Monday, November 30, 2009

India, November 1996


Myself to the right (recovering from dengue fever). Note the recording device at my feet. I wonder where the result of this session is today (i.e. the tape). I must have it somewhere.

Seminar in HUMlab: December 9, 2009 at. 10:15


Ragnarök - Farewell Copenhagen (instrumental) (1975)

Seminar in HUMlab: December 9, 2009 at. 10:15
Peter Bryngelsson,
Composer, scientist, writer
Head teacher of film music
Malmö Academy of Music

Live stream opens at the time of the seminar (follow the link)

The seminar will focus on how music "animates" all motion in the image in films and games. This means that the music selects for us the movement we will see through, so to speak, drawing an extra contour around the moving image. The brain is constantly looking for sync points and therefore it follows the music's ambiguous flows and accents it in the interpretation of the image flow.

The music sync not only the actual motion of the image, but also other, more philosophical movement patterns linked to the contemplation of the moving image as the historical movement, timing, haptic, contextual, etc.

In cooperation with the DINO project and Umeå Creative Industry Association.

Bits and Bobs: media tips for a dark monday

And now some recomended online media from the managment:

No Law 4000 - Entire film
Western science fiction set in the year 4000. Cowboys with laser guns and aliens from Mexico on a hunt to get to the hidden treasure first. Lots of explosions, gunfights and beards. I am the voice of the mad poker player who is shot at 2 mins 52 sec; "I kill men like you before breakfast. So wipe that smile off your face....."

Celtx - #1 choice for media pre-production.
Celtx is the world's first all-in-one media pre-production system. It replaces 'paper & binder' pre-production with a digital approach that's more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share. It is free I tell you...free!

Revolution Rising « ethnotechno.com Rolling hard on the bass drop, the High Chai Recordings label is excited to serve up its latest offering compiled by Ethnotechno.com visionary dimmSummer – presenting original tracks from Karsh Kale, Midival Punditz, Niraj Chag, the Nasha Experience, Jalebee Cartel, and GOONDA, along with remixes from The Arch Cupcake (Cheb i Sabbah), Jahcoozi (Asian Dub Foundation), Sub Swara (State of Bengal) and Shiva Soundsystem (Swami) plus many more…

Dakar 1966 – 1er Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres
01 Evocation du Spectacle Féérique de Gorée (24:06)
(Gorée Island Enchanting Tale)

Petite Musique de Cour des Rois Mandingue et Balante
(Ancient Court Music of the Mandingue and Balante Senegalese Kings)
02 Improvisation Pour Une Fête (kora and balafon) (2:55)
03 Air pour une Fiancée (balafon solo) (3:18)
04 Nocturne pour une Reine (kora improvisation) (2:03)

Songs of New Nations,
sung by the De Paur Chorus (New Jersey)
05 Ghana (2:54)
06 Nigeria (4:16)
07 Congo (2:11)
08 Nigeria (3:12)
09 Ghana (2:55)

Total time 47:40
LP released by Philips, France, 1966

Booker T and the MGs

The house band at Stax, responsible for writing and backing a variety of singers on literally hundreds of soul hits, Booker T and the MGs (short for Memphis Group) are the wellspring and cornerstone of American music. Their trademark sound of Booker T's groovy organ and piano, Steve Cropper's tastefully minimal guitar licks, melodic bass lines of Duck Dunn and the bedrock in-the-pocket backing of Al Jackson, could be heard on the recordings of Otis Redding, Albert King, Wilson Pickett and many others. Immensely influental as a backing band, they were possibly the greatest instrumental group of the sixties, too. These two discs collect their best instrumental work. Licensing considerations did not allow a single best-of collection at the time when these came out, so the first one spans their earlier years on Atlantic (1962-67), the second covers 1968-71 on Stax (I think the archives are misnamed - "Stax" is called "Atlantic" and vice versa).

Mu. - Arecibo Psycodelic Classics 17: Abortos Musicales
You know DIY has gone over the edge when the artist braggs that his music was recorded “with one mic made out of cell phone parts and a ball of aluminum foil”. The album titled Arecibo Psycodelic Classics 17: Abortos Musicales by Mu. is a cornucopia of percussive sounds that seem to be dually influenced by John Cage and an army of toddlers let loose in a music store. While there is a temptation to think of Mu as someone who simply wants to find as many sounds as he can get out of the household appliances, he is actually quite imaginative and has some structure hiding behind the noise. Those familiar with avant jazz percussion of the 70s will get this album faster than most but I think the rest will still enjoy this interesting noisefest.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

A Letter to Mandy



An open letter to Peter Mandelson regarding the newly announced Digital Economy Bill.

