Podcasts about Columbia Records

First of all, our apologies for missing an episode in April. We suffered some loss in our family, including our dog Leela. In this episode we pay tribute to our puppers, and pick two songs that remind us of her. We barely talk about our songs, and we just ended up talking about our pups the majority of the time.The release date of this episode is also no coincidence, as it would have been her 16th birthday. Rest in peace Leela, we love you and miss you every day!Our Songs for This Week:A Life Embossed by Protest the Hero, from their 2013 self-released album Volition.Run the World (Girls) by Beyoncé, from her 2011 album 4 released via Columbia Records.Support the show

Columbia Records and Sony Music Nashville artist Ella Langley is on the rise. The singer just released her debut EP Excuse The Mess, which is a must listen. In this conversation, Ella dishes the real info on what it's like to make it Nashville but we also talk about hunting, playing the college bar scene and so much. This episode will make you a fan.

Today's guest, for many, requires no introduction. Rick Rubin is an American record executive and producer with one of the best beards in the business. He's the co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, founder of American Recordings, and former co-president of Columbia Records.  He's worked with a laundry list of hugely successful bands and artists from various genres, including The Beastie Boys, Run DMC, Metallica, The Cult, Weezer, Rage Against the Machine, Johnny Cash to name a few. He has a podcast on the craft of music called Broken Record, and an epic, brand new podcast called Tetragrammaton. This year, he also released his first book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rick's perspective on life and creativity is truly inspiring and instructive. We recorded this episode at Rick's house in Malibu. It was a blast catching up and distilling his wisdom on life, creativity, and of course, music. We get into all sorts of fun in this episode, including Rick's experience practicing transcendental meditation from a young age, why it took eight years to complete his new book, and why he wasn't interested in writing a book about his career in music.  Let's get our creative juices flowing with the wisdom of Rick Rubin. Enjoy the ride and as always, share it with some friends. DISCLAIMER: This podcast is presented for educational and exploratory purposes only. Published content is not intended to be used for diagnosing or treating any illness. Those responsible for this show disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information presented by Luke or his guests. Please consult with your healthcare provider before using any products referenced. This podcast may contain paid endorsements for products or services. 00:06:09 — Rick Rubin's Approach to Vitality & Iconic Role in Music Rick's health regimen lately and latest approach to vitality The Source Family Starman Meditation Documentary: The Source Family Podcast: Tetragrammaton Podcast: The Broken Record  Giving flowers to The Stooges and Iggy Pop Rick's role in producing the Electric album by The Cult 00:22:16 — The Purpose Behind Rick's Book: The Creative Act Rick's mystical approach to creativity How Rick dealt with his house burning down in the Malibu fire  Learnings from Ram Dass and other spiritual teachers Read: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin  Read: A Swim In The Pond In The Rain by George Saunders The goal of this book and why it's different than what you'd expect Refinement and formulas for editing work 00:45:02 — The Essence of Art: Tapping into the Subconscious & Removing Ego Rick's unique writing process  Tapping into the subconscious for ideas  The role of the ego and intellect in creative projects  Byron Katie: thework.com  How art can easily become overproduced  The sensitivity of artists and prevalence of addiction 01:08:47 — Cultivating a Creative Way of Being & Reframing Self-Doubt The invitation for us all to be creators The impact of meditation on Rick's life How to reframe self-doubt Marshall Rosenberg's work with a non-violent communication: cnvc.org Rick's experience working with Johnny Cash and other timeless artists Rick Rubin's biggest influence in music More about this episode. Watch on YouTube. THIS SHOW IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY: BON CHARGE. Enjoy the amazing benefits of infrared sauna in the comfort of your home at an affordable price. Burn calories, recover faster from aches and pains and calm your mind, body, and soul. Use the code LIFESTYLIST for 15% off at boncharge.com/lifestylist. AND... MAGNESIUM BREAKTHROUGH. According to the American Psychological Association, chronic stress is linked to the six leading causes of death. When most people think of stress, they think of their job, traffic, tense relationships, current events, things like that. But the root of so much of the stress we experience comes down to a deficiency in one overlooked nutrient — magnesium. So, if you're ready to help your body deal with stress, instead of putting a band-aid on it after the fact, you're going to want some Magnesium Breakthrough. You can use the code “luke10” for 10% off at magbreakthrough.com/luke. AND… APOLLO NEURO. 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You can use code LUKE for 15% off at biocharged.co Resources: Instagram: @rickrubin  Twitter: @rickrubin Podcast: Tetragrammaton Podcast: The Broken Record  Read: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin Free Webinar on 6/2: lukestorey.com/goldandsilver Are you ready to block harmful blue light, and look great at the same time? Check out Gilded By Luke Storey. Where fashion meets function: gildedbylukestorey.com Join me on Telegram for the uncensored content big tech won't allow me to post. It's free speech and free content: www.lukestorey.com/telegram Related: From Hip Hop Mogul To Yoga Master With Russell Simmons #66 Dr. Christiane Northrup: Medical Freedom, Injection Protection + How To Save Yourself & Your Sanity #435  The Life Stylist is produced by Crate Media.

