The Playlists
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(This is a sticky post, please find current news items below) By Horatio Huphnagel in Hosey |
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If you'd like to download any of these tracks, click here.
1994 by Hosey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
And this is going to be our dumping ground for all the stuff we've recorded over the years that's never been released. Once it's complete, it will be known as "You Had To Be There" :
For Booking and Whatnot: huphnagel at gmail.com
Who Are We?
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(This is a sticky post, please find current news items below) in Hosey |
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Hosey is a Post-Hip Hop PostPostPunk Samplecore duo currently slugging it out in New York City. Patrik is the man behind the tables and samples, Hughes is the man swinging the bass around. The music could be lazily described as an all-too-literal combination of our influences. A more interesting way to describe it might be “What happens when Music becomes Self-Aware” or maybe “Where Music goes when It Dies”. Do you remember the scene in Transformers: The Movie (1986!) when Ultra Magnus and half the surviving Autobots land on the Planet of Junk and meet the “Junkions”, a race of robotic beings who are built of other planets' garbage? Their language is only made up of phrases lifted from Earthen TV broadcasts that reach their planet. The Junkions are a fair analog to our music: it's constructed from *a lot* of little pieces of other people's music strategically pocketed with vocals sampled from TV, movies, and other Earthling media.
We play live shows around New York City, mostly in the East Village, where we live. We also record a slew of music in our tiny little apartment, so we'll be continuously updating this page with new music and announcements about upcoming shows. We also go out to as many shows as we can and will try to keep this page updated with upcoming plans so everyone can go out and have a good ol' fun time hanging out.
Have Fun,
Hosey
Pinata Party on Wednesday July 2nd
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Tuesday, 01 July 08 - 05:44 PM (GMT -05:00) in Hosey |
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Benjamin Franklin: A Would-Be Proponent of Sampling?
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Saturday, 17 May 08 - 06:57 PM (GMT -05:00) in Hosey |
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I read an interesting thing on what Benjamin Franklin thought about intellectual property law. It seems he and I have a similar point of view, which isn't surprising seeing as how Franklin was first a scientist before he was the famous statesman we now know. Most scientists feel that research should be openly shared and free to be built on by anybody else, because that's how ideas and theories are most quickly and efficiently advanced. Imagine if Newton hadn't been able to publish his ideas on physics without first obtaining permission from and paying the estate of Pythagoras? Or any of the Greek mathematicians for that matter. What if Einstein hadn't been granted permission to use Newton's Laws to disprove the Newtonian worldview? Einstein himself was no fan of quantum mechanics, and he was notoriously vocal about it (“God does not play dice with the universe.”). What if researchers in quantum physics and string theory today weren't allowed to apply Einstein's law of relativity in their research, because Einstein didn't like the kind of experimentally verifiable results quantum physics was producing?
Excerpted from The First Scientific American by Joyce E. Chaplin, available now. Great book, go buy it!
“...
Franklin was revealingly silent on the clause of the constitution that actually mentioned science. Article 1, Section 8 gave the federal government power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Time to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The section was the origin of U.S. patent law [and copyright law -Ed.] and Franklin disapproved. Other delegates drafted, argued, and revised the clause; the convention's most famous “Author and Inventor” did not help them.
Franklin thought authors and inventors should get credit for their creations but not benefit financially. Certainly, he wanted credit for what he had invented. Having worn his bifocals [a Franklin invention -Ed.] for decades, he had made sure to tell a London friend, in 1785, exactly what they were and how they worked. He had even provided a diagram and corrected the opinion of an eminent London instrument maker and optician about their function. But he claimed no right to any reward for his “double Spectacles.” And he had even earlier stated, in his autobiography, that he had never wished to patent his Pennsylvania fireplace. He had allowed another man to do so (he got “a little Fortune by it”) because he believed “that as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours””
Quite an astounding clarity of thought. I wonder what Franklin would have thought about the kind of sampling that Hosey does? He was definitely no stranger to music. He apparently could play a few instruments, but most famous among his musical activities was his invention of the Armonica, a water-based instrument played by pressing your dampened fingers on different-sized bowls of rotating glass set in a trough of water. Weird, right? It's based on the same principle behind the way a crystal drinking glass will “sing” when rubbed along the rim with a wet finger. I really, really would like to get my hands on one someday. I've only heard one played a few times on TV, and it sounded heavenly.