Dear Peter Mandelson,

I've been following your recent policy proposals, so now they've gone through, I thought I'd contribute some vocals. The focal point of my criticism's the ridiculous decision to bring in a system where you flick a switch and disconnect the internet when it's suspected that intellectual infringement has been detected, even if the relatives they live with definitely didn't. I think it's in your best interest to bin this, yes? 'Cause isn't it a respected institution that we're considered innocent unless different is proven? Er, excuse me - how can you excuse exclusion when you've not pursued a definite conclusion?

You're picking on the little man, the Lilliputian; now there's a pain in my gulliver and it's confusing. You're swift to treat your citizens with such little human humour it's no wonder that we're disilliusioned. This resolution's gonna end in revolution just like any other governance that doesn't accept evolution. To be perfectly honest, m'lord, there'd be less intrusion if you curtly abolished the law and left us to it.

And why do games require safety ratings, but any age can see adult-aimed plays and paintings? It's state censorship, the same as Beijing; but even China thinks a pirate isn't worth the time of day for chasing. I think Chairman Mao would say the same thing - since you became secretary, it's like the state's your plaything. You made a massive sacrifice, invaded loads of privacy, but if I wanted to download, there'd be no hope of finding me. I could take my mobile phone to the local library, and utilise the free wireless to find the file I need. Then what are you going to try - to disconnect their ISP? You might as well just burn the books on rights to speech.

Dear Mandy, stay away from my family. Yours considerably angrily, Dan Bull. Dear Mandy, stay away from my family. Yours considerably angrily, Dan Bull.

Who'll profit from the Digital Economy Bill? Not the public, but the profiteers probably will. Who'll profit from the Digital Economy Bill? Not the public, but the puppeteers probably will. I've talked about how intellectual property kills and you're still just concerned with who's copping the bill. It's quite obvious you've been lobbied until the copy holders got control, and you're probably their shill. It's not your problem when you're positioned on top of the hill, in your property that probably cost a couple of mil. But wake up and smell the coffee, the milk is going off and you're not bothered 'cause your coffers are filled.

Lord, it's time you took an honesty pill, and acknowledged the majority aren't horribly thrilled. So what if I watched a torrented comedy film? I don't need to now my country's just become a Brazil. You know the truth, Orwell spoke his views, your House broke the news and all Hell's broken loose. The utopia we hoped for is overdue, so could you help out a little bit and don't be stupid?

The onus is on you to show us you aren't using your throne in a way the voters don't approve. I know you're very close to David Geffen, so maybe his interests have given you a hazed perception. Hey, do you reckon you'd win today's election, considering you're chasing this amidst a great recession? Deception's the politician's favourite weapon but we're already jaded from one too many painful lessons.

Dear Mandy, stay away from my family. Yours considerably angrily, Dan Bull. Dear Mandy, stay away from my family.

Yours considerably angrily,
Dan Bull.

P.S. I love you, Mandy x

---------------------------------------- -------------------------------------
Samples used:
Lily Allen - Never Gonna Happen
Lily Allen - Who'd Have Known

If you disapprove of the Bill, sign the petition at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/dont...

Write your own message to Lord Mandelson at http://threestrikes.openrightsgroup.org/

Download the mp3: http://www.zshare.net/audio/69029460c...

Buy or download Dan Bull's debut album Safe from
http://www.freshnut.co.uk/shop

Follow Dan on Twitter @itsDanBull - share the message with the #dearmandy tag.

Connect on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/#/pages/Dan-B...

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/danbull

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Milton Glaser



The passing on of gifts is a device to prevent people from killing each other because they all become part of a single experience."- Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser -- born 26. 6. 1929 in New York, USA -- graphic designer, illustrator, teacher.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Sinclair Beiles reading his poems (1994)


"Mother Hasn't Paid the Bill" and "Snore" read by poet Sinclair Beiles, Johannesburg, April 1994.


Sinclair Beiles (b. Kampala, Uganda, 1930, d. 2002, Johannesburg) - was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature.

Beiles was involved with American beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, and writer William Burroughs at the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris. The photographer Harold Chapman recorded this period in his book The Beat Hotel (Gris Banal, 1984). He co-authored Minutes to Go with Burroughs, Gysin and Corso (Two Cities Editions, 1960). Beiles helped edit William Burroughs' book Naked Lunch.

He worked with the Greek artist Takis and read his magnetic manifesto: "I am a sculpture... I would like to see all nuclear bombs on Earth turned into sculptures" in 1962 in Paris at the Iris Clert Gallery. At this event he was famously suspended in mid-air by a magnetic field from a powerful magnet in a sculpture developed by Takis. Beiles attributed his subsequent mental instability to this experience even though he insisted that Takis provide him with a helmet to protect his head from the magnetic field.

