Saturday, 23 April 2011
PJ Harvey Live In Concert From San Francisco's Warfield Theater April 14, 2011
Iconoclastic singer-songwriter PJ Harvey is making four U.S. stops in support of her recent album Let England Shake. Hear one of those concerts featuring songs from her latest album 'Let England Shake,' recorded live from the Warfield Theater in San Francisco on April 14, 2011.
Set List:
1) "Let England Shake"
2) "The Words That Maketh Murder"
3) "All & Everyone"
4) "In the Dark Places"
5) "The Glorious Land"
6) "The Last Living Rose"
7)"England"
8) "Bitter Branches"
9) "On Battleship Hill"
10) "The Colour of the Earth"
DOWNLOAD
(left click to play, right click to save)
Friday, 22 April 2011
Probe over riot at Australian asylum centre
About 100 people were involved in the riot, during which nine buildings at Villawood detention centre were torched.
Officials said that the situation was now calm but a number of detainees remained on the roof.
The government said the rioting was started by asylum-seekers who had had their visa applications rejected.
Immigration officials said that 22 people had been moved from the facility to a prison as part of a criminal probe into the riot, which began on Wednesday night.
"This sort of behaviour is absolutely unacceptable," Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan said. "They will certainly feel the full force of the law."
Villawood detention centre holds both irregular maritime arrivals - people arriving in Australia by boat to seek asylum - and people already on the Australian mainland who have violated their visas or had them cancelled.
Critics say the detainees - mainly from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq - are held in poor conditions and are unhappy with the length of time taken to process their applications.
In February riot police were drafted in when detainees at Australia's offshore detention centre on Christmas Island rioted.
The Australian government has recently announced the provision of more than 1,900 new beds for asylum seekers to ease crowding in detention centres.
@'BBC'
Officials said that the situation was now calm but a number of detainees remained on the roof.
The government said the rioting was started by asylum-seekers who had had their visa applications rejected.
Immigration officials said that 22 people had been moved from the facility to a prison as part of a criminal probe into the riot, which began on Wednesday night.
"This sort of behaviour is absolutely unacceptable," Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan said. "They will certainly feel the full force of the law."
Villawood detention centre holds both irregular maritime arrivals - people arriving in Australia by boat to seek asylum - and people already on the Australian mainland who have violated their visas or had them cancelled.
The riot there was the latest in a series of protests and suicides at Australian immigration detention facilities.
In recent months the number of irregular maritime arrivals has increased, leading to overcrowding. Critics say the detainees - mainly from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq - are held in poor conditions and are unhappy with the length of time taken to process their applications.
In February riot police were drafted in when detainees at Australia's offshore detention centre on Christmas Island rioted.
The Australian government has recently announced the provision of more than 1,900 new beds for asylum seekers to ease crowding in detention centres.
@'BBC'
Publishers Force Domain Seizure of Public Domain Music Resource
IMSLP, the largest public domain music library on the Internet, has just suffered a damaging attack on the site’s infrastructure. In a wrongful action over a single 90 year-old classical piece by Rachmaninoff, the UK’s Music Publishers Association convinced registrar GoDaddy to seize IMSLP’s domain name, which took the site completely offline.
While most readers will be very familiar with the commercialized mainstream pop sounds of the last 10 to 20 years, spare a moment’s thought for the deep history of our modern music. Without the great composers of the last few hundred years – Mozart, Beethoven, Bach to name just three – our soundscape today might be very different.
A group of people who are completely immersed in this history and absolutely determined to preserve it, are the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) who slavishly index public domain scores.
“Started more than five years ago in 2006, IMSLP has grown to include more than 90,000 scores from more than 5,000 composers,” administrator Edward told TorrentFreak.
Indeed, IMSLP’s coverage is extensive, spanning just about every composer one can think of. But one piece from their archives has just caused them a huge amount of inconvenience.
