Friday, April 18, 2008

Friday Downstreams (heavier than air)


The best of the free on the net this week. Well what eye came across anyway. Has a flavor of heavy sounds and psychic cohesion. Best of luck to all in the money jungle for the coming week.

DOWNLOAD: Earth - The Driver (MP3)
From "The Bees Made Honey in the Lions' Skull"
DOWNLOAD: Earth - Ouroboros Is Broken (MP3)
From "Hibernaculum"
More dark chords from the Southern Lord


"Ray of Gob" Madonna meets the Sex Pistols
Remix Video Collection from Remix Theory
The list is not by any means exhaustive, and is not linear in any way. The top links are mashups and the bottom links are early hip hop and rock videos. They were chosen in part because of the different approaches to video making, this was necessary for the class, because the students need to understand how music video language evolved throughout the eighties and nineties on to today.
Some of the videos also show early traces of sampling, for example, Trans Europe Express was sampled by Afrika Bambaataa for Planet Rock. Also, the remix of Tour de France juxtaposed with the early version shows how electronic music has evolved while acknowledging the important paradigms set by early electrofunk compositions. The now well known mashups of Christina Aguilera and the Strokes, Madonna and the Sex Pistols, as well as Michael Jackson, Britney Spears the White Stripes and Rick James are some of the most successful remixes in this genre. Part of me admittedly rejects them for their popularity, but the creativity that has gone into the audio remix as well as the video editing have to be noted, because they have at this point set a standard in Remix Culture.



Devour The Child
Devour The Child A weekly comic strip published in San Jose State's campus newspaper "The Spartan Daily" from August-December 2005. Now all 24 strips are available to read online!


Anthem of the Space: 5 albums for download found on the web.
Brant Bjork - Jalamanta (1999, stoner rock)
The Mushroom River Band - Music for the World Beyond (2000, stoner rock)
Greenleaf - Agents of Ahriman (2007, stoner rock)
Conrad Schnitzler - Rot (1973, electronic/krautrock)
Spiritual Beggars - Ad Astra (2000, stoner metal)

Psychic TV: Still on the Fringes : NPR Music
Formed in 1981 by Genesis P-Orridge after the dissolution of the industrial-noise band Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV has long been an artistic force on the fringe. The band fuses melodic pop, white noise, sound collages, spoken word, and ethnic instrumentation with a Dadaist aesthetic.
Members of Psychic TV have gone on to form other experimental music projects, including Coil, but P-Orridge kept working under the Psychic TV name (and many others) to explore more sounds. Most notably, the band took on the British rave scene, pioneering "acid house."
The latest incarnation of Psychic TV, re-assembled in 2003, features a revolving cast of musicians. The recorded result, Hell Is Invisible... Heaven Is Here, came out last year. It's a bit more conventional than past efforts, with nods to Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, yet still wildly inventive.


Decoder (MP3s, videos)
"Decoder", released in 1984, is a German low-budget paranoid proto-cyberpunk movie, based on ideas of William S. Burroughs, featuring FM Einheit, Christiane F., Genesis P-Orridge, and even Bill Burroughs himself. Here is a rough outline of the story:

Hamburg, 1983. F.M. is a youngster leading an idle urban life, totally alienated from his environment, and only active when making "sound experiments" in his home studio. Christiana, his girlfriend, works in a peepshow on Reeperbahn. A chronically depressed customer is infatuated by her and tries to get more closely acquainted. The relationship between F.M. and Christiana is cool and distant, except for the moments at breakfast, when they share the muddled visions of their dreams.

One day F.M. suddenly wakes up to the surrounding reality, as he notices how the inconspicuous background music at a hamburger joint may have some connection with the junk food. It dawns on him that muzak is designed to control and brainwash the masses, not unlike lobotomy. On top of its paralysing effects, muzak is also laced with subliminal messages. F.M. decides to go back to the bar and records the muzak for his own purposes. He starts to develop a form of "anti-muzak" in his studio, by playing the original material backwards, or at a wrong speed, or by mixing it with interfering factors like sounds of street riots or squealing frogs.

In a dream of his F.M. receives support for his one-man war from an old shopkeeper (William Burroughs) selling electronics spare parts. He gives F.M. a disassembled cassette with the advice "This is all you need!" While wandering around the city, F.M. runs into members of a shady cult, "the pirates", who have taken over an abandoned building in order to practice their nocturnal rituals of "black noise". The core of their high priest's (Genesis P-Orridge) message is: "Information is like a bank. Some of us are rich, while others are poor. It is our mission to rob that bank…" F.M. and the pirates decide to co-operate. They perform terrorist attacks in Burger Kings and McDonalds, armed with cassette players and anti-muzak. The customers get sudden nausea attacks and start rushing to the exits…

The action continues around the city, until the mighty Muzak Corporation intervenes by sending agent Jäger to track down the tape terrorists. Things get complicated when F.M. finds out that Christiana's secret admirer and regular peepshow visitor is none other than Jäger himself. All the while, F.M. and the pirates keep copying more anti-muzak cassettes and distributing them to people in the streets. Mass hysteria and general chaos ensue…



Furekaaben-Rode Roser(2nd LP),LP,1971,Denmark
This is an excellent recording, beautiful drone-scapes of improvised collaboration. Even rarer than their first LP, Prinsesseværelset,this is a masterpiece of experimental acid folk jams.


Furekaaben-Prinsessevaerelset ,LP,1970 ,Denmark
The first Furekaaben LP.Released in 1970 in 1000 copies,2 issues,one the regular plain sleeve and the other same sleeve handpainted.Also rumours of a handfull of copies in handpainted die-cut sleeve.Exotic trippy dreamy textures with tabla, zither, indian flutes, acoustic guitar, cello, etc.

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