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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

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Inventors of Fantastic and Alien Tongues

Known among hobbyists and linguists as “conlangs,” constructed languages have a long history including Klingon, Na’vi and Dothraki languages —created by UCSC/UC Berkeley alum Marc Okrand, Paul Frommer and UCSD linguistics alum David Peterson, respectively.

All three can’t emphasize enough how important considerations of culture, environment and even biology are to their language creations. The four-fingered Na’vi, for instance, have an octal system for counting, not a decimal one. The Klingon surliness and warrior ethos is reflected in their language, and the nomadic horse culture of the Dothraki is in theirs.

What do people who move from place to place call “home”? Could, or should, Klingon have a word for “aspirin”? (Okrand decided that it would be okay for Klingon to have a word for “aspirin.” It means “coward’s medicine.”)

Read the full story “Language Crafters”

(via wildcat2030)

5 years ago
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We’re reaching a cliff of AI, where the height of human knowledge falls off into a wasteland of poorly automated social grace.
Time and space fold into each other again. New York in 1985, LA in 2013, and in 2025 – the outer reaches of the galaxy, towards Delta Pavonis and Caladan, home planet of the House Atreides. Danny Preston talks to me about weirding modules, “weapons...

Time and space fold into each other again. New York in 1985, LA in 2013, and in 2025 – the outer reaches of the galaxy, towards Delta Pavonis and Caladan, home planet of the House Atreides. Danny Preston talks to me about weirding modules, “weapons that you hum or shout sound into to create a powerful sound wave that can destroy things.” In Dune, the weirding modules are the secret weapon of the House Atreides. “Some thoughts have a certain sound, that being the equivalent to a form,” Paul Atreides explains to the Fremen as he shatters an obelisk with a single shout through one of the modules, “Through sound and motion you will be able to paralyse nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy or burst his organs.” Danny tells me he had been thinking about “what kind of power that would have if our influences were played through a module, like putting the Miami Vice theme through a weirding module may be catastrophic.”

Read the full text of my interview with Rainbow Arabia at FACT.

5 years ago
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I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being – all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine – time itself: the years, days hours, minutes and seconds. And film time has also ceased to exist, since the film itself has ceased to exist.

Josefina, the new EP by A Little Orchestra on Elefant Records can be ordered now via http://alittleorchestra.bandcamp.com/ The 7" vinyl record contains five tracks, four of which feature guest vocals by, respectively, Model Village, Darren Hayman, Simon Love, and Gordon McIntyre. The fifth and final track is a new instrumental composition for chamber orchestra composed by me.

5 years ago
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“There’ll be these weird mutations that shoot out and maybe they die in a year or maybe somebody takes just one thing from it. But it is, more than any other place, I think, somewhere that new forms are showing up.” We’re backstage at the Maison...

“There’ll be these weird mutations that shoot out and maybe they die in a year or maybe somebody takes just one thing from it. But it is, more than any other place, I think, somewhere that new forms are showing up.” We’re backstage at the Maison d'Arts in the Parisian suburb of Creteil and Dan Bitney, percussionist, keyboardist, sample-triggerer and occasional saxophonist for Tortoise since their second ever gig, two decades ago, is expounding his theory of why London might just be the only place in the world right now producing original music.

It’s at this point that guitarist Jeff Parker interrupts in the meekest, most humble of tones, “You don’t think that Juke and stuff is original?”

“Yeah,” Bitney grudgingly concedes.

“Baltimore Club? Like all of that?” Parker prods.

“Yeah…”

“But what I think is unique about England,” offers John Herndon, drummer, sequencer, vibes player, “is that it gets broadcast onto radio and people get to hear it. And that’s why it makes a broad splash rather than, like, a niche thing where people have to go and seek it out. Urban dance music is definitely mutating in pockets around the world but not all of them have a system of pirate radio that will broadcast it into your home, or into your car. There’s a razor’s edge about UK pirate radio that is different from other shit.”

It is a curious thing to find oneself deep in the Parisian banlieues talking about the UK hardcore continuum with three members of one of Chicago’s most eminent and influential post-rock bands.