Baltimore artist Rican Da Menace and her dog baby Chase skip class with The Progress Report to speak about her come up, getting signed to Columbia Records, originally being insecure about her voice, thoughts on plastic surgery, people creating fake pages using her pictures, and her upcoming EP. https://www.instagram.com/ricandamenace/ https://www.instagram.com/tprmediagroup/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

NEWSLETTER LINK (Beehiiv)- Please read and subscribe!⁠⁠ The worst of the worst for the 2022-23 NBA season. Awards doled out are as follows: Worst Defensive Player of the Year Most De-proved Player Fifth Man of the Year Worst Team All-NBA Least Valuable Player (LVP) Playoff LVP Also includes a very long rant about Dillon Brooks! ---  Podcast phone number for voice mails (KLTB): (405) 466-7623 ⁠⁠Link to Playback.tv (where I will be live-streaming NBA games)⁠⁠ ⁠⁠NEW WEBSITE⁠⁠ --- An NBA history podcast about bad teams, bad luck, and bad decisions. Hosted by Lew ⁠⁠@L0GICMASTER⁠⁠ Please follow the show on Twitter: ⁠⁠@BackfiredNBAPod ⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@BackfiredNBAPod⁠⁠ and TikTok: ⁠⁠@BackfiredNBAPod⁠⁠ Stats from Basketball Reference, Stathead, and NBA.com. Transaction info from prosportstransactions.com and Basketball Reference. Intro and outro music: "Jeep's Blues" by Duke Ellington. ℗ Originally released 1956 Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment

A small village in Armenia might be an unlikely place for a future Eurovision contestant and global TikTok star to be discovered but that is exactly what happened for this week's guest, singer-songwriter-producer, Rosa Linn. With a series of massively successful singles already out, and a major record deal with Columbia Records, Rosa Linn's star is rising fast. She joins Carmel Holt in conversation to share her story.

On February 25, 1963, Columbia Records released The Barbra Streisand Album. The first song was “Cry Me a River,” and with that a star was born. Barbra Joan Streisand had a zany personality backed by a talent that Stephen Sondheim once described as “one of the two or three best voices in the world of singing songs,” adding “It's not just her voice but her intensity, her passion and control.” Harold Arlen, another of her favorite composers, commented, ”This young lady . . . has a stunning future.” With all-male rock groups like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Four Seasons ruling the charts, no one expected a twenty-year-old female singer from Brooklyn to not just hit No. 1, but repeat that accomplishment every decade that followed all the way to the next millennium and become the best-selling female recording artist of all time. Now, for the first time ever, comes the definitive book on the extensive recording career of this towering cultural icon, the Funny Girl considered by many to be the most talented singer of her generation. Barbra Streisand: The Music | The Albums | The Singles takes readers on a journey through every album, soundtrack, and single Streisand has released over the past sixty years. Our guide on this musical tour is Matt Howe, who has run Barbra Archives, the definitive Streisand-themed website, since 2003. He also has assisted Team Streisand on her Release Me album series. Besides analysis of every studio, live concert, and official compilation release, the book contains over three hundred FULL-COLOR photos from the albums, press kits, and Streisand herself. 

Which American singer songwriter sold more than 130 million records worldwide?  Who recorded these unforgettable songs?  “Sweet Caroline,” “Cracklin Rose,” “Song Sung Blue,” “Forever in Blue Jeans,” and “America.” Neil Diamond was one of the greatest hitmakers of all-time. “Sweet Caroline” was originally written for his wife at the time, but Sweet Marsha didn't work so he had to find a three-syllable name instead. He also wrote a song for the Monkees, which he'll tell us about. Remember when he had a song out that was also recorded by Barbra Streisand at the same time. So DJs around the country put the two together and forced Columbia Records to release a Barbra and Neil recording. It was a big hit. Poor guy was asleep when I called, as you will hear.

After so many music-related roles, the award winning makes an album for Columbia Records. This is the story of Terrence Howard's Shine Through It, from 2008.  Support the show: patreon.com/bizarrealbums Follow the show on Twitter & Instagram: @bizarrealbums Follow Tony on Twitter & Instagram: @tonythaxton

Vinyl sales were on the decline from the 1980s to the mid 2000s, but since 2006 sales have been on the rise. What's the history of vinyl, and what makes this format special?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hacia 1975 Fania Records comenzó a tender puentes con otras empresas a fin de expandir sus productos. Los puentes consistían en coproducciones con otras casas discográficas, siendo la principal Columbia Records o CBS en Estados Unidos. Pero Europa no fue la excepción. Una serie de acontecimientos y de contactos acabaron en la producción de un disco curioso: Blonde Latin de la banda francesa W.R.L.C., coproducción de Fania Records, Les Editions Louis Gasté y Editions Please Music, con Jean Marc Bel como productor ejecutivo. Esta es la historia de Blonde Latin y de una banda muy curiosa en La Hora Faniática.

Miles Davis is one of the most influential jazz musicians of all time, and his album "Kind of Blue" is widely regarded as a masterpiece. Released in 1959, the album features some of the most iconic and recognizable jazz tunes ever recorded. The album was recorded over two days in March of 1959 and was composed of five tracks, each one a masterpiece in its own right. The album was released by Columbia Records and was an instant success, going on to become the best-selling jazz album of all time. The album is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of jazz, and is often cited as the definitive example of modal jazz. Modal jazz is a style of jazz that focuses on a particular musical mode or scale, rather than traditional chord changes. The first track on the album, "So What," is perhaps the most famous. The tune is based on a simple modal scale and features solos by Davis and saxophonist John Coltrane. The tune is a masterpiece of understated elegance, and showcases Davis' masterful use of space and restraint. The second track, "Freddie Freeloader," features a bluesy solo by tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley. The tune is named after a friend of Davis' who would always show up at gigs without any money. The third track, "Blue in Green," is a hauntingly beautiful ballad that features a muted trumpet solo by Davis. The tune was actually composed by pianist Bill Evans, who also played on the album. The fourth track, "All Blues," is another modal masterpiece that features a memorable bass line by Paul Chambers. The tune is notable for its use of a 6/8 time signature, which was unusual for jazz at the time. The final track, "Flamenco Sketches," is a series of improvisations based on a simple set of chords. The tune features solos by Davis and Coltrane, and is perhaps the most experimental track on the album. "Kind of Blue" is an album that rewards repeated listening, as there is always something new to discover in the intricate interplay between the musicians. It is a timeless masterpiece that continues to inspire and influence musicians to this day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our 75th episode of Earned, we're joined by Lee Stimmel, a veteran of the music industry and the current head of global partnership marketing at Prime Video & Amazon Studios. We start by diving into Lee's time at Amazon, and learn how he spearheaded the company's influencer marketing program before taking on his new partnerships role. Lee explains how the lines between traditional talent and socially native creators are blurring, and shares Amazon's learnings around integrating influencers into its creative processes. Next, we take a step back and dive into Lee's seasoned career in the music industry. Lee unpacks how the industry has had to evolve from the traditional label structure to the current streaming era—a transition that has put the power back in the hands of the artists. We discuss how social media has enabled artists to connect with their communities in more meaningful ways than ever before, and the strategies behind building “fandoms” today. We then learn why Lee pursued original content creation at Columbia Records and Sony Music, and hear the origin story for “Mike Tyson Mysteries,” an animated series starring boxing champ Mike Tyson. We circle back to Amazon, and Lee explains why he saw influencer marketing as a “white space” in the company, and how Amazon continues to collaborate with and elevate these creators. To close the show, Lee shares what he loves most about working for Amazon, before revealing what's up next. In this episode, you will learn:How social media transformed the music industry How to build "fandoms" todayWhy Amazon Studios is tapping in to the creator economyKey Takeaways[04:00 - 7:01]: How Amazon Studios works with celebrities and influencers[8:13 - 11:00]: The evolution of the music industry[11:00 - 14:15]: How to build fandoms today[20:39 - 23:43]: Why Lee pioneered Amazon Studios' influencer marketing program[23:43 - 26:27]: Life at Amazon Resources:Prime Video & Amazon StudiosConnect with the Guest(s):Lee's LinkedInConnect with Conor Begley & CreatorIQ:Conor's LinkedIn - @conormbegleyCreatorIQ LinkedIn - @creatoriqFollow us on social:CreatorIQ YouTube - @TribeDynamicsCreatorIQ Instagram - @creatoriqCreatorIQ TikTok - @creator.iqCreatorIQ Twitter - @CreatorIQ

