Hawkwind 1984-02-16 Thames Hall, Slough, UK
37 minutes ago
Thursday, 16 February 2012
Natasha Kmeto - The Ache
The Ache is the first in-house release from our newest crew member Natasha Kmeto, showcasing a bold and frankly amazing new direction for the accomplished artist. After several years of creating progressively more advanced music, Natasha has arrived to deliver what is easily her best work to date, an ambitious foray into beats, bass, exotic samples, analog synths, and immaculately crafted textures, with her voice covering the entire affair like hot butter. The feel is hardly cluttered, though, and could possibly be our cleanest and most R’n’B inflected release to date, a shining example of what she’s got us calling “futuristic soul.” In contrast to some of our other material, The Ache is a lot like something you might hear on the radio, except about a dozen steps ahead, exactly where the music on the radio should be.
Credits
Released 14 February 2012 All original tracks written, produced and recorded by Natasha Kmeto in Portland, OR. Mixed and mastered by Chris Green Album art by Alex Kmeto Photo by Carly Birkey Catalog Number GEM011
www.natashakmeto.com
www.droppinggems.com
(Thanx Audiozobe!)
Fugn'ell! The one man LedZep has moved into his Plant/Krauss phase...
If you feel that you must contribute to the cost of raising his children then buy some music by his ex-wife...
Dory Previn RIP
Dory Previn, the US singer and composer who collaborated with former husband Andre on two Oscar-nominated songs, has died in Massachusetts at the age of 86.
Born Dorothy Veronica Langan in 1925, she began as a lyricist before finding success as a solo artist in the 1970s.She married Andre Previn in 1959 and worked with him on the theme to 1967's Valley of the Dolls.
After he left her for Mia Farrow, she recorded such albums as On My Way to Where and Mythical Kings and Iguanas.
According to the New York Times, her difficult childhood, divorce from Previn and bouts of mental illness informed her music.
The six albums she released in the 1970s were confessional and confrontational.
Beware Of Young Girls, a track from On My Way To Where, directly addressed Mia Farrow's role in the break-up of her marriage.
"Beware of young girls, who come to the door, wistful and pale, of twenty and four," she sang.
"She was my friend. She was invited to my house," the lyrics continued. "She admired my wedding ring".
Her death on Tuesday at her Southfield farm was confirmed by husband Joby Baker, a Canadian actor she married in 1984.
Soul-bearing
Dory was born in New Jersey in the 1920s and, after school, attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
She worked as an actress and a dancer until she began writing songs and landed a job at film studio MGM, where she was assigned to work with Andre Previn.
They married in 1959 and were nominated for their first Oscar two years later, for the song Faraway Part of Town, which featured in the film Pepe, starring Mexican comedian Cantinflas.
The pair were nominated again two years later, this time for Second Chance from the Robert Mitchum film Two for the Seesaw.
Outside of cinema, the pair wrote independently for the likes of Doris Day and Jack Jones, while Sammy Davis Junior and Frank Sinatra recorded some of their soundtrack work.
In 1965, Dory Previn suffered a nervous breakdown and was briefly institutionalised, but she continued to work.
This period produced one of her most successful works - the soundtrack to kitsch classic Valley Of The Dolls. The album spent six months in the charts, and the theme song was a top 10 hit for Dionne Warwick.
Following her divorce, in 1970, Previn received a third Oscar nomination for Come Saturday Morning, a song she co-wrote for Alan J Pakula's debut feature Pookie.
Award success came at last in 1983, when she received an Emmy for co-writing the theme song to TV show Two Of A Kind.
Jarvis Cocker is among the modern musicians who have taken inspiration from Previn's soul-baring lyrics.
The Pulp frontman mentioned her in his 2011 book Mother, Brother, Lover and chose her song Lady With the Braid as one of his Desert Island Discs in 2005.
