Kif Higgins: August 23, 1957 – May 19, 2012

With empire came sugar and with sugar came slaves. Slaves that made the sugar (African) and slaves that brought it to England and processed it (English, Irish, Welsh and Scots). Those that exploited the labour made fortunes and built the city of Liverpool (the irony of Tate Liverpool).

Auf einen Augen-Blick

‘Auf einen Augen-Blick’ is an animated video piece using sequences of hand corrupted jpg files. If I was a bit smarter i could probably have written a script that batch processed multiple files but I found that there is something important in the laborious process of doing each frame by hand – it introduces some organic element into what should be an efficient process…I like the contradiction of using digital media in such a manual way…especially when the content is all about degradation and corruption of the media itself.

Random Rough Mix

Been a while comrades: heres some audio and video of stuff from the studio floor that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day – edited together in a random fashion. Quite a large dose of Geoff Leigh in there from the work we did together and never quite finished…

 

Hello World

Jian An 13-07-2009

…Been something of a blog post hiatus recently due to severe cerebral malfunction and, more positively, the birth of our little boy Jian An, the latest addition to the Yeh-Crab clan. Lots of new posts to follow (when i have time)…

“Live Series 2” & the London Ambulance Station

Live series 2 cassette package

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jesus ‘0’, Satan ‘1’

“Man will never be free until the last king is hanged with the entrails of the last priest.”
(attributed to) Denis Diderot

A group of Fundamentalist religious extremists have finally been evicted from St Mary’s in the Castle Arts Centre, Hastings, after a successful opposition campaign. The Sonrise Church which has occupied the Arts Centre will leave the building in january 2009 having endured years of “constant harassment from a minority of ‘nameless, faceless people” including death threats to the church members and congregation, egg throwing and vandalised cars: “we have been the subjects of a faith hate campaign. So extreme has this campaign against us as a family been that on several occasions we have had to involve the police” says Glen Khan head of the Church and Sky TV preacher.

Earworms, Surgery and Musical hallucinations

“I hear singing and there’s no one there,

I smell blossoms and the trees are bare. . . .”

From ‘Call Me Madam’ Irving Berlin 1953

Earworms:The Cognitive Itch Theory

97% of us have the capacity to trigger simple audio hallucinations; For instance the sentence “brown girl in the rain” will for most of you cause an involuntarily re-occurring audio hallucination which can only be stopped by the words “Do you know the way to San Jose”. Commonly called  ‘Earworms’, this disorder is thought to be the result of specific musical properties of a song that trigger the brain to uncontrollably repeat the song in an attempt to resolve some logical musical anomaly. The most successful Earworm songs have a repetitive rhythm, bright catchy melody but importantly some unusual, unexpected musical aspect. For instance the BaHaMen’s “who let the dogs out” has an offbeat repetitive  “Who,Who” chorus making it ripe for repetitive neural analysis and keeping it high in the Earworm top ten:

“one-two-three-four-stop!” cro magnon: orgasm

Don’t let the cover put you off! (When David Tibet reviewed records for Sounds back in  ‘the eighties’ he told me that he just looked at the cover and threw the record away without listening to them…) – there was obviously an enforced visual dyslexia enforced during the 1960s…no matter…this record I like (people who know me faint in shock), arrived at by chance through random linking so i have no idea who cromagnon were apart from that this record was published in 1968 in the USA (and not to be confused by more recent ‘cromagnon’ bands).

The ANS Synthesiser pt2.0 ANS Discography

Continuing the ANS story, Here’s a pretty exhaustive list of recording featuring the ANS Synthesiser, I’ve not included Artemiev’s film soundtrack work for Tarkovsky as I’ll cover this in a separate post. if I’ve missed anything, please let me know…

ANS Discography

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“Musical Offering” 1990

The first LP to feature recordings of the ANS Synthesiser were released as a vinyl lp “Musical Offering” on the Russian Melodiya label (C60 30721 000) in 1990 and contains works from 1968-1970 by Edison Denisov , Sofia Gubajdullina and Alfred Schnittke

Edison Denisov “The Singing of the Birds,” (excerpt) 4k m3u file

Sofia Gubajdullina’s “Vivente-nonvivente” (excerpt) 4k m3u file

Alfred Schnittke’s “The Stream” (excerpt) 4k m3u file

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Electroshock
The Russian Electroshock label issued a series of electro-acoustic sampler records, the fourth being devoted to archive recordings of the ANS Synthesiser as well as two works by the composer and ANS expert Stanislav Kreichi:

ELECTROSHOCK PRESENTS: “ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC VOL. IV. ARCHIVE TAPES. SYNTHESIZER ANS. 1964-1971” – 1999
(Electroshock Records ELCD 011)

(from the Electrochock site)

“Electroacoustic Music Volume IV” is a collection of tracks dedicated to ANS, the first Russian synthesizer, created by Evgeniy Murzin over a 20 year period (1937-1957). Murzin only made one copy of the ANS and the 12 tracks on this disc were recorded by Russian musicians between 1964-1971, hence the sub-title “Archive Tapes Synthesiser ANS”. The tracks are all spacey electronic excursions and I can imagine the music must have been quite mind-blowing for its time. Far from being simple exploratory noodlings and knob-twiddlings by the curious, the contributors are clearly familiar with their instrument and have produced well thought out creative compositions. And given the context of the time it was recorded the music is quite impressive and should appeal particularly to those interested in the history of electronic music.”

1. Oleg Buloshkin – Sacrament [3:34]
2. Sofia Gubaidulina – Vivente-Non Vivente (“Alive & Dead”) [10:44]
3. Edward Artemiev – Mosaic [4:00] 7.6MB MP3 Download
   
4. Edward Artemiev – 12 looks at the world of sound [12:52] 17.7MB MP3 File Download
   
5. Edison Denisov – Birds singing [5:05]
6. Alfred Schnittke – Steam [5:50]
7. Alexander Nemtin – Tears [4:41]
8. Alexander Nemtin – I.S. Bach: Choral Prelude C-Dur [2:30]
9. Schandor Kallosh – Northern Tale [5:38]
10. Stanislav Kreitchi – Voices of the west [2:00] 7.9mb MP3 file
    
11. Edward Artemiev & Stanislav Kreitchi – Music from the motion picture “Cosmos” [12:15]
12. Stanislav Kreitchi – Intermezzo [2:00]

Pagans on the march…

A video taken just outside of our house in Hastings. To mark the end of ‘Hastings Week’ (yet another excuse for general drunkenness and ribald behavior) there was a torchlight parade through the old town by fire carrying, firework throwing pagan marching bands and stocky men and women dressed as corpses, pirates, devils and skeletons. The whole thing culminated in a massive bonfire on the beach where crucifixes were set ablaze (how we cheered!) and fireworks ignited at dangerously close proximity. A plan that was hatched to storm the nearby St Mary’s centre (occupied by Christian extremists) and throw some believers into the blaze, was, alas, abandoned in favour of acquiring more booze before the offie closed. Next year perhaps.