Author: The Byte Hop Staff

April, 1988: Victor Herbert Goes Rogue

Entertainment, Music, Time Travel
LeRoy and Schiing testing fake Remo conga skins at our facility in the Dolomite Mountains

The inventor Paul LeRoy (28 at this time and, therefore, currently unaware of his own death), met up with our percussionist Schiing the other day. They discussed, amongst other things, the incident that shook the time-travelling community last month (or, last month thirty-five years ago, to be precise), when a young and out-of-time Victor Herbert somehow managed to delay David Mamet’s play Speed-the-Plow.

It was rescheduled from April 13 to May 3, 1988, and it caused all kinds of havoc in the time-space continuum. Safe to say, Herbert is not a popular man at this particular moment in time. Everyone involved in the business knows that if you reschedule a Mamet play by a certain amount of days, all his other plays will be rescheduled accordingly. This interferes with the actors’ schedules, and, because these are often big names involved in a variety of projects, important movies and plays will be moved or cancelled.

Indeed, Mamet wrote Our American Cousin under his Tom Taylor pseudonym in 1857, and as a consequence this episode reintroduced the 1865 Abraham Lincoln assassination to history. This hasn’t occurred since the George VI tea incident.

One can only speculate what was on Herbert’s mind, but it is well known that since learning about his fate and reputation post-Eileen (1917) when he was forced to compose in a simpler style in a misguided attempt to pander to newer musical sensibilities, he has become a bitter man, and many believe that he was also responsible for the recent HarperCollins Bridgerton misprint scandal.

LeRoy and Schiing also discussed the impact of fake Remo conga skins in the broader context of pop and easy listening, and how this might have affected the popularity of Peter Allen’s classic live version of I Go to Rio across the different time rifts.

We hope to bring you a YouTube video of the entire discussion soon.

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Robots in Suits and the Mercedes-Benz 123 Series

Entertainment, Music

Back in ’76, at the Frankfurt Motor Show, Ted Mountainé discovered the Mercedes-Benz 123 series for the first time, which marked the beginning of a long-lasting love affair.

Unlike his band leader peers, who often went for flashy luxury cars, Mountainé appreciated the solid and unassuming aura of a car that looked more like a car than any other car he had ever seen, the new Mercedes 200.

And in many ways this mobile entity, practically lifted directly from Plato’s aspatial, atemporal Forms into the physical world by pure German industrial strength, became a symbol of the no-nonsense, utilitarian easy listening landscape that shaped a certain part (elevators, mostly) of the following decades with Ted Mountainé behind the steering wheel.

Unfortunately, due to the temporal whims of the space-time continuum, most people reading these words will not be aware of Mountainé’s moderate reputation in some of our parallel worlds.

But we are lucky enough to be able to present a few of his sound recordings here, to showcase the subliminal audial presence he commanded in some other – choice, naturally – worlds. Here is Robots in Suits, a musical taster from another 1983.

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Floating in Space (Cocktails) ’90

Music

Ted Mountainé says: “Hey, put on your retro sports jacket and get in my spaceship for a bit of action before we watch another episode of “30something”!”

We’ll bring you three drinks and the tab in the spacebar. Not because we’re cheap, but because we’re in constant search of a joke that’ll make your toes curl.

This is a massive undertaking – an intergalactic smooth jazz ride with too many references to mention. Sadly, it was recorded before we famously reevaluated and fine-tuned our mixing philosophy (essentially: “learned to mix”), so even though we stand by the music 100%, mistakes were made in the sound engineering department. This causes a certain lack of overall energy during the proceedings, and some rather embarrassing balancing issues. But we hope it’s still an enjoyable ride.

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Waiting for Summer

Entertainment, Music

Ted Mountainé is, as we know, currently busy in his role as a spokesperson for the International Association of Introverted Jet-Setters Travelling in the Past (IAoIJSTitP). The micro-organizational aspects of this engagement are profound in their minimality, simply due to the nature of the (incredibly annoying) people occupied with these matters.

It has tested the patience of many a regular jet-setter who has accidentally wound up on this particular yacht, as it were. We won’t easily forget the year when Leonard Bernstein unwittingly found himself as the Jet Set Miniature Assembly Kit Ceremony Master, haha.

Regardless, a couple of years ago, Ted took some time off to create this exciting montage consisting of scenery from his beautiful life and music. He didn’t really know where to stop, though (a common affliction for time travelers), so the video and the tune goes on for far too long – which we suppose only proves what we suspected long ago: You can get too much of a good thing.

But Ted stands rigorously by his work: “If every man and woman stepped out of their sepia-toned lives and took a break from their generally depressing world views, and picked up some cues from the happy distortion of cardboard people in escapist entertainment and advertisement settings instead, I honestly think we would all be better off for it,” he claims.

So, until we meet again, please enjoy this little bundle of overbaked joy from the Ted Mountainé Orchestra, for as long as you can take it.

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Update 2018: A Letter from the Staff

Technology

It’s been a few years since our last post. You may remember Paul LeRoy (arrow) from our first article back in 2011? It turns out he was right about time travel all along, and as a result of our journalistic investigations into the area, we’ve been going back and forth through history during the past couple of years.

All our correspondents have been busy in alternate realities, and all this time our editor, Ted Mountainé, has been churning out mediocre synth music to redirect the attention of the general public and stay out of view from suspicious governmental bodies.

We will go into all of this in greater detail if time permits. Before any of that, though, we want to take the opportunity to apologize about Donald Trump. You see, that was our fault – it turns out that Ted Lewis’ Hat experimented with some probability theory events in what he thought to be a dummy universe – it wasn’t

It is an easy mistake to make, so we hope you’ll forgive him, as we have.