Un 9 de abril de 1932, hace 101 años, nació Carl Perkins, gran pionero del rockabilly desde la escudería Sun Records. En 1958 fichó por Columbia Records y se trasladó de Memphis a Nashville, donde durante cuatro años fue lanzando un material que se movía entre el rock’n’roll y el country pop. El sello Sleazy lanza dos volúmenes que recogen todos los singles de esa segunda etapa de este histórico artista que no recibió en esos años el éxito o el reconocimiento que sin duda habría merecido. Playlist (todas las canciones excepto donde indicado de los dos volúmenes de “The complete Columbia singles”) CARL PERKINS “Blue suede shoes” (single, 1956) CARL PERKINS “Jive after five” CARL PERKINS “Pink pedal pushers” CARL PERKINS “Levi jacket (and a long tail shirt)” CARL PERKINS “Pop, let me have a car” CARL PERKINS “This life I live” CARL PERKINS “Pointed toe shoes” CARL PERKINS “Highway of love” CARL PERKINS “One ticket to loneliness” CARL PERKINS “L-O-V-E-V-I-L-L-E” CARL PERKINS “Too much for a man to understand” CARL PERKINS “Honey, cause I love you” CARL PERKINS “Just for you” CARL PERKINS “The unhappy girls” CARL PERKINS “Anyway the wind blows” CARL PERKINS “Hollywood City” CARL PERKINS “The fool I used to be” CARL PERKINS “Sister twister” CARL PERKINS “Forget me (next time around)” Escuchar audio

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

After going viral the 217 Princess known as Kashh Mir stopped by illanoize radio to speak on what she was doing before her musical rise, as well as the impact she's felt from the success of "Boom" formerly known as "Mouskatool" alongside Mello Buckzz, Amari Blaze and Moni Da G. As you listen you'll learn more about how Kashh is prepping to release more music including songs within the R&B genre, how Mouskatool came together, visiting Columbia Records, and more. You can also watch the full conversation on our YouTube channel and Subscribe or download the illanoize radio app. ----Connect With Us On Social Media ----- Instagram: ⁠www.instagram.com/illanoizeradio⁠ Twitter:⁠ twitter.com/illanoizeradio⁠ Facebook: ⁠www.facebook.com/illanoizeradio⁠

Pat welcomes Kevin Hartbarger back to the Co-Host chair to discuss Elvis Costello's Columbia Records discography!!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Frank Marino Interview: Frank's early experimentation with LSD led him to picking up the guitar and becoming a guitar hero, but it wasn't without a price. One of the most often overlooked guitar players out there, who's anti-establishment mindset caused industry experts to turn, this was an amazing conversation where we discussed everything, including:  Cool Guitar & Music T-Shirts!: http://www.GuitarMerch.com  Why he walked away from $250,000 and his contract with Columbia Records... details of Frank's LSD experimentation, and how guitar was the bridge from his post-LSD dream-like state into reality… God, faith, mercy… the upside and downside of signing with a record label early on in his career… how he developed his playing style, his SG and amp mods… patience, seeing good things in bad things, and more. 100% REAL: Subscribe & Website: https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/subscribe Support this show: http://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/support

50 Cent Quotes on Life, Success & Power (Wisdom Radio) Who is 50 Cent? 50 Cent (Curtis James Jackson) is an American rapper, actor, producer, and entrepreneur. He began a musical career and in 2000 he produced Power of the Dollar for Columbia Records, but days before the planned release he was shot and the album was never released. In 2002, after Jackson released the compilation album Guess Who's Back?, he was discovered by Eminem and signed to Shady Records, under the aegis of Dr. Dre's Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records. With the help of Eminem and Dr. Dre (who produced his first major-label album, Get Rich or Die Tryin'), Jackson became one of the world's best selling rappers and rose to prominence with East Coast hip hop group G-Unit (which he leads de facto). In 2003, he founded G-Unit Records, signing his G-Unit associates Young Buck, Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo. Jackson had similar commercial and critical success with his second album, The Massacre, which was released in 2005. He released his fifth studio album, Animal Ambition, in 2014 and as of 2019 is working on his sixth studio album, Street King Immortal. During his career Jackson has sold over 30 million albums worldwide and won several awards, including a Grammy Award, thirteen Billboard Music Awards, six World Music Awards, three American Music Awards and four BET Awards. He has pursued an acting career, appearing in the semi-autobiographical film Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2005), the Iraq War film Home of the Brave (2006) and Righteous Kill (2008). (imdb) #50cent #karatjuicepodcast #wisdomradio --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/karatjuicepod/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/karatjuicepod/support

