Phew! Thanks for understanding about the delay. There’s surely other changes now too, BUT never fear! I have already researched an even better process for next year, so Sound Camps, take note!
It’s ready for you all! This is some ridonkulous dust music, kids. Enjoy!
NOTE: BE SURE TO SELECT DUPLEX PRINTING TO PRINT DOUBLE SIDED to save trees.
To print a booklet, go to print and select booklet printing. Then in the options select duplex or double sided printing. And then there will be an option (on some computers) in advance settings that will allow you to select Top-Bottom. This allows the pages not to be upside down when printing
Or on other printers, select booklet printing, then under booklet subset, select both sides. And then check the box auto-rotate pages, with binding on the left selected.
We all love them and that damnable UNIMOG of a music machine, but how did all that begin? I caught up with PK of Space Cowboys for the story.
(RSL)When and how’d Space Cowboys come into being? What was the initial vision and how has it changed and grown over the years?
(PK)The Space Cowboys started wrangling the cosmos around 1997. I don’t remember exactly. It was a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away.
The Space Cowboys were one of the first large-scale sound camps at Burning Man. It started of as a group of friends who wanted to go to the desert, build and run essentially a free night-club in the true wild west. Initially the Cowboys had a large camp on one of the “corners” of Black Rock City, and ran a sound system and barter bar everynight. Big changes happened in 2000 when after meeting the fine lads of SpaceLounge, the crew’s focus shifted. As the two camps merged SpaceLounge continued to build the physical public camp that rocked every night and the Cowboys began work on a novel & radical idea at the time: a mobile sound-system. In 2001 the UNIMOG debutted on the playa, and well the playa has never really been the same since.
Ever since it’s founding the Space Cowboys have focused their on playa efforts into one evening, the Black Rock Hoedown, one of the finest events BRC has ever seen (we are a bit biased). Held every year on the Friday before the burn, with the advent of the UNIMOG the location has changed each year to a different amazing artwork on the open playa.
(RSL)Do you have sound camp veterans in your camp and what camps did they come from?
The old-timers amongst us are either original Cowboys or SpaceLoungers.
(RSL)What music stylins’ should people expect to hear from your boom bass?
(PK)Peeps should expect nothing but the finest in Breaks & House from the Cowboys. Our roster of residents is as deep as it is talented, and the individual leanings of our selectors vary. While we definitely have a funky sound, don’t be surprised to hear funk, electro and even the occasional drum & bass set coming out of the Mog.
(RSL)What is the Space Cowboys signature? What do you feel you do best?
(PK)Shaking your business! True story: At a Mog sound check by our old warehouse, an old man, the proprietor of a nearby shop, came running up and said “You! What you doing? Stop! You shakin’ my business!”
That’s frickin’ hilarious! So, with all the other big sound camps & sound art cars at Burning Man, what makes yours unique and a not-to-miss place to be?
(PK)Oh, you’ll have to come and find out. We wouldn’t be around so long if we hadn’t figured out the secret recipe!
(RSL)This year’s burn theme is Rites of Passage. For many old school electronica fans, the rave was a musical rite of passage for them. Do you remember your first rave and can you tell us about it?
(PK)Rave? I’m originally from New York City. I was going to clubs as a kid. I was Old School in High School!
[And on a side note] A True playa story: I was sitting in an RV with a friend’s ex and he asked me how I got started in this whole crazy thing, and I told him that I used to go to this club in NYC called MARS on Friday nights and we would dance all night in the basement. The crowd was amazing and diverse, there were drag queens, models, artists and big black gay men blowing whistles while the house music would keep everyone together in this amazing moment… I asked him how he got his start as a dj, and he said he started substitute djing for a buddy and eventually took his gig. When I asked where, he said Friday nights at MARS. His name was Moby.
(RSL)What a great playa story. When you think back to those days, who do you remember being the first significant DJ or what track made you fall for electronica? What about it affected you?
(PK)Jungle Brothers. I’ll House You. it made me realize that “electronica” is a ridiculous concept, the boundaries people draw are silly. Was that Hip-Hop or was it House? Who cares? Good music is good music. And to quote an ILS track: “Everybody loves good music.” [Here's a 2011 video clip with Afrika Baby Jam who discusses the group's history among other hip-hop topics on air with Breakbeats & Rhymes Radio.]
(RSL)Who are a few of your camp’s resident DJs our fellow burners shouldn’t miss and why?
