While the price war on the high street in the 90’s forced many smaller UK retailers out of business, the fatal blow was dealt the following decade by a tax loophole called Low Value Consignment Relief, which annulled the VAT on any product worth less than £18 if it was shipped from the Channel Islands. Alongside supermarkets selling CDs as checkout loss-leaders, Amazon’s Channel Islands operation suffocated the market and, unable to compete on price, selection or distribution, hundreds of record shops were forced to close.
Inspiration
Torsion Waves by Leemajik
“Torsion Waves is an album made out of feelings that I want to remember for ever. This is the reason why I made this in the first place. Memories and feelings saved in a musical form. The album is pure heart and soul that travels through torsion waves around and through the globe into ears and minds of soul mates. Love, anger, sorrow, madness and all those feelings that made me who I am today and will be tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after tomorrow….”
Rotary Signal Emitter by Sculpture [Picture-Disc LP]
Sculpture is an audiovisual performance duo from London – electronic music producer, Dan Hayhurst, and animator, Reuben Sutherland.
Sutherland ‘DJs’ with home-made zoetropic discs, intricate concentric rings of illustrated frames, projecting fragments of looping images at 33, 45 and 78 rpm – pre-Edisonian imaging technology combined with a digital video camera.
Hayhurst deploys prepared audio material (found tapes, lo-fi electronics, computer programming, and analogue noise) across 1⁄4” tape loops, hardware sampler, cassette walkman and CDJ deck.
The process is important. a kind of unstable modular collage. style. rhythm. spontaneity. input, output, and a bit in the middle called MUSIC (audible and visible) which requires the computer to be switched off.
We present here an audio video picture disc by Sculpture called Rotary Signal Emitter. It can be played conventionally or as a self contained film. It is also intended to be reusable as part of future performances.
The music: A strange amalgam of found sounds (corresponding perfectly with the found imagery), Plunderphonics, ancient electronic music recalling the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, twisted rhythms (imagine Felix Kubin playing Dubstep), all mixed hands-on on the spot.
Demonstration Reel from Sculpture on Vimeo.
'this is what it's like most of the time'
'you could call it a showreel'
zolar/t organismus
implicit integration of music in society
Anthony Storr: Music and the Mind
“Pre-literate societies have very little idea of the individual as a separate entity. They regard the individual as indissolubly part of the family, and the family as part of the larger society. Ritual and aesthetic activities are integral parts of social existence, not superstructures or luxuries which only the rich can afford. Amongst the Venda of the Northern Transvaal, music plays and important part in initiation ceremonies, work, dancing, religious worship, political protest — in fact in every collective activity. Especially important is tshikona, the national dance. This music can only be performed when ‘twenty or more men blow differently tuned pipes with a precision that depends on holding one’s own part as well as blending with others, and at least four women play different drums in polyrhythmic harmony.‘
— Music and The Mind by Anthony Storr
TSHIKONA Pipe Ensemble:
“A cultural critique for the 21st century” and “Technopolitics”
It is simply amazing that these videos have hardly any views. These are very powerful and important talks. Take your time and immerse yourself in thought. This is
Brian Holmes: “A cultural critique for the 21st century”
Armin Medosch: “Technopolitics”
livecoding (fluxus and impromtu)
Lately I’m very attracted to practice of livecoding. I’m especially looking for ..er.. well, “aestheticaly” challenging cases. Here are two of them looked at today.
One is from Andrew Sorensen who is also developing a scheme-based language for av livecoding called Impromptu. Already awhile ago I was fascinated by his “study in keith” (as in Keith Jarret). Here’s another piano piece: http://vimeo.com/8732631
On the other hand, much nearer to me, in hungary, is Gabor Papp, who works with fluxus. I very much liked this live-coded hackpact based on a glitch: http://mndl.hu/hackpact-day-21
here are embeds – take your time:
Dancing Phalanges from Andrew Sorensen on Vimeo.
Hackpact Day 21 – Glitch from gabor papp on Vimeo.
boys bands
Although the term “boy band” did not exist until the 1990s, Boston group New Edition is credited for starting the boy band trend in the 1980s. Maurice Starr was influenced by New Edition and popularised it with his protégé New Kids on the Block, the first commercially successful modern boy band who formed in 1984 and found international success in 1988. Starr’s idea was to take the traditional template from the R&B genre (in this case his teenage band New Edition) and apply it to a pop genre.
