
What would it sound like if you compressed all the Beatles UK LPs into a single one-hour mp3? The compression rate would have to be 800%.
Conceiving of this as sound art, Steve McLaughlin--yes the same fellow I mentioned here the other day--did just that. It's posted to the WFMU web site. So go here, settle in, and hear nearly everything the Beatles released in one hour.
There's a certain strange hepped-up beauty to it, I have to say. It's like a super-fast run of my youth, a aural brain chute.
Someone at WFMU then decided to un-compress several of the singles. So at the same site you can click on links to mp3s of "Julia," "I Will," and "Revolution" back at normal speed but eerily distorted from having been through the first compression.


"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'"
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for
