Iran Protesters' Twitter Revolution On Display In Paris

Dancers at the 59 Rivoli gallery in Paris perform in front of TVs displaying mobile phone videos. The "Action 1" exhibit features images captured by ordinary Iranians during huge protests against last year's re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

An exhibit in Paris brings together some of the thousands of mobile phone videos shot by anti-government protesters after last June's disputed presidential election.

Tehran largely banned international and Iranian media from freely covering the massive wave of protests over alleged fraud in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

But Iranians overcame the reporting ban by using their cell phones and social-networking and image-sharing websites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

The Paris exhibit, "Action 1," gives visitors a firsthand look at the demonstrations and the crackdown that seem to have changed the lives of millions of Iranians.

'Solidarity Beyond Imagination'

The exhibit's organizers viewed thousands of Internet videos before making the selection to display in 59 Rivoli, a gallery off Paris' busy rue de Rivoli. The group calls itself the Green Ribbon, after the symbol of Iran's opposition movement. It is made up of Iranians living in France as well as some French artists who came together after last year's election to support Iranian artists.

Orash, one of the Green Ribbon's leaders, came to Paris from Iran a year and a half ago. He doesn't want to give his last name in case he returns — and out of solidarity with the exhibit's anonymous video artists. Orash says last year's demonstrations ended the isolation of millions of Iranians.

"Personally ... I thought that I don't want this regime, but I am the only one. It's no good to shout, it's no good to write, to create. But after these events, I saw that millions and millions of [people] are thinking the same way. So it gave new hope for Iranians all over the world, and it has created a solidarity beyond imagination," Orash says.

Scenes of violence play out on TV screens all over the gallery as black-clad Basiji militia beat people and chase crowds of young people through the streets. French subtitles translate some of the conversation of those filming. "They look just like the Gestapo," says one witness.

Generation Gap

Scottish visitor Stephen Riley said he was seeing the footage for the first time.

"The contrast between the physical arms of the militia and the communication arms of the protesters, which seems to amount to mobile phones and cameras, is quite a striking paradox," Riley says.

Riley came to the exhibit with his friend, a 50-year-old Iranian who calls herself Aryan H., because she also fears giving her last name. Aryan H. has lived in Paris for 20 years. In 1979, she demonstrated to overthrow the shah and bring Ayatollah Khomeini to power. She says many young people still blame her generation for that.

"My generation, we [were] very ashamed, because it was our fault what's happened to them," she says, adding that the latest demonstrations have helped bring the two generations back together.

A Gathering Point

The exhibit has become a gathering point for Paris' Iranian community. Expats converse in Farsi on the sidewalk in front of the gallery.

Giant reproductions of some of the Twitter messages sent during the protests hang in the gallery's tall windows. "It's getting harder to log on to the Net," reads one. "Our phone line was cut and we lost Internet," says another.

The gallery's top floor is pitch dark, except for some tiny electric candles placed around the floor. The room is filled with the sound of people chanting "Allahu akbar," or "God is great," from the rooftops of Tehran.

Another Green Ribbon member, Azam, 27, says this chanting went on every night for more than six months after the June 12 election, turning what was once a mantra of the Islamic revolution into a call for protest. She says the nightly ritual brought people closer.

"They went to the top of their house or behind their window, and they say 'Allahu akbar,' and in front of your house there's another house, and there's someone there who says 'Allahu akbar,' and they know each other after one month. And it's so kind," Azam says.

These young Iranians say they believe it is only a matter of time before the movement that began last summer leads to real change in Iran. 

Audio download also available

Eleanor Beardsley @'npr'

M.I.A. Takes Revenge on New York Times Writer Lynn Hirschberg

Yesterday, The New York Times published an in-depth profile of M.I.A. written by Times staffer Lynn Hirschberg. The lengthy read followed M.I.A. through the making and promoting of her new album / \ / \ / \ Y / \. In examining many of the contradictions that make up M.I.A.'s persona, it wasn't totally complimentary, and contained un-flattering quotes from several people in M.I.A.'s camp (including Diplo and "Born Free" director Romain Gavras), not to mention M.I.A. herself.

Well, it seems that M.I.A. wasn't too happy with the piece. She just Tweeted "CALL ME IF YOU WANNA TALK TO ME ABOUT THE N Y T TRUTH ISSUE, ill b taking calls all day bitches ;)", accompanied by a phone number. We just called the phone number... and it seems to be Lynn Hirschberg's phone number. And now her voicemail is full.
Ouch.
UPDATE: She just Tweeted: NEWS IS AN OPINION! UNEDITED VERSION OF THE INTERVIEW WILL BE ON neetrecordings THIS MEMORIAL WEEKEND!!! >>>>

 

@'Pitchfork'

LIVE: Presidential news conference on BP's oil spill

Full coverage

@'Daily Kos'

A Year of Blood and Promise in Iran

The History of the Typewriter recited by Michael Winslow

“The History of the Typewriter recited by Michael Winslow” is a 21 minutes long film made by Ignacio Uriarte.

