Tuesday 24 November 2009

In Madrid this Saturday?


(Click on image to enlarge)
ARTISTA :      SACE 2       
INVITADOS :  ELECTRONAUTAS, DOWNROCKS, JANINE, KOA, ...
FECHA :        28 NOVIEMBRE 2009 a las 22:00 CLUB TEMPO(c/ Duque de Osuna 8,Metro Pza.España)

Rolling Stones VS Susan Boyle? I don't think so...

Rolling Stones have re-released their song ‘Wild Horses’ after Susan Boyle’s rendition on The X-Factor was viewed by approximately 15 million viewers last night.
The track, originally featured on the Stones’ 1971 album ‘Sticky Fingers’, has been released as a digital package featuring the aforementioned album version and a live cut taken from their ‘Voodoo Lounge’ Tour in 1995.
‘Wild Horses’ is released today on all major download sites, whilst Boyle’s version appears on her debut ‘I Dreamed A Dream’, which became the most pre-ordered album of all time.

Say "No" to Bono (part...)

"U2 will be headlining Glastonbury for the first time next year, after being rumoured to appear many times in the past. Festival organiser Michael Eavis has said: "At last, the biggest band in the world are going to play the best festival in the world. Nothing could be better for our 40th anniversary party. And there are even more surprises in the pipeline..."
A good enough reason for me to give Glasto a miss next year...

Frida Hyvönen & Jenny Wilson - Shadow Of A Doubt (Live Kobra 2009)


A truly bizarre but brilliant cover of the Sonic Youth song!
Check out the SY video here.

Don Cherry / Krzysztof Penerecki - The New Rythm Orchestra - Actions (1971)


Wow! I had no idea that there was even such an album...featuring Don Cherry, Tomasz Stanko, Albert Mangelsdorff, Peter Brotzman, Han Bennink, Terje Rypdal, Kenny Wheeler, Willem Breuker & Gunter Hampel and if you don't know who they are...well!
...and while you are there, do check out some of the other offerings. This is a really superb blog.

Kitty, Daisy & Lewis show us around


(Thanx Evan)

...moving at the sound of speed!

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Monday 23 November 2009

Trevor Brown's Black Eyed Madonna


Crystal Castles used this artwork without Trevor Brown's authorisation, which you can read about

Want



As deaths in Afghanistan rise, so does the growth of opium



A US Marine secures an opium poppy field in southwest Afghanistan
Attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan are at record levels and threaten to derail efforts to rebuild the war-torn country, while an unholy alliance of Taliban drug dealers and corrupt government officials has made a mockery of coalition forces' attempts to stem the export of heroin.
The findings, from new reports looking at the current situation in Afghanistan, highlight key areas in which, contrary to the assurances of Western military leaders, the war is being lost.
A series of secret Government documents have also laid bare the "appalling" errors that contributed to Britain's failure in Iraq. On the eve of the Chilcot Inquiry into the operation to remove Saddam Hussein, The Sunday Telegraph claimed it had hundreds of pages of documents setting out "significant shortcomings" at all levels of the mission.
The papers are believed to reveal that Tony Blair was planning for an invasion more than a year before it took place, and detail supply problems which left some troops going into action with only five bullets each, while others had to travel to the war-zone on commercial airlines.
In Afghanistan, there were nearly 13,000 attacks between January and the end of August this year – more than two-and-a-half times the number experienced during the same period last year and a fivefold increase on the total in 2005. "The most recent data available, as of August 2009, showed the highest rate of enemy-initiated attacks since Afghanistan's security situation began to deteriorate," according to a new study published by the US Government Accountability Office this month.
The ferocity of the fighting has seen almost 100 British service personnel killed and more than 400 wounded since the start of this year. According to the report, distributed to the US Congress and senior Pentagon officials, security has "deteriorated significantly" since 2005, "affecting all aspects of US and allied reconstruction". A resurgent Taliban, weak Afghan security forces, a thriving drug trade and threats from safe havens in Pakistan are all cited as factors...


Irvine Welsh: ‘Let’s tackle Scotland’s cheap bevvy culture’

Trainspotting author backs alcohol minimum pricing


He is not normally associated with moderation, but Scots novelist and provocateur Irvine Welsh ­yesterday intervened in the politically charged debate over how to tackle Scotland’s drink problem.
On the eve of the SNP government’s bill on minimum prices for alcohol, the author of the drug and drink-fuelled excesses of Trainspotting and The Acid House called for an end to the nation’s “cheap bevvy” culture.
Welsh urged politicians to “stand up and be counted” on tackling the problem of alcohol abuse which costs Scotland an estimated £2.25 billion a year in healthcare, crime, the fall-out from social problems and days lost at work.
He also took a swipe at the drinks industry, which is fiercely opposed to minimum prices, as it fears other countries could copy the Scottish example.
Welsh said: “Scotland has a growing problem with alcohol abuse. More people, younger people and more women than ever before, are at risk from being encouraged to over-consume this drug.
“We know that the price and availability of alcohol products have a strong relationship to the amount of alcohol consumed.
“This is a major social issue and needs to be tackled as such by our politicians in a democracy, and this should transcend the concerns of those in the alcohol industry who feel their profitability will be compromised.
“Very few would want to go back to the days when the tobacco industry determined policy on smoking.
“Now politicians should stand up and be counted and move us on to a new era where how much we drink will not be determined by the alcohol industry lobby.”
The statement was issued on Welsh’s behalf by the advocacy group Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (Shaap), which was set up by the royal medical colleges.
Although Welsh, who now lives in Ireland, did not explicitly mention minimum pricing, his comments were made with the current political debate in mind, a Shaap spokeswoman said...

What Earth Would Look Like With Rings Like Saturn

Sunday 22 November 2009

Foton's 'Instant Present' Mix

It´s not a big secret that without dub there would have been - amongst other things - no drum´n´bass, no remix culture and no techno music.
The last years saw the latter returning to production techniques of the first: the heavy usage of reverbs, echoes and phasers alongside four-on-the-floor beats even made a new sub-genre of techno, called dub techno, emerge.
The label pushing this sound the hardest probably is Thinner from Germany:
… select an available release from the extensive Thinner discography and there’s a very high probability that the sounds on that album can be broadly described as “dub-inspired” i.e. some permutation of a fusion of dub with house, techno, or even ambient music. it’s also quite possible that the album could be further redefined as belonging to the sound departments of either “dubby techhouse“ or “intelligent dub” …
One of Thinner´s artists is Das Kraftfuttermischwerk. Recently, they posted a link to a dope mix from Foton
01. Basic Channel – Round Four
02. Chet – Urban Dharma
03. Maurizio – M5
04. Quantec – Hidden Persuasion
05. Basic Channel – Round Three w/ Paul st Hilaire
06. Fluxion – Inductance
07. Deadbeat – Abu Ghraib
08. Jorge Gebauhr – Strange Fruits
09. Mildiou – De Natura Rerum
10. Substance – Relish Shed remix
11. Marko Fuerstenberg – Far Out
12. Lowtec Sound System – Stella Polaris
13. Marko Fuerstenberg– Site 312
14. Basic Channel – Phylysptrakit
15. Luke Hess
16. Cv313 – Dimensional Space

Download Foton´s “Instant Present” mix
@'Seen'

???






