Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Media Online and in Your Mind (Recommended)



The past week has been a blur of activity so it is only now that I find the time to post, between other tasks, some online media offerings that I recommend. I shall not get bogged down in self-reflection but push onward to THE STUFF:

UbuWeb Featured Resources, April/May 09: David Toop & Pauline Oliveros
David Toop is a musician/composer, writer and curator. Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932) is an accordionist and composer who was a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music. Oliveros was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, and served as its director. She has taught music at Mills College, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.


U B U W E B :: Canntaireachd
Dating back to the sixteenth century or earlier, canntaireachd developed as the art of "chanting" pibroch (piobaireachd), the classical form of Gaelic bagpipe music. Essentially an oral form, canntaireachd consists of vocables, which stand for recognized groups of notes but otherwise have no meaning as words. When written down or, more commonly, sung as mouth music they provide an alternative to the Western system of musical notation and a means for preserving and passing on both the the melody and fingering of tunes. The following two examples of written canntaireachd are the Ground (urlar) and first variation of the classical piobaireachd "The Cave of Gold," attributed to Donald Mor MacCrimmon, circa 1610.

Drift Study by Le Monte Young (Mp3)
"Consider the premise that in determining the relationship of two or more frequencies the brain can best analyze information of a periodic nature. Since chords in which any pair of frequency components must he represented by some irrational fraction (such as those required for any system of equal temperament) produce composite sound waveforms that are infinitely non-repeating, only an infinite number of lifetimes of listening could possibly yield the precise analysis of the intervallic relationship. Consequently the human auditory mechanism could be best expected to analyse the intervallic relationships between the frequency components of chords in which every pair of components can be represented by some rational fraction, since only these harmonically related frequencies produce periodic composite sound waveforms." Aspen Magazine 1970


UbuWeb Sound - Los Angeles Free Music Society
Broadcast on KPFK, Close Radio, (recorded live) November 3, 1977, 44 min. 19 sec. A concert of experimental music and performance.

World Digital Library
Nice interface and lots of material.


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Download the book as a PDF. "Copyright law regulates culture in America. Copyright law must be changed. Changed, not abolished." This is not simply the thesis of "Remix"; it is Lessig's mission statement, and runs through his other books, academic writing and blogging. He seeks to ensure that copyright law, the sole purpose of which is encouraging creativity, does not end up stifling it instead.


Talks by Gil Fronsdal on Buddhism
Gil has practiced Zen and Vipassana since 1975 and has a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford. He has trained in both the Japanese Soto Zen tradition and the Insight Meditation lineage of Theravada Buddhism of Southeast Asia. Gil was trained as a Vipassana teacher by Jack Kornfield and is part of the Vipassana teachers' collective at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 he received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He has been the primary teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California since 1990. He is a husband and father of two boys.

Clinical Archives
Clinical Archives is independent netlabel for eclectic and illogical music. The basic directions : abstract, avant-garde, alternative, free improv, intuition improvisation, jazz fusion, electronic jazz, free jazz, funk rocktronica, jam band, live electronic, experimental, manipulation, neoclassicism, illbient, ambient, musique concrète, noise, tape music, minimalism, acousmatic music, sound sculpture, sound collage, electroacoustic, acoustic; drone, new wave, field recordings, microsound, montage, psychedelic, folk; quasi-folk; prog-rock; post-punk; trip-hop, soundscapes, sound art, spoken word, strange and other forms ...
"Clinical Archives is about expanding the definition of music"
All those works are released for free under Creative Commons Licences.


U B U W E B - Film & Video: Craig Baldwin - Sonic Outlaws (1995)
Within days after the release of Negativland's clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music. Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.


U B U W E B - Film & Video: Tony Oursler - Synesthesia: Genesis P-Orridge (1997-2001)
Genesis P-Orridge, performance artist and vocalist for the iconoclastic English industrial band Throbbing Gristle in the late 1970s, pioneered industrial music. P-Orridge, who went on to form the experimental band Psychic TV, continues to work in music, art, and performance in New York, and is undertaking a long-term "Pandrogeny" project involving a radical identity transformation.

Raven Sings The Blues Volume 1
This comp's been in the works for the last few months and is now finally ready for public consumption. We honestly couldn't be more excited as this release (and the site redesign) also marks the 3 year anniversary of Raven Sings the Blues. A big thank you to all the artists involved and also to Darryl for the great design.

Let your freak flag fly in the months of moths to come........

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