Franklin De Costa - Process part 250

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Note: Many of the tracks are edited in arrangement and with additional production.
01. John Carpenter & Alan Howarth – Arrival At The Library
02. Darkstar – Ostkreuz
03. Emeralds – The Cycle Of Abuse
04. Cluster – Fotschi Tong
05. Actress – Maze
06. Darkstar – Videotape
07. These New Puritans – Time Xone
08. The Black Dog – Delay 9
09. Autechre – Yuop-Snook
10. Lukid – Child Of The Jago
11. Lone – The Twilight Switch
12. Teebs – Humming Birds
13. Coil – 5-Methoxy-N, N-Dimethyltryptamine: (5-MeO-DMT)
14. Hauschka – Nadelwald
15. Broken Social Scene – Never Felt Alive
16. Bvdub – The Past Disappears
17. Toro Y Moi – Fax Shadow
18. Memory Tapes – Run Out
19. Phonophani – C
20. Oneohtrix Point Never – Ouroboros

Beats In Space: Trentemøller

1. Kid Kongo And The Yellow Monkey Birds - La Lliarona
2. Suicide - Touch Me (Trentemøller Edit)
3. Chimes & Bells - The Mole (Trentemøller Remix)
4. Trickski - Pill Collins (Trentemøller Edit)
5. Nursery -
6. Jarvis Cocker - You're In My Eyes (Disco Song) Pilooski Remix
7. Nick Cave - (Trentemøller Edit)
8. Khan - Ride My Pony
9. Bruce Springsteen - State Trooper (Trentemøller Edit)
10. Crash Course In Science - Flying Turns (Trentemøller Edit)
11. - Lose Yourself
12. Oh No Ono's - Eleanor Speaks (Caribou Remix)
13. - Destroy Yourself
14. The Presets - Kiddie In The Middle
15. Kim Ann Foxman - Creature
16. Wild Nothing - Chinatown
17. The Warlocks -
18. Warpaint - Ashes To Ashes
19. Joakim - Come Into My Kitchen (Trentemøller Edit)

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Vivian Goldman: Poly Styrene, Lost & Found

Besieged, Not Fallen

Do you know what happened to terrorists who bombed the Islamabad  Marriott Hotel back in 2008, several months before the attacks on  Mumbai? The same thing that has happened to the planners, financiers and  key actors involved in Mumbai. Nothing much.
How about the killers of Benazir Bhutto, a woman who brought out an  entire nation to vote her into power not once, but twice? Do you know  what happened to them? Or the murderers of Shahbaz Bhatti? Or, the  killers of dozens of Pakhtun leaders from the tribal areas and Swat? Or,  going further back, the people who killed General Zia ul Haq? How about  the killers of Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister? Do  you know what happened to any of these murderers?
Nothing much.
In December 2009, terrorists attacked Parade Lane mosque in  Rawalpindi, on a Friday, during the weekly congregational prayer. In  attendance were serving and retired officers and their families. Among  the more than three dozen dead were children, a retired general, and a  young man who was visiting Pakistan for his wedding.
The Parade Lane attack took place several weeks after the General  Headquarters (GHQ) of the Pakistan Army had already been attacked in  October 2009, and held hostage, by 10 terrorists for 22 hours. The same  GHQ that owns the rights to the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal  and the world’s sixth largest military.
Not all the terrorists who attacked the military directly got away.  But most did. Suicide bombers have struck ISI (Inter Services  Intelligence) targets in Lahore, Faisalabad and Peshawar, and the  Special Services Group commando headquarters in Tarbela. Pakistani  Frontier Constabulary men have been kidnapped and taken prisoner by Tehrik-e-Taliban terrorists  in the tribal areas multiple times. Not much has happened to the  perpetrators.
What is the purpose of detailing a litany of terror events in  Pakistan? It is to assemble some facts. In the aftermath of Osama bin  Laden’s killing in Abbottabad on 1 May, facts seem either in short  supply, or in such a severe state of fragility that their status as  ‘facts’ becomes hard to believe...