ORNAMENTS SYMPHONY
mixed by youANDme
This CD contains all songs of ORNAMENTS 001 - ORNAMENTS 010.
Limited to 333.

PLAYLIST:

01. Intro - Peak: Darksuite (youANDme Remix) / ORN008
02. Peak: Darksuite / ORN008
03. Dubsuite: "Eigenleben" (Marko Fürstenberg's Eigendub) / ORN001
04. Sven Tasnadi: "Our Destiny" (Weisemann's Shuffle On Mix) remix by Sven Weisemann / ORN005
05. Sven Tasnadi: "Our Destiny" / ORN005
06. Thabo: "Downstream" / ORN006
07. Martin Schulte: "Cold Heart" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN001
08. Rhauder feat. Paul St. Hilaire: "No News" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN009
09. Rhauder feat. Paul St. Hilaire: "No News" (Daniel Stefanik Remix) / ORN009
10. Rhauder feat. Paul St. Hilaire: "No News" / ORN009
11. Thabo: "Berlin" / ORN006
12. Mod.Civil: "Einfachheit gewinnt" / ORN004
13. Mod.Civil: "Einfachheit gewinnt" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN004
14. Frank Biedermann: "Warrior_wasp" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN001
15. I-Robots: "Perfect Logic Circle" (G.Digger Edit) / ORN002
16. I-Robots: "Perfect Logic Circle" (Club Edit) / ORN002
17. youANDme:  "Close to me" (Robert Hood Remix) / ORN010
18. Marko Fürstenberg: "Valentino" / ORN007
19. Peak: "Darksuite" (Soultourist Remix) / ORN008
20. Peak: "Darksuite" (youANDme Remix) / ORN008
21. Marko Fürstenberg: "Tiffany's Case" / ORN007
22. youANDme: "Close to me" / ORN010
23. Sascha Dive: “Deepest America” (Samuel Davis Dark Soul Mix) / ORN003
24. Sascha Dive: “Deepest America” (Moodymann Remix) / ORN003

Lou Reed: Photographer


 A walk on the wild side: Reed captures his wife, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, in the only image in 'Romanticism' featuring a human figure

 Lou Reed may be a rock legend, the founding member of the Velvet Underground, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a man so cool that fans keel over in the reflection of his mirrored shades. Yet he has an alter ego, a solitary figure, a man who retreats quietly into nature to observe the light and make elegant, romantic photographs, far removed from his life at the heart of New York City. The process could not be more different but there are parallels between his music and his photographs. Putting together a book of photographs is, says Reed, like sequencing a CD. It is intuitive, an indefinable way of working where things happen not through planning and preordained ideas, but because they feel right. He approaches photography with the qualities of a musician. "The response is emotional. That's all I want; they are taken with emotion and put together with emotion, equal emotion," he says.
Romanticism is Reed's third book of photographs. It is a series of landscapes, entirely in black and white. Inspiration for the title came from the 19th-century Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich. "We had lined up the photographs we liked and I was shown a painting, by him. I said that's it, that's Romanticism. That's not to say that I think I am him, but it was the impetus for the idea."
As in Friedrich's painting, there is an ethereal quality to Reed's work, a sense of the divine in nature. The light in Reed's photographs has a silvery tone, which creates a sense of fantasy. They do not seem to be of this world. "They are very three-dimensional images. I have them up on my wall. The silvery translucent quality, that makes me crazy. I really love it," he says.
Rarely is there a human mark on the scene; for the most part, his photographs are of nature untouched: woods leading down to the edge of the sea, a layer of thick mist covering the earth. The branches of a tree are abundant with fruit, another tree is dead; the trunk splinters as it disintegrates. "I have never seen a tree that is not graceful," he says.
Only one photograph, towards the end of the book, shows a human form. It is an androgynous grey figure, with short hair, facing away from the camera and outlined with light. Light ripples across the top of the scene, suggesting water, and the rest is a mass of grey. The figure is Reed's wife, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson. They married last year and the only line of text in the book is dedicated to her: "These are pictures from around the world dedicated to my love & passion for my wife, Laurie Anderson."
Reed will only give laconic explanations for his photographs. There is a single photograph of boats in the book; it is a striking anomaly. Why is it in the collection? "The boats. They were there because they were there. It doesn't matter. It's all the same. It was just the light and the moment. The light was perfect. There happened to be boats there; I wished they weren't there."
He won't give specific information about where or when the photographs were made. The book is purely images, no text, all of which were made over the last two years and in many different places: Scotland, Denmark, Spain, Rome, China. No image has a title or any kind of reference point. It is a brave decision that not every photographer would get away with – but, then, it is Lou Reed: a god can ignore the needs of mortals. And he has his reasons. "There's nothing to say. A picture is worth a thousand words, to quote a cliché. What am I meant to say: 'There's a tree in a storm in January'? The response is emotional. That's all I want."
Reed has been taking photographs since the 1960s, when he and Andy Warhol were close and Reed was performing with the Velvet Underground. He developed his photographic style and learnt by watching those around him. Over the years, he has been influenced by some of the most creative talents around, people he knew and used to hang out with.
"I like to reinvent the wheel. I like to discover something for myself as opposed to being told it. Wim Wenders, there's something he showed me that I found useful. Billy Linich, he also called himself Billy Name, was at Warhol's factory, his pictures were very high contrast. And there were things that Andy Warhol would do. And Larry Clark, I still remember when I first saw "Tulsa"," he says.
Outside of music, there is something of the gifted amateur about Reed and it's an endearing quality. He has not forgotten his roots and the people he knew as a child. He recently made a film about his cousin Shirley who is 100 years old. She lives in New York City, in the West 20s, where she has been for the past 70 years.
He explains: "She is a remarkable person. I wanted to talk to her on camera, about things that only she could know: what it was like being in Poland through World War One and World War Two, being smuggled out of Canada, or working as a seamstress in the union. What she had to say is remarkable. I made the soundtrack for it with my band, Metal Machine Trio." It's an interesting contrast – his centenarian cousin Shirley and Metal Machine Trio and it's a shame that he has yet to find a place to show it.
Last year, he was guest designer for the Winter 2008/2009 issue of All-Story, a literary magazine founded by Francis Ford Coppola. Contributors have included Rachel Cusk and Woody Allen, while Zaha Hadid and Guillermo del Toro have also designed an issue. For the cover, Reed used one of his landscape photographs, in colour. It is an image that he was unable to use in his book and it is utterly romantic: pale gold light falls across a summer woodland scene. The light has a particular quality that he captures using a technique which involves hacking up the camera, although he doesn't explain precisely how this is done.
"It is instinct tempered with technique. I have been photographing a long time. All my life, I was scouring around with it, playing with it. All my life I had wished for something; it turned out to be digital. That finally came out. I could take the picture 100 times. I got it with the light the right way, not just one or two shots. I loved it. I am not using photoshop. Everything is in the camera and that's because it's digital," he says.
He denies it, but Reed is a camera geek. He can quote camera names and models with an intimate knowledge: "I have a Leica medium format – just the body cost $24,000. I have been waiting around for the M9. I love this camera. I love it that they are digital. I love the Alpa, they're quite the little company, you should check out their website. I use it with a Schneider lens. And the medium format Hasselblad, and they went into Fuji lenses. Why are some lenses so much better than others? What is it about the way they polish glass?" It's difficult to get him off the subject. "I'm not an obsessive," he says. "It's just like guitars."
(Thanx Don)