Franklin also openly wished that he could have seen life 200 or 300 years after his death. In other words, today, so it's fun to think of the infinitely curious Benjamin Franklin wandering about modern day America. Would Franklin have been onboard for the appropriation of other people's music in order to make your own? The concept seems as though it would be pretty foreign to him, as if it might be hard to even explain what's going on. He would have definitely been fascinated by Records and Turntables, seeing an amazing application of electricity, a field he was a pioneer in. And he would have applauded the innovative use of one's hands, a trait he extolled in colonial Americans. Franklin even appropriated some of the literary work and speeches of others for use in some of his essays, and in turn some of his writings and speeches have been appropriated by others, most famously in some of the lines from the US Constitution. He thought that knowledge should be free, evidenced by his desire to see education offered to all people, not just aristocrats and the elite. He was a loud proponent of the idea of Circulation; circulation of ideas, blood, money, tides, air, everything. I can only imagine he would have admired the ingenuity and intellectual free-for-all mentality exhibited by Turntablists and other Sample-based artists. The circulation and re-circulation of music, sometimes long-forgotten, would probably have appealed to him. To imagine a creation of yours, given permanent life by the constant circulation from one hand to the next, from idea to idea, from one song to another, from one generation to the next, from one context to a new one; I find it hard to imagine he would have not easily grasped the elegant beauty of the Sample Cycle.
And he certainly would have understood that a samplist's re-usage of someone else's song doesn't stop the original author from profiting through his own enterprise. Especially if the new, sample-based work is sufficiently different in sound from the original. That would mean that two people could independently produce streams of income from one resource, something I think Benjamin Franklin would have found delightful.
Have Fun,
Patrik
A Love Letter to Our Fans and Friends In Attendance on Friday
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Sunday, 11 May 08 - 10:57 PM (GMT -05:00) in Hosey |
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Thanks to everyone who came out to the show this past Friday! It was definitely the best show we've ever been a part of. You (the audience) were so raucous, wild, unhinged, and totally the biggest ball of enthusiastic love I've ever come in contact with. The whole thing was surreal, I found it hard to believe it was all actually happening when I was onstage. Thank god our set was complex enough that I could let it absorb me, or else I might have just floated off into the rafters right then and there.
And to feel genuine Applause. The kind of cheers that are real communication with a performer. The way a person claps louder and louder, not because it's what's supposed to happen or because everyone else is doing it, they clap more and more because they want to establish their own connection with the performance. Applause is funny, when it's the kind of thing that explodes out of you without control it's an expression of individuality, an expression of your personal need to be heard among this mass of noise. Crowd behavior and cheering is often associated with mob mentality, and it certainly is a mob activity in a lot of cases. Many times it is an expression of solidarity (sometimes forced or expected). But sometimes the applause only appears to be mob based, when it is in fact a unique instance where a large group of unassociated people are unified in one moment not just by their common activity of being at the same show and enjoying it, but are united by the simultaneous need to outwardly express the same emotion. I don't clap for a performer because I want him/her to hear a crowd applauding, I want him/her to hear me applauding. To accept something as “good” through your critical reasoning however frivolous that something seems, to allow something province in the real estate of your mind and memories; surely that is one of the most personal moments there can be. Regardless of why you like something, no one can take away the privateness of the moment when your mind finds something that entertains it.
Our music is somewhat strange, it's not exactly the kind of thing people are used to hearing or seeing performed. Most often, because our approach and method of making music is unorthodox, people at our shows have no prior context to apply to our performances. No “set of rules” that define whether the music is being performed well or not, whether it's any good or not, or even more specifically: whether a song is over or not. As a contrasting point, when you're at a typical rock show you know a song is over because of several things: First, we're all hyper-familiar with music, and hyper-aware of the conventions that are used in any particular style of music. Whether you have the musical vocabulary to actually verbalize it or not, your brain has been trained to understand that certain chord changes or dynamic shifts signal the end of a song. That's why critical minds find it entertaining when those conventions are played into and then broken at the last minute. Our brains love surprises. Second, bands usually very visibly convey the ending of a song in a physical way. Whether it's raising the guitar in the air to slam it down on the final downbeat of the song, or the drummer standing up to repeatedly bang the hell out of two cymbals as fast as he can, we know certain physical behaviors signal an ending. Third, we're somewhat trained to know an ending is coming because of the relatively uniform length of popular music. Somewhere between the three minute and three thirty mark, our brains begin to expect a song to conclude, simply because that's what is common. None of these things are innate either, it's something we're all trained in. To paraphrase Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain On Music , because it is so ubiquitous in our modern world, we've all become experts at listening to music.