First he recorded the original sounds of 62 typewriters of different times, countries and technologies. Then, the actor Michael Winslow reproduced a selection of these sounds in chronolgical order, tracing a temporary journey through almost 100 years of history and creating this way an homage to the sound qualities of the typewriter and its former presence in the office.

It sounds amazing, you can see the quicktime version here. I bet he can do those modem dial-in sounds too. Remember those?

Via vvork

@'today & tomorrow'

♪♫ The Damned - Neat Neat Neat (Supersonic 1977)

iSteel drums

A strange thing, but growing up we had a set of oil drums in the garage. My dad had been out to the West Indies a lot while he was in the merchant navy! 

Wish I still had them...

Regulators Found Accepting Gifts From Oil Industry

  BP wants Twitter to shut down fake account mocking the oil company. Twitter wants BP to shut down the leak that’s ruining the sea
#BPGlobalPR

The Politics of the Soundtrack

When film soundtracks take the form of an iPod on shuffle or a non-stop brass crescendo, do they make alienating cinema more human or alienated lives more cinematic? This month's Mute Music Columnist Nina Power risks removing her earmuffs 

Was there a golden age of the film soundtrack? One might reach for Ennio Morricone (at least until the late 1980s) or the ’70s and ’80s records Popul Vuh made for Werner Herzog’s most memorable films, Aguirre, Nosferatu and Cobra Verde. Even if much of the concept has gone out of ‘conceptual’ film-making and the soundtracks that accompany them, there are nevertheless highlights here and there. We could point to David Lynch, John Carpenter or Howard Shore's brittle and claustrophobic music for Cronenberg's Crash (1997), or Ed Tomney's tense and millennial compositions for Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995) as proof that film and sound can be more than whatever bland indie love-songs the studio’s marketing manager has been listening to on his iPod. The soundtrack to Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank does something interesting with the diegetic, with its muffled sounds and tinny music players - indeed, much of the film is about recorded music and its playback, from the tiny speakers that Mia dances to in an empty room to the CD player leading her to her doom in the strip-club.

Image: Stellar soundtrack. Still from Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968

If we expand our cinematic categories a little, we can point to complex figures like Walter Murch, a ‘sound designer’ among other things, rather than a simple composer or hit song provider for the charts (film soundtracks are often simply understood as ‘secondary usage’, providing producers with additional sources of income). In early silent cinema, pianists were hired to drown out the mechanical whirring of the projectors and ramp up emotion; Murch revisits the noise of the machine in the famous scene in Apocalypse Now where helicopter blades become indiscernible from ceiling fans.¹

But, for the most part, an ‘original soundtrack’ is the misnomer it always was, being neither the composite track of the film (the dialogue, the sound effects, the music) nor original, being comprised of whichever three-minute songs the studio/record label partnership wishes to promote. The apex, or really nadir, of this trend, which stretches all the way back to the beginning of the marketing of film soundtracks in the late ’40s and ’50s, was reached in Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004) in which a boring couple have boring (but real!) sex to boring (but real!) songs by Elbow and Franz Ferdinand. The pop song as unifying revelation of a shared humanity features in Magnolia (1999), as the main characters coincidentally start singing Aimee Mann’s ‘Wise Up’, an inverse tribute of sorts to R.E.M’s video for ‘Everybody Hurts’, in which the song is a backdrop to the inner thoughts of bored car passengers, who ultimately get out of their vehicles and unite in a kind of mawkish tribute to collective misery. Music unifies, levels: it is essentially human. If there was ever a different time when the machine instead was integrated and posed as a question for cinematic sound, it could well have been the ’80s, in films like Assault on Precinct 13, The Running Man and Terminator, dystopian visions in which the future sounded as synthetic as the threats that might yet come to menace it.

As we move into a period we could characterise by ‘a revenge of the visual’, with 3D films increasingly regarded as the only thing that will entice people from their mini-cinemas at home, cinema music is increasingly modelled on one of two forms: the pop song iPod playlist or sub-John Williams gloopy orchestral oozing (Williams recently composed a short orchestral piece ‘Air and Simple Gifts’, referencing Aaron Copland, for Barack Obama’s inauguration). If every big-budget soundtrack starts to sound like Jurassic Park or Wagner without the quiet bits, that’s probably because it is. Adorno once perceptively claimed that most films ‘are advertisements for themselves’. Trailers are thus the truth of the film for which the film is the advert. Length becomes a secondary question. It comes as no surprise then to learn that trailers often use music from previous hit films as their soundtrack to create a pre-existing sense of familiarly.² When Adorno in ‘Commodity Music Analysed’ (1934-40), speaks of ‘archetypal cinema music’ (‘The birth of the Wurlitzer from the spirit of Faust’ as he puts it), he argues that it is this need for familiarity that characterises much music for cinema.³ The musical means for covering over the sounds of the whirring projector were prepared by a pre-existing proclivity for a certain mix of sentiment and innovation:

