The Week in Media

Welcome to the Friday recommended online media. This week I have been working a lot, writing for the past three days and before that teaching work. I seem to have missed the recommended media last week (I don't really remember much of last week either), so there is an extra helping this week. Make sure you eat it all kids.


Salvador Dali on What's My Line.

Stag Hare. Botn into magic (mp3)
Man, I really like this....

Stag Hare ripples into the meditative psych territory with a heavy earthen smell rising out of every track on their second self-released album. Tones shimmer over the rhythmic chug of tribal percussion, fraught with chimes and more than a hint of campfire smoke. Though they ride quite easily through the free-folk valley, the din that sometimes finds its way into that genre at is kept at bay (see early Badgerlore); instead allowing the loose song-forms to take on dream-like qualities. As the band introduce vocals somehow shoegaze and forest folk careen into each other in a fevered hallucination that definitely begs to be repeated. Black Medicine Music is a strong second statement from this project, even garnering some mastering help from RSTB fave Adam Forkner whose work makes a good touchstone for where this release is rooted.

Internet Archive: 78 RPMs & Cylinder Recordings
Listen to this collection of 78rpm records and cylinder recordings released in the early 20th century. These recordings were contributed to the Archive by users through the Open Source Audio collection.
Artists available here include Ada Jones, Caruso, Eddie Cantor, Edison Concert Band, Harry MacDonough, Len Spencer, Paul Whiteman, and many others.

Hippies by Dennis Johnson
Denis Johnson gets cynical about drum circles and drugs at a Rainbow Gathering. George Plimpton reads it aloud.

Momus (Nick Currie)Six Studio Albums (Mp3)

"Okay, this is quite a big decision, but I've taken it. Six Momus albums -- the ones I recorded for Alan McGee's Creation label between 1987 and 1993 -- are out of print. Creation doesn't exist any more, and in theory Sony owns the rights to these albums, but isn't doing anything with them and probably never will. In the meantime, only Russian pirates are profiting, charging punters for illegal downloads."

Internet Archive: Lost Children
The Lost Children Net Label releases EPs and Full Lengths from Instrumental/Experimental/Post-Rockish kind of bands. We're an mp3 online releaser only and provide the music free as we believe that art should be free to the world. We are currently recruiting some of the great young bands coming up to get their limited releases to a wider audience and these bands truly deserve some support. So if you should like a band you hear please don't hesitate to forward the links on to others!

Philosophy Bites
Podcasts on philosophy for free. By real philosophers and their mates.

La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Dream House (video)
Video segments of a presentation by Young and Zazeela. Really excellent.

"When music becomes a spiritual experience, it goes beyond the concept of "I have the fixed composition right here which is a certain duration." And this process was beginning as I was learning how to improvise. But by the time I had put together my group The Theatre of Eternal Music, I was creating music in which I had sustained drones. I asked Tony Conrad and John Cale and Marian Zazeela to sustain tones while I played saxophone..."

Legal Torrents
Too many to mention. Books, CDs, Films. Why does anyone pay for anything anymore? (I myself have given away over 10000 copies of my own CDs, films and texts online....it feels great!!)

Learning Ancient History for Free
Ancient history...I love it.

For lifelong learners, courses on Ancient Greece and Rome always remain in steady demand. While these courses are poorly represented in undergraduate programs (at least in the States), they seem to make a comeback in continuing education programs designed for older students. Eventually, it seems, many come to the conclusion that you can’t skip over the foundations and still make sense of it all. And so they go back to basics.
The Teaching Company, a commercial provider of courses for lifelong learners, has recognized this demand and built a surprisingly rich collection of lectures dedicated to the Ancients. These courses are polished and well put together. But they cost money. If that’s a concern, then you should know about some of the free alternatives. Thanks to the “open course” movement, you can now find a series of free courses online, including some from top-ranked universities.

Bibliomania
Free Online Literature with more than 2000 Classic Texts. Literature Book Notes, Author Biographies, Book Summaries and Reference Books. Read Classic Fiction, Drama, Poetry, Short Stories and Contemporary Articles and Interviews. Study Guides to the most read books and Help for Teachers. Research our Reference Books, Dictionaries, Quotations, Classic Non-fiction, Biographies and Religious Text. Does it ever end...apparently not.

Guided By Voices :: Maxwells, Hoboken, NJ 3.30.95
Amazing. In 1994 as I lived the life of a crusty flâneur in Surry Hills in Sydney one of the soundtracks was Guided By Voices. Here they are in 1995 in Hoboken, live and clear in Mp3 grandness. (You should be using Download Them All to harvest this goodness, the last word in Firefox Plugins).

Insubordinations
Insubordinations is a netlabel dedicated to improvised music - freejazz or electroacoustic or other experimentations - catched without artifices, energy explosions, spontaneous constructions, abused structures, unstabilities, confrontations or simply absolute liberty.
The Insubordinations releases are completely available as free downloadable mp3s under creative commons license and are sometimes accompanied by limited physical releases.
As in the artistes interest as listeners's, Insubordinations try to provide detailed informations about its releases contents.
Insubordinations is an audioactivity colletive sub-project.

As you go about your daily, remember this is not a rehearsal.