Meet Noizepunk and Das Krooner
by BLC ©2008
When you tune into this online music station, you first hear the lovely strains of Vivaldi’s “Summer” from his Four Seasons. Ah, they don’t write music like that anymore, is your first reaction, until seconds later the sudden burst of Dolby bass jolts you back to reality. It is 2008, so fear not. This is followed by the greetings of two characters who serve as the show’s hoax—er, uh, I mean hosts.
If, in fact, right off the bat you think of them maybe as a couple of nutballs, you will soon change your mind and see that they really are a couple of nutballs, our own Gene (Noizepunk) Pritsker (tada!) and his supercool buddy Charles (Das Krooner) Coleman. Those names alone tell you that these guys think outside the music box—maybe too far outside the box—and on one occasion Gene opened the show with an imitation of Dr. Dre. I hope the real Dr. Dre wasn’t listening.
The amazing thing about these two is they prove the theory that madness is close to
genius. Somehow they actually have produced an intelligent, informative and quite delightful program (already 26 at this writing), with living (as in alive) guests with their original music to air along with commentary. Looking at some of the guests in their archival log, we see names like Framz Hackl, Dan Cooper, Beth Anderson, Dave Taylor, Joseph Pehrson, some of the people well known to them through associations developed in school and continuing to this day in concert presentations. But not all. One particular name on the list intrigued me, that of Judith Lang Zaimont.
Would the no-nonsense Judith walk out before she got to say a word about her first piece? Not at all; we tuned into that program and heard that she was having such a good time, she didn’t want this thing from another world to end. She played three of her most recent works and they sounded terrific in or out of the uncanny context.
Not so good, sorry to the say, on the occasion of the second woman composer they were to invite to the show. The opening five minutes were a complete mess, and I found myself screaming SHUT UP ALREADY!, thinking they were all trying to outtalk each other. Apparently they were having a shutoff problem. (Hey, guys, get someone to help you operate the controls!) I wanted to know what Judith Shatin had to say. Once settled it was good to hear some of her music, and we found her View from Mount Nebo, performed by the Da Capo String Players very much in her style of mixing palpable rhythms with a sense of physical property, as she said in straightening out Mr. Coleman’s misguided ideas of her music. (Maybe he should pay more attention to the pages of NMC. Judith was interviewed by us, and she had the opportunity to describe her musical intentions.) We would have liked to hear more, but imagine trying to put aside 26 hours just to catch up on Noizepunk and Das Krooner. It’s as insurmountable as searchng the archives of NMC for every interviewed composer’s self-analyses, isn’t it?
So welcome to the new world of online radio where the amount of music with talk is now enormous. You can tune in whenever you like, so long as you have a computer with plenty of storage capacity, and you can shop around the Internet and make discoveries that suit your own fancy. Forget the days when finding music on the air was a pretty lost cause. This is your own medium now.
[Visit http://www.kalvos.org/nkshows.html]