Thursday, 11 October 2012

Beck - NYC 73 - 78 (from the album REWORK_Philip Glass remixed)

First Listen: REWORK_Philip Glass Remixed

It makes sense that Philip Glass' 75th-birthday festivities would stretch out as long as they have, his work subjected to celebratory tributes, re-examinations and performances more than eight months after the big day back in January. For as often as Glass is pigeonholed as a minimalist, his real trademark is his work's malleability and sheer volume: Glass writes operas, film scores, theater pieces and everything in between, stretched out over the course of untold archived hours. So, while many tribute-album projects draw from a limited and fairly predictable archive of greatest hits, an album paying tribute to Glass — in this case re-envisioning his work as a series of 12 remixes in 80-plus minutes — could head in virtually any direction imaginable.
REWORK_Philip Glass Remixed usually meets somewhere in the middle between calming ambient pieces and kinetic electronic contraptions, with a frequent emphasis on pastiche that suits both its subject and its highest-profile guest participants. Beck, for example, stitches together more than 20 Glass works in as many minutes, living up to his stated desire to present a distillation of the composer's entire career as a continuum; the result moves through many phases, with frequently gorgeous results. Dan Deacon, who knows his way around compositions that swirl and clatter hypnotically, constructs "Alight Spiral Snip" around repetitive dissonance before letting the piece give way to smeared-out beauty. Tyondai Braxton gives "Rubric" a toy-box peppiness redolent of his own compositions, while Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson — who knows his way around works both orchestral and experimental — crafts what sounds like an especially inventive bit of portentous film score in "Protest."
It's a testament to Glass' distinctive genius that these 12 varied approaches — and remix artists as diverse as Pantha Du Prince, Cornelius and Efterklang's Peter Broderick — hang together collectively as well as they do. And, of course, REWORK doesn't stop there: It's getting its own interactive app — designed by Scott Snibbe Studio, which worked on Bjork's Biophilia project — that gives these songs a visual stamp and lets users emulate Glass themselves. Which is, of course, an appropriate way to give these second-generation pieces yet more lives beyond what Glass himself envisioned. Why should the music stop breathing and evolving once these folks are done with it?
Stephen Thompson @'npr'

'Rework_Philip Glass Remixed'

Johnny & Bobby

A Chat With Iconoclast Adrian Sherwood On Creative Integrity, Politics, Healthcare And What’s Really Important In Life

What do you think about EDM and the subsequent backlash and in fighting?
The bottom line is the lowest common denominator will always be popular. Whatever you wanna call it, we call it “butt music”—butt, butt, butt. That’s the universal sound, from Argentina to Germany to New York. So the Swedish House Mafia, Paul Oakenfeld, whatever—that’s still massive. Those DJs make a fortune, playing other people’s music mostly. They’re like little gods in Ibiza, and that’s what people want. It’s of absolutely no interest whatsoever to me. My friend Adamski [who plays synths on a couple of tracks on Survival & Resistance] he was doing that stuff. He’s doing very interesting electronic Waltz music at the moment. He hasn’t put it out yet but he’s doing interesting stuff. At the end of the day, he and people who make that stuff, they really love it. But I could not bear to be locked in a room hearing four on the floor foot drums for more than an hour. Even if I was on drugs. Maybe if I was on a lot of drugs. But I’m too old for drugs. That kind of stuff has a place, but it’s not on my turntable.

Adrian Sherwood guest mix for Dub Invasion Festival (Brooklyn)

Wednesday, 10 October 2012

Pussy Riot member freed, two head to prison camp

A Moscow court has freed one member of the punk band Pussy Riot, but upheld prison sentences for the other two.