HA! (Bondi Beach 14th November 09)

Free The Forgotten Bird of Paradise by John Pilger

After much sacrifice and showing strong resilience, East Timor became independent in 2002. The people of West Papua deserve nothing less. As veteran foreign affairs commentator and filmmaker John Pilger points out, on December 1, which West Papuans call their independence day, those exiled in Britain and their supporters will break the silence outside the Indonesian embassy in London.
When General Suharto, the west’s man, seized power in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, he offered “a gleam of light in Asia”, rejoiced Time magazine. That he had killed up to a million “communists” was of no account in the acquisition of what Richard Nixon called “the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in South-east Asia”.
In November 1967, the booty was handed out at an extraordinary conference in a lakeside hotel in Geneva. The participants included the most powerful capitalists in the world, the likes of David Rockefeller, and senior executives of the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, British American Tobacco, Imperial Chemical Industries, American Express, Siemens, Goodyear, US Steel.
The president of Time Incorporated, James Linen, opened the proceedings with this prophetic description of globalisation: “We are trying to create a new climate in which private enterprise and developing countries work together for the greater profit of the free world. The world of international enterprise is more than governments… It is a seamless web, which has been shaping the global environment at revolutionary speed.”
Suharto had sent a team of mostly US-groomed economists, known as the “Berkeley Boys”. On the first day, salutations were exchanged. On the second day, the Indonesian economy was carved up. This was done in a spectacular way: industry in one room, forests and fisheries in another, banking and finance in another. The ultimate prize was the mineral wealth of West Papua, almost half of a vast and remote island to the north of Australia. A US and European consortium was “awarded” the nickel and gold. The Freeport company of New Orleans got a mountain of copper. Forty-two years later, the gold and copper make more than a million dollars profit every day.
For the Indonesian elite, enrichment was assured. From 1992 to 2004, Freeport provided US$33 billion in direct and indirect “benefits”, much of it finding its way to the Indonesian military, the real power in the land, which “protects” foreign investments in the manner of a mafia. The reward for the people of West Papua has been a rate of impoverishment double that of the rest of Indonesia, says a World Bank report.


At Bintuni Bay, where BP is exploiting natural gas, 56 per cent of the people live in abject poverty. “More than 90 per cent of villages in Papua do not have basic health facilities,” the report noted. In 2005, famine swept the district of Yahukimo, where virgin forests and gas deposits deliver unerring profit. The suffering of West Papuans is seldom reported; the Indonesian government bans foreign journalists and human rights organisations such as Amnesty from the hauntingly beautiful territory known by its indigenous people as “the forgotten bird of paradise”.
The president of Time Incorporated, James Linen, opened the proceedings with this prophetic description of globalisation: “We are trying to create a new climate in which private enterprise and developing countries work together for the greater profit of the free world. The world of international enterprise is more than governments… It is a seamless web, which has been shaping the global environment at revolutionary speed.”
 When the carve-up of its natural wealth took place, West Papua was not part of but merely claimed by Indonesia, whose former colonial masters, the Dutch, recognised no historical or cultural ties to Jakarta and began to prepare the territory for independence. The Indonesians were having none of it; neither were the Americans, the British and the Australians, who invented a cold-war tale that the Russians were coming. In 1962, the Dutch handed the colony to the United Nations, which promptly gave it “on trust” to Indonesia on condition that the West Papuans would vote on their future.
In 1969, an “Act of Free Choice” took place. The Indonesians hand-picked 1,026 West Papuan men and ordered them to vote for integration with Jakarta. Guns were pointed at heads, literally. When two West Papuans escaped in a light aircraft, hoping to reach New York and alert the UN general assembly, they were detained by the Australian government after landing at nearby Manus Island, which Australia administered. West Papuan villages wanting a genuine “act of free choice” were strafed and bombed by Indonesia’s US-equipped air force.
West Papua would have slipped into oblivion had it not been for a resistance, the OPM, or Free Papua Movement, whose endurance has defied almost impossible odds. The Indonesians have been unsparing in their oppression, aided by British-made machine guns and Tactica water cannon vehicles. When Suharto was deposed in 1998, the people on the island of Biak celebrated by singing hymns of thanksgiving and raising West Papua’s Morning Star flag. For this, 150 of them were murdered by the Indonesian military.
In 2004, Filep Karma and Yusak Pakage were sentenced to 15 and ten years respectively for raising the flag, an immeasurable act of bravery in a country effectively controlled by a Gestapo-style force known as Kopassus, which conducted the genocide in East Timor. According to a study by Yale University, the destruction of West Papuan society is also genocide.
The post-Suharto regime in Jakarta likes to regard itself as a respectable democracy and is vulnerable to pressure on West Papua. In Britain, the mining giant Rio Tinto, formerly a shareholder in Freeport, retains a joint-venture interest that has earned fortunes for the company. On the rare occasions that the British Foreign Office is challenged about the behaviour of Jakarta in West Papua, officials drone about “respecting the territorial integrity of Indonesia”, echoing decades of Foreign Office mendacious apologies for the slaughter in East Timor. The US State Department’s response is the same.
And yet East Timor slipped Suharto’s leash and is now free, thanks to the resilience of its people and an international network. The people of West Papua deserve nothing less. On December 1, which West Papuans call their independence day, those exiled in Britain and their supporters will break the silence outside the Indonesian embassy in London.

Smoking # 38


Sasha Grey
Got a feeling that I am repeating myself here but bugger it...

