Krautrock Hörvergnügen

"Our good friends over at the RBMA have teamed up with us and Goethe Institut Los Angeles for another installment of our THEME-STREAM series – a deep web radio excursion into a designated musical area. On this occasion, we’re diving into the canon of German music for a five week long extravaganza dubbed German Sound Exploration, featuring exclusive mixes, live sets and interviews. You can tune in via the dedicated microsite anytime until May 1.
Spanning the very early days of krautrock and analogue synths with innovators such as Manuel Göttsching, Kraftwerk, and Cluster, to techno trailblazers like Moritz von Oswald and Wolfgang Voigt, to electronic baton-grabbers like Mouse On Mars, Atom TM, and To Rococo Rot, this radio stream demonstrates a rich variety of sounds and styles from across the German kosmos. Jawohl!"
(dublab)

RBMA presents ‘Hörvergnügen’

01. Brainticket – Jardins – RCA
02. Unknown – Unknown – Unknown
03. Die Egozentrischen 2 – Durchdrehn In Der DB – Was Soll Das?
04. Roland Kovac – Nymphe – Selected Sounds
05. Cluster – Caramel – Brain
06. Conrad Schnitzler – Auf Dem Schwarzen Kanal – RCA
07. Futurologischer Kongress – Stoned Im Dschungel – Berlin Rock News
08. Eric Vann – Sunken Galleons – Coloursound
09. Säurekeller – Desa D – Ulan Bator
10. Quiet Life – Schlafen – Wartungsfrei
11. Schatten Unter Eis – Red Frogs – WSDP
12. Kraftwerk – Hall of Mirrors – Capitol
13. Ashra – Ocean Of Tenderness – Virgin
14. Peter Baumann – Phase By Phase – Virgin
15. A La Ping Pong – Go Go Pongs – private

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Bill Callahan - Apocalypse (2011 - Albumstream)

Those looking for a logical musical follow-up to Bill Callahan's surprisingly accessible Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle from 2009 might scratch their heads at the sound on Apocalypse. The musical reference point in his catalog is, perhaps, A River Ain't Too Much to Love, under the Smog moniker. It's not that this recording resembles that one musically, so much as it employs outsider takes on American roots traditions to get its seven songs across. Apocalypse is a song cycle that places the usually extremely inward-looking Callahan in the unlikely role of observer and interpreter of various American myths; myths both externally held and culturally self-referential, that inform the interior world of the protagonist. Recorded and mixed in Texas and adorned by Paul Ryan's iconic painting Apocalypse at Mule Ears Peak, Big Bend National Park in West Texas, the album portrays America in all its complexity from the vantage point of an empathic yet wryly humorous narrator. On album-opener "Drover," Callahan plays a minor-key, two-chord vamp on a nylon-string guitar, offering a fragmented narrative on a cattle drive. Backed by a full-on rock band led by Matt Kinsey's reverb-laden electric guitar, and colored by Gordon Butler's fiddle, it begs the question: do these cattle actually exist or are they metaphorical elements in the protagonist's psyche? The chorus is the hint as it introduces a lovely second melody and turns the song back on the listener as Callahan sings: "One thing about this wild, wild country/It takes a strong, strong it breaks a strong, strong mind..." "Baby's Breath" is more fractured and rockist, with a taut balance of acoustic and knife-edged electric guitars populating the musical space. Callahan's protagonist found the right place, the right woman, and lost the latter. He has questions but no answers. "America" is the set's hinge piece. A repetitive, electric, pulsing, hypontic distorted blues--a la R.L. Burnside--that examines America's mythical past and its tarnished present. Callahan name checks songwriting heroes -- Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, George Jones, and Johnny Cash -- by their actual ranks and branches in the armed forces while admitting he's never served, as if that might be the problem; then amid the din to make things more complex, he names our greatest national failures and dirty conquests. The album's most melodic and utterly beautiful song is the confessional waltz "Riding for the Feeling," with glistening electric piano and Wurlitzer played by Jonathan Meiburg. Closer "One Fine Morning" is a nearly nine-minute, lilting ballad that turns on a couple of chords, some pastoral yet jarring lyrics, and a gospel piano atop strummed guitars, which transmute the listener to another place and time. Apocalypse is a deceptively complex gem.
(Thom Jurek - allmusic; 4/5)

