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Thursday, 26 April 2012
Tobi Vail: Free Pussy Riot, the Only Band that Matters in 2012
К выборам жж ДДосят, копия поста тут: http://lj.rossia.org/users/pussy_riot/3958.html
Твиттер группы: http://twitter.com/#!/pussy_riot
Noisy Jelly
This project is a fully working prototype made with Arduino and Max/Msp, there are absolut no sound editing in the video...
More picture at this flickr set (flickr.com/photos/raphaelplu/sets/72157629621382055/)
And download the Project pdf here (pluvinage.eu/NOISYJELLY_presskit.pdf)
Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly.
With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board,and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.
Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.
This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.
Author: Raphaël pluvinage (pluvinage.eu and twitter (twitter.com/#!/rpluvina)
& Marianne Cauvard (mariannecauvard.fr)
at L'Ensci Les ateliers (ensci.com)
Via
More picture at this flickr set (flickr.com/photos/raphaelplu/sets/72157629621382055/)
And download the Project pdf here (pluvinage.eu/NOISYJELLY_presskit.pdf)
Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly.
With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board,and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.
Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.
This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.
Author: Raphaël pluvinage (pluvinage.eu and twitter (twitter.com/#!/rpluvina)
& Marianne Cauvard (mariannecauvard.fr)
at L'Ensci Les ateliers (ensci.com)
Via
Army’s ‘Magic Bullet’ Will Hang Out in Midair, But Won’t Kill You
This is the recipe for peak absurdity in weapons design. One part bazooka round; one part suicidal drone; one part stun round. What the U.S. Army hopes will emerge from that mix is a warhead that can loiter in midair while it hunts a human target — but won’t kill him when it finds him.
That “Nonlethal Warhead for Miniature Organic Precision Munitions” is on the Army’s wish list for small business. And for good measure, its outline for the weapon relies on a different system, one that’s just barely getting off the ground. “This effort will require innovative research and advancements in non-lethal technologies which can be packaged within a very small volume and weight,” the Army concedes.
This latest nonlethal weapon is a modification of something called the Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System (LMAMS), something the Army explicitly compares to a “magic bullet.” That warhead “should be capable to acquire a man-size target at the system’s combat range, in less than 20 seconds, flying at an altitude of 100 meter above ground,” according to the Army’s new solicitations for small business. “If conditions for attack are not met, LMAMS will be able to loiter over the target for up to 30 minutes.”
Under this modification, the L in LMAMS would be replaced by something very un-L. “The user has expressed a strong need for a non-lethal alternative warhead for these munitions,” the Army explains. What it doesn’t explain is exactly what kind of non-lethal weapon this should be. (Chances are it won’t be a heat ray, since the power generation necessary for one is probably beyond the scope of any warhead.) The Army encourages small businesses to think about “mechanical, such as rubber balls; acoustic; chemical; electrical; or dazzle.” (Um, chemical weapons?)
One problem: the LMAMS program is in its infancy. The highest-profile example example of one of its weapons is the Switchblade drone by AeroVironment — a teeny, tiny guided missile soldiers can direct on a laptop toward a target. Elite troops in Afghanistan are expected to get the first Switchblades — the first weapon of its kind — sometime later this year.
Give the Army this: the Switchblade does demonstrate that the technology necessary for creating loitering kamikaze weapons is more than theoretical — as, on a larger scale, does the new-model Tomahawk missile, which can change direction in midair. But non-lethal weapons tend to have more flash than bang. The Air Force gave up on plans for a dazzler gun in 2008, citing practicality concerns, and the design flaws in the millimeter-wave Active Denial System, a.k.a. the “Pain Ray,” have kept it stuck in development for 15 years.
To help incentivize small businesses to outperform those recent disappointments, the Army lists some of the “potential commercial applications” for the non-lethal, loitering bazooka round. And they’re in your backyard: “crowd control for local law enforcement; border protection for Homeland Security; or temporary incapacitation of non violent criminals for local SWAT teams and/or law enforcement.” So if this weapon turns out to be too absurd for the military, there’s always the local police station.
Spencer Ackerman @'Wired'
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
♪♫ Malaria! - Thrash Me
Malaria! was an experimental electronic band from Berlin formed in 1981 by Gudrun Gut and Bettina Köster (Bettina Koster) following the dissolution of Mania D with Karin Luner, Eva Gossling later Die Krupps and Beate Bartel (of Liaisons Dangereuses). Other members included Manon P. Duursma, Christine Hahn, and Susanne Kuhnke (also a member of Die Haut). They are most often associated with Neue Deutsche Welle and post-punk.
