Tuesday, 4 October 2011

We're both right but you're wrong

No Apologies Ever

Dale Farm: Evictions 'can go ahead' but injunction remains

Monday, 3 October 2011

Mark Stewart & The Maffia Live (30.10.2005 Flex, Vienna)

The Origins Of Synthetic Weed

Brian Eno: Success ruins artists

Brian Eno is widely considered one of the great contemporary composers and music producers, famously for his work with U2 and Coldplay, but perhaps most influentially with David Bowie and the Talking Heads. He began his career in 1971, in his early 20s, as a member of the band Roxy Music, then left to make music on his own, including such albums as “Another Green World,” “Music for Airports” and with David Byrne, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” a landmark in the history of sampling.
His fascination with musical technologies and artistic systems led him to popularize the Koan algorithmic music generator, and, with Peter Schmidt, to develop the “Oblique Strategies” deck of cards, an intervention into the artistic process. His music is heard, unknowingly, by millions of people every day: he created the start-up sound of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating software. He is a founder of the Long Now Foundation, whose mandate is to educate the public into thinking about the distant future. “Drums Between the Bells” is his latest release.
David Mitchell, born in 1969, is the acclaimed, award-winning author of the novels “Ghostwritten” (1999), “Number9Dream” (2001), “Cloud Atlas” (2004) — the latter two shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — “Black Swan Green” (2006), and “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (2010). Granta selected him as one of the best young British novelists, and he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, which credited him with having “created the 21st century novel.” Mitchell was raised in England, spent many years teaching and writing in Japan, and presently lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.
Mitchell and Eno were fans and admirers of each other before the idea for this conversation came about, and spoke for the first time over email. David Mitchell asked questions, and Brian Eno provided answers.
I. NO SONG, NO BEAT,
NO MELODY, NO MOVEMENT
Do you agree that no new genre is ever invented, but rather hybridized from something that was there before? That infallible source Wikipedia credits you with coining the phrase ambient music. If that’s so, from what was ambient music cross-pollinated?
Yes, nothing starts from nowhere. My version of ambient was the coalescence of lots of different streams. Some of them were musical, others not. The musical threads I picked up would include Satie, of course, but also the early experiments of Steve Reich, Terry Riley and the other minimalist composers of the late ’60s — all of whom were looking at music as a “steady state” rather than a narrative experience. Also, I would have to add that it was the slow movements of classical works that appealed to me most — the parts where less was happening.
But really, the idea arose out of the new possibilities of the medium of recording. I listened with interest to the work of producers like Phil Spector and Joe Meek and George Martin because I realized that they were doing things with music that could be described as sound painting. For me, trained as a painter, this was exciting: Music was being made like paintings were made, adding and subtracting, manipulating colors, built up over a period of time rather than performed in one sitting. Separated from performance, recorded sound had become a malleable material, like paint or clay. And the results of this process were pointing toward a type of music that was less linear and more immersive: music you lived inside.
The technologies of this manipulation were what I came to specialize in, and they multiply every week, so quite a lot of my time is spent playing with new technology to see what it can do that could never be done before.
What does Doctor Pangloss have to say about how 21st-century human ingenuity is being channeled into inventing juicy gizmos like the iPad, instead of preparing for a world without oil, which, if even conservative estimates are correct, will be upon us by the time my daughter is in her late 20s?
The hope is that some of these gizmos become the tools by which we make those preparations. It’s a worry: Are we entertaining ourselves to death, or are we actually learning new ways of coping? Only time will tell.
One of my favorite definitions of time is that time is what stops everything happening at once. I wonder if music is what stops noise happening all at once?
I think much of your music — like on the albums “Music for Airports,” “Apollo,” “Discreet Music,” “The Pearl” — is ideal writing music. It can kick-start a good writing session, and then, if your mind wanders back to the here and now, your music sends it back to work, but these four albums never obtrude or nag or distract. I wonder if there’s a “Man From Porlock” spectrum on which all music can be placed with, say, Ian Dury at the Porlock end — which is impossible to work to, where listening is compulsory — and much of your work toward the non-Porlock end?
I remember an early review of one of my ambient records saying something like, “No song, no beat, no melody, no movement” — and they weren’t being complimentary. But I think they were accurate, because this is a music of texture and sonic sensuality more than it is any of those things they were alluding to. I’m sure when the first abstract paintings appeared, people said, “No figure, no structure,” etc … The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
I wanted to hear a music that could create an atmosphere that would support your attention but still let you decide where it was directed.
I think I got to this place by noticing what I wanted from music in my own life. Of course I wanted the high-focus, exclusive, pure-Porlock stuff like the Velvet Underground and Shostakovich — but I also wanted a music that simply “tinted” the air around me. Problem was, there wasn’t much of that kind, and what there was all had something wrong with it from my point of view — classical was too stiff and carried the baggage of people sawing away at violins; jazz had too much personality; Muzak was unbearably oversweet.
By the early ’70s, a few friends and I were exchanging cassettes we’d compiled from our record collections — long sequences of “mono-mood” music that were intended to create and maintain a feeling for a long time. Remember that records at this time were compiled on the assumption that nobody could possibly want to spend more than four minutes in the same feeling, so you’d get a fast track and then a ballad and then a dance number, and most classical music was similar: allegro, andante, largo. All of this was based on the idea that music was an ephemeral form — which it used to be, before recording — and that you’d therefore be after an adventure, a narrative.
With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture. It’s an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music. But my feeling is that it just widens the possibilities: It doesn’t prevent anyone from writing difficult and engaging, high-Porlock music if that’s what they want to do, and I’ve always tried to make it clear where I felt any particular piece of my own work rested on that widened spectrum. I came up with the word “ambient” to suggest that here was a kind of music that rewarded a different sort of listening behavior, but the term certainly isn’t meant to cover everything I do.
I notice that a lot of pop music now is much further toward the non-Porlock end than it used to be. Bands like Portishead and the Cocteau Twins started it (well, I suppose I did, too, but they made it successful). Now there are countless bands that have a sort of ambient-pop sound, where the vocals are partly buried, the instruments are swathed in echo, and the rhythm instruments are softer and more distant.
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive...

