Found this oddity whilst browsing the shelves of a great bookshop in Hitchin last week-end. I'd never heard of A. Paul Weber but I'm sure you'll agree that his vision is interesting, nightmarish and fantastical.
Friday 28 February 2014
Thursday 27 February 2014
don't ask - Meat Metaphysics
what?
he said
(don't ask what he thinks of it)
nothing
yes, I saw it
(and?)
don't ask what he thinks. if he had anything good to say he would have left a comment. wouldn't he?
never ask. it's asking for trouble. a gamble. he says 'great work!' you're pleased. he fumbles for something polite to say...or he changes the subject...
(don't ask)
Tags:
concrete
mixer
poetry
nonsense
collage
success
failure
trans-literary text manipulatory Dada vomit
Wednesday 26 February 2014
Music Round-Up: Perc, Ekoplekz & The Lord
Ali Wells comes rolling over the horizon in his armour-plated sound wagon firing salvoes at slavish followers of party political lines and plain party music - much tub-thumping, screams & sonic scrapings - it's total war! Storm the Bastille of the Bland! Burn! Loot! Everyone's favourite avant-fashionista Nik Colk Void adds vocals to Speek, one of the best tracks. Anti-manifesto racket railing against whatever you want it to - David & George is as annoying as the duo whose heads it would shred, along with yours. The Unquiet Brit on a soapbox screaming hardcore Techno-encoded slogans. Smashing.
Justified, ancient & on Planet Mu for this album, Nick Edwards hasn't altered & who'd want him to? It'll probably gain him more attention, which he deserves. Still channelling Chrome, The Cabs & Radiophonic dreams. Lo-fi, hi-fi, no-fi skills from a prolific man with more talent in his little toe than most pretenders in the Modern Electronics Made By Humans field/shed/studio. Analogue, never anal, always entertaining, Unfidelity will please fans & win a few more, I'm sure. A Brit award beckons, surely?
Praise The Lord (Paul Mill) & pass the ammunition in the form of this broadcast from Bedlam. Chopped geetar riffs & bonkers beats - broken hardly says it - but what joy to hear Mills toying with genres, even scatting (kind of), like a human beat box on the corner (The court of Dr Flimsy), still on the meths. Perhaps there's no method in his madness, but breaking free from the frivolity on Please use this for free, Sunset for Alice & Never Vex a stranger, for instance, Mills proves he can visit dark, interesting places.
Tuesday 25 February 2014
Blog Stats * Settings * Earn Money From Your Blog
If you want to create a successful blog, it's important to understand where traffic to your blog is coming from and what people do when they visit your blog. Luckily, there are a number of tools available to bloggers to help analyze the metrics of your blog.
It can be hard to find a glut of blogging stats all wrapped up in one place, so I was pleasantly surprised to find this infographic. It had a lot of data and statistics regarding blogging, and while a lot of it is US-centric, it does offer up some tasty nuggets. For example, 61% of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post. Not bad!
Stats is an important piece of the blogging puzzle, as it allows you to track your blog's traffic and find out exactly what your audience is looking for. As such, integrated, real-time stats has been one of the most frequently requested features from our users. You can find more information about Blogger Stats in our earlier announcement; meanwhile...
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| Blog Stats |
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| Settings |
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| Earn Money From Your Blog |
Monday 24 February 2014
Groovin' Lo-Fidelity Be-Bop
Groovin' lo-fidelity - hear the snap crackle 'n' bop shrouded in the time's hiss - the aural kiss of authenticity rescued from a market stall box where it languished with an assortment of other musics - priced at £2 - 10" 33 rpm - microgroove - maximum groove of dead hep cats dressed by the illustrator as high class types, bow ties an' all to gentrify the Jazz revolution - the jive junky waiting for his Man (Moose The Mooch) with contradictory stubble he (Charlie 'Bird' Parker) looking across at Dizzy Gillespie as if to say 'What?' - sepia cigarette smoke stained sleeve come down all those years since 1952 to land on my deck & sound as if it's still back there being played in a club whilst I stand outside...
Thursday 20 February 2014
It's about the way I carry myself...
Here's one I made.
Beyonce Knowles...twerkin' in the name o' The Lord - carrying herself with great dignity...
'...by their fruits ye shall know them.' Matthew 7:16
Wednesday 19 February 2014
Electronic World Inc Recording Tape Music Fantasy
Found this in a charity shop at the week-end.
'I can't believe you're buying that!' Says LJ.
'It's only two quid!'
Look, it's a company based in New York. It's history! Tape music! Not just music recorded on tape. Tape music is what I'm dreaming of looking at it. Vladimir Ussachevsky or Otto Luening might have owned it, or looked at it, or just touched the box, being at the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center. Yes? But how old is it? Google the company: no results. It looks old enough.
No, not just a tape recording, but recordings of taped sounds manipulated to make a new sonic mutation, to cut'n'paste sound - amazing! My dream was that it contained actual tape experiments, but it's unused. And besides, I'd never be able to play it. Yet just having the box perched on top of my speaker makes me feel good.
