Story Archives of 'Experimental Music'

Search around even the most modern office and you're likely to find a typewriter gathering dust in a corner.

Like so many things, its primary function has been usurped by the computer.

But this doesn't mean that people aren't still using typewriters.

In Boston, Massachusetts, for example, there's an ensemble group of musicians - the Boston Typewriter Orchestra - who use the obsolete machines exclusively in their compositions.

NHPR Correspondent Sean Hurley went to a recent performance of the BTO and files this report.

Conceptual artist and composer Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, went to Antarctica last year to record the landscape. The result, "Terra Nova: The Antarctica Suite," is an upcoming multimedia project that aims to document not just the gush of melting ice, he says, but to create the sound of ice, and all the layers of information frozen in the continent.

It's a very literal illustration of "Sound Unbound," which is also the title of a new collection of essays on sampling and digital culture. The book includes writers and musicians, such as novelist Jonathan Lethem, composers and progenitors Steve Reich and Brian Eno, and many others, looking at the intersection of sampling and civilization. Sound Unbound makes the case that layering songs and sound into mash-ups and re-mixes is not a novelty of dance club music, but is the very sound of an era - a time when bits of information circle the globe in milliseconds, and the lines between music, art, film, literature and technology have blurred - making everything fair game for communicating ideas.

Conceptual artist, writer and musician Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, joins Word of Mouth to talk about what "digital culture" means today. Also joining us is mash-up artist Greg Gillis, who performs under the name Girl Talk. His fourth LP "Feed the Animals" will be available for download this week. The album will take advantage of the so-called "Radiohead" model of making digital copies available as a download for whatever people choose to pay, and later releasing physical copies. He talks about the "hunter-gatherer" image of DJ culture, and sampling as a primal quest, and a route to reconnect us to our tribal roots.

UPDATE: You can download Girl Talk's new album Feed the Animals here.

We'll talk with Mike Silverman, the West Coast man behind That 1 Guy. Mike studied the bass and played in jazz groups on the West Coast but wanted his bass to do more than it could. So he designed the Magic Pipe which is a seriously refashioned upright with one string and thirteen triggers that sample a huge variety of sounds. He's playing at the Stone Church as part of his US tour, we'll talk to him about the mix of music and innovation.

****This interview aired originally on February 21, 2007***