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Mosharraf Zaidi @'Open'

'This is where you start the movie...'

What Have 4000 Years of Hallucinations Taught Us?

About sixty years ago the scientist C.H.W. Horne wrote that "it is remarkable that one characteristic which seems to separate man from the allegedly lower animals is a recurring desire to escape from reality."  He was referring to the widespread use of hallucinogens by young people during the middle of the last century.  What is even more remarkable, in my opinion, is how long humans have been documenting their interest in the use of hallucinogens. Cultural and religious rituals developed around the use of these hallucinogens probably as soon as they were discovered in the various plants and fungi that were present in their environment. 
Imagine that the year is 2000 BCE (before the current era) and as you are foraging for something safe to eat you discover a small yellowish mushroom that would one day be called Psilocybe mexicana. We now realize that this mushroom contains a hallucinogen called psilocybin.  Indeed, psilocybin would ultimately be discovered in at least 75 different species of mushrooms, so there was a good chance that someone, one day would have stumbled onto a mushroom containing it. Regardless, today is your lucky day - you discovered it first...

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Gary L. Wenk @'Psychology Today'

There’s No Data Sheriff on the Wild Web

Will Self asks 'Is the internet inherently psychotic?'

Adam Curtis: Have computers taken away our power?

Heaven and Earth: Musical Pioneer John Martyn’s Last Sonic Testament

When the late British musical icon John Martyn sat down at the keys, veteran music producer and good friend Jim Tullio sighed. Martyn, an innovative guitarist and singer, had just finished a suite for the London National Ballet Company, which Tullio was mixing, but insisted he needed to lay down a keyboard part. Tullio prepared for hours of noodling, but Martyn made one pass and left. As Tullio incorporated the track into the mix, he was blown away.
“It worked perfectly,” Tullio recalls. “I learned a lesson then, to trust his instincts. John was a genius. He made music more naturally than anyone I’ve ever met, as effortlessly as the way you and I speak.”
Tullio is not alone in his assessment. Martyn, a cult-status musician’s musician, was admired by everyone from Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page to Lee “Scratch” Perry and Bob Marley. Martyn’s groundbreaking guitar technique, tape delay, and recording approaches inspired Brian Eno’s ambient sound and The Edge’s shimmering, delay-drenched strings. He was lionized by Bristol trip-hoppers and chill-out DJs.
After Martyn’s passing in early 2009, Tullio and co-producer Gary Pollitt put Martyn’s last musical testament in order, transforming rough-edged vocals, expansive takes, and complex guitar work into Heaven and Earth (Hole in the Rain; May 3, 2011). Martyn’s voice and striking songs reveal the depth and perception of a musical elder, with his signature grit and sprawling panache.
Several close friends and long-time musical collaborators—including Phil Collins—contributed elements to Heaven and Earth. But the heart of the album—felt on tracks like “Gambler” and “Bad Company”—beats in Martyn’s intuitive, idiosyncratic sense of the blues, filtered through his earthy feel for roots- and jazz-inspired songwriting and his raw voice.
Sounds like: the gritty yet sparkling last word from a neglected music legend who transformed rock, reggae, club music, and folk.
“John didn’t think about much until he was there doing it. Making music was a spontaneous process, not preconceived. He had a cool vibe,” reflects Tullio, a longtime fan and musical collaborator. They first met in Martyn’s native Scotland, thanks to a colleague from the band Supertramp. “We stopped in this village behind a church and knocked on a cottage door,” Tullio remembers. “And there was John. My friend had set it up and surprised me.”
Before long, Tullio became Martyn’s American connection, reuniting Martyn with old friends like Levon Helm of The Band (whom Martyn met during a late-60s sojourn in Woodstock) and working on several of Martyn’s albums and composition projects. Martyn hung out for months at Tullio’s home and studio in Chicago, making music and becoming practically part of the family. “The personal and musical weren’t separate for John, as they aren’t for most brilliant artists,” Tullio notes.
The personal was complex, and involved a tragic addiction to drink. Martyn lost a leg to alcohol poisoning, yet continued recording, performing, and pushing his music in new directions. An admirer of Pharaoh Sanders for decades, Martyn had a project with Sanders scheduled for early in 2009. But illness took him first.
Tullio and Gary Pollitt, felt they owed it to their friend to put together the pieces of his last works. Tullio had first-hand experience with weaving together the recordings of a talented musician who died before his time, having crafted a Grammy®-winning final record by Steve Goodman (of “City of New Orleans” fame).
His experience didn’t make the labor of love before him any easier emotionally, though he and Pollitt shared a sense of how Martyn approached arrangements and of how best to honor his memory.
“We didn’t do any editing. A lot of the tracks are long—even rambling—but we left them that way, as John last heard them,” explains Tullio. “We knew this was it, so we made a conscious decision to keep everything, every morsel.”
In addition to instrumental tracks and backing vocals by some of Martyn’s favorite backup singers, Phil Collins, a close friend and avid supporter of Martyn’s, sang background vocals on his song “Can’t Turn Back The Years.” Martyn covered Collins’s song, in part as a tribute to their bond, forged as the two men were both grappling with divorce in 1980. (Martyn crashed at Collins’s home for a spell.)
“John wanted to do one of Phil’s songs to repay him,” said Tullio. “After John passed, I spoke with Phil and he really wanted to sing on the track. He said he had always wanted John to record one of his songs. You can hear the emotion in both their voices.” It’s a haunting feeling that pervades all of Heaven and Earth.
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You can listen to a couple of tracks at the link above. Sounds pretty good to me...

