Because its Friday Downloads

What a week. Busy here on the blog, busy in my space, busy in my head. Some downloads for the weekend:

What to do in a Zombie Attack (1950)
Download a series of 1950 short films on how to survive a Zombie Holocaust (remixed from public domain).

Autonomous Battleship Collective Presents June 17th, 2006, Unitarian Meetinghouse, Amherst, MA featuring Feathers, Espers, Brightblack Morning Light, James Blackshaw, Jesse Sparhawk (Mp3 of the entire concert)
I have been listening to Brightblack Morning Light's latest and it really does slow down time.

The Vishnu Purana Vol-I (1864)
The Vishnu Purana is a primary sacred text of the Vaishnava branch of Hinduism, which today probably has more adherents than any other. It is one of the canonical Puranas, a branch of post-Vedic sacred literature which was first committed to writing during the first millennium of the common era. Like most of the other Puranas, this is a complete narrative from the creation of the current universe to its destruction. The chronology describes periods as long as a hundred trillion (1014) years! It includes extensive sections on the genealogy of the legendary kings, heroes and demigods of ancient India, including those from the epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana. There are fascinating descriptions of ancient Hindu cosmology and geography. Of general interest is a collection of stories about the boyhood adventures of Krishna and Rama, whom the Vaishnavas believe to be avatars of Vishnu. There are also references to Buddhism and Jainism, which help establish the date of composition of the work.

The True Benjamin Franklin (1903)
Author: Fisher, Sydney George, 1856-1927
Published: 1903

Krozier and the Generator: Tranceformer 2 LP Set
Australia 1981
This is a treat that is difficult to explain. When I was 18 (1987) and starting out as a record collector the older weirdos in the community would speak in hushed tones about "Krozier". I never heard the music (or even saw a copy of any the records) but I got the idea that "Krozier" was the real deal. Here is what Head Heritage says on the subject:

Krozier’ was Geoff Crozier, demented psychedelic magician/performance artist from Seymour in Victoria, Australia; ‘the Generator’ refers to his musical accompaniment at this stage in his life, the group Rainbow Generator, who had previously released obscure albums of their own. Crozier was a unique character, part Arthur Brown, part Robert Calvert, part Alice Cooper (though without really singing in a conventional sense, or wearing leather jackets), part shaman, part trickster god and court jester, who appeared both on stage and in rehearsal or recording in face make-up and full outlandish regalia, living his life purely to explore and express, and to blow his own mind as well as the audience’s, and put them back together again to make something new and unexpected. Although not really a singer of much talent, the content of his words – often more recited dramatically or comedically, rather than sung as such – was sometimes puzzling, sometimes enlightening, sometimes funny, and always engaging and strange. He was both a stage magician/illusionist and a ritual magician/shaman, using multi-media performance and improvisation as the method and propulsion for his own anarchic vision of unhinged exploration, with each gig or recording session being a spontaneous ceremonial ritual to see how far out he could take it all and still be there once it was over.....
By January 1981 this grouping had recorded more than 2 LP’s worth of experimental musical performances, both in their own temporary studio set-ups and live with some overdubs added later by Mow, but in May of that year Crozier died at home in an accident whilst practicing illusory self-hanging. A very sad loss, though fortunately Mow persevered to release a selection of the recordings as a double LP by Krozier & the Generator – ‘Tranceformer’ – a few years later. [The label web site lists it incorrectly as a 1980 release. Maybe they meant when it was recorded, as the album was not put together and released until after Crozier’s death in 1981

Stan Brakhage: The Test of Time (MP3) A series of 20 half-hour long radio broadcasts by Brakhage recorded at KAIR, Univeristy of Colorado in 1982.
Includes long passages of Brakhage musing on subjects such as film, poetry, theater, and other arts. Includes music, lectures, readings, and sound pieces by Edgar Varèse, Peter Kubelka, Kenneth Patchen, Charles Ives, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Glenn Gould, James Joyce, Virgil Thomson, Gertrude Stein, Olivier Messiaen, Louis Zukofsky, William Faulkner, Charles Olson, Henry Cowell and many others.

Steampunk Magazine #2 is online and free to download (as is #1 still)
Before the age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.
Even if we had to make it all up.