Spiritualized - Ladies & Gentlemen... preorder available now through ATP Records


Label: ATP Recordings
Cat No: ATPRCD36
Format:  Collectors Edition CD Box set

Pre Sale Date: Monday 23rd November 2009

Release Date: Wednesday 16th December 2009

Label: ATP Recordings / Spaceman

Catalogue No: ATPRCD36

Format: Collectors Box Set / Strictly Limited Edition of 1000

Boxset Contains:
 . 12 x 3” Prescription Pack CD’s packaged in a foil tray
 . 2 x 5” CD’s containing 35 unreleased versions & outtakes
 . Digital Download Code for the original album
 . Individual Prescription Cards signed by J.Spaceman
 . Strictly Limited Edition of 1000
 . Brand New Artwork by the original designers Farrow & Spaceman

ATP Recordings / Spaceman are pleased to be able to offer the very limited collectors edition. This includes 12 x 3” Mini CD’s of the complete album track-by-track, a homage to the original release. This will be accompanied by 2 bonus discs.

For those who don’t wish to open the blister pack, each unit will come with a code to download the original album in MP3 format._

Limited to just 1000 units, each collectors edition will come with a prescription numbered out of 1000 and signed by J Spaceman.

Anyone who pre-orders the collectors edition before November 30th can have their own name, or name of their choosing printed on the prescription.

The Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space Collectors edition, will be sent out from the UK on December 16th. If you do not wish to pay postage and handling, there will be an option to pick it up from the Barbican shows on December 16th or 17th.

Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space Collectors edition is available for £125 + postage and handling.

AVAILABLE FROM 3PM GMT MONDAY NOVEMBER 23RD AT
www.lagwafis.com

I still have the blister pack of the original album but cannot afford $250 for this...
...but I look resplendant in the new 'T' shirt that came in a blister pack too LOL!


Can with Tim Hardin - Rare Rehearsal & Live Improvisation (1975)

A little known fact is that after Damo Suzuki left Can, there were a number of other vocalists who rehearsed and played live with them before they added Rosko Gee and Reebop to the core line up of Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit. These included Thaiaga Raj Raja Ratnam from Indonesia and the Japanese vocalist Phew.
Tim Hardin was another singer who joined their ranks for a while at the tail end of 1975.
A couple of recordings survive from their time together. There is a rehearsal (the exact date of which is unknown) and a live improvised track from a gig at the Hatfield Polytechnic on the 21st of November 1975.
It may seem a strange combination but it sort of works...though I cannot imagine Can playing 'If I Were A Carpenter' as an encore!


UPDATED 2/16 with extra material HERE

Cranky croc finds new home in Texas

It has taken several planes, a crane and good dose of valium, but a giant Northern Territory crocodile named Errol has made it all the way to Texas Zoo. At 4.7 metres, 50-year-old Errol is so long that he could not fit into a crate that would meet airline requirements. He did not take kindly to being moved out of the pen at the Darwin Crocodile Farm where he has spent the past 28 years. But with the help of some sedatives, Errol was put in a specially built box with his tail wrapped round to make sure he fit within airline cargo limits. His owner Adam Britton told ABC TV's Stateline that once in the US, the croc had to be flown in a cargo plane. "The pilot said to us 'if you want to go and check on Errol, that's fine, but you probably need to take that oxygen cylinder with you because after about five minutes you'll start feeling really faint and you might collapse'," he said. "So we thought, 'nah I think he'll be fine, he'll be good'. And in reality, he was good." He says the trip went like a dream. "We were treated like royalty and so was the crocodile," he said. He says Errol's new enclosure at a Texas Zoo has specially heated water, which the croc shows every sign of liking.
Dr Britton says Errol should draw lots of visitors because he will be the largest saltwater crocodile in North America."He's got a pretty cushy life here now. He's got nice heated water. They're going to train him and so they're going to interact with him a lot more than he was down at the crocodile farm," he said."He's going to be on full view to all the visitors at the zoo and he's going to be the ambassador for saltwater crocodiles for the Northern Territory."Fort Worth Zoo spokeswoman Dianne Barber says they will to continue to call the croc Errol until he settles in.
@'ABC'
(Thanx Reinhard!)

Faust and 'Krautrock' by Andy Gill (Mojo)


WE CAN BE HEROES
Andy Gill (Mojo Magazine)

Born into Germany's economic miracle but cultural wasteland, World War II's children set about alchemising the 60's revolutionary spirit into sound and vision. Wildly radical then, highly influential now, Krautrock is back. Andy Gill recalls some of the most outlandish, other-worldly music in rock history, and meets the legends who made it.

It's sometime in the bleak widwinter of 1973-4, and Faust are playing Sheffield City Hall. The occasion is one those early Virgin Records package tours which attempted to revive the collective spirit of the Motown and Beat-boom era revues within the context of that label's sternly uncompromising -- some would say largely unlistenable -- roster of avant-garde art-rock acts. Gong may have played, or perhaps Henry Cow or Hatfield & The North, and there may have been a film of label whizzkid Mike Oldfield performing his celebrated Tubular Bells at somewhere like the Albert Hall; it's hard to be precise, recollections growing mercifully more cloudy with the passing years.

Faust, though, remain clear in my mind to this day -- quite an achievement, since they played in near-total darkness, save for the illumination furnished by a couple of TV sets facing the band, and a pinball table positioned off to one side. In front of the TV sets are a couple of comfy, overstuffed armchairs, and behind them a drum kit. A block of concrete is dimly visible centre-stage.

Like virtually every other British 'head' of unquenchable curiosity but limited means, I'd recently invested in the copper-bottomed uncertainties of The Faust Tapes, 49 penn'orth of musical madness decked out in the deceptively calming waves of Bridget Riley's op-art painting Crest, and I was prepared for -- well, just about anything, really. Even so, I got more than I bargained for.

Through the gloom, it's possible to make out a few reassuringly hairy figures lounging comfortably in the armchairs, cradling bass and guitars. A single-minded drummer appears, and sets up a rhythm of spare, minimalist efficiency. The loungers strike up a chord and plod along earnestly for awhile. And then some. There is none of the decorative embellishment or flashy musicianship of the most 'progressive' rock of the time: this is pure riff, and nothing but, as focused as anything by James Brown, if not as danceable. How could it be, without a second chord to play against? It's like a perpetual set-up with no pay-off.

Five or 10 minutes into the piece, one of the musicians puts aside his instrument, levers himself out of the armchair, and sidles over to the pinball machine where he plays awhile, the bleeps and sproings of the leisure machine offering welcome detail over the riff which churns on, unstoppable, like a golem. His game over, he turns his attention to one of the TV's, changing channels randomly. Then, bored with that, he moves over to the concrete block, picking up something which had until then been hidden behind it. It's a tool of some form, either a hydraulic drill or, more likely, an electric-powered Kango hammer, which, without more ado, he sets to work on the block.

The noise is deafening -- and dangerous, with fragments of concrete spitting out into the front rows of the audience, who shield their eyes behind their arms. But the shock is utterly exhilarating, prompting the same thrill of modernist liberation that early 20th century audiences must have experienced at Dada or Surrealist exhibitions, or at the performances of Futurist Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori noise machine, or Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring -- the feeling that some Rubicon has been irrevocably crossed, that taboo boundaries have been sundered. Jaws drop all around the hall. Even those who had been getting restless about the relentlessly static music are won over, gleeful smiles creasing faces at this majestic bout of art-terrorism. If they could be heard over the din, they'd be cheering.