So, I bring that up because at many of our shows we've received loads of confused applause due to the fact that our musical restrictions physically disable an ability to play into typical rock show conventions. There's a lot of dynamic shift in our sets, and a person could easily be unsure that a song is over and it's OK to applaud. “Besides, one of the guys onstage is using Turntables, is he just DJing or what? You're not supposed to applaud for a DJ, right?” Common occurrences that are usually offset by an overwhelmingly warm response from people when hanging out after a show. To go from that, to this past Friday, when the response was active, immediate, and enthusiastic. To go from wrapping up a song followed by near silence and nervous glances around the room to see if it's OK to applaud or not, to Friday when like a schoolteacher I had to actually ask for the audience's silence so that I could address them or start a tricky intro to a song. I was almost forced to flick the lights on and off for silence when you guys were eagerly clapping in the wrong rhythm at the intro of “God Damn Kid”! People applauded dynamic shifts (!) in the music, people laughed at all the little in-jokes tucked away in the songs, people actually “sang” along with some of the samples! To make it to that night from where we have come, it's the greatest feeling in the world. Believe me when I say that I heard and internalized every single beat of your hands. I didn't hear the cheers of a crowd, it felt like I heard each and every genuine person's singular claps like little streams of dopamine circuited through me and right back to you.
Thank You. It's the current high point of Hosey's career and achievements, and I mean this most sincerely: It was the single greatest moment of my life thus far.
Have Fun,
Patrik
Show on May 9th
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Thursday, 01 May 08 - 02:35 AM (GMT -05:00) in Hosey |
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More info soon...
So... It Has Been a Minute
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Monday, 21 April 08 - 06:11 PM (GMT -05:00) in Hosey |
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Whew! It's been a while since we posted any news for the handful of you that follow our music. Sorry, I guess that's my fault. What's happened since we put out 1994? All kinds of fun stuff. The album has been downloaded over 300 times, last I checked, and that was a month ago. It's been streamed from this blog approaching 1000 times (!). It's been listened to or downloaded by humans in over 21 different countries(!): USA, UK, Germany, Canada, Philippines, Australia, Sweden, Taiwan, India, Poland, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Morocco, France, Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, Finland, Norway, South Korea, and Japan.
The album's been remixed slightly several times since then as well. Nothing big, just stuff that another amateur recording engineer might notice. But if you haven't listened to 1994 in a minute, you should check it out again. The mixes are much smoother, the Bass more even and full, and the sound quality is little higher fidelity. We haven't gotten around to actually pressing any CDs yet--forget that, we haven't even gotten the artwork done for the thing yet. We're still looking into getting it mastered, but it looks like for now that's just a pipe dream. Oh well. A lot of people have hand-made copies, with handwritten tracklists and a neat little "The Tick" sticker for artwork. Cherish those, they're the only physical copies out there. And what's neat: since we did this whole process ourselves, it's probably one of the few instances in your life when you've received musicians' work completely unfettered by any outside interests. These are the 7 songs we wanted you to hear, in the order we wanted, with the samples we wanted, mixed the way we wanted them mixed. Could it have been done better? Absolutely Definitely. Could it have been more honest? I doubt it.
I nearly lost my mind recording this thing, as some might know. It's strange, I haven't listened to the album much since we released it--and almost never for pleasure--but listening to it now, all that frustration and broken-ness I felt squeezing the life out of me last summer is right there in those digitally encoded 1's and 0's we call music these days. Such a strange sort of blue tinted asthmatic hyperventilation. Sleeping on a patch of deep green grass in the middle of a demolition site. You know the kind of thing, "Are the walls breathing in on us, or are we just a little bigger today?"
Not that things are very different now, and I still don't think I've gotten back to my old self yet: I still wish I was a superhero. I still wish I could joke about serious things a little more, and then still take them very seriously. I still wish the world wasn't barreling full-throttle into some sort of terribly endless Cold War II (and sidenote: women in politics will do just as well as men when it comes to continuing to screw up the world). A person can be reasonably unquestioning of 3 things in his life: He was born, he likes sex, he'll die. While Time may be real, our perception of it is certainly an illusion. Thank god I'm not a superhero, because I would probably end up a super villain in no time. We probably drink too much.
