Friday Downstreams (The Family Gladness)

The past week for me has been a family orientated one. Which has been nice, but what time I have spent at the computer has been using Word and typing words. Not so much media this week but a few pleasant surprises. A CD, a novel, some sound art and poetry. The copyright debate is further contrived by the release of free to download CDs by two major commercial players in the music market - Nine Inch nails and The Charlatans latest works can be downloaded from their own websites. One can almost hear the sighs from the majors. Take the time to feel fine and enjoy the weekend.


Karlheinz Essl - SNDT®X
Karlheinz Essl’s free online album SNDT®X is one of the more exciting releases in the electronic/electro-acoustic field that I’ve heard in a long time. Surprisingly easy to listen to yet avant-garde, it is a primer on experimental electronic music complete with drones, found sounds, sampling and much more. The title alludes to the cinematic texture of this sound art. Most of these tracks were created to accompany a film, performance, or art piece.

THE MAN WHO NEVER SLEEPS A novel by Levin A. Diatschenko
If you take thought as a tangible thing, imagine the clouds of thought hanging about our heads.
Imagine the roof of thought-fog hanging over our cities.
Beginning as a murder mystery the story unravels until it gradually unveils the origin and purpose of an organization so esoteric that it doesn't even have a name.

Lars Yenin is an overworked family man, who never gets enough sleep. When he loses both his job and family, he lies down to sleep and doesn't wake up. The mysterious coma continues for years. Two weeks into the sleep, another man who looks identical to Yenin arrives and takes over Yenin's life. Within a short time, he becomes a world-famous occultist.

This new Yenin never sleeps at all.

UbuWeb Sound - Yoko Ono
Seven peices from Fluxus artist Yoko Ono. One of them features her husband...what's his name?

UbuWeb Sound: Jaap Blonk - Vocalor (1998, Staalplaat Records)
Like its predecessor ‘Flux-de-Bouche’ (STCD 046, 1993), Vocalor features a number of versions I made of texts by great pioneers of sound poetry. Velimir Khlebnikov’s Kolokol Uma, from the teens of this century, is written in his invented language ‘Zaum’ (‘Outside Reason’). It is made up of a repetition of the word ‘um’ (‘reason’, ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’), furnished with many different prepositions to create neologisms like ‘downreason’, ‘byspirit’ and the like. The harmonics seemed to me a nice image for the bells inside the mind. Canto VII is the last poem of the cycle ‘Altazor, or the Parachute Voyage’, written 1919-31 by the Chilean surrealist poet Vicente Huidobro. It is probably the earliest published example of South American sound poetry. On my previous recording I included ‘Axtherastical’ by Guy de Cointet, which I knew from Richard Kostelanetz’ great anthology ‘Text-Sound Texts’. Last year in Los Angeles I discovered De Cointet’s 70s book ‘Espahor ledet ko uluner!’, of which ‘Axtherastical’ turned out to be the second chapter. So what else could I do now but record the first chapter, Nonomotihur. As with ‘Flux-de-Bouche’, I chose to end this new album with a piece for the more seasoned listener. It is Man Ray’s 1924 Lautgedicht (Sound Poem). To me it looks like a poem crossed out by a violent censor, that’s how I found the sound.

I.B.M. 7090 - Music From Mathematics
"Music From Mathematics" was an album of early electronic music, programmed by the boffins (very likely in authentic period white coats and glasses) at Bell Laboratories way back in the early 1960s, using the then-new IBM 7090 computer and an "electronic to sound transducer". The music on the album, about half of which is included here, is a mixture of strange, other-worldly blips, rushing white noise, tootly reworkings of classical pieces. Full marks to Decca Records for releasing the record - remember that in 1962, these alien sounds would have been totally new, and suitably space-age in their sound.

PennSound
PennSound is an ongoing project, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives. For an overview of PennSound--including a discussion of the project's pedagogical implications--we invite you to listen to PennSound podcast #6.
We intend to provide as much documentation about individual recordings as possible; new bibliographic information will be added over time (please contact us if you can supplement the information already provided). As part of the PennSound project, the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image (SCETI) in collaboration with the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at the University of Pennsylvania is developing a sophisticated cataloguing tool for all our sound files; this should be available in about one year. Click on "search," in the header to any PennSound page, for a demonstration.
We express our thanks to Penn's English Department, the Annenberg Rare Book and Ms Collection, the wonderful staff of the Kelly Writers House and of School of Arts & Sciences Computing; to UbuWeb and the Electronic Poetry Center. We are grateful to Tom and Lindy Gallagher and Paul Williams for their generous support of PennSound.
PennSound is a project of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.


Free Albums Galore :: The Charlatans - You Cross My Path
NIN: Ghosts I-IV - new instrumental album available NOW!

Lubricated Goat "Nerve Quake" (Live)
From Martin Bland:

Like most musicians in Australia and the US, I was in Lubricated Goat on and off from the late 80's thru the early 90's. I was lucky enough to see the "classic" Goat lineup that had Brett Ford playing drums. Was sad to hear of his recent passing.
This was recorded at a ghastly subterranean rock dungeon called the Kardomah Cafe in Kings Cross, Sydney. Perhaps it was a cafe during the day although I never heard of anyone ordering food there. I believe we were opening for Mudhoney this particular evening. Guy, who is playing bass for the Goat here later joined Mudhoney, replacing Matt Lukin.
It's a pretty raggedy old version but this is what we sounded like and I guess I rather enjoy it...