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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

loveisamerrygomine:

Traditional Welsh tune ‘Tros y Garreg’ by John Baker of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

(Source: gwennogwenno-blog)

5 years ago
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It was at the Tape Music Center – a “community of interest” which grew “into an interesting kind of institution” – that Sender and Subotnick worked with engineer, Donald Buchla, to create the Buchla Music Box. The almost exact contemporary to the...

It was at the Tape Music Center – a “community of interest” which grew “into an interesting kind of institution” – that Sender and Subotnick worked with engineer, Donald Buchla, to create the Buchla Music Box. The almost exact contemporary to the first Moog but designed and developed independently, the Buchla was one of the very first modular synthesizers – and unlike Robert Moog’s machine, Buchla eschewed the traditional piano-style keyboard in favour of more idiosyncratic controllers like the Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator. Buchla’s Box would later be used extensively by Suzanne Ciani and Laurie Spiegel, and to stunning effect on Buffy Sainte Marie’s Illuminations album. But Pauline Oliveros was initially sceptical of the new toy.

“Well, it was fine, you know, but it was all about control; it wasn’t about sound. Which is different,” she says, laughing a little. “And that’s probably what differentiates me from the other composers that were working at the time, because they were very interested in controlling things, but I was very interested in playing and performing things.”


Read the full text of my interview with Pauline Oliveros at Fact Magazine.

5 years ago
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dronestagram:
“ January 23: a strike at 8pm, 20 miles southeast of the capital, killing 6-7 people in a vehicle explosion. Two Saudis were among the dead, and there are suggestions that Saudi jets, embroiled in their own secret war, may be...

dronestagram:

January 23: a strike at 8pm, 20 miles southeast of the capital, killing 6-7 people in a vehicle explosion. Two Saudis were among the dead, and there are suggestions that Saudi jets, embroiled in their own secret war, may be responsible for some of the reported drone strikes. #yemen #drone #drones (at Jahana Village, Sahan)

5 years ago
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824 plays

gilliflower:

“sleeping beauty” by acanthus; from the soundtrack to jean rollin’s le frisson des vampires (1971)

(via thespectraldimension)

5 years ago
75 notes
“…if [The Ex] can be meaningfully described as in some sense a ‘noise’ band, then theirs is distinctly a haptic noise.
“Far from the spatialised, seemingly dynamic, mobile, almost visual kind of noise which extends equally from Stockhausen and GRM...

“…if [The Ex] can be meaningfully described as in some sense a ‘noise’ band, then theirs is distinctly a haptic noise.

“Far from the spatialised, seemingly dynamic, mobile, almost visual kind of noise which extends equally from Stockhausen and GRM acousmaticians like Francois Bayle to contemporary 3D sound manipulators as diverse as Monolake and Chris Watson; equally distinct from the pungent, mustily olfactory noise of the various projects by James Kirby, whether under the moniker of The Caretaker or V/VM; the sound of The Ex calls forth to and seeks to engage with one’s sense of touch. Not only is their performance onstage at all times highly physical, but as listeners we find our physical sensations engaged. In seeking to describe the sounds we hear, we immediately reach for haptic descriptors: it is rough, textural, grainy.…”

Read the rest of my piece on The Ex in Paris at The Quietus.

5 years ago
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My latest Reel Sounds column, on Yosuke Yamashita’s music for Ecstasy of the Angels (Wakamatsu, 1972) is now online at Electric Sheep Magazine.

My latest Reel Sounds column, on Yosuke Yamashita’s music for Ecstasy of the Angels (Wakamatsu, 1972) is now online at Electric Sheep Magazine.

5 years ago
6 notes
spitzenprodukte:
“ “EDUCATION IS NOT THE FILLING OF A BUCKET- BUT THE LIGHTING OF A FLYER” This A5 pamphlet was handed out prior to the storming of Millbank on 10th November 2010
”

spitzenprodukte:

“EDUCATION IS NOT THE FILLING OF A BUCKET- BUT THE LIGHTING OF A FLYER” This A5 pamphlet was handed out prior to the storming of Millbank on 10th November 2010

(Source: huwlemmey)

5 years ago
27 notes

poorsexyeast:

Urszula, a Polish disco/synthpop diva, in “Seasonal Fashion Frenzy” !!!!!!!!

5 years ago
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I’m discussing one of my favourite pieces of film music – and one of the most horrible scenes visually – from Cannibal Holocaust, at Electric Sheep.

5 years ago
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cinephilearchive:

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s delightfully surreal, long lost debut film — La Cravate.