The female trio were found guilty in August of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for storming into Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February and staging a performance criticising president Vladimir Putin.
Maria Alyokhina, 24, Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, were each sentenced to two years behind bars for taking part in a protest.
However, at an appeal hearing on Wednesday, the court decided to give Samustsevic a suspended sentence because she did not stand on the altar during the protest.
She has been freed, while Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova are expected to be sent to prison colonies, likely far from Moscow.
"We will not stay silent even if we are in Siberia," Alyokhina said.
Earlier the punk group members defiantly maintained their innocence, telling the court their cathedral stunt was aimed at Mr Putin and not religious believers.
'Nothing anti-religious'
The first full appeal hearing against their two-year prison camp sentence came days after Mr Putin gave his backing to the verdict.
His remarks were described by one of the women's lawyers as unacceptable interference in the case.
"There is nothing anti-religious in the actions of Pussy Riot, it was political," Tolokonnikova told the court in her remarks from behind the glass-paned defendants' cage.
"I am ready to apologise if I offended people, but repenting is impossible as that would be acknowledging that our action was anti-religious, which was not the case."
Calls for their freedom have been made by world figures from Madonna to Burma democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.
The group has even been nominated for the EU parliament's prestigious Sakharov prize for freedom of thought.
They have been held in a Moscow prison since their March arrest.
Involvement
Samutsevich denied any split between the three group members after she unexpectedly requested a new lawyer at the first hearing of the women's appeal on October 1.
"There is no split in the Pussy Riot group. I do not admit my guilt of hooliganism," she said.
Samutsevich's new lawyer, Irina Khrunova, argued her client did not take part in the so-called Punk Prayer protest with the others since a security guard grabbed her and her electric guitar as soon as the performance began.
"The Punk Prayer took place without Samutsevich. She had already been taken out of the church," Ms Khrunova said.
In a surprising development, the lawyer for the aggrieved, Lev Lyalin, said he agreed with her description of Samutsevich's involvement.
"The actual facts really were laid out by Samutsevich's defence correctly and objectively."
The judge refused two defence requests to call witnesses including investigators, experts and journalists, and to hold a fresh psychological and linguistic evaluation of the content of the women's protest.
Before the appeal process started, a call by prime minister Dmitry Medvedev for the trio to be given a suspended sentence and released, as well as signs of mercy from the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, had given rise to some hopes among their supporters.
@'ABC'

Katarina Samutsevich, member of Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot, has been freed from prison following appeal. Sentences upheld for remaining members

From 1691

The Athenian Mercury, number 23, 1691
Via

Eye Of The Sparrow: A Bad Lip Reading of the First 2012 Presidential Debate

The Trip (1967)

Directed by Roger Corman, written by Jack Nicholson, and shot on location in and around Los Angeles, including on top of Kirkwood in Laurel Canyon, Hollywood Hills, and near Big Sur, California in 1967. Peter Fonda stars as a young television commercial director, Paul Groves.
Info

Captain Beefheart: American Bandstand Phone Interview June 18, 1966

Bonus:

From Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart's autobiography

"I met my wife when she was 13, in 1970…" P.146 (He was 34 at this point)
"I arrived (at her parents) at 7pm and was greeted at the door by what I can only describe as a 13 year old apparition! She was simply stunning." (P147)
"…(the following year, so 14 now) I travelled to Italy to see her. I had just split from Eve Graham of The New Seekers and so, as the song goes, I was "Free Again"! P153 He marries the poor girl when she is 17. Elsewhere -
"We played a charity football match at a girls' school in Lingfield. After the match we visited some of the boarders, who were mostly epileptic. The pupils had just reached puberty and the girls wouldn't let us out of the dormitory. We had to be rescued by the staff!" (P 177)
Via
The shits just keep on coming...

For people that aren't already Ballard junkies – those who have only read one novel, who have tried and failed to get on with his work and those who are thinking of reading Ballard for the first time, for example – will Extreme Metaphors peak their interest on any measurable scale, or make Ballard's novels more accessible or enjoyable when they do get around to it?
SS: I believe so. There’s a sense, especially in the 70s conversations, that Ballard used the interview situation as a kind of laboratory. He presented real-world case studies (say, video recorders becoming popular in the 70s); ran tests on them – that is, extrapolated extreme near-future scenarios (say, an imagined dystopia of disembodied virtual sex inspired by reading reports of people watching porno films on VCRs); and published the results in his writing (his savage, gory 1977 short story ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ follows precisely that VCR/sex/dystopia line of thought). Probably my favourite interview in the book is one from 1974 where he runs rings around the interviewer, Carol Orr, dazzling her with all manner of near-future situations as he works through the themes of his then-unpublished novel, Concrete Island. If you didn’t understand Concrete Island, the Orr conversation will probably enlighten you. We avoided including too much discussion of Empire of the Sun, because Ballard even bored himself after talking about it for the umpteenth time. After Spielberg filmed Empire, it seemed that’s all anyone wanted to ask him about and I’ve read interviews where you can sense his frustration with it. Instead, we tried to get at least one sustained mention of each of his novels in the book, so you’ll find talk of such works as the much-maligned Hello America and the misunderstood Rushing to Paradise.