Chatting ‘bout grime with Tortoise over at FACT.

5 years ago
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We’re sat in the darkened breakfast bar of a chain hotel just beyond the Parisian périphérique. Branca, sixty-four years old with greying hair swept back and a slight cloudiness to his eyes suggestive of incipient cataracts, wears a heavy black...

We’re sat in the darkened breakfast bar of a chain hotel just beyond the Parisian périphérique. Branca, sixty-four years old with greying hair swept back and a slight cloudiness to his eyes suggestive of incipient cataracts, wears a heavy black jacket with half a dozen different pens in the breast pocket. A twilight blue scarf hangs down across a green jumper in rough-hewn wool. The former guitarist in no wave bands Theoretical Girls and The Static, turned composer of epic electric guitar orchestras that once featured the young Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, wears his black shirt with the collar popped up.

“When free improvisation first broke out – ” he doesn’t so much speak as growl, a throaty east coast drawl with a nicotine rasp like a traction engine “ – mainly starting with Coltrane. I mean, really free improvisation – ” his fingers, usually steepled on the table in front of him, briefly extricate themselves to gesture a little theatrically, shades of the actor he once was, “ – it was interesting,” he concedes, somewhat philosophically. “For instance, there was a really fantastic band called the Art Ensemble of Chicago – I don’t know if they’re still around anymore or not. I mean, oh man, they could blow the roof off the house…”

Read my full interview with Glenn Branca at The Quietus (which now, by the way, includes a reply to some of the comments it received from Branca himself)

5 years ago
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“About twelve minutes into the film, Cespi starts to recall the events leading up to her fugue. The image switches to black and white and we find ourselves in a large conference centre as a deep organ drone enters on the soundtrack with a series of...

“About twelve minutes into the film, Cespi starts to recall the events leading up to her fugue. The image switches to black and white and we find ourselves in a large conference centre as a deep organ drone enters on the soundtrack with a series of discordant notes added in the middle voice of the keyboard, offset only slightly by a sparse, gentle melody on the piano. As the camera pans across a series of cubicles containing translators for different languages, strings enter tremolando with a grating sound verging on scratch tone. We hear a series ofglissandi played – by the sound of it – using the screw of the violin bow, recalling Helmut Lachenmann. A flutter-tongued flute briefly enters, and the percussion drifts and rolls softly as if somewhere in the distance. It’s only a brief composition, played low in the mix under a number of multilingual voiceovers saying things like, ‘Our computer has also shown us that in the year 2000 it will be almost impossible for men to live on planet Earth’, but in its brief span of minutes this piece showcases several extended instrumental techniques then being popularised by modernist composers like Lachenmann, Krzysztof Penderecki and Luciano Berio, to startlingly atmospheric effect.

The score to Le orme was one of those cited (in numerous interviews) by director Peter Strickland as inspiration for his recent Berberian Sound Studio (it’s name an homage to Berio’s wife, the singer Cathy Berberian). But it was the melancholy opening theme which inspired James Cargill and Trish Keenan of Broadcast in the composition of their own score for Strickland’s film. The principal melody for flute and acoustic guitar is used at several moments in Le orme, its instrumentation evoking the folk records of the time – or perhaps rather the odd combination of folk and easy listening that was becoming a feature of albums of library music at the time. But there is a sadness to it, suitable for that bleak picturesque peculiar to beach resorts out of season, the setting for most of the film. It sounds nostalgic, but with a sort of cloudy, sunken feeling, like a half-forgotten memory.”

Read the rest of my latest Reel Sounds column for Electric Sheep, on Piovani’s score for Le Orme aka Footprints on the Moon

5 years ago
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“It’s not often you hear a song like A Little Orchestra’s ‘Josefina’, a song that should be given away free on the NHS to those suffering with stress. Together with Cambridge’s Model Village, the lead track from A Little Orchestra’s new ep is simply sublime.” 

– from the review at A Layer of Chips blog.
5 years ago
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via @RougesFoam

5 years ago
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