7 statements about 7 songs. And those are the last things I'll ever say about 1994 (probably). Latre.
Have Fun,
Patrik
You Had To Be There
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Monday, 21 January 08 - 12:09 AM (GMT -05:00) in Hosey |
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What I'm starting you off with is 3 old/new to you songs. The first isn't actually that old, nor is it even really a Hosey song. It's a remix of a song called "Walkie Talkie" by the band Good For Cows. I call it the "Broken Up,Right? Mix". Second is "Bad Start", which was originally played as a sister piece to "Cowgirl Blues". Third is "Oblivion" which stands out as the first song we did that hinted at the band we've become. I'll get more in depth with these descriptions in some upcoming posts.
Have Fun,
Patrik
I Got A Lot of Anger
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Monday, 31 December 07 - 05:09 PM (GMT -05:00) in Hosey |
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<= Right Click here to download this track =>
The album closer. This piece marked a change in our music writing process. It was the first song completely conceived after both Hughes and I had moved to New York City, and the first time our Sampler (the SP-303 at the time) was used as a key part in the songwriting process. Before, the Sampler had been used mainly as a playback device for sequencing done on the computer. At the time we wrote this piece, we had recently set up a method to record 24-bit stereo into the computer. Without getting too audio geek-y, let's just say that no longer was there a distinction between processing “in-the-box” or out of it. Now every part of our arsenal (computer, Sampler, Turntables, Bass, Minds) had equal weight in the writing and arranging process.
Not a lot of samples in this one. It starts out with a brilliant piece of dialogue from Home Movies, one of my favorite shows even now when it's no longer on the air. Coach McGuirk is speaking about stand-up Comedy, but I suspect what he says would apply to a lot of the same people who are reading the blog of an unknown band that “can't even get into the Army, if you can believe it”. I know at the point in time we put this together, there wasn't another sample in the world that so precisely and “eloquently” put into words the cynical fatalist perception of life shared by my friends and I. The only other really prominent sample is from the song “The Beginning and the End” off the album Oceanic by the band Isis.
Have fun with the album, kids. Thanks a lot for all the support.
I Got A Lot of Anger
I heard it's a good way to get things off your chest
You know I've got a lot of anger, Brendan.
(yeah?)
And I need to channel that anger
(yeah)
Usually,
I just have a couple of drinks
At my apartment
Start yelling
and Pass Out.
Well this is a Good Way
to bring that
Energy,
To the Public
To the People
Better Known As Burma
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Sunday, 30 December 07 - 11:17 PM (GMT -05:00) in Hosey |
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<= Right Click here to download this song =>
This is probably the strangest song on the album. It also happens to be the oldest. The main structure (everything but the scratching) was all put together way back when we still lived in Hattiesburg. It was one of the last two things I worked on there; the second being “When Will Then Be Now?”. It's made up of snippets from the Sonic Youth song “Shadow of a Doubt” off EVOL. Then some very subtle use of a piece from Mission of Burma's “Trem Two” off VS. And by subtle I mean even now I can't remember specifically what was sampled and where it was placed, but I do remember using that record for something.
The song's like this: first you have to remember that the whole thing should play out in your mind as shadowplay (if you need an example of it, check out the embedded video underneath the lyrics, the stuff is absolutely breathtaking). Everything transpires on a rickety old sailing ship, imagine something similar to a Chinese junk. A man and a woman are trapped on this boat with a madman who has the power to twist reality anyway he wants. Like Q, from ST:TNG, only much more pissed off, and sounding eerily similar to Shao Kahn. He begins a process of twisting her like a towel, and thus stirring her words in a circle, then proceeds to stealing the male's vowels. He folds the man origami-style into a samurai helmet which the maniac promptly places upon his head. He wrings the girl out like a dish rag, twisting her until she's as long as the ship's deck and thin as a no. 9 spaghetti noodle. He bends her into a two-dimensional outline rendering of a mockingbird and promotes her to first-mate. Off they sail into the blue moonset.
Better Known As Burma
What's Wrong with me?
Why do I sound Funny?
HA HA HA HA HA
Xcs m Ls... Ls
HA HA HA HA HA
::chirping, or “cheeping”::
If you play this video along with the song, remember to mute the embedded flash player! Although, it might end up sounding super cool. So do whatevah you want, actually.
... More items are available in my News Archive
