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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

magictransistor:

Wolfgang von Kempelen’s ‘Mechanical Turk’ (Chess Automaton), c. 1770.

4 years ago
109 notes

magictransistor:

En L’An 2000 (In the Year 2000); Jean-Marc Côté, c.1900.

4 years ago
171 notes

magictransistor:

A 20th century ‘futuristic’ vision of the ‘exciting’ world of ‘tomorrow’ in the year 2000. [Theodor Hildebrand und Sohn ‘Chocolate’ Co.], Germany, c. 1909.

4 years ago
259 notes

Forty-five years ago, a truly singular album first saw the light of day. Like a kind of musical vanishing point, Canaxis 5, as it was called, as if named after the far off satellite of some distant star, landed in West Germany at the confluence of two hitherto parallel but quite distinct streams which up to that point had regarded each other either with suspicion or a kind of mystified fascination.

Two years earlier, The Beatles had put Karlheinz Stockhausen on the front cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, nestled not entirely comfortably between Lenny Bruce and W. C. Fields, as if warning their fans not to take the German composer too seriously. At that point at least, the Fab Four’s experiments with tape and electronic sound were always strictly subordinated to pop song structures, periodic rhythms, and diatonic harmony (all of which were anathema to Stockhausen himself).

But in 1968, one of Stockhausen’s former pupils, a thirty year old shortwave radio enthusiast named Holger Czukay, crept into the the electronic music studios which Stockhausen managed at the West Deutscher Rundfunk and made one of the strangest albums to be released in what was already one of music’s strangest periods. Earlier in the year, amidst student protests mounting in intensity, along with one of his guitar pupils and a classmate from the Musikschule composition class, Czukay had formed what would one day be recognised as amongst the most influential bands in rock history: Can.

Read the rest of my piece about Canaxis 5 over at The Quietus

4 years ago
4 notes
In the winter of 1987–88, Negativland found themselves in a position which will be familiar to most people who have been in bands – especially in these days of diminishing record sales and tightening label budgets. Escape From Noise, their first...

In the winter of 1987–88, Negativland found themselves in a position which will be familiar to most people who have been in bands – especially in these days of diminishing record sales and tightening label budgets. Escape From Noise, their first album on a ‘proper’ label – SST Records – was a hit. It wasn’t Slippery When Wet or the La Bamba soundtrack, but in comparison to the group’s previous four self-released LPs, it was doing pretty well. There were good reviews, sales were up, and that combined with daytime plays on mainstream college radio made the members start to think it was time to take this show on the road. They were going to go on tour.

That’s where the problem started. As this was their first attempt to play live outside their immediate neighbourhood, and SST Records – despite a back catalogue that could boast such cult classics as Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade and Double Nickels on the Dime by The Minutemen – had no money for tour support, it soon became clear that the nationwide tour they had booked was going to run financial losses that none of the band members could afford. It’s a familiar problem. But how they responded to the situation was anything but industry standard.

About a year earlier, one of the group’s founder members, Richard Lyons, was in a Bay Area thrift store when he came across a record with the wonderfully off-the-wall title If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? This album, a privately pressed recording of a sermon by the Reverend Estus W. Pirkle, presents a kind of southern Baptist apocalypse, a feverish future narrative in which communists take over America and set about brainwashing its citizens. In one particularly fiery passage, Pirkle foretells of loudspeakers throughout the country broadcasting the same message over and over again: ‘Christianity is stupid! Communism is good! Give up!

Lyons and the other members of Negativland were immediately taken by the peculiarly musical quality of Pirkle’s voice. “Not just what he was saying, but how he was saying it,” as the group’s Mark Hosler would later say. They knew right away “we’ve got to make him the vocalist for a piece.” Backed with a dirge of thudding four-four beats and crashing guitars – “brainwash music” as Hosler would put it – Pirkle’s chant became the hook to the biggest anthem on Escape From Noise, ‘Christianity is Stupid’.

Fast-forward to the beginning of March 1988: Lyons is working nights as a security guard. Two weeks earlier a teenager named David Brom in Rochester, Minnesota had chopped up his family with an axe. The story was still all over the newspapers. An article in the New York Times had made brief mention of an argument over a cassette tape that Brom had been listening to that had somehow offended his deeply Catholic family.

Bored at work and depressed about the prospect of having to cancel the upcoming tour, Lyons tosses off a quick press release quoting a fictional “Federal Official Dick Jordan” who had supposedly ordered the group to cancel all concerts pending an investigation into the role their song ‘Christianity is Stupid’ may have played in the Brom murders. At first nothing happens. But gradually the story is picked up, first by some underground zines and a local arts mag, later CBS News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and National Public Radio…

Read the rest of my article on Negativland’s Helter Stupid at RBMA.

4 years ago
1 note

spitzprezlibrary:

Ned Ludd & Queen Mab

Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12   Peter Linebaugh

2012

Oakland

Retort/PM Press

21.6x13.8

9781604867046

(Source: spitzprezlibrary-blog)

4 years ago
1 note
brucesterling:
“ *So, whatever happened in 1970, one wonders
”

brucesterling:

*So, whatever happened in 1970, one wonders

4 years ago
147 notes

I still remember it quite clearly. Standing in the middle of Virgin Megastores on Western Road in Brighton. Big chunky black headphones on, listening to ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed on one of the in-store 'listening posts’. Eyes welling up, tears running down my cheeks. The song never affected me like that before or since. No idea why it did then. I remember nothing else about that day. I can’t have been more than about 15.

“When listening to music we are often surprised,” William James, the American pragmatist and psychologist, once said, “at the cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us, and at the heart swelling and lacrymal effusion that unexpectedly catches us at intervals.”

We know the brute mechanism of these watery effusions. The parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system activates the lacrimal gland. Nerve impulses run back and forth on the opthalmic division of the trigeminal cranial nerve. A colourless cocktail of water, mucin, urea, proteins, fats, enzymes, and sugars is secreted by the gland and overflows the tear ducts, simultaneously cleaning dust from the conjunctiva and preventing the cornea from drying out.

But there are tears and then there are tears. Emotional tears, the ones wrung from inner pain and the recognition of tragedy, have even a different chemical composition. There are proteins that are theirs alone. And the precise network of higher brain functions involved in these less obviously functional emissions remains shrouded in mystery.

Read more on music and tears at The Quietus.

4 years ago
0 notes