Charlie FARREN burst onto the national scene in the early 80's as lead singer of THE JOE PERRY PROJECT, teaming up with Aerosmith lead guitarist Joe Perry and releasing an acclaimed album on Columbia Records. Farren penned the Billboard charting classics “Listen To The Rock” and “East Coast, West Coast”, also co-writing four songs with Perry including the hit “I've Got The Rock ‘N' Rolls Again”.The Joe Perry Project sold out theaters across the country and toured arena's & stadium's around the world with artists such as Ozzy Osbourne, Rush, Heart,  ZZ Top, and Alice Cooper.FARREN subsequently formed FARRENHEIT, a trio releasing a self-titled debut album on Warner Brothers, produced by Keith Olsen. Three singles from that album, “Fool in Love”, “Bad Habit”, & “Lost in Loveland”, as well as video exposure on MTV, established FARRENHEIT as one of the era's premier rock acts. Highlights for FARRENHEIT included the coveted opening slot on the 75+ date BOSTON ‘Third Stage Tour', sold out from coast to coast, including a performance at the ‘Texxas Jam' to a sold out crowd of 85,000 people at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, TX.More recently, Charlie has been touring North America as ‘America's Special Guest' with Three Dog Night, REO Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, and many others. This Summer he's performed as a Special Guest with ZZ Topp, Joe Perry, Max Weinberg, Three Dog Night, Average White Band, Elliot Easton and others. His latest project, CHARLIE FARREN: GUITAR & VOICE has been rolling out with regular releases of compelling new original music that has been resonating with audiences across the United States.Charlie continues to be one of America's most original and compelling musical artists. He takes the stage alone, and leaves with a roomful of new believers.https://charliefarren.com/

The flow and the ingredients by which an idea becomes an offering — and life practices which call that alchemy forth. The mystery of it all that can only be named and wondered at — and the ordinary mystery that creativity is a human birthright, a way of being rather than doing, that beckons to us all, in everything we do, from crafting something to conversing to the arranging of furniture in a room.This is where Krista goes with the rock star music producer Rick Rubin. It's not a conversation about the creative process of the many great musicians he's worked with — but a conversation that is for and about us all. There are some surprises, too, in his lovely, soothing voice — like the way he finds a metaphor for all of life in pro wrestling. And he leaves the doors of his studio wide open as they speak, so there is a soundtrack of ocean waves.Rick Rubin has been a singular, transformative creative muse for artists across genres and generations — from the Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash, from Public Enemy to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, from Adele to Jay-Z. To name just a few. His new (and first) book is The Creative Act: A Way of Being. He is co-founder of the record label Def Jam Recordings, and former co-president of Columbia Records. He is also one of the hosts of the podcast, Broken Record. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________Please share this new season of On Being with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues, and perfect strangers… ! And be sure you've followed On Being in the app place of your choice. And if you can take a minute to rate the show, too, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok).

With Matt's dad in declining health, Jeff suggested that today's album should be "one for Dad." We discuss Dave Brubeck's Buried Treasures, an archival release which was originally recorded across three nights in Mexico City back in May of 1967. Notably, Dave took the stage with his quartet, featuring legendary saxophonist Paul Desmond, bassist Eugene Wright and drummer Joe Morello. As Brubeck writes in the liner notes, the concerts were recorded for Bravo! Brubeck!, an album that had a "Latin American themed" concept. Bravo! Brubeck! was released that same summer and the concept for the record meant that anything that didn't fit the theme was left on the shelf.  Which means a lot of material went unheard for years. The Buried Treasures release gave Brubeck fans a fresh round of cuts from what had been an extremely inspired run of shows. The liner notes, written by Brubeck, offer an extensive look behind the curtain of the performances. A separate booklet details Brubeck's history with Columbia Records. All of this makes for a fascinating journey into the world of Dave Brubeck if you're up for the trip.But that's just one part of today's episode. We discuss a number of different topics, including dads and parents in general, the sacrifices they make that we often don't know about until years later -- and getting a chance to repay the gifts. Some debts can never be truly repaid, but the gratitude lasts a lifetime. This one's for you, Dad.P.S. Get yourself a copy of Philip Clark's book, Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time. It's a must.

For Case 198 of The Rap & Order podcast First Klass Regg and Taurian B. revisit Baby Keem's debut album The Melodic Blue. The guys also discuss whether Baby Keem will ever get out of his big cousin Kendrick Lamar's shadow or will he become just another rap protégé. The Melodic Blue was released on September 10, 2021, by PGLang and Columbia Records, with Keem serving as the Executive Producer. The guys break down the album track by track with features from Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott and Don Toliver, Brent Faiyaz and Lil Uzi Vert. Be sure to watch, like, share and subscribe!

