The Wire, Season 1, Episode 6. Avon Barksdale visits The Pit. For 30 seconds the show breaks its own rules and dissolves into slow motion. For one of the only moments in all 40 hours of The Wire, musical score is used. It’s a catchy electronic thing, very obscure, and people have regularly asked me about it over the last few years. Well, here it is.
The Cytoplastik collective is a group of artists formed in Columbia, Maryland in 1997, who have been oozing their music, visual art, philosophy, and improbable hairstyles into the Baltimore area for the last several years. Somehow a demo of one of their offshoot projects made it into our hands and ears, and their tune Wax Music Box ended up being used on The Wire. Cytoplastik’s ideas are so deep, their mission so obscure, their Web site so labyrinthal, and their server so slow, that I can’t quite figure out if they are unrecognized geniuses, the ultimate technodorks, or both, but either way this track is great and they have a lot more good music available in various forms.
The Cytoplastik collective has its home here. There are more Lorem Ipsum mp3s here. Lorem Ipsum has since morphed into a project called Zeug, which can be found here.
8 Comments so farLeave a comment
very fucking dope, always loved that scene “keep it humming”
Comment by Max Heusler 06.01.05 @ 10:33 pmwhat is the name of the song?! i can’t find it
Comment by Anonymous 02.02.07 @ 2:37 am“Wax Music Box” Anon, it’s in the article… you weren’t watching “The Wire” on BET when you submitted that were you?? i saw the scene in question last night!
Comment by subterrene 02.02.07 @ 2:46 pmis there any place i can find it? it doesn’t look like its on the ipsum’s webpage?
Comment by Anonymous 02.02.07 @ 8:48 pmwhere can i dl the song?
Comment by Anonymous 05.20.07 @ 7:04 am
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Florian from Lorem Ipsum sent me an email today with some more background on the track:
“… the track (and most of the material from that period) was pieced together and composed entirely on a DOS program called impulse tracker (you can fit it on a floppy). I had written the track, while visiting family in germany, on my battered old pentium 1 laptop and showed it to jason when i got back. he promptly submitted it to clark johnson, i believe and, the next thing i know, i’m watching a group of gangstas walking in slow motion through a getto in the city i live in while my low-fi chip tune plays in the background.
several months later, when my trusty old piece of junk laptop got smashed while we were getting held up at gunpoint at our practice space in west baltimore, we were most grateful for the funds our relationship with HBO had earned us and graduated to more modern equipment (thank god). kind of ironic though huh?”
Comment by Blake 06.01.05 @ 5:25 pm