Malaria!'s most popular record was New York Passage, which was top 10 in both U.S. and European independent charts and led to a tour with The Birthday Party, John Cale, and Nina Hagen.
There are videos for the songs "Geld/Money," "Your Turn To Run," and "You, You" (directed by Anne Carlisle) along with a live video for "Thrash Me" featured in a German documentary called Super 80. (Wiki)
Tuesday, 24 April 2012
Youth of Colour: Watched and Shot
Both Trayvon and Mumia will be represented by scores of activists
converging on Washington, D.C., on April 24, in an “Occupy the Justice
Department” event, which joins the “Occupy” movement to the resistance
movement against the criminalization of youth of color.
Trayvon and Mumia have been respective catalysts for national consciousness about police violence, prosecutorial misconduct, and also the dramatic seven-fold increase, since the 1970s, of the U.S. prison population to over 2.4 million people, more than than sixty percent of whom are people of color.
The accelerated criminalization of people of color and the poor not only feeds the prisons, it fattens a government and corporate apparatus that grows top-heavy with the wealth concentrated in the economic portfolios of the top “one percent.” As University of California sociologist, Loïc Wacquant, observes in his book, Punishing the Poor, the rise of the prisons marks a new penal state, where an ethos of surveillance and practices by police and courts “replaces the social state; . . . undermining its educational and assistance missions by devouring their budgets and stealing their staff.”
Trayvon and Mumia are just two Americans among many others, particularly youth of color, and many dissenters, who have been under surveillance and face its deadly effects. We Are All Suspects Now is the title of a book by ColorLines executive editor, Tram Nguyen, writing of immigrant communities after 9/11 and the problems faced by ever larger numbers of us in today’s surveillance state. Just in the last two months, a litany of names of dead youth now haunt us, all slain in conflict with police: Ramarley Graham, Justin Sipp, Kendrec McDade, Dante Price, Rekia Boyd, Kenneth Smith, Shaima Alawadi, Ervin Jefferson. Still fresh are the memories of other people of color similarly lost: Amadou Diallo, Vincent Chin, Michael Cho, Sean Bell, Anthony Biaz, Oscar Grant, Fong Lee, Tyisha Miller, Matthew Shepard, James Byrd, Mark Duggan, Eleanor Bumpurs, and more...
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Trayvon and Mumia have been respective catalysts for national consciousness about police violence, prosecutorial misconduct, and also the dramatic seven-fold increase, since the 1970s, of the U.S. prison population to over 2.4 million people, more than than sixty percent of whom are people of color.
The accelerated criminalization of people of color and the poor not only feeds the prisons, it fattens a government and corporate apparatus that grows top-heavy with the wealth concentrated in the economic portfolios of the top “one percent.” As University of California sociologist, Loïc Wacquant, observes in his book, Punishing the Poor, the rise of the prisons marks a new penal state, where an ethos of surveillance and practices by police and courts “replaces the social state; . . . undermining its educational and assistance missions by devouring their budgets and stealing their staff.”
Trayvon and Mumia are just two Americans among many others, particularly youth of color, and many dissenters, who have been under surveillance and face its deadly effects. We Are All Suspects Now is the title of a book by ColorLines executive editor, Tram Nguyen, writing of immigrant communities after 9/11 and the problems faced by ever larger numbers of us in today’s surveillance state. Just in the last two months, a litany of names of dead youth now haunt us, all slain in conflict with police: Ramarley Graham, Justin Sipp, Kendrec McDade, Dante Price, Rekia Boyd, Kenneth Smith, Shaima Alawadi, Ervin Jefferson. Still fresh are the memories of other people of color similarly lost: Amadou Diallo, Vincent Chin, Michael Cho, Sean Bell, Anthony Biaz, Oscar Grant, Fong Lee, Tyisha Miller, Matthew Shepard, James Byrd, Mark Duggan, Eleanor Bumpurs, and more...
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Alex Trocchi: A Primer
He argued that “art and life are no longer divided”, and because of this integral inter-relationship, I’ll begin with a brief biographical overview of his literary life. This will give a context for the three different examples of Trocchi’s writing that I’ll go on to introduce: Young Adam, Cain’s Book, and sigma: A Tactical Blueprint.
Trocchi was born in Scotland in 1925, and he read English and Philosophy at Glasgow University. However, his interests and ambitions were international and he left Scotland for post-war Paris in 1951. The rejuvenated City of Light was the epicentre of 1950’s existentialism, Trocchi’s profound philosophical passion, and Paris proved highly productive: Trocchi founded and edited the pioneering journal Merlin which published a plethora of writers and philosophers, including Beckett, Genet, Camus and Sartre. He also joined the Lettrist International, later the Situationist International, which positioned Guy Debord as Captain at the ideological helm.