IMSLP’s listing of Rachmaninoff’s Bells, which was created in 1920 by a Russian and is public domain both in Canada and the USA, was spotted thousands of miles away by the UK’s Music Publishers Association (MPA).
Feeling they had some authority over the piece, MPA issued a DMCA takedown notice, not to the IMSLP site, but to their domain registrar, GoDaddy.
“We understand that Godaddy are the sponsoring registrar for the website http://www.IMSLP.ORG which makes available unlicensed copyright protected sheet music notation which is an infringement of copyright. By assisting this website, Godaddy are liable to pay damages for secondary copyright infringement once notice of the infringement has been given,” said the MPA’s Jake Kirner in the DMCA notice.
Without a second look at the issue, elephant gun wielding GoDaddy complied, seizing control of IMPSL’s domain name and taking them completely offline. Needless to say IMPSL were furious noting that the MPA’s assertion – that Rachmaninoff’s The Bells is protected under copyright in the US – “is nothing less than a bald-faced lie.”
IMPSL then when on to publish the MPA’s DMCA takedown notice in full on their website, which solicited demands from the MPA to have it removed. IMPSL refused.
“Seriously, you can’t expect to take down a major website, with a bogus DMCA takedown notice, and then try and hide the evidence. Can you see that? It makes you look ridiculous,” they wrote.
Then, just a few hours ago and following a threat by IMSLP that they could sue, MPA suddenly withdrew their complaint from GoDaddy.
Despite describing the original complaint as “underhanded” and “bogus”, IMPSL still managed to be gentlemen about the issue, and offered a “sincere thanks” to the MPA for their retraction.
“While IMSLP encourages open discussion of copyright issues, we have zero tolerance for underhanded tactics. To MPA’s credit, they have voluntarily retracted their claim. IMSLP will also be working on technical measures to prevent any future attacks,” they added.
This is not the first time IMSLP have had legal woes.
“IMSLP previously encountered major legal turbulence in 2007, when Universal Edition, an Austrian music publisher, successfully forced a shut down of the site,” administrator Edward told TorrentFreak. “However, IMSLP was able to recover after 9 months of reorganization.”
enigmax @'TorrentFreak'
While most readers will be very familiar with the commercialized mainstream pop sounds of the last 10 to 20 years, spare a moment’s thought for the deep history of our modern music. Without the great composers of the last few hundred years – Mozart, Beethoven, Bach to name just three – our soundscape today might be very different.
A group of people who are completely immersed in this history and absolutely determined to preserve it, are the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) who slavishly index public domain scores.
“Started more than five years ago in 2006, IMSLP has grown to include more than 90,000 scores from more than 5,000 composers,” administrator Edward told TorrentFreak.
Indeed, IMSLP’s coverage is extensive, spanning just about every composer one can think of. But one piece from their archives has just caused them a huge amount of inconvenience.
IMSLP’s listing of Rachmaninoff’s Bells, which was created in 1920 by a Russian and is public domain both in Canada and the USA, was spotted thousands of miles away by the UK’s Music Publishers Association (MPA).
Feeling they had some authority over the piece, MPA issued a DMCA takedown notice, not to the IMSLP site, but to their domain registrar, GoDaddy.
“We understand that Godaddy are the sponsoring registrar for the website http://www.IMSLP.ORG which makes available unlicensed copyright protected sheet music notation which is an infringement of copyright. By assisting this website, Godaddy are liable to pay damages for secondary copyright infringement once notice of the infringement has been given,” said the MPA’s Jake Kirner in the DMCA notice.
Without a second look at the issue, elephant gun wielding GoDaddy complied, seizing control of IMPSL’s domain name and taking them completely offline. Needless to say IMPSL were furious noting that the MPA’s assertion – that Rachmaninoff’s The Bells is protected under copyright in the US – “is nothing less than a bald-faced lie.”
IMPSL then when on to publish the MPA’s DMCA takedown notice in full on their website, which solicited demands from the MPA to have it removed. IMPSL refused.
