Sunday, September 27, 2009
OOIOO
Grow Sound Trees
Open Your Eyes, You can Fly
I seem to be having a Japanese Sunday, and this makes me so happy.
Lightning Bolt Live
Lightning Bolt is a noise rock duo from Providence, Rhode Island, composed of Brian Chippendale on drums and vocals and Brian Gibson on bass guitar. The band met and formed in 1994, when the members of the then-trio attended the Rhode Island School of Design. The band signed to Load Records in 1997, and released their self-titled debut the same year. In total, Lightning Bolt has released four full-length albums, numerous vinyl singles, and appeared on several compilations.
Lightning Bolt are known for their guerrilla-style live performances, where they typically play on the ground rather than a stage, with the crowd gathered around them. The band's sound is typically loud and aggressive, though the group cites composers Philip Glass and Sun Ra as compositional influences.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Live @ Lodz, 2007
Live @ Lodz, 2007
Nils Petter Molvær (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈmolvæɾ]) also known as NPM (born September 18, 1960) is a Norwegian jazz trumpeter, composer and producer. He is considered a pioneer in Nu jazz and especially the fusion of jazz and electronic music, showcased on his best-selling album Khmer, released by the German record label ECM in October 1997 in Europe and early 1998 in North America.
Nils Petter Molvær (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈmolvæɾ]) also known as NPM (born September 18, 1960) is a Norwegian jazz trumpeter, composer and producer. He is considered a pioneer in Nu jazz and especially the fusion of jazz and electronic music, showcased on his best-selling album Khmer, released by the German record label ECM in October 1997 in Europe and early 1998 in North America.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Tower Sounds: Ancient Voices and Electronics
Tower Sounds: Ancient Voices and Electronics from Shahrokh Yadegari on Vimeo.
This video is an excerpt of the "Tower Sounds: Ancient voices and Electronics" performance on July 11 and 12, 2009. by Shahrokh Yadegari in Tower by Ann Hamilton on Nancy and Steven Oliver's ranch in Sonoma County, California , This piece was originally commissioned by the Judah L. Magnes Museum as an installation piece called "Through Music" in honor of Cantor Reuben R. Rinder. "Through Music" and "Tower Sounds" were curated by Lawrence Rinder.
Performed by
Siamak Shajarian: Vocals
Kate St. Pierre: Vocals
Keyavash Nourai: Violin
Dmitris Mahlis: Oud
Satnam Ramgotra: Tabla
Shahrokh Yadegari: Lila (Live electronics)
Video by
Tara Knight and Norbert Shieh
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Captain Tobias Hume
Captain Tobias Hume - "Captaine Humes Pauin"
Captain Tobias Hume - "The Spirit of Gambo" for Viola da Gamba
Tobias Hume (possibly 1569 – 16 April 1645) was an English composer, viol player and soldier.
Little is known of his life. Some have suggested that he was born in 1569 because he was admitted to the London Charterhouse in 1629, a pre-requisite to which was being at least 60 years old, though there is no certainty over this. He had made his living as a professional soldier, probably as a mercenary. He was an officer with the Swedish and Russian armies.
His published music includes pieces for viols (including many solo works for the lyra viol) and songs. They were gathered in two collections, The First Part of Ayres (or Musicall Humors, 1605) and Captain Humes Poeticall Musicke (1607). He was a particular champion of the viol over the then-dominant lute, something which caused John Dowland to publish a rebuttal of Hume's ideas.
Hume was also known as a prankster, as some of his somewhat unusual compositions illustrate. His most notorious piece was "An Invention for Two to Play upone one Viole". Two bows are required and the smaller of the two players is obliged to sit in the lap of the larger player. This work was notated in tablature and is indeed technically possible to play. His instructions to "drum this with the backe of your bow" in another piece, "Harke, harke," constitute the earliest known use of col legno in Western music.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Sharpies (1974)
Rare 1974 insight to Sharpies in Melbourne. By Greg Macainsh. Lobby Lloyd and Billy Thorpe concert at the Melbourne Showgrounds
Sharpies (also known as Sharps) were members of suburban youth gangs in Australia mainly from the 1960s to 1980s, particularly in Melbourne, but also in Sydney and Perth to a lesser extent.
The term comes from their focus on looking sharp. The dress and dance styles were strongly influenced by the British ska, mod and skinhead subcultures, and many of the Sharpies were British immigrants, recently arrived as Ten Pound Poms.[1] Common clothing items included Lee or Levi's jeans, sweaters and T-shirts (often designed by individual members). Sharpies would try to outdo fellow sharpies by creating the best patterns, colours and detail. Sharpies were known for being violent, although a strict moral code was also evident.
Sharpies were very much a social thing in Melbourne, Australia, where the main gangs — Westside, Southside and Northside — would meet up with the smaller groups such as Prahran Sharps, Melbourne Sharps and the A A Sharps, from the Broadmeadows region usually at Flinders Street Station in the mid 1970s. It wasn't unusual for there to be hundreds of Sharpies milling about. They often went to dances and early discos, and because of sheer numbers, they were almost untouchable by the police. This led to excessive violence on behalf of the Sharpies, who would basically fight who they wanted, and take beer and money from who they wanted. The Sharpies subculture faded out due to mistrust between gangs and excessive violence.