Like all great aesthetic transgressions, it also draws the requisite outraged reaction, but from an unforeseen source. Suddenly, the drill is silenced, along with the TV's, the pinball machine, and the electric instruments. The stage power has been cut. The hall lights, conversely, fade up. Bemused, the musicians grin at each other as a neatly-dressed man -- the hall manager, or someone in suchlike authority -- strides to the front and addresses the audience.

"That's quite enough of this!" he shouts at us. "This is not music!" It's the perfect complement to the performance -- so perfect that, for a moment, I suspect it's part of the act. It isn't, of course. It's some sad Horatio, left to vainly guard the bridge of musical politeness against these barbarian hordes. Or, more prosaically, trying to save the polished wood of his stage from getting scratched to buggery by the shifting concrete block.

It's an unequal contest. Immediately, even those who had been bored by Faust's performance are seething with indignation at this suit's attempt to control their taste. Boos resound around the hall, and a slow handclap sets up. The suit departs, but the power stays off. One of the musicians comes to the front of the stage and says, sans microphone: "Hey, it's your gig. Are you gonna let this guy tell you what you can listen to?" The clapping gets louder, and the drummer takes up the beat again, while his colleagues bang along on whatever comes to hand. It's no more complex a rhythm than before, but it's a great deal louder, and there's a euphoric, collective spirit to it that wasn't present earlier. The fourth wall of performance has been shattered, and nobody who was present will forget it, or listen to music in the same way again. Who would have thought that one chord and the simplest of beats could be a life-changing experience? And what more could you want from a gig?

In the foyer, the city's avant-rock cognoscenti mingle earnestly during the intermission. Veteran improvisors AMM have just played a typically detailed, engrossing set, and hypothetical goatees are being figuratively stroked in contemplation of their work. It's a mixed crowd, though, not entirely composed of bedsit intellectuals. Over by the windows, a group of what appear to be filthy European bikers are laughing loudly and drunkenly. There are quite a few professiorial types d'un certain age, counterbalanced by a substantial complement of young, crusty hippy types. A curious Jarvis Cocker wanders around, making the most of a relative anonymity that will, within a matter of weeks, be but a distant memory.

There's a strange air of expectant, barely-suppressed violence quite at odds with the open-minded atmosphere of the Sheffield show two decades before. It's not like the audience doesn't know what to expect; on the contrary, for some in the audience, their expectations are every bit as pre-formed and rigidly demanding, in their own way, as those inflicted upon teen acts like Boyzone: if bourgeois conventions aren't given a damn good kicking tonight, well, they'll have something to say about it. No matter that such knee-jerk expectations are in themselves just as comfortable and bourgeois as those of more conservative types: in the '90s, even revolution has its own formal style.

A large curtain of scrim hides half the stage. In front of it, two men stand motionless, one a barefoot bassist, the other a balding drummer standing, Mo Tucker-style, behind a drum kit which, in the intervening 20 years, has shrunk to just one snare, one tom-tom and one cymbal. Behind the scrim, backlit so his shadow looms hugely, is Tony Conrad, the minimalist-violinist with whom Faust once recorded an album entitled Outside The Dream Syndicate. A cellist and another violinist sit alongside him, also motionless. Conrad plays a chord, then keeps on playing it, a piercing, mesmeric drone of immense, ear-endangering volume. Some time later -- about 10 minutes into the performance -- the other string players join in with similarly minimal intent, setting up a static harmonic drone which continues for another 10 or 15 minutes before the bassist and drummer suddenly launch into the kind of riff which Status Quo might have discarded as being too basic. The drummer bangs each drum alternately at regular tempo, looking for all the world as if he's jogging on the spot; the barefoot bassist, meanwhile, pummels his instrument with such single-minded fury that, shortly after he begins, one of the thick, well-wound strings has snapped. Have you ever tried to snap a bass string? It's not easy. Usually, you need pliers, but there are no tools available on-stage tonight.

The performance continues, with no discernible subsequent change, for another half-hour. But this time, no hall manager turns off the power or leaps on-stage to berate the audience's musical taste -- and the self-satisfied applause (not to mention a certain relief) which greets the piece's conclusion stands in stark, smug contrast to the sense of exhilaration felt two decades earlier. For an encore, the barefoot bassist gives the floor a desultory thump with a nearby hammer, almost like an abbreviated gestural signature, before the ensemble wade into another 10-minute piece. No-one, save maybe a few of the old-dear ushers, has been outraged, and it's my guess that no-one has been liberated, either. We all got exactly what we expected.

FAUST WERE, BY COMMON CONSENT, THE MOST EXTREME OF THOSE German bands of the early '70s that came to be regarded under the collective rubric of Krautrock -- a patronising British term (pointedly satirised in the track of that title on Faust IV) covering a multitude of disparate musical approaches spanning the entire spectrum of composition and improvisation.

At one end, Faust would be deconstructing the nuts, bolts and griders of rock music through relentlessly monotonous pieces like 'It's A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl', and laying the groundwork for today's sampler-collagists through the intricate cut-ups and splices of their astonishing debut, Faust Clear, which, as its name suggests, was released on clear vinyl in a clear plastic sleeve imprinted with an X-ray of a hand and sleevenotes in German by producer Uwe Nettelbeck. (The follow-up Faust So Far would be in contrastingly sombre none-more-black, packaged with a set of tasteful prints illustrating each of the song titles.) At the other end, Kraftwerk would labour over exquisite melodies and metronomically precise rhythms, taking the concept of machine-music to its logical conclusion, and ironically, providing the groundwork for the future development of black American music.

In between, all manner of musical endeavour was encouraged, from the trance-scapes of Tangerine Dream and the space-rock of Amon Düül II to the psychedelic proto-punk grooves of Neu! and the Eastern-tinged mysticism of Popol Vuh. What's extraordinary about virtually all these bands -- apart from the music itself, which was rarely less than that -- is that despite severely limited commercial returns, their influence was so wide-reaching that most are still working today; or if, like Can, they're no longer together as a band, the various members are still engaged on projects every bit as bonkers. Most Anglo-American bands of equivalent age and popularity, by contrast, have long since succumbed to the reaper, or totter as sad parodies of their former selves.

The difference is cultural, of course. For British and American bands, the hippy era represented mainly freedom from the utilitarian chains which post-war redevelopment had placed upon their parents. The '50s, the era of Ike and Mac, had been a time of parsimony perpetually passed off as a great bounty -- "You've never had it so good! -- and by the allegedly Swinging '60s the younger generation was determined that its surroundings and activities should reflect that supposed bounty. Despite the undercurrents of political unrest, the gaiety of the hippy era was primarily, for Brits and Yanks, a guilt-free indulgence in the wealth of new possibilities.