Nick is joined by performer Dee Tails who performed many creatures and droids for Lucasfilm in recent years including appearing as the troll Falken in Willow, L1 in Rogue One a Star Wars Story, the Pike Quay Tolsite in Solo A Star Wars Story and Slowen Lo in The Last Jedi - just to name a few. He shares his story of how he got to where he is today and the role that Star Wars played in his life.The Streaming Star Wars Network brings content to #StarWars Fans of all ages and generations. With Around the Galaxy, we bring you that magic moment when Star Wars fans meet for the first time. On Podcast of the Whills, we take a deep dive into the canon or a particular aspect of the saga. And our LIVE Friday night call-in talk show, Force Connect, looks at the latest in news and conversation in the Star Wars universe. From #disneyplus content, to comics to news and rumors, Chris, Pete and Nick have you covered! www.StreamingStarWars.comTikTok: @TheSSWNetworkInstagram: @TheSSWNetworkFacebook.com/StreamingStarWarsTwitter: @TheSSWNetwork & @ATGcastPatreon.com/StreamingStarWars (c) 2023 Pete in the Seat StudiosFrom IMDB:Dee Tails is a rising British trained actor who got his start in an RnB Band called MN8 signed to Columbia Records topping the U.K/E.U charts in the 90's, and were also added to the Bad Boys movie soundtrack. They were soon requested by Janet Jackson to join her on her 1995 European tour, while having several tours of their own as Britain's Biggest All Male Black boy band of the 90's.Soon after the huge success of band Dee found himself finally on the West End Stage performing in Shakespeare's Macbeth and Romeo And Juliet. He was also booked to reprise such roles as The Genie Of The Lamp and Dick Whittington's Cat Tommy, in Christmas Theatre Pantomime productions for the Hiss and Boo Company, as his first creature.After landing an exclusive 2011, Nescafé commercial in Cape Town, S. Africa. Dee went on to perform in his first feature film 2015's Art Ache a low budget film where he plays a wing man/best friend role to the lead, creating the humor in those scenes and in less than a year after acting in that film found himself head hunted by Neal Scanlon's CFX Department for an extremely secret 2015, Disney and Lucasfilm project, that went on to become Star Wars The Force Awakens directed by J.J Abrams.Immediately following this Dee was then tracked down by ITV who were interested in him performing on their 2015's big budget new show Jekyll and Hyde, as the reoccurring Harbinger (half man half dog creature) The show ran for one season but in that time his character proved to be a keeper and great for exposition.But Disney and Lucasfilm weren't quite finished with Dee just yet. It was while performing on the set of The Force Awakens and in between takes that caught the attention of both Neal and J.J realizing that they had access to an actor who could perform through whatever suit they threw at him. Which caused them to not only cast him in 2016's Rogue One as L1 where he was originally going to play the main droid K2so (until further development required a bigger name) but then going on to cast him in supporting roles in 2017's The Last Jedi as Slowen Lo and ultimately 2018's Solo, playing his biggest role to date within Star Wars as Quay Tolsite.In 2018 even one of the biggest Games in the world requested Dee to step in and cover a performance of its biggest character Cayde-6 in Destiny 2 Forsaken landing him his first ever gaming performance courtesy of Bungie.It's very clear to see that this versatile up and coming actor is one to watch for, as validated by some of the biggest studios in the world of entertainment and would be a huge asset to any production.

In the second of a two-part interview, Ryan speaks with Rick Rubin about his new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, respecting everyone's unique approach to the creative process during collaboration, his new podcast Tetragrammaton, the importance of studying art created long ago, and more.Rick Rubin is a renowned American record producer and the co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, founder of American Recordings, and former co-president of Columbia Records. He has produced albums for a wide range of acclaimed artists, including the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Audioslave, Rage Against the Machine, and Johnny Cash. He has won nine Grammys and has been nominated for 12 more. He has been called "the most important producer of the last 20 years" by MTV and was named on Time's list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World".You can hear part one of Ryan's interview with Rick here.

In the first of a two-part interview, Ryan speaks with Rick Rubin about his new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, the importance of allowing creativity to happen rather than willing it into existence, working with the unique facets of the artist's ego, the importance of changing up the way that you do things, the phases of the creative process, and more.Rick Rubin is a renowned American record producer and the co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, founder of American Recordings, and former co-president of Columbia Records. He has produced albums for a wide range of acclaimed artists, including the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Audioslave, Rage Against the Machine, and Johnny Cash. He has won nine Grammys and has been nominated for 12 more. He has been called "the most important producer of the last 20 years" by MTV and was named on Time's list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World".Part two of Ryan's interview with Rick will air on February 22nd for subscribers, and March 1st for non-subscribers.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

For Video Edition, Please Click and Subscribe Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgc1N2J-a90&t=160s As an A&R man, songwriter and song publisher JAY LANDERS works in many genres of music – with traditional vocalists, classical-crossover artists, pop, rock, urban and country singers, classical, comedy, children's music, Broadway Cast albums and Motion Picture Soundtracks. Visit hwww.jaylanders.com. A note from Barbra: I had never even been in a nightclub until I sang in one. And that was a fluke since I had no intention of being a singer. I wanted to be an actress, but I couldn't get a job. Then a friend told me about a talent contest at this little Greenwich Village club called the Lion, where the prize was $50, and dinner was free. I sang two songs and won, which led to being hired at a more sophisticated supper club around the corner called the Bon Soir, with an actual stage ... and a spotlight. It was 1960, I was 18 years old, and this was the first time I felt the warmth of that light. Everything else in the room went black and I couldn't see any faces, which made it easier to concentrate on what I was doing as an actress…reaching deep into myself to identify with the characters in songs that came from the theater. All of a sudden, my name was in the newspapers, my two-week engagement kept being extended, and the buzz that began at the Bon Soir led to a contract with Columbia Records in 1962, the start of a long association that continues to this day. The initial plan for my first album was to record it at the club, and these early tapes have been sleeping in my vault for six decades. I'm delighted to finally bring them out into the light and share what could have been my debut album, Live At The Bon Soir. Thanks for listening., Barbra Streisand  