'Patti Smith - Horses' review by Lester Bangs

Patti’s heroes may be gone, but she is both with us and for us, so strongly that her music is something, finally, to rally around. For one thing, she has certain qualities that can make her a hero to a whole generation of young girls; Patti has done more here for woman as aggressor than all the Liberation tracts published, and has pushed to the front of the media eye that it is just as much a process (ordeal) learning to “become” a “woman” as it is for men wrestling with all this ballyhoed “manhood” business. It’s this tough chick who walks like Bo Diddley and yet all is all woman like we’ve been waiting for so long, a badass who pulls off the feat of being simultaneously idol of women and lust object of men (and women, no doubt).
And even more than that, Patti’s music in its ultimate moments touches deep wellsprings of emotions that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching. With her wealth of promise and the most incandescent flights of and stillnesses of this album she joins the ranks of people like Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, or the Dylan of “Sad Eyed Lady” and Royal Albert Hall. It’s that deeply felt, and that moving: a new Romanticism built upon the universal language of rock ‘n’ roll, an affirmation of life so total that, even in the graphic recognition of death, it sweeps your breath away. And only born gamblers take that chance.
(Creem) February 1976
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Shaking The Dust (Hip Hop speaks the truth)

“Shake the Dust” is a must-see feature documentary by Adam Sjöberg that kicked off production in late 2009, and tells the stories of break-dancers in struggling communities around the world.
Although many of them are separated by cultural boundaries and individual struggles, they are intrinsically tied to one another through their passion for break-dancing and hip-hop culture

Yemen

Somalia

Uganda
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Shake The Dust

Face That Screamed War’s Pain Looks Back, 6 Hard Years Later

Writing on the wall

Buy it here (€9,95)
(Thanx HerrB!)