@'BBC'
Via FOIA: 75MB of zipped DHS training materials on seizure and surveillance of phones. files.cloudprivacy.net/DHS-training-m…
Jamdown (1981)
'Jamdown' takes you on a journey back to 1980, straight into the heart of the Jamaican reggae scene, following legendary reggae artists Toots Hibbert and The Congos. The film shot in 1980 had a limited release in France and therefore remained undiscovered by the rest of the world. Since its initial release almost 30 years ago, 'Jamdown' has become what reggae footage collectors often refer to as ''The holy grail of reggae films'' due to its rarity and difficulty in finding an original copy of the film. The film contains some of the only known early footage of The Congos, performing tracks from their legendary Heart Of The Congos LP which was produced by Lee Perry at the Black Ark studios at the height of their career. Jamdown contains some of the most electrifying live reggae footage to have ever been captured on film, making it a highly enjoyable performance for all reggae fans.
Wednesday, 15 February 2012
Future Opioids
'If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution - then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.'
- Aldous Huxley HERE
Via
(Thanx trnsnd!)
Losing My Revolution: A year after the Egyptian Revolution, 10% of the social media documentation is gone
of this digital content is already gone.
Websites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Storify, 1000Memories, Blogger and IAmJan25 have allowed the public to document the events of the revolution in real-time. Storify, for example, allows the user to create a timed organized collection of tweets, links, images, posts, map locations or videos to create a story. 1000Memories on the other hand allows the user to keep the memory of a loved one after he/she has passed away by creating collections about them including photos, notes, testimonials, videos and other mementos. Iamjan25 is a website dedicated mainly as a hub for all the videos and images about the Egyptian revolution sent to the website administrators.
It is fascinating to read the amalgamated stories assembled from the tweets, Facebook posts, links, images, videos, map-taggings, etc. from the authors who were experiencing and documenting these events as they occurred. These social media contributions could give a great insight of what happened in the revolution and feed the curiosity of the readers by making them relive those moments with the authors.
Even in the period when the Internet and cellular services were shut down people still took photos and videos which they later posted in the social networks. You can often find videos and images documenting the same incident from multiple angles which reminded me of the movie "Vantage Point"...
MORE
Turkey: Another victim in the undeclared war on transgender women
Via Kocaeli Gazetesi, Mynet Haber and Haber 27 comes the sad news of the murder on Monday afternoon (13 February 2012) of Melda Yuksel in Kocaeli, Turkey.As I understand it, Melda - a 26-year old transgender woman - met her younger brother Murat at a building site to ask his advice on some construction work she had commissioned. It seems that a conversation after the site meeting somehow escalated into an argument between the two about sexual orientation/gender identity, during which Mr Yuksel pulled out a gun and shot Melda five times. She died of her injuries at the scene of the shooting.
Neighbours reported hearing gunfire and officers from the County Police Department were on the scene within minutes, where Mr Yuksel was taken into custody with the gun still in his possession. The police investigation continues.
As regular readers of this blog will know, I believe that murders like this are part of a larger pattern of violence and discrimination against TS/TG people in Turkey and it's disheartening to have to repeat myself yet again:
TS/TG people are human, just like cis people. We have the same civil liberties and human rights as cis people. We're just another face in the crowd, someone you pass on the street every day. And yet, time and again, we are subjected to bigotry and violence simply because we exist. But being TS/TG is not some "lifestyle choice"; it isn't something we can leave at home when we go out into the world each day. And neither is it anything for cis people to react to, not with fear, not with hatred - and especially not with violence.
Transphobia is everywhere and it's way past time that cis people understood this and began to act accordingly, to show us the same respect that they automatically demand for themselves.
The answer is in their hands, not ours.
Cis people, you have to stop the transphobic violence, and you have to stop it now.
I extend my condolences to Melda's loved ones on their sad loss of yet another victim in the apparently endless undeclared war on transgender women in Turkey.
---------------
Photo of Melda from Mynet Haber
Thanks to Kemal Ordek, Secretary General of Pembe Hayat for the heads-up
Cross-posted from Bird of Paradox
Art and Alzheimer’s
Via
♪♫ Patti Smith & Phillip Glass - Spell
Dave L Stevens of Stevens Internet Productions has generously uploaded to You Tube this stunning performance of "Spell" a.k.a."Footnote to Howl" by Patti Smith and her band, with Philip Glass on piano, and back-up "vocals" by saffron-robed Buddhist monks (the recitation was in honor of a visit by His Holiness the Dalai Lama). As Stevens himself notes, "Not seen for more than a decade. I directed and produced this interactive webcast. When Patti Smith begins "howling" on her clarinet, it's sublime."