It is doubtless true that towards the close of the nineteenth century the music that swept people off their feet did so because it combined drastic ideas with conventionality. In so doing it satisfied the demands of the cinema before cinema was invented.⁴

Commercial cinema’s desire to block out the machine, to smother the jolts and gaps between movement means that music is often seen as a kind of empathetic patch, a device to pretend that the frames and hyper-technicality are always put in the service of larger, smoother, humanitarian wholes. ‘Mickey-Mousing’, the practice of exactly matching music to image, may be something we associate with animation from half a century ago, but this often comic self-consciousness of the relation between the sound and image is far more radical than the surreptitious manipulation of familiar emotions that much of today’s cinematic music pursues.⁵ But mainstream cinema remains one of the few places where sounds and music could potentially afford to be brave: the tracks that Kubrick used for 2001: A Space Odysessy originally as a temporary placeholder for the real score, placed Ligeti in more homes than a thousand Radio 3 retrospectives would ever have done. Similarly, as Alex Ross notes:

On the weekend of February 19th, and for some weeks thereafter, millions of Americans will enjoy a program of Giacinto Scelsi, John Cage, Lou Harrison, György Ligeti, Morton Feldman, Krzysztof Penderecki, Alfred Schnittke, Nam June Paik, Ingram Marshall, and John Adams. This fairly bold lineup of composers, which would cause the average orchestra subscriber to flee in terror, appears on the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s film Shutter Island.⁶

Academic terminology has taken something of a strange optical turn in recent years with ‘visual culture’ and ‘visual theory’ becoming catch-all disciplines that cover elements of cultural studies, art theory and critical theory. This is not to say that there aren’t people working within this areas on sound, music or sonics, however. Take for example Susan Schuppli’s work on media machines that investigates, among other things ‘the missing or "silent" erasure of 18-½ minutes in Watergate Tape No. 342’ or Steve Goodman’s work on sonic warfare.⁷ But we have to wonder why this stealthy academic privileging of the visual over other senses has come about.

It is a little as if the ‘attempt to interpose a human coating between the reeled-off pictures and the spectators’ that Adorno and Eisler recognised was the purpose of most film music, has infected the entire study of cinematic culture.⁸ The tacked-on role of the composer for cinema that Adorno and Eisler deplored, a kind of last-minute annoyance from the standpoint of the budget, has become the occlusion of the sonic in the contemporary understanding of culture in general - the reactionary stereoscopic tendency, a kind of re-visting of the 1950s in the 2010s, proving those covers of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle correct. The photo, J. R. Eyerman’s ‘3D glasses’ taken in 1952 for Life, was captured at the screening of ‘Bwana Devil’, the first full length colour 3-D motion picture, a film about British railway workers in Kenya being eaten by lions. Its tagline was ‘A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!’ As Cameron’s Avatar demonstrates, the closer you get to a pure celebration of vision, the less the music and the script matter; a comparison of the first 3D film and the biggest most recent version may well be worthwhile less for their technical similarities but for the similarity of their colonial content. James Horner’s soundtrack for Avatar - a mix of dramatic timpani rolls, ambient environmental lift-music and belligerent folderol (from ‘Pure Spirits Of the Forest’ to ‘Gathering All The Na’vi Clans For Battle’), plus Leona Lewis - is aural soup for muddy and dubious narration to drown in. Where once the music may have covered over the whirring of new and frightening mechanisms, now the soundtrack disguises little more than the banality of the script - plots which nevertheless seek to assure us of our fundamental intentional human goodness, even if everything we do is actually wrong and vicious.

As Esther Leslie puts the relation between music and image in Adorno’s conception of cinematic music:

Adorno wrote of how in film, music lends the cinematic vision a veneer of humanity, a semblance of liveliness, by masking the whir of the projector in the background, the proof that we exist under the sway of mechanization. Without it, we are blankly exposed to our counterparts, the two-dimensional shadows that cavort on screen.⁹

Increasingly film music seeks to lend humanity itself a veneer of the cinematic, an eco-friendly soundtrack to dampen the fears of the antagonisms and asymmetries of everyday existence. Coupled with the painful loudness of Dolby surround sound and the brutal atonality of sounds of cinematic violence - explosions, car crashes, gun shots - the modern cinematic ear is trained for nothing less than the sickening, yet omnipresent, combination of cruelty and fake humanism that characterises contemporary life.

Nina Power lectures in Philosophy at Roehampton University and is the author of One-Dimensional Woman (Zer0 Books). She also writes a blog, infinite th0ught http://www.cinestatic.com/INFINITETHOUGHT/

Footnotes

1 ‘As soon as movies lasted more than a couple of minutes, owners of nickelodeons hired pianists to drown the noise of the hand-cranked projectors and give an extra emotional dimension to the celluloid product.’ Philip French, ‘From the Sound of Silents to Hollywood’s Golden Composers’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/aug/12/features.philipfrench

2 See here for a list of frequently used tracks across films: http://www.soundtrack.net/trailers/frequent/. Thanks to Daniel Trilling for this point, and for his comments on the piece more generally.

