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"Wire contributor, semi-mythical pop svengali, erstwhile thespian, sampler troubadour and untidy kitchen user" - Owen Hatherley of Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy

"Your songs are pretty little paths - take us somewhere nice." - Elodie Amandine Roy, Applejack Zine
“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...

“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

5 years ago
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“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

5 years ago
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One can recall a time around the dot-com crash of 2000 when a number of books dealing with the topic of the attention economy appeared in bookstores. Economists suddenly became aware of the simple fact that in a semiocapitalist world, the main commodity becomes attention. The 1990s saw an era of increasing productivity, increasing enthusiasm for production, increasing happiness of intellectual workers, who became entrepreneurs and so forth in the dot-com mania. But the 1990s was also the Prozac decade. You cannot explain what Alan Greenspan called the “irrational exuberance” in the markets without recalling the simple fact that millions of cognitive workers were consuming tons of cocaine, amphetamines, and Prozac throughout the 1990s. Greenspan was not speaking of the economy, but the cocaine effect in the brains of millions of cognitive workers all over the world. And the dot-com crash was the sudden disappearance of this amphetamine from the brains of those workers.
Toiletpaper magazine’s intervention on the windows of the Palais de Tokyo opens June 20th.

Toiletpaper magazine’s intervention on the windows of the Palais de Tokyo opens June 20th.

(Source: toiletpapermagazine)

5 years ago
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Mechanics of the Dance Machine Kickstarter

Earlier this year, my remix (along with other remixes by Richard Lannoy, Kreepa, Medasyn, Cerebral Productions, Parsley Sounds, G. Prokofiev, and Heavy Deviance) of Gabriel Prokofiev’s Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra was used by renowned choreographer, Karole Armitage for her Mechanics of the Dance Machine at New York Live Arts. 
A former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Armitage became known as the “punk ballerina” in the 80s as she forged a distinctive career, creating original works for Baryshnikov’s American Ballet Theatre, the Paris Opera Ballet, and the video for Madonna’s ‘Vogue’. 
Rehearsals for Mechanics of the Dance Machine – which the Huffington Post called “red hot” – were filmed by Eli Schmidt who is currently seeking funding via Kickstarter to complete the short documentary about the process. You can pledge your support at their fundraising page here. Meanwhile, a short extract (which does not, incidentally, feature my remix) can be viewed below.



and here’s my remix …

5 years ago
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The Echo Nest Blog: How We Cope with Spammers, Fakers, and Cloners

echonest:

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)

5 years ago
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WHAT THE FUCK: An Anti-Work Politics of the Present... for a Post-Work Society of the Future

superwhatthefuck:

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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)

5 years ago
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Wal-Mart’s top executives…defined the company as a knowledge firm, pointing to its highly sophisticated information logistics systems as being at the heart of its remarkable growth in profits, sales, and stock market value over the past decade. Wal-Mart’s $250 billion market capitalization in 2001 was over seven times its book value. A plausible explanation was that ‘Wal-Mart’s main assets are…the intangible business process they have built around those computer systems.’ Wal-Mart’s computer system is the most powerful in the corporate world; only the US government has a larger computer network. Its web-based Retail Link network system, which is hooked up to suppliers and customers so they and Wal-Mart can track merchandise inventory and sales in any of its stores or regions, is the envy of retail marketers around the globe. These knowledge assets, however, do not show up on Wal-Mart’s balance sheet.
Macintosh - Accounting, Accountants & Accountability, p. xxi (via writingcapital)

(via nomadic-thought)

5 years ago
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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.

5 years ago
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A Little Orchestra album launch at the Union Chapel, with Model Village. Album, Clocks, is out now.

5 years ago
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“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).”
Read the full article by Stuart Huggett here.
5 years ago
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“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...

“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

5 years ago
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“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...

“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.

5 years ago
1 note