Paris enabled Trocchi to turn his hand to writing dirty books, or “d.b.’s” as they were known, and he prolifically penned many of these for the notorious Olympia Press, whose experimental catalogue also published William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Olympia Press also published Trocchi’s novel Young Adam (1954), which he had begun some years earlier in Glasgow, and in Rimbaudean style, Trocchi became acquainted with Parisian paradis artificial; he experimented with numerous narcotics, which lead to his life-long addiction to heroin.
The demise of Merlin in 1956 prompted Trocchi to relocate to the U.S.A. He wintered in Venice West with the beat beachfront creative community, before moving to New York City and working as a scow captain, which is conveyed in Cain’s Book (1960). The charge of supplying narcotics to a minor, which Trocchi vehemently denied, forced him to escape over the border into Canada in disguise, where Leonard Cohen, then a largely unknown poet, housed Trocchi until he was able to safely take a boat back to Britain; Cohen later called Trocchi “the contemporary Christ”.
In the U.K. in 1962, Trocchi furthered his riotous reputation as a subversive and international writer at the Edinburgh Writer’s Conference by clashing spectacularly with Hugh MacDiarmid, Scotland’s chief promoter of a distinctly nationalist tradition in Scottish literature, who dismissed Trocchi, along with fellow-attendees William Burroughs and Ian Hamilton Finlay, as “cosmopolitan scum”.
Trocchi had publicly provoked this dismissal - in an earlier panel discussion at the festival he had described Scotland, and Scottish literature, as “stale-porridge, bible-class nonsense”.
Having departed from Scotland more than ten years before, he was clearly glad of it...
Continue reading
Gill Tasker @'Lit Reactor'
Images: Kiki Picasso's illustrations for the 1999 French edition of 'Cain's Book'
Gill Tasker is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, researching the life and writing of Alexander Trocchi
My how the times have changed...I remember after I first read Cain's Book in about 1975 going to the main reference library in Glasgow and there was not one mention of Trocchi to be found in the public search there. Now you can do PHD's on him???
Still not forgiven btw the 'supposed' friend who nicked my original Frances Lengel 1954 Olympia copy of 'Young Adam' but...
For more about Trocchi on 'Exile' go HERE
Still not forgiven btw the 'supposed' friend who nicked my original Frances Lengel 1954 Olympia copy of 'Young Adam' but...
For more about Trocchi on 'Exile' go HERE
Paul Cadden: Drawings
http://paulcadden.com/
Via
Tim Burgess's golden rules of rock’n’roll excess
Dan Bull: Sharing Is Caring
Yesterday a young lad asked me, “Dan Bull in the charts? Is this a ‘fuck off’ to the record industry then?”
Good question, I thought. What do I really want to say to the entertainment industry?
When I released my first album “Safe” in 2009, I sent it to record companies and radio stations but they ignored it. When I telephoned Q magazine with a story, they told me they couldn’t write about it because they only feature artists with record deals.
In frustration at the glass ceiling that independent artists face, I started to publish protest songs on YouTube. To my surprise, they got much more coverage. I was excited, but thought “What if the labels see my tracks? They’ll never sign me now!”.
At that point, I realised something; if they didn’t want me, then the feeling was mutual. I didn’t need a record label telling me what to do, how to do it, and then keeping 80% of the takings for the privilege. I had the internet and I had my brain.
By embracing the free flow of information the internet allows, through filesharing and social media, I’ve found a worldwide fanbase without leaving the house. I’ve collaborated with artists across the globe without ever meeting them, and I can chat to my supporters whilst lying in bed eating pizza.
None of that would have been possible without file-sharing. If I followed the copyright law that lobbyists like the RIAA and the BPI insist is in the interest of artists like me, I would have no musical career. If pro-filesharing sites like TorrentFreak and The Pirate Bay didn’t share my work with you, you wouldn’t be reading this. I owe a debt of gratitude to every person that has ripped, burned, copied and shared anything I’ve done.
Sites such as The Pirate Bay do more to help unsigned artists than industry lobbyists ever have. Projects like The Promo Bay, which devotes The Pirate Bay’s home page, free of charge, to any musician who applies, creates overnight success stories.
The Pirate Bay stands defiantly in the face of corporate bullies who tout such nonsensical non-sequiters as “if you copy files, artists don’t get money, and if artists don’t get any money, they will stop making art.” This is an insult to the millions of dedicated amateur artists around the world.
What’s funny is that I’d have more respect for major labels if they just admitted what we already know – their bottom line is nothing but profit. There’s nothing wrong with that; there’s no need to hide it. But there is a need to play fair.