3 Theodor Adorno, ‘Commodity Music Analysed’, Quasi una Fantasia, trans. by Rodney Livingstone London: Verso, 1992, p. 37

4 Ibid., p. 42.

5 See the rather smart parody of both Avatar and Mickey Mouse in a recent episode of the Simpsons (2115), when Bart and Homer see a 3D version of an Itchy and Scratchy film called: ‘Koyaanis-Scraachy: Death out of Balance’.

6 Alex Ross, ‘Lo and Behold!’, New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/alexross/2010/02/lo-and-behold.html

7 For more on Susan Schuppli, see, http://www.uwo.ca/visarts/faculty_staff/susanschuppli.html . For more on sonic warfare, see Steven Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear, London: MIT, 2009. There is a description at http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11890

8 Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films, London: Contium, 2005, p.59.

9 Esther Leslie, ‘From Stillness to Movement and Back: Cartoon Theory Today’, Radical Philosophy, May/June 2006.

Nina Power @'Mute'

The Mescaline Experiment

Humphry Osmond was the British psychiatrist who coined the term "psychedelic". This short video documents an experiment in 1955 in which he administered mescaline to Christopher Mayhew, a member of parliament. Mayhew ingested 400mg of mescaline hydrochloride and recorded his experience on camera.
The footage was originally supposed to be broadcast on BBC.
Mayhew himself maintains that it was a genuine mystical experience which "took place outside time" and wanted it to be shown. However, an "expert" committee of psychiatrists, philosophers, and theologians reviewed the footage and reached a unanimous verdict that Mayhew's experience was not a valid mystical experience. So it was never broadcast.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

HA!

How Sex And The City Made Me An Existentially Vacuous Cunt 
(Thanx Luke!)

Night Nurse

Sly & Robbie w/ Mick Hucknall

1 Nightnurse (Radio Mix) 3:54

2 Nightnurse (Dub) 3:53

3 Nightnurse (Jah Wobble Radio Mix) 3:39

4 Nightnurse (Jah Wobble 12" Mix) 8:21

HERE

+

Nightnurse (On-U Sound 12" Mix)

Backing Vocals, Programmed By - Carlton "Bubblers" Ogilvie

Engineer - Adrian Sherwood, Alan Branch, Carlton "Bubblers" Ogilvie

Guitar - Skip McDonald

Remix - Adrian Sherwood, Carlton "Bubblers" Ogilvie

Saxophone - Michael "Bami" Rose

Trombone - Henry "Button" Tenhue

Trumpet - Niles Hailstones

HERE 

Shows what the ginger one can do when he has a good song to begin with and great musicians around him...

If anyone does have the On-U mix and the On-U Dub The Patient Mix at a higher bitrate could they get in touch!
Thanx!
(For Dray: again!)

Smoking # 70 (WTF???)

Ardi Rizal, Sumatran 2-Year Old, Smokes 40 Cigarettes A Day

Revolutionary Weapon

(Thanx Gary & Dave!)

♪♫ Cabaret Voltaire - Seconds Too Late

Rostik Litvak May Mix

   

The Geotaggers' World Atlas #2: London

HERE

Floating Chords & Echoes by Northern Shore

  

Ambient Tracks by Intrusion, Echospace, Variant, Rod Modell & Brock van Wey.

Thanx to HerrB for the hint!

There are more great Deepchord/Echospace/Bvdub mixes by Northern Shore to download at
Soundcloud

Owen Freeman - New Burrough's book covers

The William Burroughs paperbacks that I illustrated earlier this year along with Naked Lunch just arrived from the printers. Because the art director liked the style of the Silky Shark print in my portfolio for the initial Naked Lunch assignment, I continued the process using a silk screen-style approach and a limited palette throughout the sketches and finals. The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and The Place of Dead Roads all followed the same process as Naked Lunch, including two or three layers of drawn tones, which I attempted to keep in tune with the style of each book and as a set. The final layouts and text were done by Jo Walker at Harper Collins and I think they did a nice job of pulling the artwork together.

 @'24 Hour Emergency'

Anti Design Festival London 2010

The Oliverwho Factory - Nightlights

   

North Korea scraps South Korea military safeguard pact

New Idea Society - Quiet Prism EP

New Idea Society is Mike Law and Chris DeAngelis, along with new members Trevor Watson and Marshall Ryan.

During 2008 New Idea Society was involved in a serious accident on Germany's Autobahn while on tour - as a result, main songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Mike Law was unable to play guitar. During his recovery period, he composed a number of songs, including Iradell and They Won't Find Us, on vintage synthesizers.

These tracks, along with the debut of the brand new song Autumn You (the first release from their upcoming full-length out later in 2010), and two other guitar-based tracks, make up the Quiet Prism EP.

Quiet Prism is a collection of songs created within a time of solitude and recovery. The songs are a prelude to

the larger scope and scale of the upcoming album. Some of the songs can even be classified as solo efforts, as Mike Law attempted to work every day, mostly alone in Brooklyn's Translator Audio while waiting for bones to heal.