The Kills - Pull A U 04/14/11

Plan B - Love Goes Down

Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

'Co-ordinated attacks' hit Afghan city

Loud explosions and gunfire have been heard in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, where witnesses say the provincial governor's compound as well as other sites are under a co-ordinated attack.
Sounds of gunfire and explosions were heard coming from near the provincial governor's heavily guarded compound on Saturday, as well as from four other locations in the city. Hospital sources in the city told Al Jazeera that 12 people had been injured in the attacks so far - three of them were members of the police, and the rest were civilians.
Gunmen were holed up in a five-storey shopping mall, and traded fire with security forces at the governor's compound, with the Associated Press reporting that fighting was focusing on the rear of the compound, near the governor's residence.
An Afghan government spokesperson said that in all six suicide attacks had taken place across the city.
"So far there have been 10 explosions in Kandahar today. We have confirmation that six of the explosions have been suicide attacks," Zalmay Ayubi told AFP.
"Small arms fire is still going on. Two RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] have been fired onto the [governor's compound] so far. The northern and eastern sides of the compound are under direct attack," Ayubi said.
An explosion was heard at governor Tooryalai Wesa's compound, while another was heard several minutes later in the west of the city. Black smoke was seen rising from the compound, a witness told Reuters.
James Bays, Al Jazeera's correspondent in the capital, Kabul, reported that the RPGs landed 300m from the compound. It was not immediately clear whether Wesa was in the compound.
Local authorities have blocked journalists from accessing the site, as fighting is continuing.
Bays reported that shooting had also been reported from near the city's intelligence headquarters, from an Afghan Civil Order Police (ANCOP) compound in the city's eastern District Five, and also from near a jail in the west of the city where the Taliban had last month helped hundreds of inmates escape.
Firing was also reported from near a school and police station on the road to Camp Gecko, a US Special Forces base built on the site of Osama bin Laden's former home in Kandahar. That gunbattle was taking place in the northwest of the city, in District Eight.
It was not clear if the shooting near the Kandahar headquarters of the Afghan intelligence service was targeting that building, or the nearby traffic police headquarters.
At the ANCOP compound, police said they shot two would-be suicide bombers, Bays reported.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the chairman of the provincial council, told Al Jazeera that authorities were attempting to bring the situation under control, but that Taliban fighters were still hiding at some of the attack sites.
'Spring offensive'
Last week, the Taliban announced the start of their "spring offensive" against US-led coalition troops and the Afghan government.
Kandahar, the Taliban's birthplace, has been the focus of military operations for the last year, with commanders saying they have made gains, but qualifying successes by terming them "fragile" and "reversible".
In a message released on Friday, the Taliban warned that this week's killing of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda's leader, would give their fight against foreign and Afghan forces "a new impetus".
@'Al Jazeera'

abumuqawama Andrew Exum

You know, now would probably be the time for the president to tell his administration to STFU about all things #OBL.

ASC & Bvdub - Symbol #2

Bvdub - Instead I Left You

Interview with Wikileaks Artist Michael Parenti, aka @exiledsurfer

ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald

So predictable: US tries to assassinate US citizen Anwar Awlaki (with no due process) - misses, kills 2 others instead: http://is.gd/Y6TKi7

The Future of National Security, By the Numbers

Leaderless Resistance: Well Isn't That Convenient?

The Daily Show - Face/Off

The White House decides to airdrop the Bin Laden photo into an affluent Pakistani suburb so it won't be found for years...

MMFlint Michael Moore

And, I'm sorry: Ground Zero is a graveyard of heroes and victims. It is not a place to hold a party, spray champaign, & shout "USA! USA!"

Kevin Rudd in row over Osama bin Laden ally Umar Patek's arrest

Bonnie “Prince” Billy and the Phantom Family Halo - The Mindeater

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evgenymorozov Evgeny Morozov

"Towards Distributed Citizen Participation: Lessons from WikiLeaks and the Queensland Floods" [pdf] http://goo.gl/Cnngt

Ad break #18

(Thanx Linda!)

HA!

Röyksopp - Live PA, Roskilde Festival, DK: P2 - Sveriges Radio 2005-07-02

Broadcasted On Swedish National Radio 2006-02-17

Tracklist:
1. [00:00] Mekon ft. Marc Almond "Please Stay (Röyksopp Remix)" (2000) [Wall Of Sound] (4:43)
2. [04:43] Röyksopp "Eple" (2001) [Wall Of Sound] (4:25)
3. [09:08] Röyksopp "Alpha Male (Live From Roskilde)" (2005) [Wall Of Sound] (8:12)
4. [17:20] Röyksopp "Beautiful Day Without You" (2005) [Wall Of Sound] (5:30)
5. [22:50] Röyksopp "Only This Moment (Radio Edit)" (2001) [Wall Of Sound] (4:01)
6. [26:51] Röyksopp "Poor Leno (Edit)" (2001) [Wall Of Sound] (4:21)
7. [31:12] Röyksopp Röyksopp "Poor Leno (Röyksopp's Istanbul Forever Take)" (2001) [Wall Of Sound] (6:53)
8. [38:03] Röyksopp Röyksopp "Curves" (2001) [Wall Of Sound] (4:21)