Continue reading

@'Salon'

EFA, Pirate Party slam film industry lawsuit “extortion”

Audio Palimpest

Audio Palimpsest (2010) is an interactive sound-based installation that explores applications of indeterminacy and randomness in an interactive platform. The piece is based on a hacked cassette recorder, where the device functionalities are reconfigured to work in a different context. Audio Palimpsest is an auditory art system that allows multi-point interaction by synthesizing data inputs collectively and emphasizing the thought of open-endedness in its execution -- opening up content generation to sources beyond the traditional expectations.
Via
Such a good word 'palimpest'...

Arctic ozone loss at record level

Ozone loss over the Arctic this year was so severe that for the first time it could be called an "ozone hole" like the Antarctic one, scientists report.

About 20km (13 miles) above the ground, 80% of the ozone was lost, they say.
The cause was an unusually long spell of cold weather at altitude. In cold conditions, the chlorine chemicals that destroy ozone are at their most active.
It is currently impossible to predict if such losses will occur again, the team writes in the journal Nature.
Early data on the scale of Arctic ozone destruction were released in April, but the Nature paper is the first that has fully analysed the data.
"Winter in the Arctic stratosphere is highly variable - some are warm, some are cold," said Michelle Santee from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
"But over the last few decades, the winters that are cold have been getting colder.

"So given that trend and the high variability, we'd anticipate that we'll have other cold ones, and if that happens while chlorine levels are high, we'd anticipate that we'd have severe ozone loss."

Ozone-destroying chemicals originate in substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that came into use late last century in appliances including refrigerators and fire extinguishers.
Their destructive effects were first documented in the Antarctic, which now sees severe ozone depletion in each of its winters.
Their use was progressively restricted and then eliminated by the 1987 Montreal Protocol and its successors.
The ozone layer blocks ultraviolet-B rays from the Sun, which can cause skin cancer and other medical conditions.
Longer, not colder Winter temperatures in the Arctic stratosphere do not generally fall as low as at the southern end of the world.
No records for low temperature were set this year, but the air remained at its coldest for an unusually long period of time, and covered an unusually large area.
In addition, the polar vortex was stronger than usual. Here, winds circulate around the edge of the Arctic region, somewhat isolating it from the main world weather systems.
"Why [all this] occurred will take years of detailed study," said Dr Santee.
"It was continuously cold from December through April, and that has never happened before in the Arctic in the instrumental record."
The size and position of the ozone hole changed over time, as the vortex moved northwards or southwards over different regions.
Some monitoring stations in northern Europe and Russia recorded enhanced levels of ultraviolet-B penetration, though it is not clear that this posed any risk to human health.
While the Arctic was setting records, the Antarctic ozone hole is relatively stable from year to year.
This year has seen ozone-depleting conditions extending a little later into the southern hemisphere spring than usual - again, as a result of unusual weather conditions.
Chlorine compounds persist for decades in the upper atmosphere, meaning that it will probably be mid-century before the ozone layer is restored to its pre-industrial health.
Richard Black @'BBC'