“Seriously, you can’t expect to take down a major website, with a bogus DMCA takedown notice, and then try and hide the evidence. Can you see that? It makes you look ridiculous,” they wrote.
Then, just a few hours ago and following a threat by IMSLP that they could sue, MPA suddenly withdrew their complaint from GoDaddy.
Despite describing the original complaint as “underhanded” and “bogus”, IMPSL still managed to be gentlemen about the issue, and offered a “sincere thanks” to the MPA for their retraction.
“While IMSLP encourages open discussion of copyright issues, we have zero tolerance for underhanded tactics. To MPA’s credit, they have voluntarily retracted their claim. IMSLP will also be working on technical measures to prevent any future attacks,” they added.
This is not the first time IMSLP have had legal woes.
“IMSLP previously encountered major legal turbulence in 2007, when Universal Edition, an Austrian music publisher, successfully forced a shut down of the site,” administrator Edward told TorrentFreak. “However, IMSLP was able to recover after 9 months of reorganization.”
enigmax @'TorrentFreak'
Lord of the Drone: Pandit Pran Nath and the American Underground
This was the sound La Monte Young heard the first time he heard any music from India, Ali Akbar Khan’s 1955 LP Morning and Evening Ragas, in a Music City Records promo-spot on the radio in Los Angeles. Young drove over, bought the record, and brought it back to his grandmother’s house, where he locked himself in his room and listened as the musicians were introduced by violinist Yehudi Menuhin, along with their instruments — this is Mr. Ali Akbar Khan on sarod, this is Mr. Chatur Lal on tabla, and this is the third instrument, the tambura, played by Mr. Gor. The sound that follows this final introduction lasts only a few seconds on the recording, but it had a dramatic impact on the young composer, who heard in it the basis for a music built around sustained tones and a sublimated, slowed-down rhythmic pulse.
If minimalist music as we know it was in some sense an emanation from that first tambura on the radio, it seems safe to say that it was another tambura that midwifed the birth of its more intimate, disparate heirs. Pandit Pran Nath’s tambura was louder, higher, and harder; it hits you deep in the body with its synesthetic sine wave vibrations and cascading overtones. Hear the world poised at the brink of some radical unfolding, the macrocosm in a bare moment, the maximum minimum, the music of another set of spheres. You haven’t heard the tamburas sing this song before because Pandit Pran Nath was a lifelong student and devotee of these incredible machines’ unearthly sound, adding a special finish of his own fashioning to their resonant lower gourds and tuning them up for hours until they turned into the lightningblack curtains and magenta-midnight light for the Malkauns, a raga with a special place in his repertoire.
It isn’t just the quality of the drone that distinguishes Pandit Pran Nath’s performance of the Malkauns, recorded at midnight in a studio in Soho in 1976. What really stands out in this recording — identified by his former student Henry Flynt as one of the two or three most important ever made — is his voice, stony and austere, with a subterranean intensity. When he hits the tonic note — what in Indian music is called the shadaja — and then slides it slowly, microtonally, downward, you can feel it inside your chest, an impossible emotion somewhere between awe, erotic desire, and annihilation. Some ragas are light-footed maidens dancing through springtime, at play on swings in the flowered groves along the Yamuna riverbank; Pandit Pran Nath’s are cremation grounds, the blue-black color of smoke rising softly from the smoldering log of a sadhu’s fire, the moon on the mountainside.
A musicologist will tell you that a raga is a specific mode, a series of notes that serve as the basis for improvisation, but Pandit Pran Nath and his students would tell you something else, that a raga is a living soul the performer invokes like a celestial, numinous presence moving behind and between the notes, a cosmic teacher that the performer, if he is successful, embodies and transmits, dissolving the boundaries between singer, listener, and song. Each raga comes assigned to a certain time of day, but many artists ignore them in performance, regarding the designations as conventional and dispensable; Pandit Pran Nath only sang midnight songs at midnight. The Malkauns raga is one such, a druggy pentatonic nocturne that some superstitious musicians refuse to play on the grounds that it attracts demons; it works like a powerful narcotic, replacing clock time with another temporality altogether. Do not attempt to operate a motor vehicle under its influence. Put on the recording from 1976 and prepare to lie down on something soft: those four simple syllables Pran Nath sings — go vin da ram — are the name of God...