Believed lost for fifty years, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film, La Cravate (aka Severed Heads) was found in an attic in Germany in 2006, and released on DVD in 2007. Adapted from Thomas Mann’s short story, “The Transposed Heads - A Legend of India in Paris”, La Cravate was made between 1953 and 1957 and starred Denise Brossot, Rolande Polya, Raymond Devos, Saul Gilbert and Jodorowsky.

The film tells of a young man’s desire to win the love of a woman. To do this, he visits a store which allows customers to switch their heads, and thus their personalities. The young man trades in his head for a variety of different models, and while his body continues to woo the woman of his dreams, the store’s proprietor, a young woman, takes a fancy to the man’s original head and takes it home. The moral is never to lose your head over unrequited love, but find someone who loves you as you are. It’s bizarre, amusing and charming, and an impressive first film.

(Source: dangerousminds.net, via cinephiliabeyond)

5 years ago
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The critic Michael J. Arlen recognized the profound moral implications of this arrangement more than 40 years ago: the manner in which, for example, the propagandistic early coverage of Vietnam helped build public support for the war. Like Trow, Arlen regarded television not as a window onto the actual state of the world but a set of corporate-carved keyholes offering fragmented and often misleading visions.

It’s painful to read Trow or Arlen today because their intuitions about the effects of visual mass media have proved so eerily prescient. Our latest innovation, the Internet, was hailed as an information highway that would help us manage the world’s complexity. In theory, it grants all of us tremendous narrative power, by providing instant access to our assembled archive of human knowledge and endeavor.

In practice, the Internet functions more frequently as a hive of distraction, a simulated world through which most of us flit from one context to the next, from Facebook post to Tumblr feed to YouTube clip, from ego moment to snarky rant to carnal wormhole. The pleasures of surfing the Web — a retreat from sustained attention and self-reflection — are the opposite of those offered by a novel.

We haven’t lost the capacity to tell stories. Artists and journalists and academics still work heroically to make sense of the world. But theirs are niche products, operating on the margins of a popular culture dominated by glittering fantasies of violence and fame. On a grand scale, we’ve traded perspective for immediacy, depth for speed, emotion for sensation, the panoramic vision of a narrator for a series of bright beckoning keyholes.

Once Upon a Time, There Was a Person Who Said, ‘Once Upon a Time’ - NYTimes.com

“unsure how they arrived in such a precarious place, and uncertain even how to tell the story that might make sense of their journey.”

(via new-aesthetic)

(Source: The New York Times, via new-aesthetic)

5 years ago
102 notes

If the Elvis-worshipping, punk-rocking teenage delinquent from Dennis Hopper’s cult film, Out of the Blue, had made a pop hit instead of blowing herself up in a pick-up truck full of dynamite, it probably would have sounded something like the new single by The Lovely Wars. 

Their new single, ‘Let’s Blow the Whole Thing Up’ is available for free download on Monday the 21st of January.

5 years ago
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Viewed from above, Asim Waqif’s installation at the Palais de Tokyo, Bordel Monstre (2012), resembles a tornado in freeze-frame, a perfect storm sweeping up plastic chairs, packing crates and dying crops without discrimination. For fans of The Wizard...

Viewed from above, Asim Waqif’s installation at the Palais de Tokyo, Bordel Monstre (2012), resembles a tornado in freeze-frame, a perfect storm sweeping up plastic chairs, packing crates and dying crops without discrimination. For fans of The Wizard of Oz, such a sight is an invitation to dream, to enter another world. But Waqif’s installation is not meant to be viewed from above – or at least not only – but stepped into and explored. Wherein it becomes a kind of living creature, responding in different ways to different explorers, bellowing and belching through partially concealed speakers, shaking and stirring as you make your unsteady passage through its thatched belly.

Bordel Monstre is a fascinating exercise in making use of things otherwise neglected: constructed in a corner of the Palais de Tokyo which hasn’t previously been used, made out of materials discarded at the end of the previous exhibition. And if its exterior form resembles the damage wrought by a force of nature, its construction was as spontaneous and unplanned as the weather. Faced with a lot of discarded empty wooden frames – all straight lines and right angles – Waqif knew that he wanted to build curves. Beyond that, he simply started building one day on site, starting at the ‘mouth’ by which the public enters this rubbish-dump beast (which would be one way of translating its title) and working from there, sometimes alone, sometimes aided by local students and a trio of engineers – from both Paris and his native India.

Read my full review at Frieze.

5 years ago
1 note