Saturday, January 30, 2010

Media for Free(dom): Drink in the Wonder



Miroslav Tichý (b. 1926) wandered the small Moravian town of Kyjov in rags, pursuing his obsession with the female form by secretly photographing women in the streets, shops and parks with cameras he made from tin cans, children's spectacle lenses and other junk he found on the street. He would return home each day to make prints on equally primitive equipment, making only one print from the negatives he selected. His work remained largely unknown until 2005, when he was 79 years old.


This week has been one of deep creative pursuit, fevered writing, mixed meetings and the discovery of much good on the web. Let us begin.

Talking Heads :: Saratoga Performing Arts Center, NY August 1983

1983 was was an incredibly fertile year for the the Talking Heads. The companion album to Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense made an effort at capturing the band’s live mojo, but due to its length (neutered at nine tracks) failed to paint a complete picture. Thankfully there are a number of high-quality boots in circulation. The below show, a soundboard recorded in August of ‘83 in Saratoga, NY, captures this period beautifully. I ripped the FLAC files to 256 kbps mp3s. Highest recommendation.


Dualtrack: Throbbing Gristle - Greatest Hits (1980)
On this ironically titled collection, the band offers 11 tracks that plant the seeds for a number of genres. Synth pop is here in the primal, awkward guise of "Adrenalin," while "Hot on the Heels of Love" may be one of the very first techno songs ever. "Subhuman" would set the standard for the type of ranting industrial rock that Skinny Puppy and Ministry would actually have to water down, and "Six Six Sixties" is the sort of guitar-driven noise narrative which would later find brief popularity with the New York City art rock scene.

Jan Kounen - D autres Mondes
Documentary film. French (No Subs)
The secrets about unlocking the mysteries of consciousness by plant-drugs. The related chances and risks involved in this shamanism.

Time Has Told Me: V.A. Cornemuses
Cornemuses. Gaelic bagpipes
La cornemuse est un instrument de musique à vent et plus particulièrement à anches. Il en existe plus d'une centaine de types dans le monde. Son aire de répartition correspond à l'Europe entière, au Caucase, au Maghreb, au Golfe Persique et va jusqu'à l'Inde du Nord.

Whole Earth Catalogue at DOMENICO QUARANTA
These artists use simple tools and editing tricks in order to comment on the current status of the image, to talk about themselves, to edit found material and to improve its meaning; they explore cultures and habits in order to sample, remix and comment them; they use and abuse technologies; they export metaphors, practices, aesthetics and narratives to other situations. This may sound weird if you are not living in their same time slice, but please – don’t call them formalists. They are not working within a medium: they are working within a media-implemented reality. They are realists, in the only way that realism makes sense nowadays.

Free Music Archive: ESP-Disk Blog
ESP-Disk is a New York-based record label, founded in 1960[1] by lawyer Bernard Stollman. The label's discography was important in the history of jazz, and especially free jazz.
From the beginning, the label's goal has been to provide its recording artists with complete artistic freedom, unimpeded by any record company interference or commercial expectations—a philosophy summed-up the ESP motto, printed on every release: “The artists alone decide what you will hear on their ESP-Disk”.
Though it originally existed to release Esperanto-based music, starting with its second release (Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity), ESP became the most important exponent of what is commonly referred to as free jazz. ESP also released recordings by uncommercial underground rock acts including the Fugs, The Godz and Pearls Before Swine. Though it largely ceased releasing records in the 70s, a few new releases have crept out from the label, and it still exists to this day, with nearly its entire catalog still available.
Other artists who have recorded for this label include Ornette Coleman (the "Town Hall Concert"), Pharaoh Sanders (who made his recording debut on ESP), Sun Ra, Ronnie Boykins, Marion Brown, Sonny Simmons, Paul Bley, Ran Blake, and Perry Robinson.
The label's catalog has been licensed frequently over the years, but Stollman has reportedly resumed direct responsibility for reissues.
ESP-Disk's current general manager is Tom Abbs.