Tuesday 18 February 2014
Pan Sonic - Oksastus (Kvitnu)
Travelling through time from June 6th, 2009, Pan Sonic return to pulverise your mind. Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen's brutal bump and grind mechanics resonate as powerfully today as they did one night in Kyiv, Ukraine. Witness 17'28" (track titles simply describe their length), which starts with an increasingly fast sound wave fit to ensure that your brain is primed before being pummelled by a hyper beat and blistered by noise before driving slowly towards a climatic crunch - phew. The intensity rarely lets up, least of all on 5'31", although there's room to breath on 4'35", 4'41" and 5'42", the relatively calm pieces. You probably know what 'calm' means in this context. 11'03" starts in a stable fashion, but 'live' interference begins around the 3min mark when the duo set you on a road towards their sonic sink hole down which you will inevitably fall, the electronic roar ringing in your ears. A fierce blast from the past and a real treat for Pan Sonic fans.
Kvitnu
Wednesday 12 February 2014
The Conquerable Resistance Of Corn Flakes...
1967
...and you thought Kellogg's Corn Flakes were just another cereal. But as this psychologist proves, eating them is in fact a form of preparation for the day's trials and tribulations which may initially appear to be crunchy, brittle and difficult to swallow, but can actually soften and become easy to conquer. Covering them with milk and waiting until they all soften before consuming is, however, cheating. There's never enough milk to soften all the problems life throws at you, though. And besides, if there was, you would not enjoy the experience of having to conquer them.
Next week: the seemingly insurmountable problem of toffee
Tuesday 11 February 2014
Algo - Acouasm (Algorhythms)
1st class sub-harmonic skull-plundering metal machine music.
dread dub designed to terminate all rational thought, forcing you to succumb & twitch spasmodically as if possessed by a spirit which rewires your nervous system.
the needle is stuck; it's diamond cuts into your brain until reaching the temporal lobe, forming a portal to the caves of steel inside where drums of thunder reverberate whilst electrical charges crackle and fizz
small, immense, intense, prudent, dynamic constructions.
from the press pack:
'The E.P. was produced with the aid of an amplifier circuit housed inside an old cigar box. Sounds were created using resonant-spring contact microphones and circuit-bending body contacts to create piercing feedback loops, analog glitches and temporal sub-harmonics.
More good stuff at Bandcamp
Monday 10 February 2014
you just don't matter much...?
Tags: triple bypass brain management
psychotic wooden flower meadow
fag butt interior
constructivist imagination audit
[lower case]
what was he thinking? that whatever he had to say about anything actually mattered to anyone?
he was crazy
certified beyond the pale horizon...where a trillion-plus digital manifestations of other people's thoughts dissolved into mist...
zoom in > still nothing...
comments: 'I love it!'
'That's great!'
'I don't comment. I just look.'
he had to amuse himself somehow...otherwise...he could read, watch TV, watch a film, go for a walk...
he sometimes looked at the lit windows of other houses at night, wondering what people were doing in there. some nights he could see inside. twilight was the best time for snooping, when people had turned on the light but not bothered to draw the curtains yet...
...look at the rooms, the various chosen styles of décor...
...classical, that's nice, a deep green wallpaper on which small paintings hang...and all those books...
...a bare light bulb - terrible! their cold bright yellow lives, clearly illuminated, ugly, obese sofas & nicotine-stained walls...
...Ikea interior flickering in the light from a huge flat screen TV, the corner of which is visible from the street, as are the legs of a couple on their sofa...
a long time ago before the age of the computer he remembered that so many voices couldn't be heard...only those on TV, down the pub...friends...and so many photos of strangers couldn't be seen...and all the semi-literate could not prove themselves to be so...and all the music could only be heard on the radio or record player...
...he looks back at those times now as if watching old film on TV...grainy black & white representations of somebody's reality in colour...
...it matters, what you do! does it? so easy to disappear. but also seemingly impossible! ah, the urge to scratch you name on the bark of a tree in the endless forest...
...silence...
...
...is everyone's voice being heard and being lost? the illusion: you are being heard. the reality: perhaps, by a few...
...what do you want, an audience of millions hanging onto your every word?! no, no, no...
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! [laughs like a maniac - disappears.....................]
Conrad Schnitzler - Live '72 (Further Records)
pre, present, post-techno(logical) scientific sound from Conrad Schnitzler which makes your toes curl, your teeth buzz and the hairs inside your ears quiver
this ain't no tangerine dream you're having
it's a wide-awake experience of electronic clusters bubbling up from Con's brain into yours
multi-dimensional electronic alchemy turning mechanical sound into golden vibrations
resonating from 1972 into the forever
Wednesday 5 February 2014
Michel Banabila - More Research From The Same Dept. (Tapu Records)
What will the music of the future sound like? We know that predicting any aspects of the future is foolhardy and bound to be scoffed at by people in the future. We can safely say that a TV channel will still be re-running episodes of Come Dine With Me, can't we? Perhaps not. And will anyone notice when it disappears from our screens forever? What will that signify? The end of the world, or just the end of re-running re-runs?