While German youth of the same era shared similar hopes and desires, there were other, much darker influences at work on their world view. As Can's Irmin Schmidt explains, "All the young revolutionaries of 1968 had parents who were either Nazis or had suffered under the Nazis, and the relationship of the parents to the Nazis, and of their children to them, was a special German thing, and had a big influence on the '68 troubles. And for 20 years, we had got rid of culture. It wasn't just towns that were bombed, culture was bombed too, and you can't rebuild culture."

Consequently, the iconoclasm of the times cut that much deeper with these German bands, and provided them with a more enduring cast of mind. When Faust took up their road-drills and attacked concrete blocks on-stage, it was with the same order of symbolic destruction that would fire the original punks a few years later: tear down the walls, cut out the cancer. Except that in their case, the cancer in question was more than just a vague feeling of generalised boredom or, as the Germans have it, Weltschmerz. And as with German performance artists of the '60s -- such as Otto Muehl, who would climb inside freshly-slaughtered animal carcasses, or the self-mutilator Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who eventually bled to death after severing his own penis (ExileEd - This is not true - see here) German musicians of the period applied fearsome standards to their work: it wasn't just a brief diversion, it was a whole-hearted attempt to find a new route to the future, by exorcising the past.

In doing so, they rediscovered their own national identity. As Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter explained to Lester Bangs in 1975, "After the war, German entertainment was destroyed. The German people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it. I think we are the first generation born after the war to shake this off, and know where to feel American music and where to feel ourselves. We cannot deny we are from Germany."

TO THE BRITISH AUDIENCE STUMBLING UPON KRAUTROCK ALBUMS, they were like the proverbial mystery surrounded by an enigma.

The minimal cover designs of early Faust, Neu! and Kraftwerk albums promised something completely self-contained compared to the psychedelic fantasies of Roger Dean which dominated the home market's 'progressive' iconography. The brave mix of art, noise and strange beauty present in most Krautrock was also somewhat at odds with the lumbering traditionalism of Yes, Genesis and ELP, whose work always seemed to be apologising for not being classical music.

Just as revolutionary was the discomfiting blend of deep seriousness and mad humour that most Krautrock bands displayed as they pirouetted at the interface of new technology and new consciousness -- who else but a Krautrocker would dare pass off the same piece of music at different speeds as separate tracks, as Neu! did on their second album? Not least among Krautrock's attractions was the thrilling notion that somebody had entrusted all this expensive new machinery to such obvious headcases.

Aficionados sought out anything recorded at Conny Plank's legendary studio, where many of the great Krautrock epics were recorded. Meanwhile, alerted by the strange, exotic soundtracks to Werner Herzog's idiosyncratic films, the curious unearthed the mystical, mantra-like music of Florian Fricke's Popol Vuh, the most overtly religious of the Krautrock groups (Fricke himself appeared in some of the films, most notably as the deaf pianist in The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser). Others were more extreme in their interest: David Bowie, ever the intrepid explorer, went the whole hog and actually moved to Berlin, where he and Brian Eno would fashion two of pop's great leaps forward (Low and Heroes under the influence of Krautrock).

"I was a big fan of Kraftwerk, Cluster and Harmonia, and I thought the first Neu! album, in particular, was just gigantically wonderful," admits Bowie. "Looking at that against punk, I had absolutely no doubts where the future of music was going, and for me it was coming out Germany at that time. I also liked some of the later Can things, and there was an album that I loved by Edgar Froese, Epsilon In Malaysian Pale; it's the most beautiful, enchanting, poignant work, quite lovely. That used to be the background music to my life when I was living in Berlin. In a way, it was great that I found those bands, because I didn't feel any of the essence of punk at all in that period, I just totally by-passed it."

Bands proliferated in the wake of the pioneers featured here. Names like Guru Guru, Ash Ra Temple, Between, Agitation Free, Cosmic Jokers, Embryo, Wallenstein, Brainticket, Triumvirat, Novalis, Ramses, Kraan, Jane, Hoelderlin, Grobschnitt, Floh De Cologne and Achim Reichel fought for space in the limited Krautrock market. Meanwhile, older bands like Neu! split into their separate elements, adding names like La Düsseldorf and Harmonia to the fray. Before too long, the Krautrock section of the record racks was bulging with synth-twiddling weirdos and space-rock cadets, many of whom seemed to have little grasp of quality control. People like Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler released vast quantities of electronica, while the borders between true Krautrock and the more mundane German heavy rock bands started to blur as the '70s wore on.

Eventually, interest inevitably waned in the genre as a whole, save for the occasional boost such as that given when Johnny Rotten owned up to liking Can, or the ripple effect caused by Kraftwerk's hit singles. Through the '80's and '90's, the Krautrock light was kept aflame by such as the Freeman brothers, Steven and Alan, via their Audion magazine and Ultima Thule record shop; and, more recently, Julian Cope published his Krautrocksampler guide to the genre, re-igniting wider interest in the form.

As for the bands themselves, there are fresh stirrings from various quarters: Popol Vuh last year released City Raga, Florian Fricke's attempt to come to terms with current technology and musical style, and Amon Düül II have likewise put out Nada Moonshine and hauled themselves back into live performance. Tangerine Dream have never cut back on their recording schedule, augmenting their own releases with a constant stream of soundtrack work. And Kraftwerk... well, Kraftwerk proceed at their own pace, with scant regard for fashion.

IT'S DECEMBER 2, 1996, AND Faust are playing The Garage, at London's Highbury Corner.

On-stage there is a vast array of percussion -- metal pipes, tin things, drums, cymbals -- alongside an adapted keyboard with wires bristling from its back and sundry boxes piled on top of it. A cement mixer grinds out a rhythm, while the bassist hammers away at a minimal beat. Out front, an enormous oil-drum on wheels stands ready to be pummelled, while fenced off for our protection, a sculptress grinds away at a metal construction, sending showers of sparks across audience and band alike.

At one point, the bassist tears off his clothes, jumps into the audience and makes his way to the side, where he starts flinging paint at hundreds of album sleeves stapled to a board, smearing it liberally across them. (The sleeves, when dry, are then used as personalised covers for a numbered limited-edition of 300 12-inch singles, costing ? each -- mine's number 155). Later on in the proceedings, he again jumps into the crowd and makes his way to a tarpaulin-covered machine in the centre of the room. It's that most invaluable of musical instruments, a threshing-machine. Straddlind it as the crowd cheers, he dumps into its funnel sack after sack of dead leaves, which come blasting out across the assembled masses.

Compared to the monotonous Queen Elizabeth Hall show a year and a half earlier, it's an all-action show: action-painting, action-sculpting, action-playing. When the lights go up, the scene is one of devastation, a cross between factory, forest and artist's studio. No-one turned the power off, though. It's almost like a continuation of their shows from 1973-74, a belated picking-up of the baton they so noisily dropped back then, and a resumption of the spirit of Krautrock.

