12.31.2010

Top Ten 10 WD iTunes



- 10 - The Dovers, She's Not Just Anybody
- 09 - Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Reminiscences
- 08 - Stellar Om Source, Alpine Architective
- 07 - Pantha du Prince, Stick To My Side
- 06 - ARP, White Light
- 05 - Tame Impala, It's Not Meant To Be
- 04 - Ducktails, Beach Point Pleasant
- 03 - Deerhunter, Revival
- 02 - Amen Dunes, Amen Dunes
- 01 - Alasdair Roberts, The Flyting Of Grief & Joy (Eternal Return)

Get it here

12.30.2010

Substance

Luminophores

Intervals


Twelve compositions (including one shameless repost of the sublime The World Brushed Aside by David Grubbs) selected in frantic Piano Phase. To be played in no particular order, but loud enough. Uncharted soundscapes guaranteed.

La Monte Young, The Well Tuned Piano I
Harold Budd + Ruben Garcia + Daniel Lentz, Pulse Pause Repeat
Peter Garland, The Days Run Away
Cecil Taylor, Amplitude
Steve Reich, Six Pianos
David Grubbs, The World Brushed Aside (repost)
John and Alice Coltrane, The Sun
Marylin Crispell, After the Rain
Claude Debussy, The Wind over the Plains

12.23.2010

Are you real



"The Planet of the Apes meets Cannibal Holocaust meets Thundarr the Barbarian", "the first hypnagogic metal band", or even "part Sabbath and part Residents", here are few tracks by Dwarr, taken from the albums "Starting Over" (1985) and "Animals" (1986).

Genre(s): Doom/Heavy Metal
Lyrical theme(s): christian devotion, horror, drugs, personal issues
Origin: United States of America (Columbia, South Carolina)
Formed in: 1981
Label: WARR Enterprises
Current line-up: Duane Warr - All Instruments, Vocals
Former/past member(s): Ron Sparks - Session Percussion
Additional notes: The best way to describe his music would be Hard Psych Rock with Doom and Heavy elements


Reach for the Fire, from "Starting Over"
Christmas Shopping, from "Starting Over"
Ghost Lover, from "Animals"
Lucky Star, from "Animals"
Lonely Space Traveller, from "Animals"

Are you real (video)

12.21.2010

Monochrome


Solar Collector

"Lorsqu’en 1985, je rencontrai à Berkeley l’astronome et cosmologiste Jo Silk, il me fit découvrir les sons des pulsars. Je fus séduit par ceux du pulsar de Véla et immédiatement, je me demandai à la manière de Picasso ramassant une vieille selle de bicyclette : « Que pourrais-je bien en faire ? ». La réponse vint lentement : les intégrer dans une oeuvre musicale sans les manipuler, les laisser exister simplement comme des points de repère au sein d’une musique qui en serait en quelque sorte l’écrin ou la scène, enfin utiliser leurs fréquences comme tempi et développer les idées de rotation, de périodicité, de ralentissement, d’accélération et de « glitches » que l’étude des pulsars suggère aux astronomes. La percussion s’imposait parce que comme les pulsars, elle est primordiale et implacable, et comme eux cerne et mesure le temps, non sans austérité. Enfin, je décidai de réduire l’instrumentarium aux peaux et métaux à l’exclusion des claviers. Le Noir de l’Etoile était né ou presque…

Il restait à imaginer un complément lumineux de la partition, à élaborer une scénographie, à convaincre la communauté des astronomes de Nançay de transmettre un pulsar dans une salle de concert, enfin à réunir une équipe qui fût autant que moi passionnée par le projet. Lorsque la musique parvient à conjurer le temps, elle se trouve investie d’un véritable pouvoir chamanique, celui de nous relier aux forces qui nous entourent. Dans les civilisations passées, les rites lunaires ou solaires avaient une fonction de conjuration. Grâce à eux, les saisons pouvaient revenir et le soleil se lever chaque jour. Qu’en est-il de nos pulsars ? Pourquoi les faire venir ici, aujourd’hui à l’heure où leurs passages dans le ciel boréal les rend accessibles ?
Bien sûr, nous savons ou croyons savoir qu’avec ou sans nous, 0359-54 et le pulsar de Véla continueront leurs rondes interminables et, indifférents, balayeront les espaces intersidéraux de leurs faisceaux d’ondes électromagnétiques. Mais n’est-ce pas en les piégeant dans un radiotélescope, puis en les intégrant dans un événement culturel et sophistiqué - le concert - qu’ils nous renvoient alors plus que leurs propres chants ? En effet, le moment du passage d’un pulsar dans le ciel nous astreint à une date précise et en rivant le concert sur cette horloge lointaine, il devient un événement in situ, plus exactement in tempore donc relié aux rythmes cosmiques. Ainsi, les pulsars détermineront non seulement les différents tempi ou pulsations du Noir de l’Etoile, mais également la date et l’heure précise de son exécution. Musique avec pulsar obligé !