Beiles wondered through Europe, including a spell in London and settled in the Greek islands during the 1970s. He fought frequent bouts of depression, mental illness and drug addiction. He was married to the South African poet and artist Marta Procter.

In later life he returned to South Africa and was associated with the Johannesburg-based Gallery III group of poets, writers, composers and performance artists and lived in the central and artistic district of Yeoville. He and the South African columnist and playwright Ian Fraser, formed a friendship which lasted many years. The poet had a burst of writing activity from 1991 to 2000, publishing a large number of poetry collections, including A South African Abroad (Lapis Press, 1991). He died in relative poverty.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Village and Forest



"The 'village' is a society that Bergson describes as closed, comparable to a group of animals Static and inalterable, the closed society goes about regulating communal life by obeying moral constraints. The 'forest', on the other hand, is an 'open' society, transformed by the vital impetus, obeying nothing, distracted by newness, and dispersing the group by breaking its social cohesion. These two extremes emanate from a common origin; the strength of belonging and of life in society on one hand, the freedom of the forest, the mystical impetus on the other hand. On the one side time, on the other side rupture."
- Introduction to “Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture” by Catherine Clément pxiv (1994)

Visualizing the Decline of Empires



This is mainly an experimentation with soft bodies using toxi's verlet springs.
The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. The visual emphasis is on their decline.

More on that project mondeguinho.com/master/visual-experiment ations/visualizing-empires

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Byron as Player



This is clever:

"I made this video for class. We were researching english poets, and my group had to do Lord Byron. He would be considered a "player" in today's standards, courting many women. That would also make him "Promiscuous". I decided that it would be fun to make a video to the song "Promiscuous" featuring images of him and the women that he was with. Enjoy! ^_^
I currently have comments on a "wait" list, so if you want to just shout something out, do so, or send me a general message, ok?
I do not claim to own the song; this is a song created by Nelly and owned by UMG. Please go buy the song at Amazon or iTunes if you like it."

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Recomendadtions from a Week of Screen Staring



November is a month of visions. A few hours of light in the middle of the day frames a time of shadows moving across the eye. From its corners spring shapes and figures. Rain washed streets glaze figures wrapped in woolens and the hoods of hurrying home. Dead leaves pad out footsteps. Doors are more rarely knocked upon. Inside is favored with journeys out postponed or forgotten between cups of tea and screens of work or cinematic distractions. Winter touches the edge of the cloak of night as daylight retreats to a small cave in the mountains. We dream.

In this time of murky days and long nights I take my time with words, films, games and sound.

The Psychedelic Review Archives 1963-1971

Writers who explored the potentials of consciousness exploration in the psychedlic era included Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Ram Dass among others; an important journal of the time was The Psychedelic Review

Bill Plummer - 1967 - Bill Plummer and the Cosmic Brotherhood
This album manages to fuse jazz, Indian music, and wacky psychedelia, while still ending up as more than the sum of its parts. You need to become part of the Cosmic Brotherhood as soon as possible.

Copy Me (in Swedish)
The collected texts from the Swedish Pirate Bureau. Digitization of Culture and information has developed into one of today's major points of contention. With a computer, anyone can copy information for free, which has made the monopolists desperate. Their bitter rejection of all that digital culture is called has created a black and white and dull debate.
The analog media has been filled with those that try to respond to the alien digital world in the most odd ways. Newspapers have been reporting from the press perspective. The book you hold in your hand is composed of texts analogized from the digital culture.
Perspectives that emerges is both the hacker, artist, philosopher and the ordinary interchange's. Copy Me offers cut copy discussion myths, but also vision and practical example of a culture that has long since left the copyright era behind them. From Public Enemy to Friedrich Hayek, a video game history to Michel Foucault, from computer to pharmaceutical plants. For the first time in book form in Swedish and presented here are a collection of texts on one of our century's most burning topics: copying.

zSHARE - jesse bernstein - selected works.pdf

This is a chapbook ebook that contains some (all?) of one of Jesse's earliest chapbooks, "Choking on Sixth". Major props to Jesse fan Jeremiah for putting this together. Thanks, man!

ABC of Relativity: Understanding Einstein By Bertrand Russell
Narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi - Runtime: 3hrs, 20mins
Series of mp3 audio files of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) explaining the velocity of light, clock time and space time, Einstein's Theory of Gravitation, and What Is Matter?.

