The Tone Generation is a ten part series of podcasts about the earliest days of electronic music. Part One [mp3 link] covers Britain - with rare recordings from the 1950s and '60s by people like Tristram Cary, Daphne Oram, and assorted Radiophonic Workshop alumni. The music on offer is all pretty challenging - lots of atonal bleeps and waves of noise and very different from the commercially-minded output of Raymond Scott, who was working at the same time - although with more expensive gear. The podcast is presented by Ian Helliwell, and produced by Simon James, who also did the splendid Welcome to Mars.
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I wish I had the space/time/money to buy this Wurlitzer Sideman and give it the love and attention it deserves. In 1959, the Sideman was the first ever commercially-produced drum machine - a huge all-valve box with a spinning rotor-arm which triggered the various sounds, a bit like Raymond Scott's awesome light-powered Circle Machine. It's a fantastically complicated and ambitious thing, complete with switches for things like "foxtrot variations", and ten trigger buttons on the top which are the spiritual ancestors of those grey pads on Akai MPC samplers. This Sideman is apparently in good working order, but tragically has no bid yet at $99 with 21 hrs to go. (Thanks, Christopher)
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Sure, you can take a decent in-focus picture of anything (particularly anything with a blue LED on it) and it will look cool, but... goddamn! This is a Chiclet - a pocket-sized digital music-making box that runs for ten hours on two AA batteries. It's been in development by a group of MIT Media Lab types since 2002. The thing is, it's totally baffling. I've read most of this site, and this site, and I really don't understand it. One of the programmers, Ethan Bordeaux, had a paper published called: "Implementation of a Modern Adaptive Multirate (AMR) Codec for Cellular Systems Using a Multicore DSP". The one bit that sounds really interesting is this: They're planning to mass-produce the boxes, but rather than selling them to musicians (who'd want customer support, usable software etc), they want to sell them in record shops, programmed with their own musical alogrithms, as a kind of self-contained music generating box. So... as with all these things, it all goes back to Raymond Scott who in 1967 launched the Fascination and the Participator - two ambient music boxes which generated background music for your house.
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