Que l’on n’en déduise pas cependant que je suis un adepte de la musique des Sphères ! Il n’est d’autre Musique des Sphères que la Musique Intérieure. Celle-là seule pulse encore plus violemment que nos pulsars et oblige de temps à autre un compositeur à rester à l’écoute. Et je soulignerai en outre : L’aspect inouï et irremplaçable de l’arrivée en direct dans le lieu du concert de ces impassibles horloges cosmiques qui ont franchi plusieurs années lumières… Leur confrontation inattendue à une musique qui non seulement prépare leur « entrée » sur une scène musicale et théâtrale mais dont toute l’organisation temporelle provient de leur vitesse de rotation… Leur intégration à une musique spatialisée par la position des six percussionnistes et des haut-parleurs autour des spectateurs… La mise en scène et la mise en lumière de ces étoiles éteintes au moyen de projections et d’éclairages appropriés… Le caractère à la fois musical, visuel, théâtral mais aussi festif et didactique d’un événement émouvant et exceptionnel." (Gérard Grisey)

Texte de l'astrophysicien Jean-Pierre Luminet. Voix off spatialisée. Percussions de Strasbourg disposées autour du public et sonorisées. Naissance d'une pulsation sonore et lumineuse. Rotations, périodicités, accélération, décélérations. Découverte de l'espace acoustique et visuel. Lent parcours de la macrophonie à la microphonie. Attente de l'« objet céleste ».

Gérard Grisey, Le Noir de l'étoile (1989-91)
Demdike Stare, The Stars are Moving (2010)

12.19.2010

10 4 10



2010 in alphabetical computer-done order.

Autechre, Krylon, from "Overtsteps"
Greg Davis, Regarding Wave (Part 1), from "Regarding Wave"
Demdike Stare, Matilda's Dream, from "Liberation Through Hearing"
Ducktails, Screen Scene, from Ducktails & Dracula Lewis "Split Vinyl"
Emeralds, Genetic, from "Does It Look Like I'm Here?"
Hype Williams, Han Dynasty Pt. 3, from "Han Dynasty"
Matrix Metals, Tanning Salon Pt. 2, from "Flamingo Breeze"
Oneohtrix Point Never, Stress Waves, from "Returnal"
Sun Araw, The Phynx, from "The Phynx"
Sun City Girls, Come Maddalena, from "Funeral Mariachi"

12.16.2010

Long Distance Calls



“It all began on a summer night in 1987. The idea for a television series based on Greek culture had just crystalized and we were facing a spectre which haunts the realm of the cultural documentary and that Chekhov defined for eternity: to say things that clever people already know and that morons will never know.”

(Chris Marker)

Chris Marker, L'Héritage de la chouette (The Owl's Legacy), 1989. Written by Marker. Photographed by Emiko Omori, Peter Chapell, et al. Edited by Khadicha Bariha, Nedjma Scialom. With Iannis Xenakis, George Steiner, Elia Kazan, Theo Angelopoulos, Cornelius Castoriadis. (In English, and French, Georgian, Greek with English subtitles, Color, 3/4″ Video, projected, Cassettes courtesy Chris Marker with permission of Film International Television Production and La Sept) (Total running time, parts 1, 2, 3: 75 mins)


In the late 1980s the newly formed cultural television channel La Sept (forerunner of the Franco-German Arte), with the support of the Onassis Foundation, commissioned Marker to make a television series on the legacy of ancient Greek civilization in the modern world. Composed of thirteen 26-minute episodes, The Owl’s Legacy is among Marker’s most ambitious projects, but because it has not had the wide exposure of a commercial cinema release, the series has garnered little critical attention. The Owl’s Legacy stages an extended encounter between Marker’s commitment to interviews and the oblique yet unmistakable intervention of his own private sensibility and preoccupations. The notion of the ‘owl’s legacy’ primarily represents the stated quest after the contemporary heritage of ancient Greece (the owl being associated with Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom), but Marker himself can bediscerned in the guise of his favourite bird, as the different episodes of the series set out and expound, via a range of opinions and perspectives, the abiding concerns and reference points of his own work.

(Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, London: Reaktion Books, 2005, 170)


GL: I was interested to talk about the relation between the different strands of your practice, from texts to more event based, research or discursive spaces. For instance the work that is currently on show as part of the Turner Prize at Tate Britain incorporates Otolith III (2009), the final work in the Otolith trilogy, Inner Time of Television (2007), a thirteen monitor installation of Chris Marker's television series The Owl's Legacy (1989) and artists book entitled Inner Time of Television as well as The Image in Question, a series of three roundtable discussions and screenings during the exhibition as well.
AS: We have always been interested in working with the idea of integrated practice in the way that Black Audio Film Collective were thinking about the politics of making, production and distribution in the mid 1980s. In terms of how we think about our work, it helps us to present the ideas that we draw upon in public, in order to think through the connections and the divergences and to make those continuities and separations visible, audible and shareable today.
GL: To some extent then I suppose that comes down to how things can have visibility, or rather the different modes of visibility that are valorised. There are a lot of works that use different other works to try and say something, because ultimately, why would you say something badly yourself, if you can use someone else’s work that’s already done that better. Or because you love that work and you want to show that to someone. Often though, this type of work can be misconstrued as part of an appropriation discourse, where showing someone else’s work is about ownership, rather than presenting another visibility or means of distribution.
AS: I would say that Inner Time of Television is not a project of appropriation. We knew that The Owl’s Legacy existed so we mailed Marker in the summer of 2007. He mailed back and explained how and why the work was so difficult to see and sent us the French version and the English subtitled version. What we wanted to do was analyse why this work was made for television at that time. We wanted to formulate an argument for presenting it in a gallery context in order to think through the role played by art in relation to a cinematic encounter with philosophy in the context of television.
KE: The Owl’s Legacy is a television essay, one of a small number of television essays, from the same era as Noël Burch’s series on silent cinema entitled What Do These Old Films Mean? and Godard’s series of television-essays that culminates in Histoire(s)du cinema. We are preoccupied by all the forms of the essayistic. The essayistic is not a question of genre; it emerges from a discontent with the duties of documentary and a skepticism towards the obligations of what we think documentary should do. It is the name for a discontent with documentary that is registered in and through the mode of documentary.

(What form would that abstraction take now?, The Otolith Group in Conversation with Gil Leung (PART 1 of 3))

More here.

Heroica 3 (The masked ball)



Jocelyn Pook, Masked ball

12.13.2010

Thank you, Exotica Weirdness



Moondog, A. Sax
Television & Brian Eno, Hoo
Bob Chance, Jungle Talk
El General, Tu Pum Pum
Emmanuel Jar, Kuar (Olof Dreijer remix)

On a Clear Day



Barn Owl, Twilight
Marc Ribot, Flicker
Chris Weisman & Greg Davis, Christalline
Terry Riley, The Ecstasy

12.12.2010

Nite Flights (Soft Power Special)



Kitaro, Seiun
Kate Bush, Hello Earth
The Walker Brothers, Nite Flights
Talking Heads, Drugs
Arthur Brown & Craig Leon, Strange Romance
Peter Gabriel & Robert Fripp, Here Comes the Flood
Yes, Yesterday and Today
Todd Rundgren, Lost Horizon
10CC, Old Wild Men
Wings, Goodnight Tonight

Download compilation (69.8 MB)

12.04.2010

Trois Hypothèses

Chris Marker, 2084 (1984)

12.01.2010

The Cave


Daniel Pommereulle in La Collectionneuse by Eric Rohmer, 1967

"As everything, for him, was an article of faith, nothing, to his mind, was difficult to understand: the Great Flood had covered the entire world; before, men had the misfortune of living a thousand years; God conversed with them; Noah had taken one hundred years to build the ark; while the earth, suspended in air, stood firmly at the center of the universe that God had created out of nothingness. When I said to him, and proved to him, that the existence of nothingness was absurd, he cut me short, calling me silly." (Giacomo Casanova, from The Story of My Life)

How does a mixtape of sounds about thinking would sound : try out by throwing an ear here.

Mike Kelley, Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile (w/Sonic Youth)
Socrates that Practices Music, Live at the Luminaire
Atlas Sound, Logos
Richard Pinhas, Le voyageur (Nietzsche by Deleuze)
Scritti Politti, Jacques Derrida
Robert Ashley, Concrete: Ideas About Thinking
Oneohtrix Point Never, Emil Cioran