde electronic music techniques and simple, genre-based dance music. Give it a listen.

“Deck the House” is on Akufen’s 2002 disc, My Way, which you can buy here.

The great Los Angeles-based radio artist Joe Frank has been struggling with health problems over the last few months.

If you’ve never heard of him, Joe is a completely original American storyteller whose shows have pioneered new forms of radio narrative over the last two decades. I’m most obsessed with his monologues, which are usually accompanied by eerie looped music, but his shows often incorporate other formats, including taped phone conversations, found sound, and improvised radio plays that Joe records with actors and then imposes a structure on in the editing room.

Joe’s work might best be described as a cross between Kafka, Nietzsche, Raymond Chandler, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and David Sedaris. He’s a short-story writer, a philosopher, a comedian, a raconteur, and one of the greatest-ever purveyors of the postmodern-noir sensibility. He’s spent his career grappling with all the grand topics: sex, love, morality, lust, greed, sin, fear, hatred, the search for meaning. Much of his best work is both utterly profound and completely hilarious. He often blurs the lines between real life and fiction, and his shows are sometimes explicitly about the creative process. At his core, he’s a tortured man who attempts to make sense of the world by telling stories about it. There is simply no one else like him. Can you tell that I’m completely obsessed?

And I have yet to even mention his voice, which is incredibly rich and expressive and spellbinding.

Much more about Joe after the jump, including details about his health, links to some of his work, and other info.

[Continue reading "Joe Frank, Radio’s Brilliant Purveyor of Postmodern Noir, Has Been in the Hospital"...]