In south-east Sydney, a gang from the La Perouse area (called La Pa by the locals) were known as the Lapa Sharpies. In Perth, youths in areas such as Medina, Rockingham, Armadale, Kelmscott, Lynwood and Thornlie joined skinhead/Sharpie gangs. Many of these young people were children of recently arrived British migrants who built and ran the BP Kwinana Oil Refinery.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Thoth (Entire Film)
Haunting and enigmatic, S.K. Thoth built a reputation as one of America's great street performers. Chronicling his life from childhood to the present, "Thoth" captures the spirit of an individual who has made personal freedom his occupation. Directed by Sarah Kernochan, the film won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.
HUNGU (Entire Film)
The hungu is an African musical instrument, ancestor of the Brazilian berimbau. Its origins are carried on in an ancient tradition. Inspired by the grace and raw beauty of African rock paintings, Nicolas Brault applies his narrative gifts to a world where humans and nature are subtly linked.
Under the African sun, a child walks in the desert with his kin. Death is prowling, but a mother's soul resurrected by music will return strength and life to the child when he becomes a man.
The filmmaker combines 2D animation on a graphics tablet with the warmth of sand animation, thus uniting modernity and tradition, Brazil and Africa, music and memory. Sparse in design and humanist in its outlook, Hungu exudes the elegance and suggestive power of a timeless story.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Swedish Hardcore
Forever Young
Lesra - Never Again
Last night I experienced some of the sounds of the new Umeå Hardcore. The city was famous in the 1980s for its Straight Edge Hardcore music scene and it seems a new generation is stepping up to the plate and expanding on the genre. Last night I saw my friend Eric and his band, Forever Young, which was great. the band is based in Gothenburg now but they are from Umeå and seem to be very influenced by the sound and attitude of the old hardcore scene in the city. The energy of the group was really strong and they actually grooved, with a serious and brilliant sense of rhythm and rhyme. The headliners for the night were Umeå band Lesra, and they were intense.
Lesra, Class War
Friday, September 11, 2009
Spirited Away (2:04:29)
Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi?, lit. Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away) is a 2001 Japanese animated film written and directed by famed animator Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli. The film views a sullen ten-year-old girl in the middle of her family's move to a new town (presumably the countryside) and her adventures in a world of spirits and monsters.
The film received many awards, including the second Oscar ever awarded for Best Animated Feature, the first anime film to win an Academy Award, the first (and so far only) non-English speaking animation to win, and the only winner of that award to be traditionally animated or win among five nominees (in every other year there were three nominees). The film also won the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival (tied with Bloody Sunday). Spirited Away overtook Titanic in the Japanese box office to become the highest-grossing film in Japanese history.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Monday, September 07, 2009
The Fourth World War
From the front-lines of conflicts in Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Palestine, Korea, and the North; from Seattle to Genova, and the War on Terror in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq, The Fourth World War is the story of men and women around the world who resist being annihilated in this war.
While our airwaves are crowded with talk of a new world war, narrated by generals and filmed from the noses of bombs, the human story of this global conflict remains untold. The Fourth World War brings together the images and voices of the war on the ground. It is a story of a war without end and of those who resist.
The product of over two years of filming on the inside of movements on five continents, The Fourth World War is a film that would have been unimaginable at any other moment in history. Directed by the makers of This Is What Democracy Looks Like and Zapatista, produced through a global network of independent media and activist groups, it is a truly global film from our global movement.
The Fourth World War by Subcomandante Marcos La Realidad, Chiapas, Mexico
The following text is an excerpt from a talk given by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos to the International Civil Commission of Human Rights Observation in La Realidad, Chiapas on November 20, 1999. The outline for the talk was published in Letters 5.1 and 5.2 in November of the same year, with the titles "Chiapas: the War: 1, Between the Satellite and the Microscope, the Other's Gaze," and 2, "The Machinery of Ethnocide." Any similarity to the conditions of the current war is purely coincidental. Published in Spanish in La Jornada, Tuesday, October 23, 2001.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Werckmeister Harmonies (High Quality - Opening Sequence)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Hungarian: Werckmeister harmóniák) is a 2000 Hungarian film directed by Béla Tarr, based on the novel The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), by László Krasznahorkai. Shot in black and white and composed of only thirty-nine languidly paced shots, the film describes the aimlessness and anomy of a small town on the Hungarian plain that falls under the fascist influence of a sinister traveling circus lugging the immense body of a whale in its tow. A young man named János tries to keep order in the increasingly restless town even as he begins to lose his faith in the unnatural and disordered universe from which God Himself seems to have disappeared.
The title refers to the baroque musical theorist Andreas Werckmeister. György Eszter, a major character in the film, gives a monologue propounding a theory that Werckmeister's harmonic principles are responsible for aesthetic and philosophical problems in all music since, which need to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony.
Via the bounty that is the orifice of Warren Ellis
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Friday, September 04, 2009
Los Angeles Wildfire
Timelapse - Los Angeles Wildfire from Dan Blank on Vimeo.
Time-lapse footage of burning chaparral in California by Dan Blank, set to music from Brian Eno's Another Green World.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
The Mark of Cain
The Mark of Cain is a hard band from Australia. I used to go and see them play in the early nineties when they came to Sydney from Adelaide. It was not an experience for the faint hearted. The Mark of Gain where like a brutal rhythmic machine that dealt out poetry to those who have been left behind in the great postmodern society of dreams and disasters. Music to stare across a room of blank eyed drinkers in a dark hotel by with minutes to closing time and nowhere to go. The beauty of pain. The Mark of Cain.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Genesis P-Orridge
At 59, of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and Thee Majesty finally seems to have found peace.
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