(PK)Oh. I’m not going to play favorites. You crazy? Our crew is amazing. With talent like Shissla, Mancub, ShOOey, rrrus, 8ball, Kapt’n Kirk, Brad Robinson, Tamo, Deckard, Zach Moore and others how do you?
(RSL)Is there anything else you’d like BRC citizens to know about Space Cowboys this year?
(PK)Sure we’re going to do a little day thing at our ranch on Wednesday in the BRC Historical District, 4:45 & Esplanade, and of course out there somewhere on the open playa Friday night for the Black Rock Hoe Down. Come find us. [Note: RSL knows where they'll be Friday!]
RSL SUGGESTION #1 – MUSIC FOR THE ROADTRIP HOME
Go to www.spacecowboys.org, www.soundcloud.com/spacecowboys or check the Space Cowboys’ RIPEcast (their weekly podcast) available on Podomatic or iTunes and load up on sweet Cowboy sets.
Robert Moog. In 1965 he spearheaded a radical paradigm shift in music and its creation by inventing the Moog music synthesizer. Others had created computer based syths, but Moog was the first to create a modular keyboard instrument that allowed the musician to adjust timbre, pitch, intensity and fade, and it cost $11,000, a tenth of the price of RCA’s binary code run synthesizer. Then, in 1971, he invented the Minimoog, a portable synthesizer one easily could take on the stage and the road. Here is BBC video footage of the Moog’s 1965 world premiere.
Giorigio Moroder & Donna Summer. Leap forward six years to 1977. Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer craft a hit dance single almost entirely created on Moog synthesizers and what was to become known as the first completely electronic song: “I Feel Love.” Brian Eno is known for infamously bursting into David Bowie’s recording session for his Berlin Trilogy with Summer’s song.
Bowie says, “One day in Berlin … Eno came running in and said, ‘I have heard the sound of the future.’ … he puts on ‘I Feel Love’, by Donna Summer … He said, ‘This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.’ (From Bowie’s Sound and Vision CD liner notes.)
But why bore you with my writing about the significance of the Moroder/Summer collaboration. Here, Alison Goldfrapp narrates an amazing BBC Radio 2 documentary of the birth and significance of this song – Well worth a download and listen.
And if you wish to fully immerse yourself in electronic dance music history, download BBC’s four part series, The Great Bleep Forward: Presented by Andrew Collins. In 2004 along with BBC 6 Music, Collins explores the development of electronic music. Though the video isn’t anywhere online, the audio for the entire four part series is available for free from the Internet Archive. Why not download and listen to these truly intriguing intriguing and fun electronica history lessons on your way Home?
Then, perhaps you’ll find new appreciation for the epic pilgrimage the genre has made while your sparkly booty shakes to those incredible beats out on the playa. Oh, and, if you happen to be hitting decks out there, I’d sure looooove to be surprised by creative samples of Donna Summer’s monumental track.
I have a musical confession to make. I am a choir geek. I sang in high school and in college. (Singing Verdi’s Requiem in it’s entirety was the highlight of my choral ‘career.’) Those moments are entirely too far and few between now. So, I occasionally belt it out at karaoke and regularly sing in the shower or bellow as I drive in my car. I must thank Sister Clarina, my 3rd grade teacher and the all-school music educator, for giving me the love of beats early on in life. But then again, beats and music surround us. And for but a moment I will travel back musically to feed my inner geek just for this one blog post.
John Cage was one of the original composers to challenge the idea of what music is. He harnessed everyday tonal sounds into music and predicted the future liberation of musical composition based on electronic instruments and music. Here, as part of his The Future of Music: Credo, written in 1937, he predicts the future sound of electronica.
“The special property of electrical instruments will be to provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration.
WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL PURPOSES ANY AND ALL SOUNDS THAT CAN BE HEARD. PHOTOELECTRIC, FILM, AND MECHANICAL MEDIUMS FOR THE SYNTHETIC PRODUCTION OF MUSIC
It is now possible for composers to make music directly, without the assistance of intermediary performers. Any design repeated often enough on a sound track is audible. 280 circles per second on a sound track will produce one sound, whereas a portrait of Beethoven repeated 50 times per second on a sound track will have not only a different pitch but a different sound quality.”
Let’s visit a modern day example which proves Cage’s prediction with haunting exactness, and it happens to be a track that also took the playa by storm in 2009.
And if you so desire, here’s a more in depth podcast with history about and music from Pierre Henry, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Or perhaps you’d be interested in listening to John Cage’s 4’33″ and the story of it’s composition.
Ok, and because you’ve been so good, here’s a little something by Disorient’s DJ Arrow Chrome to get you shaking your burn booty.