Jamie Woon - Live at Boiler Room, London

With his celestial voice, ethereal future folk textures, and exceptional songwriting, Academy '08 alumnus Jamie Woon has become the undisputed voice of the post-dubstep generation. He first caught the attention of the likes of mystical producer Burial back in 2007, with his unearthly take on spiritual folk classic 'The Wayfaring Stranger'. Now signed to Polydor, and with one of the most eagerly anticipated album releases of 2011 under his belt, the future looks even brighter for this modern-day troubadour who just scored another massive underground hit with his captivating ode to nocturnal strolls, Night Air. This show was recorded at the official launch party for his debut LP 'Mirrorwriting' at London's Corsica Studios, in cooperation with Boiler Room. Just get yourself into these sounds for about two seconds, and you will know what the whole world is fussing about – including the BBC, who named Jamie one of the main artists to watch out for in their ‘Sounds Of 2011’ list. It's the year of the Woon!

Ethan Zuckerman: Shirley Hung on control of the Chinese Internet

BNP suffers election meltdown

As Billy Bragg just remarked over at Facebook:

Whatever the outcome of the AV referendum, we have something to celebrate today - The BNP have been heavily defeated across England. Well done to Hope Not Hate and everyone else who was out there campaigning against them. The massive blow which we struck against them this time last year looks like it may prove to have been terminal.

Breaking Bin Laden: visualizing the power of a single tweet

10 reasons the AV referendum was lost (GB2011)