New Idea Society (NIS) will tour the U.S., Europe and Japan in late 2010, in support of their upcoming full-length release.

Get it

HERE

Carla Bruni Asks for a Finger Up Her Butt

Needless to say all hell has broken out at the Élysée Palace!

Still looks...

 ...like the same old shit to me...

BP Used Riskier Method to Seal Oil Well Before Blast

WTF???

Fake Shops Used To Revive High Street

Dub Gabriel - Live @ Surefire Sound Party SF

   

Many Faiths, One Truth by The Dalai Lama

  When I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best - and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naive I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today.

Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence. In Europe, there are intense debates about newcomers wearing veils or wanting to erect minarets and episodes of violence against Muslim immigrants. Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs. In the Middle East, the flames of war are fanned by hatred of those who adhere to a different faith.

Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance - it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries.

Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.

An early eye-opener for me was my meeting with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in India shortly before his untimely death in 1968. Merton told me he could be perfectly faithful to Christianity, yet learn in depth from other religions like Buddhism. The same is true for me as an ardent Buddhist learning from the world’s other great religions.

A main point in my discussion with Merton was how central compassion was to the message of both Christianity and Buddhism. In my readings of the New Testament, I find myself inspired by Jesus’ acts of compassion. His miracle of the loaves and fishes, his healing and his teaching are all motivated by the desire to relieve suffering.

I’m a firm believer in the power of personal contact to bridge differences, so I’ve long been drawn to dialogues with people of other religious outlooks. The focus on compassion that Merton and I observed in our two religions strikes me as a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths. And these days we need to highlight what unifies us.

Take Judaism, for instance. I first visited a synagogue in Cochin, India, in 1965, and have met with many rabbis over the years. I remember vividly the rabbi in the Netherlands who told me about the Holocaust with such intensity that we were both in tears. And I’ve learned how the Talmud and the Bible repeat the theme of compassion, as in the passage in Leviticus that admonishes, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In my many encounters with Hindu scholars in India, I’ve come to see the centrality of selfless compassion in Hinduism too - as expressed, for instance, in the Bhagavad Gita, which praises those who “delight in the welfare of all beings.” I’m moved by the ways this value has been expressed in the life of great beings like Mahatma Gandhi, or the lesser-known Baba Amte, who founded a leper colony not far from a Tibetan settlement in Maharashtra State in India. There he fed and sheltered lepers who were otherwise shunned. When I received my Nobel Peace Prize, I made a donation to his colony.

Compassion is equally important in Islam - and recognizing that has become crucial in the years since Sept. 11, especially in answering those who paint Islam as a militant faith. On the first anniversary of 9/11, I spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, pleading that we not blindly follow the lead of some in the news media and let the violent acts of a few individuals define an entire religion.

Let me tell you about the Islam I know. Tibet has had an Islamic community for around 400 years, although my richest contacts with Islam have been in India, which has the world’s second-largest Muslim population. An imam in Ladakh once told me that a true Muslim should love and respect all of Allah’s creatures. And in my understanding, Islam enshrines compassion as a core spiritual principle, reflected in the very name of God, the “Compassionate and Merciful,” that appears at the beginning of virtually each chapter of the Koran.

Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics, economic crises and ecological disaster. At that scale, our response must be as one.

Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers - it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole.

New York, NY, USA, 25 May 2010 (New York Times Op Ed by Tenzin Gyatso)

Dub Gabriel feat. U Roy - Luv n' Liv ( Ming vs. Subatomic Sound System Remix)

  

Free Man Hifi - Digital Time Bomb

Tracklist

01. Intro
02. Johnny Osbourne - 13 Dead
03. 13 Dead Version (Simba Records 12")
04. Mighty Diamonds - Jam Session
05. Jam Session Version (Live & Learn 7")
06. Midnight Riders - Youthman Invasion