"We should have communicated with Kraftwerk and all those others back then," acknowledges Jean-Hervé Peron before the show. "We should have invited them to Wümme, because all these groups, in their different styles, were creating a movement. We didn't realise that at the time. Now, that movement is accepted and appreciated, but we didn't know then. We were spread all over, and nobody felt the urge to bring all these people together. Now people are talking about putting on Krautrock festivals."

Icon

"Bollox!"

Tsugi Podcast 106 : The Black Dog

Tracklisting :

01. Scanner - Sharewear Introduction - DS93
02. Louderbach - Sunspots - M_nus
03. Pig & Dan - Cubes - Yoshitoshi Recordings
04. Oliver Huntemann - Rikarda - Ideal Audio
05. The Black Dog - Long Walk Home - Dust Science
06. N/A - Variance (CH-Signal Edit) - Sandwell District
07. Harald Bjˆrk - Skvaltan - Kranglan Broadcast
08. Samuli Kemppi - Orbiter - Komisch
09. OVR - Interior - Blueprint
10. PWOG - True - KK Records
11. Cheap And Deep Productions - Darkroom Beats - Cheap And Deep
12. Xhin - Fixing The Error - Stroboscopic Artefacts
*Fragment. The Black Dog - Skin Clock - Soma Recordings
13. Cluster - F¸r Die Katz - Brain
14. Jamie Anderson & Deep Groove - Juggernaut - Cocoon Recordings
15. The Black Dog - Floods (Live Re-edit) - Soma Recordings

@'New TechnoID'

The Black Dog also have a Krautrock mix available
HERE

Saturday 21 November 2009

Ancients - Paeans & Odes


An 'Exile' exclusive today
very kindly supplied by
Michael Dustdevil (from the
excellent
Young Moss Tongue blog)
You have to hear this album.
Get it

HERE
(dedicated to Paddy)

Friday 20 November 2009

Gang of Four VS...

  • jonking jonking

    20 Nov 2009, 11:04AM

    Yet again the Guardian attacks the interests of musicians, acting as neo-liberal apologists for illegal filesharing . As if this is either a victimless crime or that it's the fault of the victims , who had it coming, and only themselves to blame.

    Keegan writes" The music industry still complains of a billion illegal downloads every year, but has yet to prove that any significant economic damage is inflicted on it". This is prejudice masquerading as fact.

    Illegal filesharing causes me, Lilly Allen and every other recording musician I know , economic damage. Every single song I've written and recorded in Gang of Four is now available for free , illegally, online. So I'm not allowed to be paid for my work.

    As an illustration: illegal downloads of "Entertainment!" in the UK vs legit sales run at a minimum two to one at the moment. The album has sold more than 100, 000 legit units in the UK, 35,000 in the last 10 years. Illegal fileshares over the same period are estimated to be 70-100K albums . At a midline price of £6 per album , around £400K has been lost, 10% royalty on which would have gone to the band ; meaning each member has lost £10,000 plus lost publishing income , another £6000. And this is just the UK. There's a 360K loss to our record company . Gang of Four is only one band. To see the real damage , find out how many recording artists there are in the UK, the number of albums they've made. This is where the billion download number comes in. You do the math. You work out the damage to musicians livelihoods.

    The biggest victims are young bands, ambitious or non-pop musicians, the non-singles market , non X-Factor crews who don't get handsome concert fees and will never get paid for their recorded work .

    Keegan states elsewhere,another apology for theft: "... lots of those who have ? and will continue to ? illegally download wouldn't be buying them anyway and may not be listening to many of those they do download." Well, that's alright then! Apart from this being only an opinion unsupported by evidence, using the author's supermarket analogy, if shoplifers don't want to pay for stuff, let them carry on!. They wouldn't have paid for the stuff they stole anyway!

    Every recording musician I know, successful or otherwise, suffers these losses. This is a fact, not a point of view. It's happening now, despite there being easy ways to be honest.
    But Keegan doesn't think it's serious: "We are not a nation of thieves, but if a supermarket leaves its doors open and shuts down the tills, it should be unsurprised if people help themselves" .
    But, using his words, it is a nation of thieves. Taking things without the owners consent and without paying is theft, not a right. Musicians must get paid!


  • paulsandham paulsandham

    20 Nov 2009, 11:48AM

    I bought Gang of Four's Entertainment and Songs of the free on vinyl a long, long time ago and it cost me at least £6 for each album (all those years ago) as well as a number of their 12"s and a couple of gigs in Sheffield.

    So Jonking, if i am to enjoy your music on my mp3 player or itunes library i have to pay another £6? to you and your record label? For what exactly? The cost of production? The incredibly dubious "remastered/reissued" versions (not sure if these exist for the Gang of Four - apologies if they don't - but for the rest of the music industry this has been proved to be a waste of time and money for the end consumer).

    Until you can justify why you have the right to rob me of £6 for content that i have already legally purchased and enjoyed so that i might enjoy this same music on an inferior but far more convenient digital format. A format that costs a tiny fraction of the original to produce and distribute.. your cries of unjust and robbery sound as meaningless and to be frank pathetic as the "home taping is killing music" crap that surrounded us in the 80s. Home taping was endemic and it didn't kill music.

    Instead of bitterly counting "lost sales" of decades old albums try reading Lessig's Remix - making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy.. and even more implausible what about writing and releasing an album of new material that is good enough to make me and others want to buy it?


Comment @'The Guardian'

1-0 to paulsandham

In search of Narod Niki...

While searching for a 2006 gig by Narod Niki, I came across this page with lots of live sets by various dub techno outfits as well as some other artists of interest.
HERE

Icon

Pete Doherty
Congrats for three albums in the NME top 50 albums of the decade!

Khamenei Will Be Iran's Last Supreme Leader

The clerical establishment has become so sick of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that they will not replace him when he dies.

Iranian reformists and liberals worldwide can be forgiven for thinking that the election and crackdown last summer strengthened the hardliners. In the short term, they're right: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still president and his opposition has gone to ground. In the long run, though, they may have already won the battle: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is likely to be the last all-powerful Supreme Leader of the Islamic republic, even if the theocratic system manages to survive this tumult...

@'Newsweek'

An inconveniant truth: the Dutch smoke less pot

Government drug policy experts don’t like the numbers, which is one of the reasons why you probably haven’t seen them. Among the nations of Europe, the Netherlands is famous, or infamous, for its lenient policy toward cannabis use—so it may come as a surprise to discover that Dutch adults smoke considerably less cannabis, on average, than citizens of almost any other European country.

A recent report by Reed Stevenson for Reuters highlights figures from the annual report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which shows the Dutch to be at the low end for marijuana usage, compared to their European counterparts. The report pegs adult marijuana usage in the Netherlands at 5.4 %. Also at the low end of the scale, along with the Netherlands, were Romania, Greece, and Bulgaria.