Americans Raid Byways of Haqqani Insurgents in Afghanistan

Gone but Not Forgotten

Al-Qaeda Claims al-Awlaki is Still Alive

As the U.S government is relishing its victory over al-Qaeda with the alleged death of several of the group's top leaders, amongst whom well-known cleric and mastermind in al-Qaeda in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki; the terror group has announced that the allegations were false and that al-Awlaki was still very
alive.
Only a few days, the Yemeni and American government bi-laterally announced to the world that they had killed U.S most wanted terrorist in an airstrike in al-Jawf province in Yemen, north of its capital Sana'a.
Allegedly, al-Awlaki was traveling in a 3 car-convoy when he was struck from the air, leaving him and 3 of his companions dead.
Soon after the announcement of al-Awlaki's death, U.S intelligence officials declared that they believed the bomb maker Ibrahim al-Asiri and Samir Khan, the group' English magazine co-editor, had as well been killed in the attack.
As is happens, al-Qaeda in Yemen is now claiming that both al-Awlaki and al-Asiri are still alive and were in fact nowhere near the explosion.
Since the Yemeni government claimed once already having successfully eliminated the infamous cleric, to be later proven wrong when the man issued a televised statement, doubt has been cast upon the veracity of the American-Yemeni's declarations of victory.
@'Yemen Post'

McKenzie Wark on Occupy Wall Street: 'How to Occupy an Abstraction'

The occupation isn't actually on Wall Street, of course. And while there is actually a street called Wall Street in downtown Manhattan, “Wall Street” is more of a concept, an abstraction. So what the occupation is doing is taking over a little (quasi) public square in the general vicinity of Wall Street in the financial district and turning it into something like an allegory. Against the abstraction of Wall Street, it proposes another, perhaps no less abstract story.
The abstraction that is Wall Street already has a double aspect. On the one hand, Wall Street means a certain kind of power, an oligopoly of financial institutions which extract a rent from the rest of us and in exchange for which we don't seem to get very much. “What's good for General Motors is good for America” was the slogan of the old military industrial complex. These days the slogan of the rentier class is: “What's good for Goldman Sachs is none of your fucking business.”
This rentier class is an oligopoly that makes French aristocrats of the 18^th century look like serious, well organized administrators. If the rhetoric of their political mouthpieces is to be believed, this rentier class are such hot house flowers that they won't get out of bed in the morning for less than a thousand dollars a day, and their constitutions are so sensitive that if anyone says anything bad about them they will take their money and sulk in the corner. They have, to cap it all, so mismanaged their own affairs that vast tracts of public money were required to keep them in business.
The abstraction that is Wall Street also stands for something else, for an inhuman kind of power, which one can imagine running beneath one's feet throughout the financial district. Let's call this power the vectoral. It's the combination of fiber optic cables and massive amounts of computer power. Some vast proportion of the money in circulation around the planet is being automatically traded even as you read this. Engineers are now seriously thinking about trading at the speed of light. Wall Street in this abstract sense means our new robot overlords, only they didn't come from outer space.
How can you occupy an abstraction? Perhaps only with another abstraction. Occupy Wall Street took over a more or less public park nestled in the downtown landscape of tower blocks, not too far from the old World Trade Center site, and set up camp. It is an occupation which, almost uniquely, does not have demands. It has at its core a suggestion: what if people came together and found a way to structure a conversation which might come up with a better way to run the world? Could they do any worse than the way it is run by the combined efforts of Wall Street as rentier class and Wall Street as computerized vectors trading intangible assets..?