“Produced in the same year that the ex-Roxy Music synth player would record his second collaboration with Robert Fripp and earn a credit for ‘direct injection anti-jazz ray gun’ on Robert Wyatt’s second solo album, Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard, it’s a reasonable assumption that he employed the same system of daisy-chained delay units. It’s a modus operandi Eno would accuse Terry Riley of copying from him – an accusation that would be a lot more plausible if only history travelled backwards – and is an early example of his now all-consuming passion for generative composition, inspired by the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, the process-based minimalism of Riley and Steve Reich, and the generative grammars of Noam Chomsky. But what sounds contemplative and quietly zen on its near contemporaries is here unearthly, unsettling, goose-pimpling stuff. One of the real highlights of Eno’s soundtrack career – and an unfortunate omission from his two Music for Films compilations.”
Read the rest of my column on Brian Eno’s music for Land of the Minotaur at Electric Sheep Magazine
Tweet
“For the best part of a decade now we have have endured a series of Doctors who have looked like the Bullingdon Club and acted like Bono. With the departure of the latest foppish do-gooder, it is time to consider a change.”
Read the rest of my article for The Quietus, Dr Who as Cosmic Clochard: Why We Don’t Need Another TopMan Dr
Toiletpaper magazine’s intervention on the windows of the Palais de Tokyo opens June 20th.
(Source: toiletpapermagazine)
Tweet
and here’s my remix …
Here, The Echo Nest Senior Software Engineer Aaron Mandel explores the sneaky techniques used by musical spammers to “game the system” in music services — and how we stop them from succeeding.
—
The Echo Nest knows approximately 2.4 million artists as part of our database of music…
(Source: echonest)
WHAT THE FUCK is a discussion, social and working group developed by members of Thames Valley Plan C. We are open for all to join and our aim is to better educate ourselves and inform the development of our politics and strategy for the coming year. Our current ‘theme’ of readings and…
(Source: superwhatthefuck-blog)
(via nomadic-thought)
Pightie 21, sung by Lisa Bouvier and Monster Bobby, backed by A Little Orchestra, at the Union Chapel, London, for the launch of the album Clocks on Saturday June 8th.
TweetA Little Orchestra album launch at the Union Chapel, with Model Village. Album, Clocks, is out now.
Tweet“A Little Orchestra is a classical ensemble formed by Pipettes creator ‘Monster’ Bobby Barry. The repertoire of the 10-piece group includes compositions by Terry Riley, Michael Nyman and Angelo Badalamenti, although they’re most active live and as an orchestra for hire within the UK indie-pop scene.
The group’s concerts have seen them joined by singers including MJ Hibbett, Shirley Lee of Spearmint and Elizabeth Morris of Allo Darlin’, or swelling the ranks of bands such as Pocketbooks and Haiku Salut. Guests on A Little Orchestra’s debut album Clocks, set for release on June 10th, include Darren Hayman, Gordon McIntyre (Ballboy), Simon Love (The Loves) and Lisa Bouvier (The Proctors).”
“At the age of four, Anri Sala was taken to the Palace of Pioneers in Tirana, then capital of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, in order to begin the violin lessons he had asked his parents for. ‘So there was this man sitting in front of a piano,’ the artist recalls, ‘and he needed to check if I had an ear.’ In a small, darkened room, the instructor clapped out a series of rhythms for the boy to repeat, each one longer and more complex than the last, ‘and I got so worried that I would miss the next one,’ Sala says. But he didn’t falter. ‘Good,’ said the violin teacher finally, satisfied with the boy’s ability to recognize and repeat a rhythm. ‘You’re done.’
Sala went on to study violin for seven years and, though he no longer reads music, he acknowledges that the experience helped him develop ‘an idea about musical tempo, and how to speak with musicians’ – both of which have proved useful in his numerous projects involving music of various stripes, be it Tchaikovsky or The Clash. But there is something about this story of his initial encounter in the Palace of Pioneers, with its play of difference and repetition, that resounds especially clearly in Sala’s upcoming project for the French Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale this year.
‘The idea was that I wanted to make a work that is about repetition,’ Sala told me last month in a cafe across the square from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, ‘the same and its difference and how you produce difference in the same.’ ”
Read all about that project in my latest blog for Frieze’s Venice Preview, Anri Sala Unravels His Project for the French Pavilion
Tweet
“Early on in the latest film by former philosophy teacher Bruno Dumont, Alexandra Lematre’s character (identified only as ‘elle’) takes an in-ear headphone from the pocket of her hoodie and slips it in her ear. We, the audience are never made privy to the music she listens to, but the gesture draws attention to the use of sound in the film.As traditionally defined, there is no music in Hors Satan – no silken Hollywood strings, no pop songs, no diegetic performance, no non-diegetic score. Even the kind of sonic re-structuring usually handled by a sound editor is missing, for Dumont did not hire one.
No music, nor very much dialogue either – and most of what there is, is largely inconsequential. But Hors Satan is not a silent film. Far from it. We hear birds tweeting, cocks crowing, leaves rustling, as well as several more revealing sounds – a camera dolly rolling over its track, the wind blowing against a microphone.
In an interview with Jean-Michel Frodon, the director explains, ‘We recorded only live and “mono” sounds. What you hear in the film are the actual sounds recorded during shooting. I didn’t alter or re-record them. I wish some noises weren’t there, but I kept them anyway, stoically… The sound material is very rich and untamed. Therefore, when there is a moment of silence, you can feel it loud and clear.’
At one moment, after it has been raining, we hear water running over a corrugated iron roof and falling to the ground. The two main characters pause in their journey to watch and listen, and we listen with them. These characters frequently take time out to simply stand still and pay attention to some ambient sound. And even in their absence, the camera will likewise pursue such sounds to their sources, which become, in the process, a character like them. Sound – and a certain quasi-musical attentiveness to sound – thus subjectivizes, and in so doing constructs an audience that will be willing, like the film’s characters, to offer a certain attentiveness toward sounds, to give them time, without preconceptions.”
Read the rest of my latest Reel Sounds column, about Bruno Dumont’s Hors Satan, at Electric Sheep Magazine.
Tweet