ALBUMSTREAM

Structure of stars revealed by 'music' they emit

♪♫ The Weather Prophets - Hollow Heart

Playing Russian Roulette at Davis-Besse - Nuclear Nightmare on the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes of North America make up 20% of the Earth's fresh surface water. Their dynamic ecosystems have been considered by many Native American tribes to function as the heart of the interconnected ecosystems that make up the North American continent known to many of the Indigenous peoples here as Turtle Island. The Great Lakes are known world wide for their biodiversity, beauty, fishing, and trade and shipping routes. These fragile and beautiful ecosystems along with the human populations that live along their shores are under constant threat from the Nuclear Industry that has been slowly and quietly irradiating the heart of the Turtle for decades.

Spent fuel pools of highly radioactive wastes sit dangerously on the shores of lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan and Ontario. Aging and dysfunctional reactors continue to operate as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy and their Canadian counterparts push to allow these dangerous behemoths to function for decades more, prioritizing corporate profits ahead of public health and safety and the protection of the natural environment. This series of articles will detail this Nuclear Nightmare on the Great Lakes of North America as it has transpired and continues to unfold.

Davis-Besse

The Davis-Besse Nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Erie sits just over 20 miles east of Toledo, Ohio near the town of Oak Harbor. Its' legacy is one of narrowly averted catastrophic nuclear accidents and negligent mismanagement that has worked to expose the criminal incompetence of the plant's operator, FirstEnergy Corporation, and complete ineptitude of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in monitoring this facility. FirstEnergy and the NRC are now colluding in an attempt to extend the operating license of this imminent and constant nuclear threat to the citizens of Ohio, Michigan and Southern Ontario as well the Great Lakes ecosystem by another 20 years. The current license expires in 2017.

Davis-Besse boasts the two worst industry accidents in the United States since Three Mile Island and discoveries as recently as 2010 have been enough to bring alarm and outrage to citizen's groups fighting to protect public health and the Lake Erie Basin from a profit and greed driven catastrophe. A hole in the original reactor head; equipment failure and malfunctions; worker instability, mistakes and incompetence; an F2 tornado; and a concerted effort by the NRC and FirstEnergy corporation to cover-up major systemic problems with the Davis-Besse reactor have led to several near catastrophes in the 34 year history of the plant's operation. In 2008 a Tritium leak was discovered by chance. Discoveries of cracks in the reactors replacement head in 2010 and subsequent inadequate repairs have been brushed aside by NRC regulators to allow the FirstEnergy reactor to operate full steam ahead until another replacement lid can be put into place in the fall of 2011.

3/16 of an inch from a meltdown?! The reactor with a hole in its head, March, 2002

In 2002 Davis-Besse faced what the U.S. Government Accountability Office describes as "the most serious safety issue confronting the nation's commercial nuclear power industry since Three Mile Island in 1979..."

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Ad (rock) break...

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OH this will stop kids smoking...

Australia today unveiled logo- and brand-less cigarette packs that the government is hoping tobacco companies will use, if a legislation aimed at curbing smoking among young people is passed, reports News.com.au.
Under the proposed legislation, tobacco companies will be required to follow strict rules on cigarette packaging, including the removal of all logos and setting type in a specific font. The new packs are all olive green, which research found to be the “least attractive color for smokers”, the Australian news website said.
Health warnings and graphic images depicting the various diseases smoking can cause will be enlarged to take up 90% of the front of packs and 75% of the back, News.com.au said.
“Our research shows that the look of the pack is an important consideration for young people at risk of being drawn to smoking,” Ian Oliver, chief executive of the Heart Foundation and Cancer Council Australia, said in a statement.
[via News.com.au]
Via

Kode 9 - Otherman / Love is the Drug (Hyperdub)