I visited Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers during a visit to Los Angeles in 1994 and was utterly awestruck. Rodia’s sui generis creation is truly one of the greatest examples of American outsider art. This 12-minute documentary from 1957 contains interviews with Rodia, who spoke with a thick Italian accent, as well as excellent footage from the surrounding neighborhood. (It also features a weirdly Twilight Zone-ish score.) I found this on Rick Prelinger’s archive.org a couple of years ago and was planning to upload it to YouTube myself, but I just discovered that it’s there already. Bonus Simon Rodia fact: He appears in the collage on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s.

This is simply the best thing ever: a fake trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that’s edited to make the movie seem like a heartwarming family tearjerker. The soundtrack song is absolutely perfect.

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.