Ask a dozen people to name a genius and the odds are that 'Einstein' will spring to their lips. Ask them the meaning of 'relativity' and few of them will be able to tell you what it is. The basic principles of relativity have not changed since Bertrand Russell first published his lucid guide for the general reader. The ABC of Relativity is Bertrand Russell's most brilliant work of scientific popularisation. With marvellous lucidity he steers the reader who has no knowledge of maths or physics through the subtleties of Einstein's thinking. In easy, assimilable steps, he explains the theories of special and general relativity and describes their practical application to, amongst much else, discoveries about gravitation and the invention of the hydrogen bomb.


UbuWeb Sound - Hanatarash
Hanatarashi (ハナタラシ), meaning "sniveler" or "snot-nosed" in Japanese, was a noise band created by later Boredoms frontman Yamantaka Eye and featured Zeni Geva guitarist Mitsuru Tabata. The outfit was formed in Osaka, Japan in 1984 after Eye and Tabata met as stage hands at an Einstürzende Neubauten show. After the release of the first album, the "I" was dropped and the name became Hanatarash.

Jennifer Government: NationStates
A close friend said to me this week, "games teach you to see things." Very profound and true. NationStates is a free nation simulation game. Build a nation and run it according to your own warped political ideals. Create a Utopian paradise for society's less fortunate or a totalitarian corporate police state. Care for your people or deliberately oppress them. Join the World Assembly or remain a rogue state. It's up to you.

Aquarium Drunkard: Music Blog » Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy :: Death To Everyone (Live)

Having just spent a coule of weeks listening to Billy and remembering the brittle joy I felt when I first found the pit that is his music, I was made even more sardonic by this tune. Markedly different from the stark I See A Darkness version, MBV just debuted this live rendering of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “Death To Everyone,” a track that while culled from the same session will not be available on the forthcoming BPB live album Funtown Comedown. Recorded with the Picket Line; out 12/15 via Sea Note/Drag City.


Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions in 2D and 3D models.


Question Mark Question Mark Question Mark
I listened to the recording on my drive back to LA that night. It was indescribably weird. The dedication to the floppy disk case, chicken scratch message, and treasure map implied that someone with way too much time on his or her hands crafted it. The insanity of the recording -- with one or two kind of pretty moments -- mirrored the obsessively constructed feel of the package. I didn't know if I was listening to the work of a mad genius or a deranged psychopath. The sounds are a combination of heavily processed human voices and schizophrenic space music. The 11 tracks are very short, with only four "tunes" lasting longer than three minutes. Most are in the thirty-second to two-minute range in length. I wouldn't call it "rock," but it's guitar-centric. I also wouldn't say that it is very good, but it made for an interesting listen.

Reality Is An Accident, a playlist by RIAA, on Fairtilizer

Audio surrealism, ranging from funky to funny to weird to WTF? I’ll be adding tracks as I go along.


Dave Allen on Religion

May your god go with you....

Friday, November 20, 2009

Wave of Action

The University of California is occupied. It is occupied as is the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and the Technical Institute of Graz; as were the New School, Faculty of Humanities in Zagreb and the Athens Polytechnic. These are not the first; they will not be the last. Neither is this a student movement; echoing the factory occupations of Argentina and Chicago, immigrant workers occupy forty buildings in Paris, including the Centre Pompidou. There is still life inside capital’s museum.
no capital projects but the end of capital






Yes, the university is a graveyard, but it is also a factory: a factory of meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death. A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life (identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private property). Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future. Everywhere democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a way acceptable to the electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments here together into a set of legible and fruitless demands. The Necrosocial by Giorgio Agamben



Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna is Occupied.


Life is not for Sale!
Education is not for Sale!
Palaces for everyone!
“Resistance to the education cutbacks is part of the fight against capitalism!
Luxury for all, instead of profits for the few!” Occupiers of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna



Vienna Calling

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Music for Wednesday


MusicPlaylistRingtones
Create a MySpace Music Playlist at MixPod.com

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Brody Condon: Twentyfivefold Manifestation

"The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life." Raoul Vaneigem


Combining the fantasy Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) subculture, public sculpture, and ritualistic performance art, Twentyfivefold was a series of physically and psychologically intense live games involving 80 players which evolved over the Summer of 2008. The events were organized by the artist Brody Condon for the Sonsbeek International public sculpture exhibition in the Netherlands.