Continue reading
Alexander Keefe @'Bidoun'
Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996)
Ragas of Morning and Night
1.
Raga Todi
2.Raga Darbari
(Right click/save as)
Ragas of Morning and Night
(Todi, Darbari) Gramavision 18-7018-7 (1986)
Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996)
Ragas of Morning and Night
1.
Raga Todi2.
Raga Darbari(Right click/save as)
Ragas of Morning and Night
(Todi, Darbari) Gramavision 18-7018-7 (1986)
This is a rare recording from 1968 India of Pandit PranNath singing Rags Todi and Darbari.
Pran Nath's Ragas of Morning & Night has nothing to do with entertainment, everything to do with meditation and everything to do with New Age music, so much of which is profoundly influenced by traditional Indian music. As we listen, we are drawn in, captivated and eventually transported to psycho-spiritual clarity. Ragas is an intense album for serious listeners who regard listening as a process of inner development.
Pandit Pran Nath in UbuWeb Film
Pandit Pran Nath in UbuWeb Film Syria's Twitter spambots
Syrian hashtag searches have been inundated with links to photographs and football statistics. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
As demonstrations rage on Arab streets, a different battle is happening on Twitter. In Morocco, Syria, Bahrain and Iran, pro-revolution users of the site have found themselves locked in a battle of the hashtags as Twitter accounts with a pro-government message are quickly created to counter the prevailing narrative.
Deemed a revolutionary tool in many of the region's uprisings, Twitter has been used to great acclaim for disseminating news and images, often from the ground. In Egypt, where Twitter users number in the tens of thousands, tweets using the hashtag #Jan25 from Tahrir Square helped paint a picture through weeks of demonstrations. Elsewhere across the region and beyond, observers and even journalists turn to Twitter to get a handle on what's happening in the streets.
Though often a tool for good, Twitter can be used by anyone for virtually any purpose. Journalist Nick Kristof incurred the wrath of the Twitter masses after covering stories of protesters in Bahrain being attacked by police forces. During Morocco's 20 February protests, pro-monarchy tweets targeted anyone using the #Feb20 hashtag. And back in 2009, reports abounded of Twitter being used to throw off supporters of Iran's green movement.
The latest news comes from Syria, where Twitter use remains low despite – until recently – a ban on certain other social networks, including Facebook. Nevertheless, Syria's dedicated Twitter users have taken to the microblogging site to post news, images and photos of the demonstrations taking place across the country. Using the hashtags #Syria, #Daraa and #Mar15, they've managed to bring attention to a movement – and ensuing crackdowns from security forces – that hasn't seen much global media attention.
Twitter users have to contend with competing interests as protests continue elsewhere in the region, but also with a cabal of pro-regime accounts, set up recently for the sole purpose of flooding the #Syria hashtag and overwhelming the pro-revolution narrative.
As the Syrian blogger Anas Qtiesh writes, "These accounts were believed to be manned by Syrian mokhabarat (intelligence) agents with poor command of both written Arabic and English, and an endless arsenal of bite and insults."
These accounts, run by individuals, harassed users but had little effect on the hashtag search. Another set of accounts, however, managed to inundate the #Syria tag. Using a Bahraini company, EGHNA, bots are sending messages – sometimes several a minute – using various Syria-related search terms.
Under the heading "Success stories", the EGNHA website says:
While often annoying to users, accounts set up to tweet links across a hashtag are not in violation of Twitter's terms of use. Twitter's help centre suggests blocking users to prevent seeing their content. But without third-party software, blocking doesn't remove a user from a search.
Nevertheless, although Twitter shies away from moderating content and removing users, the search functionality favours users with a complete username, profile and photograph, and users who automate their tweets can be removed from search.
