March 30, 2012: Drake Chenault, Mark Ford, Hugo Keesing: Documentary About The Phenomena Called Chart Sweep/Time Sweep

DRAKE CHENAULT, MARK FORD, HUGO KEESING: DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE PHENOMENA CALLED CHART SWEEP/TIME SWEEP

If you hear it you don't forget it. But what's perhaps most interesting about it, is how a collage composition like this that was once heard in national syndication, annually, by millions and millions of listeners, keeps seeming to shake its author. So much so that when someone anonymously uploads a fourth-generation cassette copy of it to SoundCloud, it warrants a 'hey wow look at this neat Internet thing' headline story on salon.com: http://www.salon.com/news/music/index.html?story=/ent/feature/2011/02/23/soundcloud_every_pop_song_ever

Two to six seconds of every single #1 pop song since the advent of the pop charts, i.e. when hits stopped being followed in terms of the 'hit parade' (still primarily seen in terms of the sheet music, the song and not any one recording of it) to the recording.

On the one hand the concept is so self-evident it seems like something beyond what any one author could take credit for. But anyone who listens to it carefully can hear the artistry in the editing, and realize that not just anyone can throw together all these songs with the effect of melting away the decades into a musical overview of the development of recorded popular music, the 'Time Sweep' is a composition and a masterpiece and it's unfair that it isn't nationally recognized as such, so I'm getting on a platform for a few minutes. http://ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=86066

The main body of the piece, 1955-1981, was collaged by Mark Ford, the chief audio engineer for Drake-Chenault Enterprises, the company that pioneered in FM radio syndication (i.e. the company that brought canned radio playlists to nationwide US markets).

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