Friday, May 30, 2008

Friday Downstreams (Sunshine is Free as Well)



A week has passed and what a week it was. Sickness in the house, exams and essays, a chapter on the way, planning for the summer and enjoying the weather. There was no downloads last week, so this week there are more:

Last.fm + YouTube = music tv goodness
"This is a mashup of Last.fm and YouTube made by Tim Bormans. It’s best described as an online music television based on your taste." Good.

Downloads | CNMAT
Download tools from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at University of California, Berkeley. Effects programs, filters, modulators and a harmonic waveform with specified amplitudes and phases. Perfect for the weekend.

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stockhausen's Originale: Doubletakes, The Film (1964)
In 1961, at age 33, Karlheinz Stockhausen was already among the most well-known of living composers, though not yet the guru figure of Beatles tributes and electronica lore. He had just finished composing Kontakte, a piece for electronic four-channel tape and piano/percussion duo, in which he attempted a high degree of interaction between live performers and taped sounds, as well a new degree of theatricality in the onstage movements of the musicians. He received a commission for a "theatrical" work from a theater producer in Cologne, and Originale (Originals) was scripted rapidly during a visit to Finland in July of 1961.

U B U W E B :: Allan Kaprow: Untitled Essay and Other Works (Book)
AMERICAN PAINTER, ASSEMBLAGIST, CREATOR OF HAPPENINGS and theorist, born 1927 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Within a brief and intense early career, Kaprow progressed from an interest in Abstract Expressionism and many-levelled paintings incorporating collage to assemblage. He enrolled in Hans Hofmann's painting school (1947-48). Through Hofmann he began to develop an expressive, high spirited style of action painting, based on real landscapes and figures, which was to lead, by a number of well-defined and documented steps, to the happenings of a decade later. With a number of Hofmann's students he cofounded the Hansa Gallery (named after their teacher), a cooperative artists gallery on East 10th Street in Greenwich Village. He soon moved away from the single art object or picture frame to environments and to a new art form called Happenings.

Shilo™ Presents We Make It Good
This is the second mix in our ongoing series featuring international man of good fortune, Chris Devlin. When he is not touring the world backing up Naeem “Spankrock” Juwan with his dj partner Ronald James Darko then he is most likely hanging out with his wonderful lady Ariel in the pastoral landscapes of Jamaica Plain, Boston. A Baltimore native, truly dear friend of mine, and absolutely amazing musician; Mr. Devlin has astounded me yet again with a mix of found field recordings, classic disco, original production, and lots of hammering and drilling noises. Definitely an amazing listen, kind of like if Animal Collective were DJs instead of a weirdo, hippy, hobbit family.

HAPPY ARRIVAL DAY, SUN RA
Collection of downloads from Sun Ra, celebrating the birth-earth-day arrival of the jazzman from outer space, and truly one of the most innovative, and bizarre, figures in 20th century music.

Night Air - 25 May 2008 - The Other Worlds of Sun Ra (Podcast)
We shine astro black atcha as we celebrate Sun Ra 'Arrival Day'. Sun Ra's visionary Afro Futurist project, begun in the 1940s, provided fuel for many strands of musical culture: he stood with one foot in rhythm and blues, one foot in free jazz and two hands stretched out into space.
His wild, cosmic philosophy and music fed into jazz, funk, reggae and ultimately techno and noise. We discover more about Ra with Amiri Baraka, the legendary poet/playwright/activist who collaborated with Ra in the 1960s and performs the tribute poem, 'Message From Sun Ra'. There are archival clips of the Sun Man himself acting, chatting and delivering a unique 'lecture'; and, of course, there's plenty of Sun Ra's strange and beautiful music.

Jalikebba & the Toubabs
A unique CD combining african Kora - music with swedish folkmusic and indian Tabla.
recorded live at Tanji Village Museum in The Gambia on 29.1.2005, that's the amazing result of an wellgoing jam-session of musicians from three cultural heritages.

Arnold Schoenberg Piano Piece. Op.11 a very early work from 1909 (Mp3)
The historical and musical significance of Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 can hardly be overstated. The consensus today that they are landmarks, situated as his "earliest consistently atonal opus" (in the words of George Perle), belies a long history of analyses by resistant theorists who attempted to valiantly shoehorn them, however awkwardly, into the syntax of tonal harmony. Where one theorist heard the opening thematic material of the first piece as outlining the Phrygian mode, another heard it as an E major-minor, with F as a lower neighbor note. Another said, amazingly, "Of atonality there is no trace. One might possibly speak, however, of polytonality, of different tonalities heard simultaneously." (Forte)

Dialogic: Film School: Jennifer Baichwal Director of Manufactured Landscapes
An interview with Jennifer Baichwal director of Manufactured Landscapes. Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.

Noise Zuni « Continuo’s weblog
Founded in 1982 by Danny Yung (b. Shanghai, 1943), Zuni Icosahedron 進念‧二十面體 is a Hong Kong art collective working on theater plays and performing festivals, locally or abroad. Over the years, Zuni has become one of the major professional companies in Hong Kong [+]. In the mid 1990’s, they began to work with traditional chinese opera and actors, what they later dubbed ‘experimental tradition’, as exemplified in their 2008 production of Tears of Barren Hill [+]. Their theatrical plays were apparently rather demanding for the actors, asked to cry, laugh, breath heavily, in dramatic, theatrical gestures. ‘Chronicle of Women’ (1991) consisted of ‘12 women robed in china-blue cheong-sam with their backs towards the audience sighing to an empty stage. Only the final sighs grew from weak to strong, breathing, groaning, panting, a mixture of everything.’ (from Danny Yung’s liner notes).

Various ‘Sound Art’ CD and Booklet
Gorgeous book published 2007, notable for a collection of invaluable photos from rare performances by little exposed composers/artists, among which I was thrilled to find pictures of Hermann Nitsch, Harry Bertoia, Bernhard Leitner, Maryanne Amacher, Bill and Mary Buchen that were all unknown to me (the pictures, that is). Emphasizing sound by visual artists, the book focuses on music out of art galeries in the guise of sound installations, happenings, sound sculptures, Fluxus performances, etc. The inclusion of no-wave NY bands (like Gray, Menthol Wars, 3 Teens Kill 4) is a dubious choice, though it brings fresh air in the art-saturated galery spaces. The drawback of the book is to limit itself to art galeries, so that artists’ records, self-releases, anti-music, collective experiments, radio art are not even mentionned. Of course Licht has extensive knowledge of what happened in New York art galeries during the last 20 years and he has access to additional material from the 1970s and 1980s. His enthousiasm and curiosity for all kind of sound experiments make for a great trip through sound art history.

Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising
Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson is a guide book of "how to get from here to there", a synthesis of Timothy Leary's 8-circuit model of human consciousness with traditional psychology. It will totally change your perspective on the people you consider "stupid."

Shine on no matter what your form!!!!!!!

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