The Friday Downstreams

Today's downstreams are a mixed bag. Such a collection reflects the season; summer holidays, the streets of our student quarter are deserted, we keep irregular hours and work is performed at a leisurely pace. Let's begin with a gem from the Buddha Machines:

Layering Buddha Machines
"The track here is a stereo recording of the very first Layering Buddha six channel performance, recorded on January 31 2007 at Maria am Ufer during the Club Transmediale events in Berlin" by Robert Henke. An outstanding excursion into layers of sonic tones, drones and bell like frequencies.

Brian Jonestown Massacre
The complete discography of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, includes interviews, concerts and radio appearances. This week I saw the documentary DIG, about The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. The music to the film. mostly from live concerts seems to me to the best of the Massacre as the one studio album I have downloaded so far (Thank God for Mental Illness) is a pleasant listen, but it contains no surprises and covers ground that was dealt with in 1966 by the Velvets and associates. For a band to release their entire catalogue online for free is a noble thing and I intend to spend more time with their music; as background to the activities of daily living probably.


Acid Mother Temple live at The Empty Bottle May 13, 2006
Continuing the psychedelic theme. These 3 discs worth of the Acid Mothers Temple will wake you up after the pleasant ditties of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Kawabata Makoto, the groups leader and guitarist has a philosophy and he is willing to share it with you.


The Public Record (Free Music Now)
In an increasingly conservative climate within electronic music and the audio arts, Public Record remains committed to releasing projects that do more than make political claims or represent political ideas. Like the Ultra-red organization itself, Public Record provides a space for exchange between artists and audiences of art directly engaging the political.
The German art critic Walter Benjamin once rebuked the Surrealists, demanding that artists who assume the mantle of revolutionaries would do better engaging actual political struggles than promoting their individual artistic careers. Benjamin challenges artists to pursue sustained and committed relationships with social movements.

Angus MacLise, The Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda
Angus MacLise is best known as the original drummer of the Velvet Underground, although he dropped out of the lineup before they had made any records. His brief stint in the Velvet Underground, however, was just one stop on a lengthy career in experimental music and films that was more diverse and extensive than most realize. As a percussionist, MacLise merged the avant-garde and world music, particularly Asian music, and was a significant collaborator with avant-garde musician La Monte Young and several experimental filmmakers. The nature of his contributions has been difficult to assess in light of the scarce availability of recordings in which he participated, a situation that changed with the release of a compilation of his work, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, in 1999.

Illegal Art Exhibit collection
These songs are from the Illegal Art Exhibit, which documents the impact of copyright law on freedom of expression. Many of these tracks have been censored due to intellectual property law. For background on the particular tracks and the cases involved, see: http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/

Police Radio Trafic
Nearly-continuous recordings of radio scanner traffic in Hamtramck, Michigan (42.404631, -83.057438) for June of 2006. Ideal for strange samples on the homemade CD experiment.

Microscopic Fungus Process by Pythagora & Metek
From Malmo, Sweden. This 2006 album is about stones, stones, stones, stones...
in a harsh nature. Mycophillic tentacles in the dark, dark soil. Rocks exposed by erosion, temperature, water and pressure. Oh yes... Deep stuff like that. We r from Malmo in Sweden. We like noise ...

Melinda - Audio Letter (44:55)
The entire content of an audio letter found, back in the 1980s or so, on a cassette retrieved from a dumpster by a certain Matthew Jasper.

Avarus Live
Live recorded works of the experimental Finnish psych-folk collective Avarus. Their mysterious improvisation for about 30 minutes. Recorded in Tulliklubi, Tampere, Finland in 2004.

Pelt For Michael Hannahs
This was a very limited release made up for the completed Pelt 1997 US tour. Nice droning music with acoustic instruments mostly,very meditative and eastern influenced.