After numerous complaints, that's exactly what has happened to the #Syria bots. Though they can still be viewed by their followers and those who input the URL directly, Syrian hashtag searches – vital to many hoping to gain firsthand news from the country – are no longer flooded with links to photographs and football stats.
Syrians still face numerous obstacles online – from the fear of security forces infiltrating their accounts, to the red lines placed on free speech – but this one small victory means that, in the battle for narrative at least, they've won.
Jillian C. York @'The Guardian'
Deemed a revolutionary tool in many of the region's uprisings, Twitter has been used to great acclaim for disseminating news and images, often from the ground. In Egypt, where Twitter users number in the tens of thousands, tweets using the hashtag #Jan25 from Tahrir Square helped paint a picture through weeks of demonstrations. Elsewhere across the region and beyond, observers and even journalists turn to Twitter to get a handle on what's happening in the streets.
Though often a tool for good, Twitter can be used by anyone for virtually any purpose. Journalist Nick Kristof incurred the wrath of the Twitter masses after covering stories of protesters in Bahrain being attacked by police forces. During Morocco's 20 February protests, pro-monarchy tweets targeted anyone using the #Feb20 hashtag. And back in 2009, reports abounded of Twitter being used to throw off supporters of Iran's green movement.
The latest news comes from Syria, where Twitter use remains low despite – until recently – a ban on certain other social networks, including Facebook. Nevertheless, Syria's dedicated Twitter users have taken to the microblogging site to post news, images and photos of the demonstrations taking place across the country. Using the hashtags #Syria, #Daraa and #Mar15, they've managed to bring attention to a movement – and ensuing crackdowns from security forces – that hasn't seen much global media attention.
Twitter users have to contend with competing interests as protests continue elsewhere in the region, but also with a cabal of pro-regime accounts, set up recently for the sole purpose of flooding the #Syria hashtag and overwhelming the pro-revolution narrative.
As the Syrian blogger Anas Qtiesh writes, "These accounts were believed to be manned by Syrian mokhabarat (intelligence) agents with poor command of both written Arabic and English, and an endless arsenal of bite and insults."
These accounts, run by individuals, harassed users but had little effect on the hashtag search. Another set of accounts, however, managed to inundate the #Syria tag. Using a Bahraini company, EGHNA, bots are sending messages – sometimes several a minute – using various Syria-related search terms.
Under the heading "Success stories", the EGNHA website says:
"LovelySyria is using EGHNA Media Server to promote interesting photography about Syria using their Twitter accounts. EGHNA Media Server helped LovelySyria get attention to the beauty of Syria, and build a community of people who love the country and admire its beauty. Some of their network members started translating photo descriptions and rebroadcasting them to give the Syrian beauty more exposure.Other accounts, such as @SyriaBeauty, @DNNUpdates and @SyLeague, perform similar functions. Their messages are sometimes political, sometimes not, but all were created recently and all serve the purpose of diverting attention from the Syrian protests.
LovelySyria is using their own installation of EGHNA Ad Center to generate the Twitter messages, their current schedule is two messages every five minutes."
While often annoying to users, accounts set up to tweet links across a hashtag are not in violation of Twitter's terms of use. Twitter's help centre suggests blocking users to prevent seeing their content. But without third-party software, blocking doesn't remove a user from a search.
Nevertheless, although Twitter shies away from moderating content and removing users, the search functionality favours users with a complete username, profile and photograph, and users who automate their tweets can be removed from search.
After numerous complaints, that's exactly what has happened to the #Syria bots. Though they can still be viewed by their followers and those who input the URL directly, Syrian hashtag searches – vital to many hoping to gain firsthand news from the country – are no longer flooded with links to photographs and football stats.
Syrians still face numerous obstacles online – from the fear of security forces infiltrating their accounts, to the red lines placed on free speech – but this one small victory means that, in the battle for narrative at least, they've won.
Jillian C. York @'The Guardian'
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