Welcome to the FuturePerfect Podcast where we talk with compelling people breaking new ground in art, media, and entertainment. This podcast is produced by FuturePerfect Studio, an extended reality studio creating immersive experiences for global audiences. Visit our website futureperfect.studio for more details.The text version of this interview has been edited for length and clarity. Find the full audio version above or in your favorite podcast app.For episode 006, Wayne Ashley interviews Andrew Keller, founder of We Few Group, a post-media company that manages singers and songwriters, and develops brand partnerships and ventures with internationally known visual and musical artists. Making innovative use of blockchain technologies and NFTs, Andrew has been building compelling projects with such noted organizations as the David Bowie Estate and singer-songwriter Stefan Storm.Early career at Columbia RecordsLet me start right off by saying how excited I am to be speaking to someone who's been part of the music industry for over 20 years. As much as I love music, I've had very little access to the inside workings of the business. You've had these long relationships with labels like Columbia and Capitol Records. What are some of the most important insights you've gained over the last two decades?Andrew Keller: One of the biggest insights I've gained is that change is necessary and hard. When you're dealing with global major labels it's really hard to make noticeable changes. There's a lot of people working at major labels who are innovative and want to do good. It's just really hard to turn a gigantic ship around. You're dealing with all sorts of policies and god knows how many different types of contracts that were written over the years.How did you get started at Columbia Records and what were your major focuses were when you were there?AK: I started at Columbia as a 17 year old and was a total music-head. I grew up in New York City so I had access to absolutely everything, and thankfully, I had parents who were simultaneously really supportive and also slightly oblivious. From the time I was 13 or 14 I was going out to places I probably shouldn't have been and exploring all sorts of different scenes from nightclubs to hardcore and punk shows to mainstream pop shows. I was really giving myself a crazy education in different subcultures and figuring out little scenes and pockets that had their own worlds, archetypes, and systems in place. And they're probably all relatively similar, it's just people wearing different clothes and different hair. But the whole concept of having these scenes and worlds always excited me. It kind of all played into ideas of identity—sonic identity and visual identity.I was going to lots of shows around 2002 when there was this giant emergence of bands in the tri-state area who were coming out of the punk scene. And it became kind of this pop-punk, emo, screamo post-hardcore thing. I refer to it lovingly as the Warped Tour-scene, which was this festival that traveled around the US for years. There was a ton of attention on bands that I was friends with and bands that I had built relationships with as a fan.One thing kind of led to another and I ended up getting hired as a junior A&R scout / assistant at Columbia and got to work for some amazing people. One of whom is kind of this incredibly legendary small bald man named Matt Pinfield, who was a DJ and then VJ on MTV. A lot of the time we kind of ended up having a deal where he would get booked to DJ and then I would basically cover his set and he'd split the money with me if he had to leave.So I started DJing and it was just this awesome moment in time where I was really young and exposed to so many people. It became clear to me at that point that I just loved being around creative people. I was never in a band. I don't sing. I don't consider myself an artist in any way, shape or form. I do consider myself a creative person and a professional fan. I realized early on that for me it was gonna be about being the conduit and the kind of middle man between the artist and the rest of the world.That period of time was really incredible. I got to work on MGMT's first two albums as a coordinator then started to sign bands on my own like Cults and St. Lucia and doing stuff in the dance space with Krewella and Dillon Francis. And then one of the last things I got to do at Columbia was Bring Me the Horizon, which as a metal kid was unreal. And that was all under a guy named Ashley Newton, who is still one of my closest friends and mentors. He was responsible for signing Spice Girls, Massive Attack, Daft Punk, and Pharrell. Ultimately I went with him and Steve Barnett, who had been the chairman of Columbia, over to Capitol Records when Steve was relaunching Capitol.Streaming music, shifts in the industry, and joining Capitol RecordsI'm very interested in the sort of crises that upend one's assumptions about the world and motivate people to do something radically different than what they've been doing. You mentioned inertia in the music industry when we talked earlier. What happened that caused you to leave Columbia, join Capitol and eventually start your own company?AK: There were a few things. I was 30 and had started at Columbia when I was 17 and I really wanted a change. I loved my artists and everyone I worked with. It really was a family, but I was too comfortable. If you do A&R at a label your real challenge at the end of the day is to sell records. Your goal is to find artists, help them make the best record possible and have as much success as you can. There's a million ways to do it, and I'm not even saying I was great at it, but it's a very linear goal. You go from point A to point B, and that's fine, but it had just done so much and I needed a change.So Steve Barnett called me and said what would you want to do if you were going to stay at a label? And my answer was that streaming was starting to become really dominant. And the thing that streaming changed was access to global music. Before streaming if you were a British band you would sign to a label in the UK for the world. But unless something really took off, you might not even get a US release. When Spotify started putting out music, for the most part, nothing was geo-locked. Everything was coming out day and date, but labels were still working territorially.So I said to Steve, I think there's gonna be a really big shift in the way music is consumed from an international standpoint and I wanted to create “international A&R 2.0” for streaming. So off I went to Capitol Records where I started figuring out this whole system. And also taking systems that were already in place and trying to break them because there were things that didn't make sense to me and that I thought needed to be changed. Part of that was really just being the ambassador and being the person who could go and have some difficult conversations. But also go and represent Capitol around the world. It was a lot of time on airplanes.I had a ton of fun at Capitol. I got to partner with Lewis Capaldi who is on his arena tour right now and is a fantastic artist. I introduced Capitol to SM Entertainment, one of the biggest K-pop labels in the world, and they have an amazing and fruitful partnership. When I reached the end of my deal at Capitol I was in my thirties and my brand had always been owned by a major corporation. There were things I wanted to do that I'd never be able to do in those situations. For example I wouldn't be able to music supervise a movie, I wouldn't be able to launch my own projects or do certain things.An open-ended post-media companyFrom here you started your own company We Few Group. I like to call it an “open-ended post-media company”. You take on so many roles—an artist manager, a mixing engineer, an NFT project producer, an entertainment strategy consultant, you're also working closely with visual artists to produce a graphic novel and even knitwear. This kind of post-media practice that you engage in is so exciting to me and it's exactly what FuturePerfect is doing. How are these different worlds and practices connected for you?AK: When I went off to start We Few Group everyone was like what is it, what are you going to do? And