07. Youthman Invasion Version (Thunder Bolt 7")
08. Midnight Riders - Posse Form A Line
09. Posse Form A Line Version (Thunder Bolt 7")
10. Patrick Andy - Sencimania
11. Sencimania Version (Hit Bound 7")
12. Michael Palmer - Modeling Girl
13. Modeling Girl Version (Tonos 12")
14. Michael Palmer - Ghetto Dance
15. Johnny Osbourne - Let Him Go (Midnight Rock LP)
16. Ghetto Dance Version (E.T. Records 7")
17. Corna Stone - In This Town
18. In This Town Version (Supreme 7")
19. Michael Palmer - Gowna School (Tonos LP)
20. Tony Ford - Money Make The Mare Gallop
21. Money Make The Mare Gallop Version (Music Industry 7")
22. Michael Prophet - Cop A Come
23. Cop A Come Version (Techniques 7")
24. One-A-Way - Sufferer
25. Little John - Fales News (Hit Bound 7")
26. Sufferer Version (Route 54 7")
27. Lionel Ganja Barrett - Rasta Cowboy
28. Rasta Cowboy Version (Chopper 7")
29. Michael Palmer - Give Me Your Love (Tonos LP)
30. I Sees - Break Your Heart
31. Break Your Heart Version (Temper Rose 7")
32. Coco Tea - Girl Get Ready
33. Girl Get Ready Version (Moodies 12")
34. Tony Tuff - Mi Love Mi Like
35. Mi Love Mi Like Version (Keeling 12")
36. Carl Meeks - Red Eye Lover (Redman International LP)
37. Conroy Smith - Suger Me
38. Dennis Brown - True True True (Digital B 7")
39. Suger Me Version (Jammys 7")
40. King Kong - Agony And Pain
41. Agony And Pain Version (Jah All Mighty 7")
42. Cocoa Tea - Big Sound (Jimpys LP)
43. Cocoa Tea - M.B. (Jimpys LP)
44. Cocoa Tea - Hail Jah Man (Jimpys LP)
45. Yami Bolo - Free
46. Free Mandela Version (Skengdon 7")
47. King Kong - He Was A Friend
48. He Was A Friend Version (Jah All Mighty 7")
49. Johnny Osbourne - Chain Grabber
50. Chain Grabber Version (Live & Love 12")
51. The Bloodfire Posse - Rude Boys
52. Rude Boys Version (Studio Worx 7")
53. Echo Minott - I Am Back
54. I Am Back Version (Jammys 7")
55. Vivian Withers - Hangin´on
56. Hangin´on Version (Trojan 12")

Download

@'Free Mixtapes'

This one is for you Spacebubs!

Do the Fozzy!

Jamaica shoot-out death toll 'rises to 44'

Smoking # 69

After Long Argument, BP Official Made Fatal Decision on Drilling Rig

HERE

Rape myths debated in schools

The Telegraph disapproves. I think it is a good idea:

Children as young as 11 are being asked to debate myths surrounding rape – including claims that “women ask for it by wearing short skirts”. A charity is distributing teaching materials to secondary schools as part of a campaign to end violence against women.
The pack, which schools can buy for £100, covers subjects such as domestic violence, female genital mutilation, forced marriages, prostitution and human trafficking. Rape Crisis said the lessons were intended to encourage mixed classes of boys and girls to discuss issues surrounding rape.
In one class, pupils are asked to debate claims that “women enjoy rape”, while another lesson instructs children to discuss the myth that “women ask for it by wearing short skirts, drinking alcohol etc”.

As long as we live in a society where people are still willing to victim-blame, we need education like this. And as with a lot of reports regarding schools, I suspect that eleven year olds are not being taught about the graphic aspects; it is just that they happen to be at the same school.

Rumbold @'Pickled Politics'

Republicans discover sarcasm, don't like it much

I've been receiving a lot of mail lately urging me to pharyngulate the America Speaking Out site, but when I saw what it was about, I held off…I could tell what kind of self-screwing it was going to be. Here's the premise: the Republicans saw, in their remote and confused sort of way, that the internet (aka "series of tubes") had some real potential, and looked really smart, and maybe if they took advantage of it, they could look a little less yokely and rubish. Seriously. You can't make this stuff up.

Lest you think Republicans are just discovering the Internet, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.) let it be known that "House Republicans have tweeted five times as many as the House Democrats. Leader Boehner has almost five times as many Facebook fans as Speaker Pelosi." Boehner grinned and gave a double thumbs-up.
Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.) contributed to the discussion by twice giving out the wrong address for the new site.

So what did they do that was making them so pathetically proud? They created an open web site to formulate an agenda for the future of the Republican party, where anyone could make any proposal, and everyone could vote on it. No filters, except against profanity. The doors are open, y'all are invited to come on in and tell the Republicans what to do.
The results are predictable: complete chaos. Teabaggers are raving, liberal saboteurs are inserting all kinds of crazy suggestions, and you can't tell them apart. You tell me; which of the following suggestions are serious, and which are taking the piss?

A 'teacher' told my child in class that dolphins were mammals and not fish! And the same thing about whales! We need TRADITIONAL VALUES in all areas of education. If it swims in the water, it is a FISH. Period! End of Story.

Require all Muslims in the U.S. to wear ankle bracelet transponders so we know where the terrorists are at all times.

We should administer capital punishment to anyone who has an abortion. In order to cut costs that the death penalty normally entails, we will have lax gun laws that will allow people to obtain guns with greater ease. Then we would allow the "free-market" to dictate whose philosophy wins out - the liberals irrational philosophy or our logical and God following philosophy. Liberals who have abortions would be taken care of by a militia of the willing who will get rid of all liberals who take the life others irrationally and will allow us to remove all of our opponents to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

all leaders should proclaim faith in Jesus Christ. anyone who does not, like muslims and atheists should be removed from office.

It's like Poe's Law written out all across the country, on every subject. It's insane.
They've also discovered another little problem: Americans are rushing to take part in the hilarity, and this error message is coming up all the time.

A very high volume of Americans are speaking out right now.
Please wait a moment and try again.

I bet they are. Every basement-dwelling troglodyte with an opinion, and every laughing liberal looking for a giggle, is hitting that site right now. And once again, the Republicans are looking like incompetent idiots.