Set in a distant future where civilization as we know it had almost been lost, players from different worlds met deep in the holy forest and inhabited a 40 feet high tower "in character" for 3 days at a time while worshiping invented deities embodied by the other artworks of the exhibition.


www.sonsbeeklive.org


"Copyright law is broken. Creative consumption and modification of existing media is a totally intuitive and appropriate way to function as a cultural producer. That is not to say I function without any honor system whatsoever, I give credit where it is deserved..." Brody Condon, Rhizome interview

Friday, November 13, 2009

But Cosy Poetry for a Glum Friday




The Sad Bag Cassette (1990) Steven "Jesse" Bernstein

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

The Late Age of Print, Ted Striphas



Striphas investigates the everydayness of books that he claims is intimately bound with: "a changed and changing mode of production; new technological products and processes; shifts in law and jurisprudence; the proliferation of culture and the rise of cultural politics; and a host of sociological transformations" (5). His main argument is that books had been integral to the making of modern consumer culture in the 20th century, as they were one of the first commercial Christmas presents, and today are responsible in part for the fall of that consumer capitalism into a society of controlled consumption, a term that he borrows from Henri Lefebvre. He convincingly shows that book publishing pioneered the rationalization and standardization of mass-production techniques in that the massive quantities of book production required efficient production processes and the move toward an hourly wage. Ultimately, The Late Age of Print investigates how books have become ubiquitous social artifacts entrenched with the everyday. His book successfully proves that book circulation is, and has always been, a political act because the circulation of books embody specific values, practices, interests, and worldviews (13). And as such, the practice of circulating books embody struggles over particular ways of life.

What does this mean for the late age of print (a term coined by Jay David Bolter to characterize the current dynamic era of book history instigated by media convergence where books remain central to shaping dominant and emergent ways of life)? Well, for some, like Sven Birkerts, author of Gutenberg Elegies, this is a crisis, a decline in the quantity (and the quality) of literature being read and it poses a real threat to culture in general.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Don't Die Wondering

Monday, November 09, 2009

Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Cooper Union



“First as Tragedy, Then As Farce”: Philosopher and Cultural Theorist Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Cooper Union
Dubbed by the National Review as “the most dangerous political philosopher in the West” and the New York Times as “the Elvis of cultural theory,” Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory.

In his latest book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to what he calls the farce of the financial meltdown.

He spoke on that same theme at Cooper Union during a recent trip to New York.

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Ozymandias as Machinima (2000)



Praised by everyone from New York Times Arts columnist Matt Mirapaul, to film critic Roger Ebert, through to games journalists and literature professors, Strange Company's groundbreaking visual adaptation of the Shelley poem remains one of the most evocative pieces of Machinima.

Developed using an early version of Strange Company's Lithtech Film Producer software (a project which was later dropped, sadly), "Ozymandias" was created in just over a week for a demonstration show. However, the idea had been in director Hugh Hancock's mind for much longer.

"I've wanted to visualise to poem for years" says Hugh. "The imagery and the feel of the words is so strong that it really is crying out to be made into a film - and indeed, our adaptation stands as the latest of a number of films based on the poem."

Roger Ebert compared the film's minimalist construction to seminal Anime work "Grave of the Fireflies", and its attempt to capture the spirit of the poem was judged so successful that several literature courses used the film as part of their teaching program. Dell used the film as part of their demonstration at the Windows 2000 launch, and it appeared at several film festivals as part of Strange Company's Machinima showcase.

"As with all of these things, I had no idea that "Ozymandias" was going to be so successful when we were making it." says Hugh. "This was one of the most off-the-wall ideas I'd come up with, and its success has been very gratifying."

Download Ozymandias

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)

Dancing in the Streets

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Wrecker and Mended Media for the Weak



Some choice online media items have landed on my screen this week. Is it my imagination or are the weeks moving at a more rapid pace than they used to.


Total Eclipse: Rimbaud and Verlaine

Silver Currant: Howlin Rain Live @ The Sidecar, Barcelona, Spain. 11.12.08
This Sidecar show is a warts and all event no doubt about it. The recording quality and "looseness" of the band are all part of the glory and charm. This show holds a very fond place in my memory both for the audience enthusiasm and because an old friend of ours from Humboldt County, Aolani Beere, came down from the Spanish hills where she now lives as a gypsy musician to join us on violin for a 12 minute version of "Nomads".

Music of Oceania – The Abelam of Papua Niugini
Nothing can prepare you to New Guinea’s ethnic music. The fact it is not much circulated doesn’t help either. Before I go any further, I shall notice these recordings are either initiation, ceremonial or sacred events, and shouldn’t be considered merely as music, or worse, entertainment. Nevertheless, I will discuss their sonic properties only. The Abelam are a tribe from North of the Sepik River and south of the Prince Alexander Mountains, in North-Eastern Papua New Guinea. The recordings were made by Brigitta Hauser-Schaublin in 1978-83, with a few tracks recorded by Professor Dr. Gerd Koch in 1966.


