Saturday 27 July 2013

Brazil's music revolution: the new stars remaking a nation's culture

Herbert Huncke photographed by Magnus Reed

Via
Huncketeacompany

Olympic-Sized Hoax? 'Lost' Krautrock Warm-Up Tapes Mysteriously Surface

SPOTTED: 7″ Technics SL-700 turntable in the wild!

Here in the Overdeveloped World: An Interview with McKenzie Wark

Friday 26 July 2013

♪♫ Purity Supreme - Always ∀lready (EP)

Purity Supreme was the collaboration project name used by Leslie Winer & Christophe Van Huffel for this 4 song EP recorded over a period of a few days in May 2011.
Track Listing:
Milk St.
Half Past 3 Cowboy
Famous Inhabitants of Louth
Dunderhead
Info/Download
Videos by Sébastien Chou
As Leslie said on Facebook:

Pleases me to note that the (very few) reviews for this record were significantly more generous when the reviewer was under the impression I was a MAN !

Get a load of this purple prose for the Man Singing:

"The main attraction to the listener is the singing-intoning voice of the lead fellow, who may be the French half of the act. Cracked and dusty his vocal cords be, whether through mannered device or naturally desiccated, trying to convey the effect of a dissolute and broken man. Just right for followers of Wm Burroughs we might think, but this sort of prose-speak-sing also shades into areas once occupied by Nick Cave or Michael Gira, as does the lugubrious and dense content. The lyrics are highly ambiguous, even when they seem straight to the point and use plain English at all times. I like to hear multiple repetitions of slightly mysterious phrases in songs and Purity Supreme does this trick very well. The first song keeps saying “It’s Nice To See You”, when the mood of the singer and indeed the music itself is expressing the exact opposite of that sentiment, and it’s a song that wishes we would just go home and stay there. Angst-ridden steel strings and a relentless drum pattern make this snarky item a vicious twin brother to Leonard Cohen’s later works. The second song is slightly more recognisable as something a weary Lou Reed might have recorded at any time between 1975 and 1988, and with its basic guitar and drum sound could almost pass for any decent slab of indie art-rock music. On the flip, even more words and more repetitions in the two remaining songs. So many words, these songs are more like recited poems or short stories really, very much like a slightly nastier Tom Waits or what we might hear if Charles Bukowski turned his throaty husk to song. Indeed the words are privileged by appearing in full on the front cover. And there’s a very strong cinematic component too, with vivid film noir images somehow encoded in the very sound of the record. Narrators alluding to scenes unknown, to backstories we cannot know, and delivered with a snarling curl to the lip at all times. The creators here are the French musician Christophe Van Huffel, and the American writer-composer Leslie Winer. Quite unusual, muscular, and opaque music from these offbeat modern beatniks."

‪#‎SlightlyNastierTomWaits‬ - I'll take it ! Damn, son.

All My Exes Live in Texts: Why the Social Media Generation Never Really Breaks Up

♪♫ Elvis Costello & The Roots - Walk Us Uptown

Visions of Jack Kerouac ... in an epic 13 volumes

Carried Off

In March 2011, Rose Candis had the worst lunch of her life. Sitting at a restaurant in Shaoguan, a small city in South China, the American mother tried hard not to vomit while her traveling companion translated what the man they were eating with had just explained: her adopted Chinese daughter Erica had been purchased, and then essentially resold to her for profit. The papers the Chinese orphanage had shown her documenting how her daughter had been abandoned by the side of a road were fakes. The tin of earth the orphanage had given her so that her daughter could always keep a piece of her home with her as she grew up in the U.S. was a fraud, a pile of dirt from the place her daughter’s paperwork was forged, not where she was born. Candis had flown thousands of miles to answer her daughter Erica’s question—who are my birth parents?—but now she was further from the answer than ever...

Music of Resistance: Race To Fight Racism (Al Jazeera 2009)

For almost 15 years, Asian Dub Foundation has delivered uncompromising messages of social change - looking at prejudice against Britons of Asian descent. The first episode of Music of Resistance - a six-part series which tells the stories of musicians who fight repression and sing about injustices - looks at Asian Dub Foundation's efforts to steer talented, inner-city youngsters away from gangs and violence and toward music
Music of Resistance