playing the sperm

[via Dangerous Minds]

mouth music (post-human beat box)

actually prefer the Mix version i think




Also mouth-music-y is this live version of "Numbers" - which sounds fantastic (and there was i thinking the idea of a live Kwerk album seemed absurd), there's so much dimension to the sound



Back to "Boing Boom" and the nonhuman beatbox thing

Bernie, bro!

!!!!!Parmegiani soundtracks to French science fiction flic of the early 70s +  same director's earlier well-weird animated film of 1965!!!! Available on the WRWTFWW label.





Les Soleils de l’Île de Pâques (1972), by French director Pierre Kast, is a sci-fi feature which secured itself a well-deserved place in the pantheon of mysterious cult films thanks to hallucinatory (and superb) cinematography, exploration of supernatural phenomenons and occult symbolism, and one hell of a trippy atmosphere. La Brûlure de Mille Soleils (1965) also comes from Pierre Kast, but this time with the help of none other than writer, photographer, multimedia artist, homme à tout faire Chris Marker (notably known for films La Jetée, A Grin Without a Cat and Sans Soleil) who edited this bizarre short to brain melting results that live up to the promises of its synopsis: A depressed millionaire poet, accompanied by his cat Marcel and a sign language robot, travels in time to shake a persistent feeling of ennui and falls hopelessly in love with a woman from another planet. Nuff said! "

The vinyl version comes "with original silver Procédé Héliophore sleeve in the fashion of the Prospective 21e Siècle series"!!!! 

[via Bruce Levenstein]

some more hot Bernie O/S/T action

száj zene (absolute otherwheres)

bonus voicescapes





hardcore, he knows the score



continuum meaning something else here



a mighty mighty organ



not really rock, but nifty



gimme a beat

eagles

robin, eagle - ornithological fun!



A Byrd sings about eagle - more ornithological fun!



the eagle of the sea, innit, the osprey



unspecified, but it could be an eagle (also this is the song that Marshall Tucker are kinda sorta semi ripping off)



about the Moon mission and the grandeur of soaring into space

my link to



Theme to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the radio series at any rate)

mouth music (syncopatico)

season of the witchy

A Year in the Country on a curious if compact patch of film in the late Sixties at the intersection of horror, bucolica, psychedelia and "high fashion" - images and text in part extracted from the book Wandering Through Spectral Fields 










Touchables is the one I really want to see - especially given that the script was by Donald Cammell

"It is a very modish tale of a group of stylish sixties women who live in a huge see-through plastic bubble in the middle of the countryside who kidnap a pop star as “a temporary solution to the leisure problem” and in order make him their plaything"



Nirvana here rewriting their hit "Rainbow Chaser" nicely

musique de bouche

music quotations

assignment - pick one quote from these below and write 1000 words on why you agree, or disagree with it

 “Without music life would be a mistake” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer , 1889

“My music is best understood by children and animals” - Stravinsky

 “Words are bound in chains, but, happily, sounds are still free” —Ludwig van Beethoven, 1826, writing to the poet Christoph Kuffner.

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent” – Victor Hugo, in William Shakespeare, 1864

 “From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music” – Aldous Huxley, “The Rest Is Silence” from Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931

"Music alone has the power to evoke as it will the improbable places, the unquestionable and chimerical world which works secretly on the mysterious poetry of the night, on the thousand anonymous sounds made when leaves are caressed by the rays of the moon."- Debussy

“Music is probably the most difficult of the arts to criticize" - Winton Dean from "Criticism",  New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1980  

“Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure” – E.M. Cioran

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation...  should be nothing without the form...  that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees....  It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other”- Walter Pater, in ‘The School of Giorgione’; from The Renaissance: Studies in Art & Poetry, 1877

“Music is the universal language of mankind” - ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Every theorist and philosopher who hasn’t a real place for music ends up with one-dimensional melancholia” – Nick Land, 1998

“I am never merry when I hear sweet music” – Jessica, from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

"This music is here in opposition to other music. It doesn't all co-exist together nicely. The fact that I have chosen to do this implies that I don't value what you're doing over there. My activity calls into questions the value of your activity. This is what informs our musical thinking and decision making" – UK improv musician John Butcher, in The Wire magazine, 2008

“Architecture is music in space....  a frozen music” - Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 1845

“Music...is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves” - Victor Hugo, in William Shakespeare, 1864