Likembe: Unknown Fela: Perambulator

Perambulator (Lagos International Records LIR 6) was released in 1983, following a rather fallow period in Fela's career, and just before the jailing on trumped-up charges that would bring him back to the world's attention. "Perambulator," the song, was apparently recorded a number of years earlier. Toshiya Endo writes in his Fela discography that it was the B side of the French issue of Shuffering and Shmiling (Barclay 829 710-1) in 1978 while "Frustration" was recorded as "Frustration of My Lady" in 1977 as the B side of an Afrodisia LP that was never released.


Antediluvian Rocking Horse - Music For The Odd Occasion, CD,1995,Australia

Very strange electronic/experimental band from Australia.As strarting point here we have the outskirts of trance(in their most extreme way)and we continue with dada experiments,psychedelic madness,ethno beats, strange sounds ,cut ups .... First released through Psyharmonics label but then released also by Negativeland's Seeland label(the similarities are more than obvious).The notorious Ollie Olsen is also involved in this project. Great listen!


The Peculiar Sounds of Peter Scion

WHO IS PETER SCION AND WHAT DID HE BRING INTO THE WORLD? Peter Scion is a Swedish musician who in the 90's and a couple of years into the 00's privately released a series of albums of psychedelic folk. The albums were released as micro edition CD-R:s and are now hard to find. Peter Scion retired from music making in the early 00's. This blog offers (legally and for free) Peter Scion's music recorded as a solo performer, and as a member of Continental Soul Searchers, Modryn and Pangolin.

Leningrad Psychedelic Blues Machine -Dark Star,tape,1996,Japan
Psyched out fuzz monster by some masters of the kind!Leningrand Psychedelic Blues Machine was a meeting of the psych wierdos Leningrand Blues Machine of Tabata Mara with Nanjo Asahito(High Rise,Mainliner,Toho Sara,etc) and Kawabata Makoto.This meeting of acid burned psych minds ended up to a version of Grateful dead's Dark Star.Fuzzed psyched out bass keeping the Dark Star main rhythm while Mr. Makoto's mystical jazzy achievement to psyced out excurtions give as a result a spaced out version of Jerry Garcia's jam.

Especial Jean-Luc Godard
A ton of Godard films for download

U B U W E B :: Salvador Dali
The antic genius of "the divine Dali" has never been better displayed than in these sprightly conversations with his old friend, Alain Bosquet, a novelist, poet, and critic. The setting for all ten conversations is Dali's luxurious Paris apartment. "From time to time a charming and formidable ocelot wearing a muzzle came strolling in from the next room, making the intruders tremble." But there are no muzzles on Dali and Bosquet.


Burroughs narrates Poe (video, MP3) - WFMU's Beware of the Blog

1995 videogame "The Dark Eye", featuring William Burroughs reading "The Masque of the Red Death", accompanied by some creepy slides

Friday, November 06, 2009

Human Lobotomy - Save the internet



This is happening now. Not just in the USA. In Sweden. In Australia. In Canada. In France. Not just through ownership, but via legislation. Copyright is being used to secure access to the internet for those who can pay. You should be concerned. It is about the sort of society you want to have for future generations.

I Love Wooden Veil


The Wooden Veil Awaits




Wooden Veil: Gravity Problems by Hanayo

Wooden Veil is a Berlin-based art group formed in 2007. Inspired by the shared hauntedness of their respective homelands, they combine elements from forgotten and misremembered traditions to create a microcosmic world which only Wooden Veil inhabits, complete with its own symbols, clothing, food and shelters. Performances, installations and videos are characterized by an expansive wardrobe of ritual dress, and the creation of shrines, relics and talismans used to create music.

The group consists of artists Marcel Türkowsky (also a composer, founder of Snake Figures Arkestra, Cones, Uuhuu, collaborations with Datashock and Christoph Heemann), Hanayo (known for her solo work as a photographer and singer, collaborating with the likes of Christoph Schlingensief, Merzbow, Red Crayola, and Kai Althoff), Christopher Kline (Valkenburg Hermitage, †, Night Music, and Soft Peace), Dominik Noé (member of krautrock legends Lustfaust), and Jan Pfeiffer (Songs For Rocks, Soft Peace, Purple).