I just said I'm going to do things that excite me with people I like. And that was it, that's the entire thing.For example, you mentioned the knitwear. A couple of years ago, there was a painter that I was obsessed with and I wanted to buy his paintings. I ended up getting on a Zoom call with him for over two hours talking about what he was doing. At the end of the call he asked—if I manage artists could I also manage a painter? He's in the kind of traditional art world, but makes these 30-second horror films around each of his pieces on TikTok. It's all kind of neo-gothic stuff.He has all of these kids as fans, everyone from artists and influencers and just regular teenagers and 20-somethings, the typical TikTok audience. And they all wanted merch. They weren't necessarily buying fine art, but they wanted merch. And he and I started having conversations about it. He wasn't really interested in making merch because he is an artist, but he was like, I'll start a clothing company. Next thing you know, I'm learning about knitwear.This connects back to your earlier question of why I was leaving. The answer is I wasn't learning stuff. There was no time in my life at a label that I would ever be learning about making knitwear, or consulting for Arizona Iced Tea and helping them with their entertainment strategy for two years. I now know more about consumer packaged goods and beverage production and can wrapping. Is that the world's most useful thing to know [laughs]? No but I love learning that kind of stuff and being around it.Crypto and transforming artistic engagementThis brings me now to your fascination with the crypto space. That's another expansive world. What about crypto most excites you and your efforts to transform both artistic and business practices? How did you get into it?AK: I got into crypto early. I'll preface this with saying it's not because I bought millions of Bitcoin at $2 and am now sitting here just pounding money. I wish that were the case, but it's not. I started buying little fragments of Bitcoin in like 2010. Growing up things like business and banking and the stock market were like the devil to me. For better or worse, I kind of vilified it in my mind. But with crypto it felt almost like punk rock banking. I was completely intrigued by it as a kind of rebellion. For years friends heard me talking about crypto, and when the pandemic started and touring was shut down there was suddenly a bull market mentality in the crypto space. And NFTs, which had been around for a few years prior, started to be something that artists, managers and agents were paying attention to. People started calling me saying you probably know about this stuff, right?I gave pretty much everyone the exact same conversation. I said please don't do this, it is really early. This is a real world and kind of culture. You do not care about them. They do not really care about you. Your fans do not care. You know, this is bad for everyone. I guess not a lot of people were voicing that at the time. A lot of people were saying we should do this and people made a bunch of money, but I think a lot of them also looked a little dumb. A lot of the projects were pretty empty. Most of them don't get talked about anymore.But as this world kept growing I started getting calls again. I realized that I could help be a middle man and tour guide. I could help bring the right people with the right intentions in and help shape what adoption to Web3 looked like and help introduce people to the real crypto-native world and to the people who really care about this. A lot of what I do now with Web3 is try to find interesting projects and people who I think will love and enjoy this space and help them either dip their toe in the water or jump in the right way surrounded by the right people.Working with the David Bowie EstateTalk about the David Bowie project, because clearly this is something that you have a lot of passion for, and through it we can better understand what you mean by NFT, crypto space or blockchain.AK: It was without a doubt, one of the most incredible and surreal things I have and probably will ever get to be a part of. Let's put it this way, when my son came home from the hospital in his nursery at home over the changing table is a caricature of David Bowie. My dog's name is Bowie. I'm not a casual Bowie Fan. I revere Daivd Bowie.I couldn't write it better. I'm sitting on the computer one night buying something on the NFT marketplace OpenSea with my dog Bowie sitting next to me and I get a text that says “I can't really say much, but can I introduce you to the Bowie estate, they want to talk about NFTs.” We end up starting this dialogue with the executor of the Bowie estate, who is just an incredible man. He had heard a lot about crypto and what was going on in this space and was very cautious, but had a kind of bullishness. As someone who knew Bowie well, he knew Bowie would've been really excited by this. For me, there had to be a very specific why. That question of why are we doing this? What is our north star for this?What was the vision that emerged for the project?AK: I basically spent the weekend thinking about Bowie and everything I knew about him and digging into his art collection because he was a huge art collector. I happened to have the catalog of the Sotheby's auction when they auctioned off his collection. So I started going into it and asking what did his collection look like? What kind of art did he collect? Then you start thinking about him as a technologist and a lover of new technology. And you're like okay you had BowieWorld before Metaverse was even a thing we talked about. You had BowieNet, which was his own ISP and kind of fan club site. You had BowieArt, which ultimately became a showcase of art that he liked and art made by his community. And then you start thinking about Bowie Bonds and the idea of him having commodified his work and well, that sounds a lot like a bunch of NFT projects. And I just went, okay, this is a guy who kind of had the ethos of the crypto artist before that was a thing. If the blockchain is the permanent immutable ledger, then let's go put this on the blockchain. Let's go put his legacy there.So what does that mean to put his collections on the blockchain?AK: Well, it wasn't his collections, it was, let's do a project that puts on-chain—something that is on the ledger and can never be deleted—that he was here. And let's create something to honor his legacy. I kept going back to the fact that he was a huge supporter of new artists. He was a digital artist himself. I got access to the Bowie archives through my partner Joaquin and I would literally get screenshots on my phone of anything from the archive whether it was an outfit he wore or a ticket to one of his shows or art he had done or a photograph. Everything is meticulously databased. And so Joaquin and I basically started narrowing down this idea.The project became, let's get a handful of the best artists in the crypto art space, from super established to new and up-and-coming and give them free rein to create anything they want to contribute to Bowie. They also had the added bonus of incorporating anything from the archives, which no one has ever been able to do. From there I started to ask who do we want, who makes sense here?I did things like going through Bowie's personal art collection and basically tagging a bunch of stuff like “landscape”, “British artist”, “contemporary African artist”, “sculptor”. And then I did the same with crypto-native artists and tried to find what the connections were. It wasn't about finding a one to one match with everyone, but there were certainly people where I could say okay, this guy's work kind of reminds me of this guy's work. Or I think what this guy does with his art is kind of interesting in relation to this part of Bowie's archive. And also people who were fans of Bowie and people whose art represents certain things that I thought were key to Bowie's legacy. So we came up with a dream list and started approaching them. Almost everyone said yes.What makes this specifically crypto art? How do you differentiate the art that emerges within the blockchain? What is unique about it?AK: What makes this special? Well it is a