Orgonite melt
November 9, 2009
Geoff Leigh has uploaded some of his video experiments with ice formed under the influence of orgonite (with a soundtrack of some music work we did earlier this year). Orgonite, a dubious by-product of the Willhelm Reich school of pseudo-science, is an agglomerate of left handed metal swarf and acrylic resin said to have mysterious and mystical properties…
Links:
what the song you play that?
August 11, 2009
leytonstone, london summer 2009.
As work on ‘The New Album’ comes to a close i’m faced with the inevitable quandary of not only what to call it, but what to call the ‘band’ and also decide the names of all (well, most) of the songs. It’s not that the ’songs’ aren’t about anything it’s just that describing them via titles would come across at best as either sterile – numbers, dates, sequences – or pretentious; trying to succinctly enunciate the meaning of the piece in short form. So, with this in mind i decided a good first approach would be to apply a logical process that will not only ensure commercial success but provide meaningful, memorable titles that will resonate with the intended demographic target…kind of:
Method:
- Find a list of song titles from the last, say, fifty years that have had some kind of chart success…
- Find the most repeated words within that list i.e. the most used song title words in the last fifty years…
- Stick these words together randomly to create two or more word song titles
so, the top forty words from the top ten songs of the last fifty years are:
ain’t around away baby blue boy cry dance dream eyes girl give gonna happy heart heaven home kiss lady life live lonely love man mine moon music night oh rain rock rose song star sweet theme tonight wanna woman world
It almost writes itself…
Beyond the wall: new music from China
May 21, 2009
Yan Jun with Wu Na & David Coulter/ White/ FM3/ Xiao He
Barbican St Luke’s London. 26-04-2009
‘Beyond the wall’ is a rare chance to glimpse the musical innovation that is taking place in China right now. Modern Chinese music is usually ‘state approved’, uncontroversial and sanitised i.e. the ubiquitous Mando/Canto Pop which almost exclusively dominates the airwaves and record stores. Despite and maybe because of this commercialism an experimental counter-culture has developed over the last decade under the radar of official or unofficial state control. Characterised by a noisy and experimental approach and championed by a loose pan-Chinese coalition of oddballs, new middle class youth and eccentric musicians; this music is the direct polar opposite of the banalities of Chinese Pop:
Musical roads of the world.
January 19, 2009
Steen Krarup Jensen and Jakob Freud-Magnus building the Asphaltophone
Top of the Nazi pops: towards a racially pure top ten
January 1, 2009
“We are on the verge of moving into the music business in a big way – something with enormous cultural, political and financial potential.”
BNP Chairman Mr. Nick Griffin 2005
What would British music sound like if it was free of racial ‘impurities’ and foreign influence, what would the undefiled, ‘indigenous’ British top ten sound like? The obvious answer would be that it wouldn’t sound like anything because music has been for millenia a fertile mix of multiple cultural influences echoing the mixed racial and cultural profile of the people who make it. Despite this, white supremacists seem intent on defining ‘M.O.W.I.’ – Music of White Origin – as the genre of choice of the true white indigenous British race.
“Muslimgauze: Chasing the Shadow of Bryn Jones”
December 23, 2008
Ibrahim’s encyclopedic book on the history and music of Muslingauze is finally finished “Muslimgauze: Chasing the Shadow of Bryn Jones” will soon be available from amazon:
“A decade after his untimely passing, Bryn Jones, better known as Muslimgauze, left behind a staggering catalogue of published and unreleased music that continues to be appreciated by dedicated fans as well as converts to industrial, techno, hip-hop, dancehall reggae and dubstep styles. Manchester-born Jones was both prolific and controversial. Working alone in his bedroom studio, Muslimgauze’s music highlighted the struggles of the Muslim world against the West, with the Palestine/Israel conflict as the focal point.”
“Live Series 2″ & the London Ambulance Station
November 28, 2008
To Londoners, The old Kent rd has been for many years a byword for poverty; the cheapest, dismal brown coloured property on the monopoly board and in reality a grimy thoroughfare providing the boundary of two of the most neglected regions of London, Peckham and Bermondsey. Once the heartland of a solid white working class population the area was bombed close to complete destruction during the war and then rapidly rebuilt with monolithic high-rise housing estates which by the 1980s had begun to be abandoned and crumble.
In the cold winter of 1984 we – bourbonese qualk and crew – occupied the Ambulance station, an empty five story castle-like building on the Old Kent Road. Our ambition was to create a radical ‘cultural-political centre’ (though we would never have used that term) and a general base for our activities – performance space, recording studio and office for the Recloose organisation label – in the middle of this piece of un-picturesque South East London. After lengthy renovation (removing 1 meter deep layers of dead pigeons, replacing piping, windows and tiles on the vertiginous roof) The top two stories were converted into artists studios, the middle storey our living quarters. The first floor was taken up as meeting space for anarchist groups, a free cafe and offices for the local squatters organisation, ‘S.N.O.W’ (who housed more people in 1985 than the local council). The ground floor was changed into a large performance space and bar as well as a recording studio, sculpture studios and print workshops.
The grand erector
November 10, 2008
Bit late now because it’s sold out – but, Andy Wilson’s (Sunseastar etc) latest audio product is ‘The Grand Erector’ a fancy limited edition (100), 12″ vinyl, ten page booklet type thing which also includes six audio tracks of mixes, distortions and mangling of sounds contributed by members of the Faust mailing list. Can’t vouch for the music as i haven’t heard any of it and don’t have vinyl reading technology – but it probably sounds a bit like this:
The Grand Erector - “Brasov Monkeys”
This and many other ‘fascinating’ releases are available on the Beta Lactam Rrring website - soon with free MP3 downloads!
‘foreign sounding’: asian racial stereotypes in popular music
October 22, 2008
“Plinky plunk, A Chinese Elopmement” sheet music from 1930s USA
The “Oriental Theme”
Sun Ra the black liberationist, spaceman and jazz musician in ”Overtones Of China”(1957) unconsciously perhaps, repeats the old tradition of exotic stereotyping in defining musical Chineseness as wood blocks, gongs and pentatonic piano stabs. In essence the piece is an evolved jazz version of the ‘Oriental Theme’ that serves to evoke Orientalism in the western imagination. The tune, a nine note phrase, is found throughout modern popular music most famously in the introduction to Carl Douglas’s ‘Kung fu fighting‘ , The Vapour’s ‘Turning Japanese’, and David Bowie’s “China Girl”:
Oriental Theme MIDI File
What does death sound like?
October 13, 2008
“A truck rear ended my car and I died instantly. All the traffic was at a stand still and a truck not paying attention to traffic, blasted into the rear end of my car. Not wearing a safety belt, I was thrown against the windshield and all of a sudden I was in this white silver light. A man’s voice, whom I couldn’t see, said to me “You can either come with us now, or you can go back.” The next thing I knew, I was back in my injured body. the music started pouring through me like Niagara Falls…”
In the film ’Touching the Void’ as Joe Simpson descends the mountain close to death and in the grip of delirium, he realises he is about to die because he is plagued with the sound of ”Brown Girl in th Rain” going round and round in his head; “I was so pissed off… because i realised I was going to die to Boney M”. This post explores the audio experience before and during death – an event of importance perhaps, but little researched. Descriptions seem to have some commonality across cultures but of course come from either survivors of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and therefore compromised by memory and suggestion or from religious/cultural texts - compromised by cultural values but perhaps a store of a cultural memory of death…