To understand:

Hold right hand, cupped near right ear; turn hand back and forth slightly with wrist. Bring left hand to opposite eye with the second finger pointing in the direction one is looking. With index and thumb of right hand, form an incomplete circle, space of one inch between tips; hold hand towards the earth, then move it in a curve across the heavens and back toward the horizon.



moon & hamburg wooden veil

"The music of Wooden Veil is at once chaotically ritualistic and curiously precious. From all indications it would seem that the Berlin-based collective have gone to great lengths to reach this dichotomy. Maintaining the project as a way to create a unique world that only Wooden Veil inhabits, the group's performances bring together symbols, clothing and rituals that are to be regarded a part of this world. Borne out of half-remembered traditions and etched in the fringes of culture, the music seems tribal through the eyes of a post-catastrophic modern man. Pieces of a once great culture slip in but it seems that much of their sound inhabits a forced forgetfulness, both innocently and ferociously using the remnants of instrumentation to create a new life in music. Among the pound of drums, the scorch of drones and the wail of frightened voices some beautiful moments emerge; alive but tenuously testing to see if, how and why that's possible." Raven Sings the Blues (includes two Mp3s)


WOODEN VEIL
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"Belonging to a world that is at once pre-millenial and post-apocalyptic, Wooden Veil’s music is the drumbeat of an ancient yet technological past channeled through the sounds of a post-human race. Masked and costumed, the players invoke a musical force as a shaman would a ghost. Collecting rhythm like wind collecting a storm, Wooden Veil gives grand form to noise – they make it an event. Drums, drones, harmonies and screams clamor in their songs, erupting now and again into a plainsong that rings just long enough for a melody to take shape, before it dissolves back into sonic entropy."
- Carson Chan, Program – Initiative for Art + Architecture, Berlin

"Playing like a semiotic mist, Wooden Veil approach their performances as handmade, patchwork quilt-like structures with emphasis on showing the lines of assembly, sewing together mythologies, traditional song, craft, ritual and acoustics."
- Steven Warwick (Heatsick, Birds of Delay)


Gloom Across the Ice

Wooden Veil on MySpace

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Princess Hijab



Awake. Today. Writing. Anything Possible.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Sound in Context (Full Film)

Sound in Context (Full Film) from Sound and Music on Vimeo.



Sound in Context is a short documentary exploring the unique practice of sound within the visual arts world. Through conversations with a number of key art institutions/galleries, artists and curators working with sound in the UK, Sound in Context allows practitioners to discuss some of the issues of presenting and exhibiting sound in the gallery and contemporary art domain.

Sound as a medium is time-based and is sensitive to space, perception/experience and environment, and has become intertwined with disciplines of sculpture, architecture, installation, film and media art. The ephemeral, invisible nature of sound poses a number of challenges within cultural practice and presentation. Situated between practices of music and art, sound overflows boundaries of the gallery, disrupts line between stage and audience, moves beyond categorizations, and merges models of economy and culture industry. Sound in Context explores the place and future of sound within an expanded arts milieu, while opening up reflections for sound artists engaging in the art world, and visual artists engaging with sound in their work.

Interviews with:

Seth Cluett (artist), Benedict Drew (artist/curator), Barry Esson (director, Arika), Anne Hilde Neset (deputy editor, The Wire), Hans Ulrich Obrist (co-director, Serpentine Gallery), Mike Stubbs (director, FACT), David Toop (writer/curator), Richard Whitelaw (programme director, Sonic Arts Network)

Produced by: Jonathan Web and Ashley Wong
Thanks to: The Jerwood Space, Goldsmiths' University of London, Sonic Arts Network, Nicolas Sauret, Arika, FACT Liverpool, Serpentine Gallery, The Wire

Sound and Music is an arts organisation that supports innovative practice in contemporary music and sound. From sharing information at our website, to a full programme of live events and commissioned activity, we raise the profile of contemporary music and sound in its cultural context, to build support and audiences for new work in the UK.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

The Right to Occupy Disused Property Threatened in the Netherlands

Table Bed Chair - A documentary about the squatter scene of Amsterdam by Robert Hack and Jakob Proyer from DCTV on Vimeo.


Table Bed Chair is a documentary about the squatter scene of Amsterdam. The film combines insights into the history of the squatter movement and its particularly well developed autonomous structures and practices with a focus on the extraordinary legalsituation in the Netherlands."Squatting is taking over an empty house, basically." With this statement, cool and precise at once, the viewer is introduced to the world of the ‘krakers’, as Amsterdam’s squatters are called.

Table Bed Chair sketches a documentary portrait of the movement by inquiring into ideological approaches and real-world alternatives to existing social structures. Explosive archival footage traces the historical roots of the movement to its climax in the volatile years of the 1980s when up to 10.000 krakers lived in squatted houses in Amsterdam.Contrasting interviews are used to explore differing points of view on issues such as self-organisation, autonomy and ideology, as well as violence as a legitimate means in the struggle.

"Squatting will go on!" For decades, this has been the national rallying cry of the Dutch squatters' movement. But if a current parliamentary majority has its way, their activities will soon be dealt a swift and lethal blow. Radio Netherlands (with another video).


