Don Toliver Announces 2026 North American Arena Tour
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Thursday, 4 October 2012
FACT mix 349: Silent Servant
Silent Servant is the solo project of Juan Mendez, the California native who first made his name in techno circles in the 90s with his production work under the name Jasper, and with his co-founding of the highly respected Cytrax label. It was during this time that Mendez befriended Karl O’Connor, aka Regis, beginning a creative alliance that has lasted to this day and led to all kinds of interesting outcomes.
The two artists, along with Dave ‘Function’ Sumner and Peter ‘Female’ Sutton, turned Sandwell District from a functional 12″ series into highly influential artistic collective and record label, encouraged in no small part by Mendez’s design and visual nous, and culminating in the release of a widely praised album, Feed-Forward (2010), before they decided to call it a day earlier this year. Mendez also became intimately involved with the running of O’Connor’s long-running Downwards label, bringing young American bands like Pink Playground, Dva Damas and Deathday into the fold (check the recently released So Click Heels compilation for a fine snapshot). One such act was Tropic of Cancer, the brainchild of Mendez’s wife, Camella Lobo, to whose first three releases (‘The Dull Age’ and ‘Be Brave’ on Downwards, The Sorrow Of Two Blooms EP on Blackest Ever Black) he contributed significantly.
Of course, it’s as a techno producer and DJ that Mendez remains best known. His 12″ productions as Silent Servant elegantly combine the industrial force of classic Downwards with the the dub-wise spaciousness of Basic Channel/Chain Reaction and the skippy minimalism of Cytrax. For Negative Fascination, he has widened his palette, or rather wholeheartedly pursued directions that in the past his work has only hinted at. In simple terms, the LP finds Mendez reconciling his interest in cutting edge dance music and pin-sharp, club-ready sound design with an even deeper, more instinctive affection for 80s DIY, minimal wave and the like, and this reconciliation yields some extraordinary results: take ‘Moral Divide (Endless)’, where a typical 4/4 kick is rejected in favour of a scuffed, skeletal drum machine tattoo that Suicide might reject on grounds of it being too raw, then shrouded in strings that could teach Detroit a thing or two about grandeur and moodiness, or the way ‘The Strange Attractor”s EBM-style tom-hits ricochet wildly against the taut techno grid that encloses them, or ‘Temptation & Desire”s foregrounding of shoegazey guitar noise. It’s undoubtedly one of the year’s finest full-lengths.
“Even though it’s only seven tracks, Negative Fascination is very representative of what I wanted to achieve,” Mendez told FACT in a recent in-depth interview. “There’s a little bit of Cabs, there’s a little bit of DAF, there’s a little bit of early Basic Channel and early Downwards, there’s some weird post-punk, upbeat, almost Joy Division-like sounds. It was just this weird mutation in my head.”
The Silent Servant FACT mix sheds further light on, and traces the origins of, this “weird mutation”. It was recorded live, with turntables, CDJs and mixer with effects.
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Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry
This feature-length Oscar®-nominated documentary focuses on Malcolm Lowry, author of one of the major novels of the 20th century, Under the Volcano. But while Lowry fought a winning battle with words, he lost his battle with alcohol. Shot on location in four countries, the film combines photographs, readings by Richard Burton from the novel and interviews with the people who loved and hated Lowry, to create a vivid portrait of the man.
Donald Brittain & John Kramer, 1976, 99 min 20 s
Donald Brittain & John Kramer, 1976, 99 min 20 s
Bob Dylan: The Other Side of the Mirror
Murray Lerner's documentary features Bob Dylan's performances at the Newport folk festival between 1963 and 1965 - the time when Dylan changed the music of the world and changed himself from the fresh-faced cherub singing Blowin' in the Wind to the rock 'n' roll shaman who blew pop music apart when he went electric.
Wednesday, 3 October 2012
Slavoj Žižek: The Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism
http://www.egs.edu/
Slavoj Žižek, contemporary philosopher and psychoanalyst, discusses Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, Western Buddhism, the West, capitalism, science, ideology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, bodhisattva, samsara, enlightenment, kharma, nirvana, war, Thomas Metzinger, free will, Benjamin Libet, Martin Heidegger, Patricia and Paul Churchland, and The Lion King. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland. 2012 Slavoj Žižek.
Slavoj Žižek is the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the London School of Economics, Princeton University, The New School for Social research and the University of California, Irvine. He has published over forty books and been the subject of two movies, Žižek! and The Perverts Guide To Cinema. In 1990 he ran unsuccessfully for president in Slovenia's first democratic elections and he has been a consistently powerful voice in the world since then. His essays are regularly published in the New York Times, Lacanian Ink, the New Left Review and the London Review of Books.
There is little in contemporary thought that Žižek has not explored on some level. From communism to Maoism, film studies to literature, and from Lenin to the issue of torture in the post-9/11 world, Žižek's work has, and continues to, inform the dialogue that surrounds them. Žižek's first book in English translation, The Sublime Object of Ideology, examines the issues surrounding the placement of "sublime objects" in a regime's iconography which allow it to transgress or alter commonly accepted moral law or thought. It is these objects—be it God, Fuhrer, Dear Leader or Land, the Flag, Democracy—that allow the regimes to "self-sanctify" their actions. While much of Žižek's work is strictly philosophical or psychoanalytical dealing with Hegel, Kant, Freud and Lacan, since 9/11 his work has become increasingly political, directly referencing the illegal actions taken by the Bush administration and the complicit nature of the European regimes of Blair, Sarkozy and Berlusconi.
Slavoj Žižek is the author of The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), For They Know Not What They Do (1991), Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture(1991), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock) (1992), Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood And Out (1992), Tarrying With The Negative (1993), Mapping Ideology (1994), The Indivisible Remainder (1996), The Plague of Fantasies (1997), The Abyss Of Freedom (1997), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau) (2000), The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, On David Lynch's Lost Highway (2000), The Fragile Absolute or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For (2000), On Belief (2001), The Fright of Real Tears (2001), Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (2001), The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (2003), Iraq The Borrowed Kettle (2004) Violence (2008), First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (2009), and Living in the End Times (2010). Most recently, 2012, Žižek published his monumental Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.
Bonus:
(Thanx Jon!)
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