We can predict that a lot of stupid people will be listening to stupid music, but what those who tried to predict Future Music in the past got wrong is that all music will not contain either a theremin, or synthesizer. To be fair, the Easy Listening futurologists and space-age synth pioneers weren't so much predicting as simply imagining with the tools available, and cashing in on a trend.
What dreamers imagine is one thing; what they forget is that a multitude of musical styles always exists. They have to, otherwise their space-age soundtrack would be a collection of every known genre. If you're John Zorn, cramming them all into one track, this is good.
Sadly, in the future, someone will still be strumming an acoustic guitar and thrashing electric ones. But they will also be playing violins, which is preferable. You may have noticed my penchant for electronic music made by machines using humans as transmitters. That, at least, is what they should do. That, anyway, is what I like to imagine.
Here is Michel Banabila's future music. Yes, we know The Future is now, but he calls tracks A Giant Cyborg And Tiny Insect Drones, Cricket Robotics and Alien World, so he is thinking way ahead, as far as I know. Unless he's developed such things in his research department and been far Out There. This is what they sound like, anyway. Here is the crackle and blip of things to come. No dramatic drones of whooshing spaceships or colliding planets here. Instead, subtle tones and clicks, with occasional heavy buzzing and the drama of an intense but temporary jolt to the system. Cryptography is particularly effective, summing up the method and means by which Bababila sends his messages, like coded alien language.
William Burroughs Birthday Tribute
William Burroughs was born 100 years ago today. If there's a hell below he's down there for being a queer junkie who attacked the religious establishment along with every other, but there isn't, so he's not. From the literary bomb that was The Naked Lunch through the cut-up trilogy of the 60s to The Third Mind (with Brion Gysin) and beyond he tore up literary conventions. Essayist, tape manipulator, artist, he was counter to even the counter culture that embraced him.
'Calling partisans of all nations - Cut word lines - Shift linguals - Vibrate tourists - Free doorways - Word falling - Photo falling - Break through in Grey Room - ' - Nova Express
Here's a mix I made about a year ago in case you missed it.
There's plenty more good Burroughs-related material on Include Me Out. Check the label on the list to the right.
A collage I made, which I suggest you enlarge for the details.
The Photo Collage, essay, 1963
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| Untitled, 1972 |
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| Untitled, 1965 |
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| Self-Portrait, Tangier, 1964 |
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| Collage, date unknown |
Tuesday 4 February 2014
Monday 3 February 2014
Music Round-Up: Cage Suburbia, Rainer Veil, Mark Banning & Sun Ra
Rainer Veil tell it like it is on their new E.P. called, er, New Brutalism (Modern Love). If the title's not exactly subtle, neither are the sounds, but what did you expect? That said, they sound like New Age music compared to Cage Suburbia. Liam Morley and Dan Valentine almost contradict themselves by erecting comparatively complex blocks of rhythm build from old (breakbeat/junglist) and new materials. It's step up for them after Struck. If you lean over the concrete ramparts and holler 'METALHEADZ!' into the core of this building you'll hear an echo, and that's no bad thing. Gnarly but still nuanced. Out Now.
Did I mention New Age? Flashbacks to the 80s and shops selling crystals along with posters of dolphins - oh no! Oh yes, but despite resisting last year's I Am The Center compilation (it wasn't hard to do) I find myself (worryingly) enjoying Journey to the Light by Mark Banning (Students of Decay). Made in '84 on a private press, this two-tracker is blissful without being too soft and best of all has no crappy 80s synth overload in an attempt to prove just how New it was. With a title such as Everlasting Moments, the first track should be selling chocolates, and if it was, they'd be at least 70% cocoa, which is something. A Sea Of Glass continues to seduce us all into lighting incense and meditating, almost. I'm not that taken with it, but yes, even I need peaceful vibes, ma-a-a-n, and this makes a change from the usual suppliers of that such as The Modern Jazz Quartet. Out now.
Last but never least, Other Strange Worlds, a transmission by Sun Ra & His Astro-Infinity Arkestra, first beamed in 1965 but only now being relayed to us Earthlings by Roaratorio, bless 'em. Whilst not as crucial as the quartet release, The Night Of The Purple Moon, this quintet session still has the quirkiness (and charm?) of the similar Strange Strings album. It's the same idea, give horn stalwarts such as John Gilmore and Marshall Allen kora and percussion to play with instead and see what they come up with. The result is much plucking and scraping of strings, and like the true Afro-futurists they were, creating antique black off-world sounds. Ali Hasaan's trombone is the Voice Within The Stars, a rare brass note amid all the drums and strings. Allen's oboe-playing on The Other Beings is a highlight, as is the blowing on Journey Amongst The Stars. Without these solos the record would be a much less interesting excercise but Sun Ra could and did do what he liked, which is why he's a god. Out late February.
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