MORE
MORE
♪♫ Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Fire (1979)
French TV 'Midi Première' with Serge Gainsbourg
Bonus:
Rosa Yemen - Herpes SimplexDeep Roots Music
Vol. 1: Revival - Ranking Sounds
Vol. 2: Bunny Lee Story and Black Ark
Vol. 3: Money in My Pocket and Ghetto Riddims
(Thanx SJX!)
Vol. 2: Bunny Lee Story and Black Ark
Vol. 3: Money in My Pocket and Ghetto Riddims
(Thanx SJX!)
Liverpool shirt sponsor in 'robust talks' with club over Luis Suárez
Said it yesterday and I will say it again today - Suárez HAS to go...
P.I.L. - One Drop
As promised, the first new Public Image Ltd. song in 20 years — a lilting, almost dub-ska track called “One Drop” — received its worldwide debut today via Steve Lamacq’s afternoon show on BBC’s 6 Music. You can stream the track, with the DJ’s intro and outro, via the player above. The song will be released on a vinyl EP as part of Record Store Day on April 21 in advance of the release of the full-length This Is PiL in May or June. Check out full details on the first new PiL music since 1992′s That What Is Not right here.
Via
(Thanx Paul!)
Joy Division and New Order master tapes turn up in old bank vault
The new restaurant, which is being built in a former branch of the Midland bank, was being excavated when the tapes were found, alongside guns, gold and jewellery. The total value of the haul is £1.1 million, reports Holy Moly. Oliver has since given everything found in the basement to the treasury.
Via
UPDATE:
Peter Hook says (in 2008):Yeah, it was quite a strange situation, actually. When Factory went bankrupt, [Joy Division/New Order manager] Rob Gretton had his hands on a lot of New Order's live stuff, and a lot of film stuff. And it turns out, he put it in this vault to protect it [laughs] from the official receiver, I think. What happened was that the bank lost the record and didn't bill us for this vault. So when Rob died, he took the memory of the vault with him and nobody knew it existed.
Very recently, the lease has come up on the building, so the bank has had to move. So they had to track down the people who had these vaults, then realized that they hadn't been billing anybody, so they let us all off, which was quite nice. But we got our hands back on all this wonderful stuff which we thought had disappeared-- like a full stereo recording of the Tenth Summer Festival that we did with the Smiths. We were told those tapes had been destroyed!
There were about 200 New Order live tapes of mine that had been in storage since 1990 that I had forgotten about. I even found the original master tapes of [Joy Division's debut EP] An Ideal for Living. It's freaky, you know? To get your hands on that after all those years and see your writing on them is unbelievable. The thing is, we don't know what the hell to do with it [laughs]. But it was wonderful to get it back.?"
Via
(Thanx Iain!)