new medium for art, a new way to distribute art. Artists are able to do things they couldn't do with prior art forms. For example, there are some works that are coded to literally change the time of day; there are pieces that morph over time; some of the artists built mechanisms into the work that would change the work automatically at a future time…at the end of the day it's just art. There's a community aspect to this art. All of the artists in the project interact directly with their community, their fans, and collectors. There is no middleman. There are no traditional rules. There needs to be collaboration, direct connection, dynamic movement, and that's what makes it special to me. Being on the blockchain is a means for it to exist. And then there is the “smart contract.” That's a huge part of what an NFT is, the actual code you are gaining access to in this token. This contract protects not only Bowie, but artists and the NFT community from being exploited. Everything was a 50/50 partnership between the artists and the estate, and 100% of the profits went to charity. Launching a new transmedia art projectTell me about Kids of the Apocalypse, another far reaching transmedia project that spans across music, NFTs, music videos, a comic book, and film. Here is a quote from the Kids of the Apocalypse Discord channel that sums up the project really well: In the aftermath of a cataclysmic bio-explosion, a social movement of revolutionaries is born to break the chains of the tyrannical rule of Horizon Corp in the wake of the apocalypse. A multimedia art project born from the music, Kids of the Apocalypse (KOTA) aspires to highlight the themes represented on the journey of our - awakening, unity, and deposition of unjust power. Positioned as a multimedia IP with strong experience and connections in the music industry alongside a world-class design team, KOTA is a love letter to those who dare to speak out and be themselves - delivered in the form of a suspenseful, emotional, and immersive sci-fi adventure.AK: Kids of the Apocalypse was a concept and story that was conceived about 10 years ago. There was a Swedish production group called The Sound of Arrows, and Stefan Storm from the group had started this kind of side project idea Kids of the Apocalypse. Imagine a dark comedy version of—I'm gonna say X-Men because it involves mutants—that is alt and internet leaning and kind of self-referential which also has a music component. There's this whole story and a really immaculately created lore and universe. And now imagine 10 years ago saying let's make this happen. Where the do you begin? So this idea sat there for a long time.So cut to 10 years later and I'm reconnecting with my friend Derek Davies, who was the founder of Neon Gold, which was a label that I had actually done a label deal with when I was at Columbia and who had signed Sound of Arrows and put out their first EP. He was still in touch with Stefan, and Derek is also doing a lot of stuff in the Web3 space. He has an incredible company called Medallion. I think we have put together a pretty incredible team—we've got Derek and the Medallion crew, we have Stefan and his crew, we've got an incredible creative agency who have been working on all of this alongside Stefan. And we've got the guys at Bench Mob who are some of the best digital architects out there from a social media strategy perspective. We've got an incredible community manager, we've got a advisory board of people who really are some of the best and brightest in the space from Cooper Turley on the music NFT side to John Roger, who's one of the advisors and was marketing for Star Wars for Lucasfilm and then became the first head of franchise development at Disney.We have released a few songs and one video, which I think might be the number one (I hate data points because they get outdated quickly so I might be wrong here) most traded piece on Glass which is a music video NFT protocol. We've also created something that I think has never been done before, which was creating a mechanism that integrates traditional streaming with NFT minting. Where in order to gain access to the allow list you actually had to interact with and log yourself into your Spotify or Apple account. This is a very blockchain-native project, but I also want everyone to be able to hear the music, even if you don't know what an NFT is, because the music is fantastic. The first drop is a PFP (profile picture) project. It's season one and includes the eight main characters, which you're randomly assigned to and each of them has its own unique theme music and properties, and it's all happening on the Blockchain. We're doing all this on Solana, which is a chain that I think allows for very quick movement. And part of what we want to do is really involve our community in the storytelling and really let them into all of the bits and pieces of the lore. And to me, a lot of that will come from surprise and delight and from airdrops and from opening up your wallet one day and seeing things you didn't know were going to be in there.For those of us who are still new to this space, what is a wallet? AK: The wallet is the digital space through which everything is integrated and enters into your possession. Your wallet is where you hold your cryptocurrency, where you hold your NFTs. So you may log into your wallet one day and if you're a holder of Kids of the Apocalypse NFT, you may find something new that has been added to your wallet. We've also created an amazing community in Discord, and the fan art alone is pretty incredible. I encourage people to check it out because we really are trying to build something unique. I think the website is one of the coolest websites I have seen, it is fully immersive, and we're going to play with it.So how will the comic book and full film emerge? How is that all going to be integrated?AK: The full-length film is a dream. It could be a short film too, we don't know. The plan is for this to be a story told in a moving visual media. We're still having discussions about how and what that will look like.Before we stop, were there any other current projects that we should be aware of?AK: Yeah there are two things. After the Bowie project I felt that it was important for me to put myself out there more. I felt that there was an opportunity to experience what artists and creators in this space go through, their step-by-step process. My father was a photo journalist, and I've always loved photography. I had this idea going back to the idea of the blockchain as a permanent immutable ledger; and thinking of photographs, particularly snapshots, as as memory objects; and what if you minted those memories to the blockchain, and then they're there forever. Now what happens if you then renounce your ownership of them? If you're using the snapshot as a representation of a memory, what if I minted it, and sent it to you and now it's yours? What does it mean for someone else to have my memory? It was an idea that I kept coming back to and I finally felt the need to bite the bullet and just put this out there. It's called Memory Loss. I spoke to a few artists in the crypto space to see if the idea offended anyone. I got their support and encouragement. I minted some of the snapshots and made them available on the Tezos blockchain, which is a space that is more experimental, low key, less pressure. It's on the marketplace Objkt. I do have ideas for future ways for this to evolve.The other project, equally experimental, gives support to visual artists who want to start playing in the music NFT space. There are some artists making really amazing music and building a fan base and building patrons and building their own worlds with their own rules in this space. I wanted to create a way for visual artists, who are curious, to safely and with integrity and respect, integrate themselves into that world. The short of it is I am launching an NFT-based singles label. The name is, W3 F3W like my company, except that the ees are 3s. It's going to be a place for great new music and great visual art to collide and hopefully again, just bring people into a world that I'm pretty excited about. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit futureperfect.substack.com