We hope to bring you an interview with Paul LeRoy himself in the near future. He’s currently busy playing lead clarinet in the 1973 incarnation of Raymond Lefèvre’s orchestra, but we should be able to lure him out. It’s an incredibly boring job – Lefèvre is, after all, all about the string section.

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Cowell: Stupid Might Beat Boring But I’m Tired of Throwing the Punches

Entertainment

Knob manufacturers Arton and Leonard Brother have negotiated a deal with Simon Cowell for a new television show.

American Preservationist will debut on ABC on March 16, 2012 and it will be hosted by Stephen Hawking. Executive producers are Brother’s sister Susie Brother Love, former CEO of Hallmark’s NASA division, and folk singer Gordon Lightfoot. Lightfoot will arrange the title tune, a “sunny keyboard version” of Natalie Cole’s “Miss You Like Crazy.”

Simon Cowell describes the show as “an Idol show for anyone, or anything, on the verge of extinction.” The difference between the new show and Cowell’s previous endeavors, he says, is that this time he’s turning the spotlight on things actually worth saving. Cowell claims that he’s “dead tired” of disposable teen idols, and painfully regrets signing new three-year deals with ITV for Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor. He says that the prospect of having to endure “these ridiculous fatheads” well into his sixties scares him shitless.

The Brothers are excited about the opportunity to get a break from the knob business. “You know, it’s a broad concept. We can move from Tony Orlando to Mike Love, and then to a moth-ridden desk, in an instant. Hopefully we’ll squeeze some knobs in there as well, but that’s not important, really. It’s an opportunity for us to do something completely different — and it’s nice not to worry about profits for a change, because honestly, no one expects the concept to catch on with sponsors. We’re doing it because it’s not knobs.”

Stephen Hawking doesn’t want to comment on his role. When we asked him about the show at a local protest targeting plans to enlarge a hotel complex on the River Cam recently, he simply shrugged his shoulder. Metaphorically speaking. that is.

Shaoncé vs. Foucault: The Use of Pleasure

Music, Philosophy

Pop darling Shaoncé has revealed details about her new album scheduled for release in early 2012. After the tremendous success of her previous album, Shock, people are curious to see if she can live up to the hype — but judging by yesterday’s press conference in Paris there is no need for concern. Sporting an outfit that would make Lady Gaga proud, the young singer won the world press over with her sharp wit and acute observations. Her warm, conversational style created a unique and friendly atmosphere, and even old codgers like myself had to let down our professional guard a bit to enjoy the exhilarating intelligence and humanity of the encounter.

Produced by the people behind the hit tv series Glee soundtrack, the title of her new album is The Use of Pleasure. It’s primarily based on original texts by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, translated into English by acclaimed American songwriter Diane Warren, occasionally assisted by ms. Shaoncé herself.

On her new album, Shaoncé is particularly preoccupied with Foucault’s disassociation from the structuralist movement and how it has affected what she perceives as impotent principles of application in computational semiotics. This is underscored by the extensive use of FM synthesis and autotuning. “I would never use autotune under normal circumstances,” she says. “But for this album we really had no choice — there is no better way to represent the concepts of artificial intelligence, computer-human interaction — all that stuff that we’re dealing with on the album. So you may say that autotune is the recurring theme here, a kind of non-musical leitmotif.”

I asked her if this meta-perspective might not get lost on her audience in a musical landscape where autotune is, per se, the default. “But, you see, what you’re saying, that is the beauty of it. No one knows for certain whether it’s one thing or the other. That’s my point — our ears are so accustomed to autotune that we don’t question it anymore. It’s the same with semiotics. We are so entrenched in one way of thinking — the wrong way, I’d say — that we can’t really see what’s right anymore.”

The Use of Pleasure will be released on EMI in 2012.

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LeRoy: I Am From the Future

News, Technology

As a self-proclaimed inventor focusing on time/space issues, Paul LeRoy (36) has a dubious record. Following his amazing discovery that it is possible to move chromium through time,  further research has provided little insight — and it has indeed been claimed that the spectacle surrounding his Cr24 AnaChrom experiments was never anything but a carefully considered marketing plan masterminded by his sponsors, and that the entire project was a hoax. When LeRoy’s book “Time As I See It” was released three years ago, he was written off as a hack and a madman by peers in the National Society of Inventors.

His reputation is not going to be redeemed by the astonishing statement he made in Bern yesterday. At a press conference at Hotel Bellevue Palace, he claimed that the Paul LeRoy of our time was murdered a couple of weeks ago. As luck would have it, the 2013 version of LeRoy found out about his 2011 fate, and survived his own death by traveling back in time to a point where he was actually still alive. Had he not made it back in time, he says, his 2013 self would apparently have been killed off along with his current — or perhaps we should say his former — self.

These claims are of course contrary to most popular theories about time travel, according to which his future self would have evaporated the instant he was killed in the present, but then again, all of these theories are entirely based on fiction. LeRoy says popular belief surrounding time travel is based on an essential scientific misconception about the nature of time: Time, he says, is not chronological and, thus, not consequential.

The implications of this idea would be overwhelming, to say the least. Unsurprisingly, however, leading psychiatrists state that there is no doubt LeRoy is suffering from severe mental illness, and colleagues tell us that he has been under a lot of pressure in the last couple of years, following negative publicity and the loss of several important sponsors. So far, the Swiss police has not investigated LeRoy’s murder allegations.

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