Dutch squatters are under fire. After a series of incidents surrounding evictions, a majority in the lower house of parliament is in favour of a ban on squatting. "They should just keep their hands off other people's property." The squatting scene is in shock.

The words of Christian Democrat MP Jan Ten Hoopen sum up the anti-squatting mood.
"Squatting has become far too blunt an instrument to combat speculation. It doesn't suit the times any more. It causes annoyance and inconvenience, and a lot of damage that can't be recouped."He has the wind behind him, following a series of turbulent evictions in Amsterdam, the bastion of the squatters' movement. Apart from being on the receiving end of what has become a traditional barrage of paint bombs, the Amsterdam police claim that unpleasant surprises awaited them once they entered the buildings. According to Chief of Police Hans Schönfeld, the police encountered "booby traps and snares, which in one case actually enabled the squatters to make the ceiling collapse". Squatting ban threatened after eviction incidents



Squatting in Holland
According to the law in Holland, just three objects are essential to declare a squat: a bed, a table and a chair. Bart and his house mates brought those things with them as they moved in.

To what extent today do you think squatters are appreciated or demonized?

"I think in Amsterdam they are still appreciated by most of the population. People will feel that squatters are kind of weird, maybe deviant people, but at the same time they recognise that they have a very important role to play. In a city that has such a huge demand for space and is so much under the threat of commercialisation, squatters do provide a powerful antidote." Uiterman Justus Uitermark, University of Amsterdam

Monday, November 02, 2009

Charles Ess Tomorrow



Charles Ess at Århus Univeristy 'Global Convergences, Political Futures? Self, Community, and Ethics in Digital Mediatized Worlds'

Tomorrow I will be attending a seminar (and having lunch) with Prof. Charles Ess at HUMlab. While I have read Ess on new media ethics I have been looking further into his work and found something that almost excites me. He works with a concept termed 'relational self':

This takes us still further to the left – to the sense of self as relational or, in slightly different terms, “smeared out.” This is a sense of self that is characteristic of many cultures and peoples around the world, including those countries shaped by Confucian traditions, as well as indigenous peoples, e.g., in Africa (see Paterson 2007), North America, the polar peoples, etc. My friend and colleague Henry Rosemont, Jr., uses the metaphor of the onion vs. the peach. The atomistic self is something like the peach-pit that underlies an external body: while the external body undergoes change and decay – the peach-pit remains the same through time. Relationships with others for such a self are always extrinsic: even if all such relationships are removed, the peach-pit will continue to exist. By contrast, the relational self is constituted by its diverse relationships with others – e.g., friends, family, the larger community, etc. – with each relationship analogous to a layer in the onion. Such relationships are intrinsic to such a self: remove the relationships – peel away every layer of the onion – and there is nothing left.

The concept of the relational self is similar to what I have been thinking about for quite a few years as a result of studying Australian Aboriginal narrative systems. Traditional Aboriginal narratives cannot be classified as fiction or non-fiction, they organize society in such a total and integrated way that they defy all conceptions of narrative according to Western classifications. It was precisely this that I was thinking of when I wrote a long piece Narratives of Creation and Space: Pilgrimage, Aboriginal, and Digital:

To even speak about narrative in the context of Australian Aboriginal story systems is to misrepresent the roles of story in cultural contexts. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction cannot be successfully applied to Aboriginal story systems. The language based knowledge systems that are termed in English ‘Dreamtime’ were given the name by the British anthropologist Baldwin Spencer in 1896 in relation to what he understood of Aranda culture of the Central Australian desert (Silverman 2001). The term persists today and is now used by many Aboriginal people to describe how the “actualized transiency in the present, and the perduring life of the world is carried by ephemeral life- forms. All living things are held to have an interest in the life of living things with whom they are connected because their own life is dependant upon them. Care requires presence not absence….those who destroy their country destroy themselves” (Bird xvi). Over the enormous landmass of Australia very different Dreamtime law systems developed and I am speaking generally when I discuss aspects of them here. In every system however, the individual is bound within complex networks of relationships and responsibilities to the land area from which they come, context dependent family relations, the histories of both of these and their “actualized transiency in the present”. How these relationships develop through a person’s life is expressed in visual, spatial, linguistic and sonic arts. These arts assist my general exploration of Aboriginal language based media.


My hope is that an awareness of context-dependent, relational selves will draw human beings back from the moral precepts of bourgeois individualism, what Mikhail Bakhtin described as “the culture of essential and inescapable solitude”. Is it possible? This may be a question I ask Professor Ess tomorrow.