Music, sound, and other noise. Welcome to Edition 144.
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Hello to the strangely large number of new subscribers this week. If you signed up recently and have five seconds, could you let me know where you found me?
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Helping a friend with research for a recent DJ gig lead us to this fascinating essay about Danceteria in NYC in the early 80s. ‘Old NY’ nostalgia lives another day.
New York Nightlife Gone: Danceteria ’82-’86
“I remember getting into Danceteria as a young art student, seeing Nina Hagen perform, and then going to dance to Fela and War on a different floor, chilling and watching strange film loops, going to doorman Haoui Montaug’s crazed cabaret No Entiendes, and seeing people from different scenes mixing. At its best, Danceteria felt like a city unto itself. It had a charged Blade Runner/Airport vibe.'"
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I was THIS CLOSE to grabbing the discarded 1990s MiniDisc player someone discarded on Bergen St. last week. Instead, I looked up this article and made some AI-driven portraits of retro portable music devices.
The Story of the MiniDisc, Sony’s 1990s Audio Format That’s Gone But Not Forgotten
But never cheap or widespread enough for the average listener, nor quite high-fidelity enough for the exacting audiophile, it spent most of its life in the West as a niche product. Today, a decade after its discontinuation, the history of technology has come to recognize MiniDisc as the evolutionary link between the Walkman and the iPod.
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I’ve been breaking out of my algorithmic music recommendation rut by, well, following different algorithmically compiled playlists, such as this l o w e r c a s e playlist appropriately called ‘aesthetic’.
Even better, digging into the manually compiled public playlists of users who follow matthew schnipper’s excellent deep voices newsletter. Here is user Gekkie Gappe’s ‘Angel’ list.
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Please enjoy (or go on a treasure hunt to find working downloads) for the great Smylon Nylon mixtape dump of the early aughts.
SMYLONYLON 28 Tape mix!
“Back in the late 1990's in NYC, in the search for another good used piece of clothing, I wandered into the Center for the Dull on Lafayette street. The place was like a cave inside with used jeans piled everywhere and clothes hanging from the ceiling. What really struck me, though, was an amazing mix of songs playing in the background. I asked and they were selling mixtapes done by the owner called Smylonylon. The only ones I could buy at the time were numbers 27 and 28. Some of the songs sounded like they'd been slowed down almost beyond recognition to match the beat, but it worked like very little I've heard since. Somehow, I've lost number 27 and I've asked many people and never found any other tapes.”
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The Korg SQ64 Sequencer is on sale! (US only, sorry.) This is not a sponsored post, just a good deal.
-Matt
Matt Pinto is a musician and designer based in New York.
Primeval / CRT