UPDATE2
The Greatest Love of All
(Anonymous guest post)
The Greatest Love of All ... is self-delusion in many cases. Back in the mid-80s, a lot of American parents were looking for easy answers to the complex problems of life. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were FAR too messy and dangerous for the narratives that Nancy Reagan's "just say no" army was telling itself. Conservatives wanted to believe that we now lived in a post-racial society, and that any problems with race or class were due to inherent laziness or criminality (like Reagan's famous comment about "welfare queens"). "Just look at the Cosby show," they'd say. "Blacks are successful and upper-middle class now, so we can stop talking about racism." They bought into all the surface sheen and the bright, flashy colours and kinetic videos on MTV with kids bopping their heads to the great pop music of Michael Jackson and Madonna. Whitney Houston represented everything that was successful and happy and MORNING IN AMERICA Reagan-approved. Her song about loving yourself was held up as an ode to drug-free living and self-determination. When in contrast to these wonderful cultural things happening all around them in this wonderfully post-racial, post-class, post-drug utopia that surely we were all moving inexorably towards, many American children were beginning to experiment with cannabis and rejecting the joys of family and bright sunny attitudes and stable, unflashy all-American jobs that were helping us defeat the Godless Soviets. Drugs and art were messy, dangerous and corrosive to the American family dream! They led to sex and dissatisfaction; to differentiation and rejection. As long as Whitney Houston could get on stage and tell them everything they wanted to hear, they were unable and unwilling to dig beneath the surface, to see the turbulence and violence that swirled beneath the sheen of the technicolor 808 thump. It created a schism within them between what was real and what was experienced. And anything that challenged the authority of their comfortable illusion was suspect. They were on the wrong side of history. People think that the Reagan America won the cold war, but nothing could have been further from the truth. While Nero's fiddle played, AIDS devastated the gay community, civil rights victories were rolled back, corporate savings and loans looted the treasury, and illegally funded wars devastated entire countries. It is hard to look unflinchingly at the shadow side of humanity, and escapes are seductive. They are also temporary, and you will always wake up the next morning to deal with the fall-out until you just don't wake up. Today Whitney Houston is not here to wake up and deal with it any longer. I believe the illusion that she had to partake of at various times in her career was a more destructive force than any of the drugs. She put a pretty face and a beautiful voice on top of a diabetic coma inducing, media-deployed hypnotic drug. And most Americans wanted to drink this Kool-Aid. Only the real, the lived, the messy accidents and near-misses of being fully alive can pull you through. Everything else is sleep-walking.
The Greatest Love of All ... is self-delusion in many cases. Back in the mid-80s, a lot of American parents were looking for easy answers to the complex problems of life. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were FAR too messy and dangerous for the narratives that Nancy Reagan's "just say no" army was telling itself. Conservatives wanted to believe that we now lived in a post-racial society, and that any problems with race or class were due to inherent laziness or criminality (like Reagan's famous comment about "welfare queens"). "Just look at the Cosby show," they'd say. "Blacks are successful and upper-middle class now, so we can stop talking about racism." They bought into all the surface sheen and the bright, flashy colours and kinetic videos on MTV with kids bopping their heads to the great pop music of Michael Jackson and Madonna. Whitney Houston represented everything that was successful and happy and MORNING IN AMERICA Reagan-approved. Her song about loving yourself was held up as an ode to drug-free living and self-determination. When in contrast to these wonderful cultural things happening all around them in this wonderfully post-racial, post-class, post-drug utopia that surely we were all moving inexorably towards, many American children were beginning to experiment with cannabis and rejecting the joys of family and bright sunny attitudes and stable, unflashy all-American jobs that were helping us defeat the Godless Soviets. Drugs and art were messy, dangerous and corrosive to the American family dream! They led to sex and dissatisfaction; to differentiation and rejection. As long as Whitney Houston could get on stage and tell them everything they wanted to hear, they were unable and unwilling to dig beneath the surface, to see the turbulence and violence that swirled beneath the sheen of the technicolor 808 thump. It created a schism within them between what was real and what was experienced. And anything that challenged the authority of their comfortable illusion was suspect. They were on the wrong side of history. People think that the Reagan America won the cold war, but nothing could have been further from the truth. While Nero's fiddle played, AIDS devastated the gay community, civil rights victories were rolled back, corporate savings and loans looted the treasury, and illegally funded wars devastated entire countries. It is hard to look unflinchingly at the shadow side of humanity, and escapes are seductive. They are also temporary, and you will always wake up the next morning to deal with the fall-out until you just don't wake up. Today Whitney Houston is not here to wake up and deal with it any longer. I believe the illusion that she had to partake of at various times in her career was a more destructive force than any of the drugs. She put a pretty face and a beautiful voice on top of a diabetic coma inducing, media-deployed hypnotic drug. And most Americans wanted to drink this Kool-Aid. Only the real, the lived, the messy accidents and near-misses of being fully alive can pull you through. Everything else is sleep-walking.
DJ Spooky presents Vertov Enthusiasm: Sinfonia Donbassa (beta)
A rescore of Dziga Vertov's first sound film.
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