PZ Myers @'Scienceblogs'

How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop

An interview with Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee about hip-hop, sampling, and how copyright law altered the way hip-hop artists made their music.

June 1, 2004  |  

When Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in 1988, it was as if the album had landed from another planet. Nothing sounded like it at the time. It Takes a Nation came frontloaded with sirens, squeals, and squawks that augmented the chaotic, collaged backing tracks over which P.E. frontman Chuck D laid his politically and poetically radical rhymes. He rapped about white supremacy, capitalism, the music industry, black nationalism, and -- in the case of "Caught, Can I Get a Witness?" -- digital sampling: "CAUGHT, NOW IN COURT ' CAUSE I STOLE A BEAT / THIS IS A SAMPLING SPORT / MAIL FROM THE COURTS AND JAIL / CLAIMS I STOLE THE BEATS THAT I RAIL ... I FOUND THIS MINERAL THAT I CALL A BEAT / I PAID ZERO."

In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of opportunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But by 1991, no one paid zero for the records they sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot. The following is a combination of two interviews conducted separately with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.


Stay Free!: What are the origins of sampling in hip-hop?

Chuck D: Sampling basically comes from the fact that rap music is not music. It's rap over music. So vocals were used over records in the very beginning stages of hip-hop. In the late 1980s, rappers were recording over live bands who were basically emulating the sounds off of the records. Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989.

Stay Free!: Those synthesizers and samplers were expensive back then, especially in 1984. How did hip-hop artists get them if they didn't have a lot of money?

Chuck D: Not only were they expensive, but they were limited in what they could do -- they could only sample two seconds at a time. But people were able to get a hold of equipment by renting time out in studios.

Stay Free!: How did the Bomb Squad [Public Enemy's production team, led by Shocklee] use samplers and other recording technologies to put together the tracks on It Takes a Nation of Millions.

Hank Shocklee:The first thing we would do is the beat, the skeleton of the track. The beat would actually have bits and pieces of samples already in it, but it would only be rhythm sections. Chuck would start writing and trying different ideas to see what worked. Once he got an idea, we would look at it and see where the track was going. Then we would just start adding on whatever it needed, depending on the lyrics. I kind of architected the whole idea. The sound has a look to me, and Public Enemy was all about having a sound that had its own distinct vision. We didn't want to use anything we considered traditional R&B stuff -- bass lines and melodies and chord structures and things of that nature.?

Stay Free!: How did you use samplers as instruments?

Chuck D: We thought sampling was just another way of arranging sounds. Just like a musician would take the sounds off of an instrument and arrange them their own particular way. So we thought we was quite crafty with it.

Shocklee: "Don't Believe the Hype," for example -- that was basically played with the turntable and transformed and then sampled. Some of the manipulation we was doing was more on the turntable, live end of it.

Stay Free!: When you were sampling from many different sources during the making of It Takes a Nation, were you at all worried about copyright clearance?

Shocklee: No. Nobody did. At the time, it wasn't even an issue. The only time copyright was an issue was if you actually took the entire rhythm of a song, as in looping, which a lot of people are doing today. You're going to take a track, loop the entire thing, and then that becomes the basic track for the song. They just paperclip a backbeat to it. But we were taking a horn hit here, a guitar riff there, we might take a little speech, a kicking snare from somewhere else. It was all bits and pieces.

Stay Free!: Did you have to license the samples in It Takes a Nation of Millions before it was released?

Shocklee: No, it was cleared afterwards. A lot of stuff was cleared afterwards. Back in the day, things was different. The copyright laws didn't really extend into sampling until the hip-hop artists started getting sued. As a matter of fact, copyright didn't start catching up with us until Fear of a Black Planet. That's when the copyrights and everything started becoming stricter because you had a lot of groups doing it and people were taking whole songs. It got so widespread that the record companies started policing the releases before they got out.

Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear every sample?

Shocklee: It wouldn't be impossible. It would just be very, very costly. The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout -- meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound -- for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you're looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.

Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums, which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, "Your artist is doing this," so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original artist or the publishing company.

Shocklee: By 1990, all the publishers and their lawyers started making moves. One big one was Bridgeport, the publishing house that owns all the George Clinton stuff. Once all the little guys started realizing you can get paid from rappers if they use your sample, it prompted the record companies to start investigating because now the people that they publish are getting paid.

Stay Free!: There's a noticeable difference in Public Enemy's sound between 1988 and 1991. Did this have to do with the lawsuits and enforcement of copyright laws at the turn of the decade?

Chuck D: Public Enemy's music was affected more than anybody's because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn't have been anything -- they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

Shocklee: We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but you can't really get the right kind of compression that way. A guitar sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in the studio. The guitar that's sampled off a record is going to have all the compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It's going to hit the tape harder. It's going to slap at you. Something that's organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has gotten a lot softer.

Chuck D: Copyright laws pretty much led people like Dr. Dre to replay the sounds that were on records, then sample musicians imitating those records. That way you could get by the master clearance, but you still had to pay a publishing note.

