Kitchen Sink Music Vol. 3: Pop Music - Ross Harris

Punk balloons. This is what you are about to receive. A thirty second blast of non-music music involving pops, bangs, whimpers, and helium.

It's been said before, but damn that should have been longer. Filmmaker and VFX artist Ross Harris made this short but sweet number with his daughter several years back and it's been doing viral rounds ever since. Balloons are proving to be surprisingly musical objects.

Palimpsest - Yasunao Tone & Florian Hecker

Today we are going to stretch the term song to its breaking point. I would highly recommend headphones for this one- both for the experience and also to protect the sanity of those around you.

Yasunao Tone is a Japanese artist chiefly known for creating digital sound collages by damaging CDs and capturing the fractured sound as it's desperately attempted to be read by older CD players. Much like noise artist Christian Marclay, he physically engages with (read destroys) the machines we use to experience music and crafts new soundscapes in the process.

Today's Best Song Ever, Palimpsest, is a collaboration between Tone and electronic music composer Florian Hecker. In order to create the piece, Tone converted the symbols of the Man'yoshu (the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry) into data encoded onto CDs and recorded the sound of that data being interpreted by a CD player. Basically. The important thing is it sounds pretty nuts. These are the schizophrenic ramblings of electricity recorded for your listening pleasure.

As with much sound art/noise music, the piece isn't a song so much as an experience. By the end of its twenty eight and a half minutes my head had turned completely horizontal. My brain was bombarded with images of metal floss being yanked between my ears, an electric beehive, fleas dying at hyper speed, and the distinct impression my teeth were falling out. It's like walking through an arcade with highly selective tinnitus.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's pleasant listening, but it's endlessly fascinating. You'll hear a violin for a moment before it turns into a digital toilet flush which rapidly disintegrates into the shattering of an invisible wine glass. How many other songs can lay claim to something like THAT?

Phonodrum - Christian Marclay

Phonodrum - Christian Marclay (Spotify)

Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American visual and sound artist known for intentionally damaging vinyl records in order to create multi-layered sound collages. He is an argued early pioneer of turntablism and is closely linked with noise music.

Marclay claims he doesn't look for specific records when creating his works- he simply buys random vinyls from pawn and charity shops and manipulates them. At times he has even taken pieces of different records and joined them together to get rapidly changing and endlessly distorted sounds.

Today's Best Song Ever, 'Phonodrum' can be found on his compilation Records 1981-1989. Marclay reportedly created the unique sound in the number "by dragging a guitar string attached to the stylus across wooded records and wooden discs studded with nails." The sound is about as nuts as you'd expect from that origin.

It's like a building falling at hyperspeed into your ears over and over again as your brain rips down a conveyor belt while being assaulted by robots. Out of the screeches, bumps a squeals comes a sudden urgent and insistent rhythm. It's damaged punk evolving into a dance routine made of twisted metal and broken wood.

Song of the 2nd Moon - Electrosoniks

Dutch composers Dick Raaymakers and Tom Dissevelt are and were pioneers of electronic music and taped effects under the name Electrosoniks. In 1957 they released Song of the Second Moon, a composition built upon unusual audio samples and early synth sounds. The song was one of the first it's kind and stands as an example of early forrays into the field of electronica.

It's also fairly bonkers, but in the most lovably unnerving way.

The intro sounds like the opening of Voodoo Child shoved forcefully through a rotary phone. It has everything from distorted ghostly whistles to the death burbles of clavi-keyboards and the crushed whispers of industrial machinery. The song jumps styles several times over the course of it's three minutes- but always remains consistent in it's tone and presentation. The overall effect is that of a classical record collection being pounded into rubber electricity.

Laughing Song - The Residents

The Residents are an avantgarde music and visual arts group from San Mateo, California. All members of the group prefer to remain anonymous, frequently appearing in public wearing eyeball helmets and tuxedos. Like so:

Duck Stab is their fourth album. It is also considered to be their most accessible. Let that sink in while you allow Laughing Song to claw and dig it's way into your brain while letting off streams of giggles. Then go and find more and more and more.

Etude Aux Chemins De Fer - Pierre Schaeffer

Pierre Schaeffer is the credited originator of a form of music theory known as Musique concrète. Schaeffer posited a genre of music which uses acousmatic sound as a compositional tool. Put simply, this means using sounds from pretty much anything in the world (not just classically musical sounds such as those from instruments or the human voice) to create a collage of samples manipulated into a musical form.

His first composition in this style, composed in 1948, was Etude Aux Chemins De Fer or Study With Trains- today's Best Song Ever.

As you'd expect with music that rejects music, it's rather hard to describe. My personal listening experience has unfolded in two very distinct ways. When I initially sat down to listen I had put the song on in the background, and all I heard were random train noises. And something that sounded suspiciously like an angry cockatoo.

Then I listened to the song again, this time paying close attention to the rhythm and textures of the sound. You know what? I heard drums thundering along the tracks. I heard musical trills built out of the snapped and clipped whistles. They didn't always flow continuously, but they were most definitely there.

So it's not a perfectly flowing piece of music (how could it ever be?). In many ways it feels like a series of musical snapshots-brief ten seconds glimpses into the melodic rhythms flowing through the world around you, cut together into a two minute blur of the greatest intstrument of them all: Life.

Caledonia - Cromagnon

To break up all the good-time novelty records we've had recently, how about some avant-garde, throat tearing, industrial folk music? Just so you don't start feeling too happy.

Cromagnon were a collective band from New York lead by multi-instrumentalists Brian Elliot and Austin Grasmere. The band put out a single album titled Orgasm (later re-released as Cave Rock in 1993), recorded in just three days. Orgasm is a less a set of songs and more a piece of sound-art. Tracks include ones comprised entirely of screams and rocks being beaten together (Ritual Feast of the Libido), unsettling sound collages of modern technology (Fantasy) and over ten minutes solid of static driven white noise (Toth, Scribe I).

Today's Best Song Ever is opener Caledonia. Somewhere between a Scottish war march and Marylin Manson, the song tears at your eardrums with the whispered screams of madmen and the dead. Warped bagpipes squark and wheeze and drums echo and thunder like boulders tumbling down a mountain.

What's truly incredible about the song is how there were no musical reference points like this sound at the time. No one else was making music like this in 1969, and really no one would again until the late seventies/early eighties blossoming of industrial and black metal.

This creation of an entirely new sound was the foundation of the Cromagnon ethos and the concept behind the album. In a rare interview given in 2009 drummer Sal Sagado described their mission as being one of musical evolution. As he put it, ''The original concept of the album was to progress from different decades of music. Like, in ‘59 Elvis was shaking his pelvis and driving people — well, women — crazy. And adults as well, making them very upset. And then ten years later Hendrix was pouring lighter fluid on his guitar and getting a lot of great distortion out of his Marshall amps. And the Who was breaking up equipment. And then we were trying to carry it on to the next decade. We were going to say, maybe in 1979 there’ll be a group of people on stage that’ll be blowing through reeds of grass while someone is reciting some poetry, and another person is squirting water at a microphone on stage with a hose…'

The members of Cromagnon have since dispersed into solo groups, non-music related work or simply vanished into the ether. Their one album remains a unique and timeless experiment in sound, as fresh and terrifying today as it was when first quietly handed to an unsuspecting public.