The Free Music Archive
The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads. The Free Music Archive is directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America. Radio has always offered the public free access to new music. The Free Music Archive is a continuation of that purpose, designed for the age of the internet.
Every mp3 you discover on The Free Music Archive is pre-cleared for certain types of uses that would otherwise be prohibited by copyright laws that were not designed for the digital era. Are you a podcaster looking for pod-safe audio? A radio or video producer searching for instrumental bed music that won't put your audience to sleep? A remix artist looking for pre-cleared samples? Or are you simply looking for some new sounds to add to your next playlist? The Free Music Archive is a resource for all that and more, and unlike other websites, all of the audio has been hand-picked by established audio curators.

Guns of Navarone - Various Artists (Trojan Records 1969)
Tracklist:

01 Skatalites - Guns Of Navarone
02 Baba Brooks - Bank To Bank Part 1
03 Ike & Crystalites - Illya Kurayakin
04 Tommy McCook - Saboo
05 Carlos Malcolm - Bonanza Ska
06 Baba Brooks - Vitamin A
07 Lyn Tate & Jets - Something Stupid
08 Flames, The - Broadway Jungle
09 Tennors, The - Copy Me Donkey
10 Roland Alphonso - El Pussy Cat
11 Eric Morris - Penny Reel
12 Soul Brothers, The - Sound Pressure
13 Lyn Tate & Jets - Napoleon Solo
14 Skatalites, The - Ball O' Fire
15 Baba Brooks - Guns Fever
16 Baba Brooks - Bank To Bank Part 2


Tracey Moffatt - Bedevil (1993)
BEDEVIL is the stunning debut feature from Tracey Moffatt (NIGHT CRIES, NICE COLORED GIRLS) and the first feature directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman. Inspired by ghost stories she heard as a child from both her extended Aboriginal and Irish Australian families, Tracey Moffatt has constructed a sublime trilogy in which characters are haunted by the past and bewitched by memories. All three stories are set in Moffatt's highly stylized, hyper-real, hyper-imaginary Australian landscape. In the first story MISTER CHUCK, a young boy is fascinated and terrified by a swamp that is haunted by the ghost of an American GI. CHOO CHOO CHOO CHOO finds a family living by railroad tracks haunted by strange happenings. The mother (played by Moffatt) is drawn to the tracks at night as she senses the horror of a past tragedy. The final story, LOVIN' THE SPIN I'M IN, follows a woman who resists eviction attempts by her landlord so she can keep vigil for her dead son.

UbuWeb Sound - Tape-beatles / Public Works / Collaborations
The Tape-beatles are a collaboration of varying membership that make music and audio art recordings,"expanded cinema" performances, videos, printed publications, and works in other media. They work under the aegis of Public Works Productions.


MUTANT SOUNDS: VIBRACATHEDRAL ORCHESTRA-LINO HI, CD, 1999, UK

One of the earlier and harder to locate titles by this preeminent drone syndicate and cosmic improv mafia. Shivery susurrations from the cosmic ether channeled by ethnic instrument-armed freaks that fulfills the promise made by The Theater Of Eternal Music and Limbus 4 and runs circles around a lot of the second generation freak folk/communal inprov whatsis that they helped usher in by their example.


Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers | Wu Tang Vs The Beatles

Crazy shit. No idea how but it sort of works.....


More Matrix and Philosophy Podcast
We're going in. One more time. And this time we're facing some pretty mean programs. Cynicism. Obfuscation. Postmodern despair. Plus, the usual obnoxious bunch of totally ruthless Agents, who always insist upon Conformity or Deletion. And just in case you were hoping to make it back, they've reconfigured the culture so there are hardly any phone booths left.
We're gonna need guns. Lots of guns. And an endless supply of logic, humor, disobedience, defiance, and argumentative tenacity.
The surviving members of the old crew are still on board, along with some new recruits, freshly located, unplugged, and debugged. Are you with us?
You've already made the choice. Now you have to understand why you made it.

Sex Pistols - (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone (1980)
aahhh Lovely.

Finally if you missed my video blog post on Krautrock from the BBC, watch it here. It is very very good.

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