ACT 1
Scene 1, Off Air
In which DJs Ivy Meadows and Visitation Rites arrive at the Newtown Radio studio ready to set up but are hypnotized by a 25-minute bongo-laden siren dirge — Dreamcolour’s “Spiritual Celebration” — at the tail end of Sunday Brunch with Chocolate Bobka. Unbeknownst to them, the song spills fifteen minutes into the beginning of their set.
Scene 2, Aside
Meanwhile, Peter Pearson, Derek Muro, and Lorna Krier of Brooklyn’s Love Like Deloreans steal away from their home base — a renovated closet space in Bushwick containing some 20 synthesizers — load half of them into a Volvo station wagon, and appear at the station door, successfully breaking the spell that has been cast over Ivy Meadows and Visitation Rites.
ACT 2
Scene 1, On Air
Still haunted by the specter of the siren from Act 1, Ivy Meadows and Visitation Rites attempt to communicate their experience by layering ambient musics from lands as far and wide as ‘70s Germany, early 21st Century Northampton, and present-day Canada into a single organic continuum.
Scene 2, Aside
In which Love Like Deloreans set up all seven of the synthesizers they brought in the drowsy blink of a Sunday afternoon eye, causing Ivy Meadows and Visitation Rites to suspect that that they too possess supernatural powers. Love Like Deloreans do their best to assuage their fears, suggesting that they are simply “putting the punk back in punctuality.” Exeunt Chocolate Bobka.
ACT 3
Scene 1, On Air
Love Like Deloreans perform the first half of their in-studio. Dancing, Ivy Meadows and Visitation Rites attempt to document the event through Blackberry photos, Tweets, and a FlipCam.
Scene 2, On Air
Love Like Deloreans pause to participate in an informal Q&A with Visitation Rites, touching upon their origins as a group, their cohabitation of the classical world and Brooklyn DIY, their roots in New York minimalism and Kosmische, and why the best way to listen to their music is while traveling cross-country.
Scene 3, On Air,
Love Like Deloreans perform the second half of their in-studio. Dancing resumes. Ivy Meadows films an excerpt of their set through the anamorphic lens of an oddly shaped water bottle, the results of which can be seen below.
Curtain
Download: Arthur Radio Transmission #11 with Love Like Deloreans 3-28-2010
This week’s playlist after the jump.
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![3498240974_8a727df272[1]](http://www.visitation-rites.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/3498240974_8a727df2721.jpg "3498240974_8a727df272[1]")
In 1968, Walter Carlos (a.k.a. Wendy Carlos) and Benjamin Folkman turned John Sebastian Bach into a 15-minute pop deity by transposing a handful of his “greatest hits” to an early Modular Moog synthesizer, tediously recreating every lurch of the old divine sewing machine on a custom-built 8-track. Switched On Bach earned the old bewigged master three Grammy Awards, seventeen weeks on the Billboard Top 40, and the post-humous satisfaction of being the first classical composer to go platinum. To Carlos and Folkman’s great pride, it carved out a space for the synthesizer in the West’s pop musical imaginary, eliciting orders for Moog organs everywhere from cushy American recording studios to the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in West Germany, where synth-based krautrock acts Tangerine Dream and Cluster got together for their first group improvisations. Who cares if it needed to be paired with something as tried and true as the Brandenburg concerto for people to listen up? For a hot moment — just as every new technology has its “hot moment” — the pulsating, electronic revelation of the analogue synth was the sound of the future.