Some managers in Europe soon created their own acts after being inspired by New Kids on the Block. First beginning with Nigel Martin-Smith’s Take That in the UK who formed in 1990 and followed by Tom Watkins who had success with Bros in the late eighties and formed East 17 in 1991 who were marketed and pited against Take That as rivals with a harsher attitude, style and sound. Irish music manager Louis Walsh had seen the impact of these two British boy bands and put out an advert for an ‘Irish Take That’ creating Boyzone in 1993.
Starr, originally from Florida, moved to Boston with his brother Michael in the early 1970s. After moving to Boston he recorded two unsuccessful R&B albums, Flaming Starr and Spacey Lady. Since he was unsuccessful as an artist, he decided to create a band to perform the songs that he wrote. Starr won Songwriter of the Year in 1989.
In 1982, Starr found the band New Edition on his talent show. The group produced a number of U.S. Top 10 R&B hit singles and a Top 5 hit in the Billboard Hot 100. Differences between Starr and New Edition caused the two to go their separate ways. Eventually the band split up. One of the members, Bobby Brown, went on to have a successful career as a solo act. […]
After losing New Edition, Starr needed a new band to record his songs. In 1984, he created New Kids on the Block, a band consisting of five male teenagers. Starr produced New Kids on the Block to be a white version of New Edition as he stated I honestly believe that if they’d been white, (the group) would have been 20 times as big.
New Edition: Cool it down (1984)
ada lovelace day!
Internauts, Punks and Infrastructure
Very interesting writing from Blay (pyratbyrian).
[…] if the internet is not to be considered an infrastructure that is put into place it must be considered something that needs to be performed. Latour said that technology is society made durable, but clearly he is neither a hacker nor an industry lobbyist. The construction of the internet is slower, more resistant and more inert than the fleeting performance of a theatre piece. But this is a difference in scale and in terms of the actors involved, not in principle. Viewing the internet as a performance not only has the consequence that it constantly needs to be maintained, but also, like any performance, that it might change from time to time and even run out of steam. A performance is an intervention in a specific context. It implies having to distinguish between which procedures make the internet the internet and which that are its superficial manifestations, rather than accepting the internet and its path of development as it is today as its final form.
Towards the end of the article, he goes:
Oval is better when he plays guitar, punk is more punk in other styles of music and the internet is more explosive in post-digital environments.
via Internauts, Punks and Infrastructure. Thanks to Goto80 for the original tweet and quote.
Ne pristajam na to, da smo idioti, ker nas zapeljujejo podobe
Umetnost lahko v tem kontekstu napravi tak učinek, da imajo žrtve ali ljudje, ki se jih potiska v vlogo žrtev, pravico, da niso žrtve, ampak da so zmožni ustvarjati fikcijo in se poigravati z dvoumnostjo določene situacije.
via klepet z Jacquesom Rancièrom | Kino! Revija za film in filmsko..
“Free software projects are not products”
One of the best things to happen if you are a free software developer is to see your code cropping up in other projects. […]
To me this highlights how thinking about free software in terms of being products (in a consumer capitalist sense) is an ill fit. This kind of cross pollination is really “the point” of free software, and would be, by necessity full of barriers if these projects were proprietary.
The problem is that it’s very hard for us to see outside of these ideas when they are so ingrained in our world and our thinking. It’s sometimes valuable to try and outline these assumptions, and become more aware of them.
The popularity in terms of raw market share is an interesting metric for a free software project as it has a kind of irrelevance or is even an obstruction when users are not supporting the project somehow. In the same way, the definition of “user” and “developer” seem a hangover from the same kind of producer/consumer thinking we are interested in finding the edges of.
What we want to know is what kind of people are using the project, are they curious, will they fiddle with things, do they blog about the work they are doing, can they translate the documentation? Most of all, will they increase the energy surrounding the work? People that do that are precious.
via dave’s blog of art and programming | Free software projects are not products.