Leading the pack was Italy, at 14.6 %, followed closely by Spain, the Czech Republic, and France.

While cannabis use rose steady in Europe throughout the 1990s, the survey this year says that the data “point to a stabilising or even decreasing situation.” The study by the European Monitoring Centre did not include figures for countries outside Europe...
@'Addiction Inbox'

Who's responsible when you've had too much?

So just when is it safe to blame someone else for what you do after you drink?

With new laws emerging to ensure parents' liability for giving alcohol to minors at private parties, the teenagers will have a sure target.

But we can thank the High Court for the latest bombshell for adults.

Now the pub is in the clear if you leave after a session and kill yourself on the road. What's the world coming to?

The decision arose from the case of Shane Scott, a 41-year-old backhoe operator who settled in for an evening at the Tandara Motor Inn on Tasmania's east coast in the summer of 2002.

He put his motorbike in the hotel's plant room and handed his keys across the bar because the word was that there was a police breathalyser about.

Scott drank eight cans of whisky and coke over three hours, swore at the publican for offering to ring his wife to pick him up, demanded the keys, mounted his bike with apparent control, and rode off.

Within minutes he crashed into a bridge and died, with a blood alcohol reading of .253.

The case taken by his widow, Sandra, and the Motor Accident Insurance Board of Tasmania, was that the publican, Michael Kirkpatrick, failed in his duty of care to Scott.

This was rejected by the Tasmanian Supreme Court, accepted on majority appeal to its Full Court, and finally knocked over last week by the High Court.

It decided publicans had no general duty to "monitor and minimise the service of alcohol, or to protect customers from the consequences of the alcohol they choose to consume".

Pubs were, and still are, bound by specific laws that demand licensees not serve liquor to people who are drunk, disorderly, or causing undue annoyance.

But how can someone serving alcohol really go that extra step beyond denying service, and accept a civil duty of care to a customer who's had too much?

Scott wasn't a pupil under the control of a teacher, a patient in hospital, or even a prisoner in jail. He was under his own steam. Introducing a civil duty of care test for such people wouldn't work, the court said.

"Expressions like 'intoxication', 'inebriation', and 'drunkenness' are difficult both to define and apply," the court's justices Gummow, Heydon and Crennan concluded.

Too much inquisition into how drinkers felt was impractical, impertinent and an intrusion.

"To ask how the drinker feels, and what the drinker's mental and physical capacity is, would tend to destroy peaceful relations, and would collide with the interests of drinkers in their personal privacy."

The judgment also got around to issues of individual responsibility in one telling sentence.

"Virtually all adults know that progressive drinking increasingly impairs on's judgment and capacity to take care of oneself."

But for those who would rather not cross that bridge, they did offer a glimmer of hope.

There may be "exceptional" cases where a publican has a duty of care. All you have to be is so blotto you're incapable of any rational judgment, intellectually impaired, obviously mentally ill, or unconscious.

@'The Age'

For Ings:

Culture - Two Sevens Clash c/w Dub 7'' (1977)

Remember buying this at Probe in Liverpool back in, yes you guessed 1977.
Was I served by Pete Burns for this particular purchase?
Quite probably!

PS: Just read that Burns has two Blue Peter badges for apearing on the show. Some bastard stole my BP badge back in about 82!

Head Full of Noise Trailer


Head Full Of Noise Trailer

On-U Sound | MySpace Music Videos

Adrian Sherwood - Boogaloo

N.A.S.A: Tom Waits + Kool Keith, Spacious Thoughts (BB Video)

PS:

How many trips to Corfu, paid for by David Geffen has Mandy taken?

UK backbencher MP Tom Watson:

It'll break the Internet. I will not support this and neither should you. http://bit.ly/Yarrrrr

Mandelson seeks to amend UK copyright law in new crackdown on filesharing

Lord Mandelson is seeking to amend the laws on copyright to give the government sweeping new powers against people accused of illegal downloading.

But Labour colleagues are concerned that if he succeeds it could give a future Tory government the ability that Rupert Murdoch wants to quash Google.

In a letter to Harriet Harman, the leader of the house and head of the committee responsible for determining changes to such legislation, Mandelson says he is "writing to seek your urgent agreement" to changes to the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act "for the purposes of facilitating prevention or reduction of online copyright infringement".

By writing to Harman, the business secretary is seeking to get the change made through a "statutory instrument" – in effect, an update to the existing bill that the government can push through using its parliamentary majority.

That can be done with the minimum of parliamentary time, which is already at a premium.

The letter, which is circulating inside the government, comes as ministers prepare to publish the digital economy bill at 7.30am tomorrow. That is expected to set out a "three strikes" policy under which people who are found to be illicitly downloading copyrighted material have their internet connections withdrawn after three warnings.

Internet service providers have warned that the scheme is unworkable and unlawful.

The proposed alteration to the Copyright Act would create a new offence of downloading material that infringes copyright laws, as well as giving new powers or rights to "protect" rights holders such as record companies and movie studios – and, controversially, conferring powers on "any person as may be specified" to help cut down online infringement of copyright.

The changes proposed seem small – but are enormously wideranging, given both the breadth of even minor copyright infringement online, where photographs and text are copied with little regard to ownership, and the complexity of ownership.

Mandelson says in his letter that he is concerned about "cyberlockers" – websites that offer users private storage spaces whose contents can be shared by passing a web link via email.

"These can be used entirely legitimately, but recently rights holders have pointed to them as being used for illegal use," Mandelson writes in the letter.

But the proposal to alter the Copyright Act in this way has caused alarm within government, where some fear that an incoming Tory administration could use it to curry favour with Murdoch, head of the News International publishing group.

"They've seen that file-sharing is essentially unpoliceable, but the net effect is that a future secretary of state could change copyright law as they see fit," said one Labour insider.

In his letter, Mandelson sets out the expected reaction from the three groups who would be affected by the changes: rights holders such as record companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and consumers.

"I expect rights holders to welcome this and to support it. ISPs are likely to be neutral until it is clear what effect it will have on them in terms of costs." Consumer groups "are likely to oppose [the move] but will see it may lead to further unquantifiable measures against infringing consumers."

He also expects "a great deal of scrutiny" of the idea in parliament.

Murdoch has recently said that he believes that copyright is being abused, particularly by organisations such as Google, which uses short extracts from online newspapers to create its Google News page, and the BBC, which he has accused of "stealing from newspapers".

Earlier this month Murdoch was vituperative about how search engines have aggregated news. "The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them," he said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... They shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."

By giving the business secretary the power to amend the Copyright Act at will, Labour fears Mandelson could be creating a Trojan horse that under a Tory administration would allow Murdoch to be rewarded for his support for David Cameron over Gordon Brown, for example by making it illegal to use such extracts from a news site for profit.

A spokesperson for the Department for Business said the department could not comment on correspondence between ministers.

@'The Guardian'

See also 'BoingBoing'