The geography of Pitchfork’s 2011 Top 100 list.

Full article/methodology is here.

"The 7” single set the length of the standard pop song, the double album symbolised the excesses of 70s prog rock, and the 12” gave life to the idea of the extended dance track for club DJs. The clarity of sound, the seductive gleam and rip-off pricing of CDs became emblematic of 80s yuppie aspirationalism – which made the sheer functionalism of the rave era’s white label 12”s, often with nothing more to identify them than a scrawled phone number from Doncaster, Dagenham or Düsseldorf, seem all the more thrilling and rebellious."

The Medium is the Message: Joe Muggs on how it’s never just about the music: music, and how we respond to it, is shaped by the medium.

This is clearly an oversimplification, but it’s still cool to watch.

Besides, everyone knows that acid house started in India.

The History Of Western Dance Music

Original blog post

Interactive version

Static version

- Mark Johnstone

(Source: ilovecharts)

"Music aestheticizes our lives. We walk around with headphones on and the sound colors everything we see. While listening Belle and Sebastian’s “Ease Your Feet Into the Sea” maybe life becomes something like a Wes Anderson movie, and the cute haircut on a girl waiting for the subway seems choreographed for that moment. Listen to Masonna’s Inner Mind Mystique and some random bored faces suddenly look gripped with pain. In 1983, the Japanese musicologist Shuhei Hosokawa wrote an article called “The Walkman as Urban Strategy” and said that the then-new device “provides the possibility of a private soundscape and provokes the dramatization of the walk act and the theatralization of a street."

from “Disintegration Loops and Simplesongs” By Mark Richardson, Pitchfork

(Source: tinkerkid)

"Change no longer happens all at once for everyone, as it did with the rush of Punk puncturing the ennui of 1970s mainstream culture. In digital networks, change is happening everywhere, constantly, and the mainstream is a much more fragile and temporary consensus than it once was. There will still be moments when something breaks through to enough people at the same time to feel like Punk, but it won’t be the same thing. There are a hundred punk moments happening every day, if you look hard enough."

“The New Patterns of Culture: Slow, Fast, and Spiky”

The whole essay is well worth the read.

(via sashafrerejones)

"Acknowledgement of lineage makes the new contribution stronger and more pronounced. But in this culture of copyright and ownership and money, it seems as if claiming unique ownership is somehow more valued than claiming lineage or reference or heritage. To have been influenced might mean you owe someone some money."

Douglas Rushkoff, from a conversation with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in The Believer

The Radioactive Orchestra: learning about radionuclides through music.

(thanks, Alex!)

SoundCloud genre demographics.

"So back to the League Unlimited Orchestra LP. This was an album that clocks in at about 35 minutes long, that contains about 2,600 edits, all done with tape, a custom-made ruler, and a splicer. As Rushent relates in the interview he did with Simon, he couldn’t rewind or fast-forward the master because he was too worried about the tape disintegrating completely."

Geeta Dayal wrote a tribute to legendary artist and producer Martin Rushent, who passed away recently. Go read the whole thing.

"

…instead of pipes, there were sixteen cat heads each with its body confined; the tails were sticking out and were held to be played as the strings on a piano, if a key was pressed on the keyboard, the corresponding tail would be pulled hard, and it would produce each time a lamentable meow. The historian Juan Christoval Calvette, noted the cats were arranged properly to produce a succession of notes from the octave…

It produces katzenmusic by torturing live animals as a productive means, causing them to mew on demand: literally cat-calls that are not merely cat-calls, but something more—a form of music semiotically reassembled from the distinct voices controlled by the device.

"

The Birth of Sampling by Michael Betancourt

Or, how the katzenkavalier presaged recombinant sampling and Autotune.

RIAA data, units in millions of cassingles shipped.

More on the cassingle.

(Source: marathonpacks)

Synth Britannia, a BBC4 documentary about UK synthpop in the 1970s and 1980s. The first part is above; Liz Revision has posted all six on her site.

Whale 'Pop Songs' Spread Across the Ocean →

Absolutely fascinating article about how the songs of humpback whales in the South Pacific evolve and spread. It turns out that specific themes in songs change astonishingly quickly, every 2 to 3 months, and new songs travel westwards from the east coast of Australia to French Polynesia.

But the best part? “Sometimes the “hit song” contained snippets from previous seasons…” Humpback whalesong mashups!