No one ever claimed that Guardian readers were representative of the wider population, but compare the referendum result with the views you expressed in our own survey a couple of years ago, and you could be forgiven for thinking that planet Guardian exists in an entirely different universe. At the height of the expenses crisis, 5,000 of you gave your views on a new politics, and by a country mile you said that the top priority had to be fixing the voting system. Well, the nation has now had its say on electoral reform of a type, and has decisively flipped its thumbs down.
But this is not, in fact, a case of a chasm between those branded the chattering classes by their detractors, and the wider population. A year ago, opinion polls were suggesting strong support for the general idea of reform, and even recording double-digit leads for the particular option of the alternative vote, which has now been so squarely rejected. So there was a chance for change, but that chance was blown. Here is a quick top 10 of the reasons why. As with the hit parade, we will work our way up from the bottom, until we reach the top spot in the blame game.
10. The referendum format. A yes/no plebiscite reliably puts reformers on the defensive. Instead of attacking the status quo in general terms, which is always easy to do, they must suddenly pin their colours to the particular change on offer on the ballot paper, in this case the alternative vote, and then stick by it – warts and all. Australia's referendum on the republic in 1999 provides a case study of how an impulse for change can dissipate over the detail, as voters fretted about whether they wanted the sort of presidency on offer, or a directly elected one instead.
9. In this context, the alternative vote system itself posed particular problems. Infamously dismissed by Nick Clegg as "a miserable little compromise", it is loved by no one, with most of the yes camp hankering for reform that links a party's tally of votes to its tally of seats, something AV fails to deliver. Few Labourites, and no Lib Dems, regard AV as an end itself. It scarcely mattered that from the reformist point of view it is unambiguously better than the system we start out with. What did matter was that the reformists could not muster the energy to market something that they did not truly believe in.
8. Leaflets from the electoral commission, which were designed to explain what the reform would mean to every household with meticulous neutrality, ended up making AV look horrendously complex. The blurb summed up first-past-the-post in just three sentences, while describing AV with an excessively complex example election, which required three diagrams and text that spilled over four pages. The commissioners included entirely superfluous information, such as the fact that the lack of an obligation to rank all of the candidates means an election can, in certain circumstances, be won with less than half the total votes.
7. A bigger blow was dealt by the shockingly deep conservatism of much of the Labour party. Although Gordon Brown had stuck an AV referendum in the last manifesto, candidates never had to declare how they would vote, and when the moment arrived to show their hands half the parliamentary party turned out to be against. Labour has always been split on electoral reform, and for the moment the ranks of the naysayers are swelled by intense animosity to coalition government as currently practised, and towards the Lib Dems in particular. Despite the pro-AV leader, Ed Miliband, having stuck his neck out a few times for the yeses, belligerent turns by grumpy old stagers such as John Reid and David Blunkett have created the impression that the people's party has no interest in giving the people more of a say.
6. And then there is the rather less shocking conservatism of the Tories. David Cameron had signalled he would be quite relaxed about the whole thing, and there were a few rumours that some modernising Conservative ministers would support AV. But after his backbenchers and backwoodsmen made plain this was one thing they would not wear, Cameron threw both the Tory machine and the considerable Tory bankbook at the operation. Obedience is the Conservative creed and before long the polls were showing decisively that Conservative voters were falling back into line.
5. A no campaign that got down, dirty and deceitful in the best traditions of the party of which it had became a wholly owned subsidiary. Made-up costs were attached to made-up voting machines, and posters proclaimed that these would be paid by soldiers making the ultimate sacrifice. After an infant's need for a maternity unit failed to shift the polls sufficiently, a sick baby in intensive care was deployed instead. The cynical message was that because hospitals matter democracy doesn't, and so you'd better vote no or else the little one gets it.
4. A wet yes campaign, on the other hand, entirely failed to meet fire with fire. The wrong celebrities (Eddie Izzard) were marshalled by worthy functionaries who looked like they would be most at home arguing in favour of a Financial Times editorial about joining the euro (something else Izzard once campaigned for). In a political culture that rewards those who pitch themselves against the system, for all the semi-comprehensible suggestions that AV would make politicians work harder, the campaign looked like the work of a metropolitan elite. More use should have been made of self-interested yes-mavericks, such as Ukip's Nigel Farrage, to summon up a rabble army.
3. Mistrust of coalitions. They represented a new politics last year, but are now seen by many, whether fairly or not, as the byword for dodgy deals and broken promises on health, universities and cuts. No matter that AV only marginally raises the chances of a hung parliament, most of the yes supporters want more of these, so they could not bring themselves to point this out.
2. The abject luck of a winning argument, and a failure to target the top. Abstractions about fewer safe seats and the need for representatives to reach out to a majority of their electors were never likely to cut the mustard, and particularly not when the yes team could never seem to settle on one of them as its central argument. There's no easier enthusiasm to whip up than the enthusiasm of hatred, and the campaign to have fought would have ruthlessly targeted on David Cameron. Here was an Etonian prime minister, asking for a licence for business as usual from those whom he deigns to rule over. The yes camp should have made no bones about a call to the nation to shake things up, by bringing him down a peg or two.
1. If the lack of a hate figure was the gaping hole for the yes side, Nick Clegg provided an unbeatable one for the noes. The man himself recognised that voters wanted to poke him in the eye, and he dutifully kept a fairly low profile in the campaign that was by far the most visible single concession that he obtained from the Conservatives. Shrewd as it was for him to go to ground, it could not prevent the noes from warning that "President Clegg" would be kept forever in power by everybody's second preferences. He had a horrendous hand to play last year, but he made things worse for himself by appearing to the country as a head boy thrilled at being unexpectedly tasked with helping to run the school. When the headteacher and his staff meted out their long-planned litany of horrors, it was not they but Clegg who felt the force of the pupils' revolt. Having once dismissed Gordon Brown's pre-election promise of an AV referendum as doomed by association with him, there is a bitter irony here. It is not association with Brown but association with Clegg that has now sunk the electoral reform he was so desperate to achieve.
Tom Clark @'The Guardian'

newsbrooke Heather Brooke

It used to cost money to share info. Now the expense is keeping it secret. $10 billion last year: http://bit.ly/inPSPd

A University Trustee Expands on His View of What Is Offensive