Entertainment lobbyists want to have their cake and eat it – they accumulated massive wealth through exploiting a free market when the means to distribute recorded art was scarce. This scarcity no longer exists – the market has moved on; and now they’re fighting to enforce artificial measures which will recreate those fleeting economic and technological conditions which allowed them to flourish.
Art has always been about sharing, adapting, and re-interpreting what you experience. Our children deserve to grow up in a world where they can enjoy this freedom without the fear that a pack of corporate lawyers will circle in and extradite them overseas.
People born in the late 80s have now lived more of their lives in the 21st century than the 20th century. A new generation has arrived for whom sharing information online is as easy and reflexive as breathing.
This generation isn’t going away; it’s growing larger all the time and to them, defunct business models developed by greying monopolists are utterly irrelevant. But these kids aren’t freeloaders or criminal masterminds, they are normal, decent people. When they hear a song or see a video that they like, they’ll post it to Facebook; they’ll Tweet it. They might remix it, or poke fun at it. This very behaviour which big entertainment claims to be the death knell of creativity, is the same behaviour that I believe will make my single a success.
“Sharing Is Caring” is a satire on this age of instant communication. It’s about what happens when things go wrong, and whether we are using the power of online communication to its full potential. Hidden somewhere in the track you can hear me urinating on a printout of the Digital Economy Act.
There are three main versions of the song – each about a different social network (Facebook, Twitter and Google+). There’s also a dubstep remix by Benny Aves and a reggae-tinged reworking by Animal Circus. I’ve also provided instrumentals and acapellas for you to remix and re-imagine at will.
I invite you to download “Sharing Is Caring” for free. If you like it, and want to support the campaign, you can choose to buy it. Each version you buy will count as a sale towards the charts. There are ten versions in all, meaning a single person can create ten sales towards the charts.
The singles charts are worthless as an indicator of quality, and artists needn’t strive for the validation of reaching them. However, by taking a free song by an unsigned artist to the echelons normally reserved for the industry elite, I want to smash the glass ceiling and show that there is another way of doing things. We don’t need the protection of ACTA, CISPA or any other acronym. As long as our internet is free, creativity will thrive.
And so, to answer the original question – I’m not shouting “fuck off” to the entertainment industry.
I’m saying “excuse me, but I think you’re in my seat”.
Links to the torrent or paid version of “Sharing Is Caring” are available here.
@'TorrentFreak'
DJ JetSet - Fifty minutes of Marko Fürstenberg (the netlabel years)
Gegenströmung Marko Fürstenberg
Option23 Marko Fürstenberg
Gegenströmung Marko Fürstenberg
Sol (Marko Fürstenberg Rmx) L.O.D.
Long Loco Out Thrill (Surphase Remix) Selffish
Südschleuse Surphase & Rktic
Eissequenzer Marko Fuerstenberg
Busch Marko Fuerstenberg
Porn Infection (Remix) Marko Fürstenberg
Chasm 2 (Surphase Remix) Danny Kreutzfeldt
Trockendock Surphase & Rktic
Kampftruppe Marko Fuerstenberg
via
Monday, 23 April 2012
First Listen: Damon Albarn - Dr Dee
Though he's more tethered to traditional means of releasing albums, Damon Albarn has more or less arrived in the same place. He sold millions of records as the leader of Blur, then formed the human-cartoon hybrid "virtual band" Gorillaz with Jamie Hewlett, only to sell tens of millions more. If he wants to record the bizarrely clanging score to 1999's cult horror movie Ravenous, or make an album of Malian music, or start another new band and call it The Good, The Bad & The Queen, or form a side project with Flea and Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, he can — and does. The fans remain, the money is available to him and, when he's set to make another recording for a mass audience, it's still a big deal.
Out May 8, Dr Dee is not one of those mass-appeal projects. Billed as a solo album for Albarn, it's an offshoot of an opera the singer helped craft with director Rufus Norris and the inspiration of mercurial comics legend Alan Moore. Based on the life of John Dee — a 16th-century philosopher, alchemist, astrologer and medical advisor to Queen Elizabeth I — Dr Dee fans out in many directions at once. If anything, it adds up to a sort of willfully obscure folk opera, full of baroque flourishes, spoken asides, unsettling rhythm tracks, guest vocalists and hairpin turns that lead down unpredictable cul de sacs.
It's hard not to wish that Dr Dee came with a bit of visual context for Albarn's free-floating musings, or at least footnotes to attach them to the history lessons in play here. But the album warrants the further exploration, with sounds as uncompromising and unconventional as the man who brings them to being.
Stephen Thompson @'npr'
Hear 'Dr Dee' In Its Entirety
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