The guys at the always-excellent animation blog Cartoon Brew celebrated their fourth birthday today and dredged up a link from February about the improbable Sponge Bob Square Pants Musical Rectal Thermometer (pictured above, business end presumably at the left).
While a complete assessment of the tuneful device’s impact on the development of human dignity won’t be in for years, it’s safe to say that the price of parental failure to closely read operation instructions just went way up.
Once, I produced music technology video and stuff for Gearwire.com, but nothing as cool as this piece wherein GW producers Bill Holland and Gretchen Hasse are invited into the basement of Mutato Muzika, the Los Angeles studio home of Devo. Gretchen turns on the nightvision and Bill leads us through the Mines of Mutato.
Artifacts spanning Devo’s career as well as Mutato’s business of soundtrack composition for the likes of feature film director Wes Anderson are casually piled hither and yon in the ghostly Baghdad-esque nightvision light. We stub our toe on the Wasp bass synth, almost knock over the Acoustic Reverbrato used on the keyboards on Devo’s “Gut Feeling” (!!), spot Devo’s Roland D-50 leaned up against the wall with “Gates Of Steel” patch numbers helpfully written thereupon and get an earful of guidance from Mutato composer / curator John Enroth.
Just when it couldn’t get any cooler, we find Raymond Scott’s (broken) Electronium - the world’s first sequencer - complete with “Doo Wah” knob. It goes to prove what I always guessed: Mark Mothersbaugh + major-league film budgets + Ebay = The Coolest Basement In The Western World.
Gear porn doesn’t get any better than this. Nice work Gearwire!
The always-cool Modern Mechanix ran this 1933 Popular Science story reprint yesterday. The message: chase away the blues of the Great Depression by building, tuning and playing an inexpensive monotimbral “electric organ”. If for no reason other than the one-note, tuned-resistor characteristic, I thought right away of the electrical and likely tonal similarities to the much-later Stylophone - and its good works in the hands of Kraftwerk (”Pocket Calculator”) and Bowie (”Ashes To Ashes”). No matter what decade, it’s always a miracle when you can make music from the sound of a crappy apartment building door buzzer. Plans here.
So what happens when you’re Van Halen, the last song in your set list is the million-seller “Jump” with its synthesizer-keyboard opening…and the recording you’re using to play back the synth is accidentally run at 48K instead of 44.1K?
What happens could be this (recorded in Greensboro, NC four days ago):
I can’t tell which is funnier, this long-hated cheesebag-anthem turned into a much more interesting, atonal mess in front of thousands of paying customers or the hilarious soldiering on of the Van Halens as they look at each other from inside the trainwreck. Eddie tries to transpose on the fly and match the wildly fucked up keyboards but the great thing there is the difference in pitch is non-musical - about 1.5 semitones sharp. So there’s no frets he can choose to fix the problem!
I know I’m courting my own on-stage disaster by making fun of this. But so what, it’s not like you’re going to be there to see it.
UPDATE: For a technical discussion of what is going on in this clip, click here.