Shocklee: See, there's two different copyrights: publishing and master recording. The publishing copyright is of the written music, the song structure. And the master recording is the song as it is played on a particular recording. Sampling violates both of these copyrights. Whereas if I record my own version of someone else's song, I only have to pay the publishing copyright. When you violate the master recording, the money just goes to the record company.

Chuck D: Putting a hundred small fragments into a song meant that you had a hundred different people to answer to. Whereas someone like EPMD might have taken an entire loop and stuck with it, which meant that they only had to pay one artist.

Stay Free!: So is that one reason why a lot of popular hip-hop songs today just use one hook, one primary sample, instead of a collage of different sounds?

Chuck D: Exactly. There's only one person to answer to. Dr. Dre changed things when he did The Chronic and took something like Leon Haywood's "I Want'a Do Something Freaky to You" and revamped it in his own way but basically kept the rhythm and instrumental hook intact. It's easier to sample a groove than it is to create a whole new collage. That entire collage element is out the window.

Shocklee: We're not really privy to all the laws and everything that the record company creates within the company. From our standpoint, it was looking like the record company was spying on us, so to speak.

Chuck D: The lawyers didn't seem to differentiate between the craftiness of it and what was blatantly taken.

Stay Free!: Switching from the past to the present, on the new Public Enemy album, Revolverlution, you had fans remix a few old Public Enemy tracks. How did you get this idea?

Chuck D: We have a powerful online community through Rapstation.com, PublicEnemy.com, Slamjams.com, and Bringthenoise.com. My thing was just looking at the community and being able to say, "Can we actually make them involved in the creative process?" Why not see if we can connect all these bedroom and basement studios, and the ocean of producers, and expand the Bomb Squad to a worldwide concept?

Stay Free!: As you probably know, some music fans are now sampling and mashing together two or more songs and trading the results online. There's one track by Evolution Control Committee that uses a Herb Alpert instrumental as the backing track for your "By the Time I Get to Arizona." It sounds like you're rapping over a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song. How do you feel about other people remixing your tracks without permission?

Chuck D: I think my feelings are obvious. I think it's great. 

Kembrew McLeod @'Stay Free Magazine'

DOH!

Buildings and light beams as sound

"Architecture is Like a Song, Frozen in Stone"

Bomb Squad mixes

Shocklee Free BOMB SQUAD mixes-004: http://bit.ly/aSKo5m 003: http://bit.ly/cVvkj5 002: http://bit.ly/9CIf8Z 001: http://bit.ly/d9w9d1

♪♫ Townes Van Zandt - Heartworn Highways

Heartworn Highways

Charlotte Gainsbourg - Time of the Assassins

Stupid Drug Story of the Week

The Associated Press on the arrival of "deadly, ultra-pure heroin."

Postscript: 

Also, the AP article makes a botch of its attempt to connect heroin potency with a "spike in heroin overdose deaths across the nation." To begin with, 25 years of AP reporting indicates that high-potency heroin has been widely available for some time, so it's silly to start blaming it for a recent increase of deaths. And second, the AP gives no sense that its methodology, in which it counts 3,000 heroin deaths in 36 states in 2008, is the same as that used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to count 2,000 deaths a year at the beginning of the decade. The comparison could be apples to oranges—or apples to salamanders. We just don't know.

Another problem with the AP piece is that it never defines death by heroin overdose. Is that a death in which only heroin is consumed? Or does it include deaths in which other drugs are taken in combination with heroin?

The question isn't pedantic. As it turns out, death by heroin alone is relatively uncommon, according to a 2008 study by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Florida Medical Examiners Commission. The study (PDF) analyzed the cases of all 8,620 people 1) who died in the state during 2007; 2) whose death led to a medical examiner's report; and 3) who had one or more major drug (including alcohol) onboard when they died.

In only 17 of the 110 heroin-related deaths was heroin the only drug onboard. In most cases of heroin-related death, decedents take other drugs that depress the central nervous system—other opiates, alcohol, sedatives, etc. The dangers of "polydrug use," as some call it, have been well understood for some time. A survey of the medical literature published in Addiction in 1996 titled "Fatal Heroin 'Overdose': A Review" warns against attributing all deaths in which evidence of heroin is present as "heroin overdoses." The authors write:

In a substantial proportion of cases, blood morphine levels alone [the body converts heroin into morphine] cannot account for the fatal outcome of a heroin "overdose." It appears that a great many "overdoses" are in fact fatalities due to multiple drug use. ... For a substantial number of heroin-related fatalities, then, heroin "overdose" may be a misnomer.

Moral of the story: Don't take heroin, but if you must, never mix it with other drugs.

A final point. The AP story makes a big deal about how falling heroin prices make the drug irresistible. "To hook new users, dealers are selling heroin cheap—often around $10 a bag," the story reports. But there's nothing new about that price. As an AP story cited above reports, bags of "60 percent to 85 percent pure heroin" were selling for $10 in 2000.