“Music “says” things about the world, but in specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical statements “in our own words” is necessarily doomed to failure. We cannot isolate the truth contained in a piece of music; for it is a beauty-truth and inseparable from its partner. The best we can do is to indicate in the most general terms the nature of the musical beauty-truth under consideration and to refer curious truth-seekers to the original. Thus, the introduction to the Benedictus in the Missa Solemnis is a statement about the blessedness that is at the heart of things. But this is about as far as “our words” will take us. If we were to start describing in our “own words” exactly what Beethoven felt about this blessedness, how he conceived it, what he thought its nature to be, we should very soon find ourselves writing lyrical nonsense… Only music, and only Beethoven’s music, and only this particular music of Beethoven, can tell us with any precision what Beethoven’s conception of the blessedness at the heart of things actually was. If we want to know, we must listen...” -  Aldous Huxley, in “Music at Night,” from Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931

"Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: 'Duce! Duce! Duce!'. The call repeats itself into the infinite and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions.... as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment.... Rock'n'roll is a sign of depersonalisation of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity” - Dr Joost A.M. Meerlo, New York Times, 1957

“Music has a thirst for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its potential 'fascism'?" --Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

"Music is nothing but organised noise. You can take anything -- street sounds, us talking, whatever you want -- and make it music by organising it" --Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy, 1990.

“Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven’s or Mozart’s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner’s music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It “says” less because it is always speaking” - Aldous Huxley, “The Rest Is Silence” from Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931

"Styles of music intended for dancing have a way of evolving into music for listeners only" --Charles Keil and Steve Feld, Music Grooves, 1994

"More participatory musics are more rhythmically complex (and harmonically simple); more contemplative musics are rhythmically simple (and more harmonically complex).’

– Simon Frith Performing Rites, 1996

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without” ― Confucius, The Book of Rites

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain” - Bob Marley

“When I'm tired and thinking cold / I hide in my music, forget the day /And dream of a girl I used to know/ I closed my eyes and she slipped away / She slipped away / It's more than a feeling / When I hear that old song they used to play” – Boston, “More Than A Feeling”, 1976

“God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble… The musical art often speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart… Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful” – Friedrich Nietzche, autobiographical fragment, date unknown

“Invisible airwaves / Crackle with life /Bright antennae bristle /With the energy /Emotional feedback /On a timeless wavelength / Bearing a gift beyond price /Almost free /All this machinery / Making modern music / Can still be open-hearted / Not so coldly charted /It's really just a question /Of your honesty, yeah your honesty”- Rush, “The Spirit of Radio”, 1980

“We're lost in music / Caught in a trap / No turnin' back / We're lost in music / Feel so alive /I quit my nine to five / We're lost in music” – Sister Sledge, “Lost In Music”, 1979

mouth music Top 10

UbuWeb Top Ten 
November 2014
Selected by Simon Reynolds 

1. Fylkingen Text-Sound Festivals – 10 Years 
2. Canada - Jeux Vocaux Des Inuit (Inuit du Caribou, Netsilik et Igloolik) 
3. Lily Greenham - Tabula Plena 
4. Paul Lansky – Artifice 
5. Furious Pig - I Don’t Like Your Face 
6. Delia Derbyshire (and Barry Bermange) - Dreams 
7. Extended Voices - Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, John Cage, Robert Ashley, Toshi Ichyanagi, Morton Feldman 
8. Jaap Blonk - Flux de Bouche 
9. Trevor Wishart - Vox 
10. Tellus#22 ‘False Phoneme’ 

favorite science fiction novels

11 of my fave s.f. books

Keith Roberts, Pavane  

Alternative history/counterfactual set in England where the Reformation never happened, Roman Catholicism dominates the country, and science has been suppressed.

Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee

Alternative history in America where South won the Civil War, an unacknowledged precursor to steampunk in terms of technological backdrop, very well written and characterized, full of great historical jokes and inversions - e.g. in the impoverished, backwards remnant of the United States of America, the transcontinental railroad was never completed, the Native American tribes never defeated, and Deseret (the original Mormon name for Utah) still has polygamy, while a Klu Klux Klan-like militia called the Grand Old Army fights against the overwhelming economic influence of the Confederate States of America, a/k/a those damn Southrons.

Robert Sheckley, Mindswap. 

The exact plot escapes my memory – something involving a guy who ends up in an alien body and his attempts to get home, involving jaunts across many strange planets - but Sheckley is that rare thing, the genuinely hilarious s.f. writer.

John Brunner, Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. 

These weren’t quite sequels but more like companion books, both set in an overpopulated future, Sheep I think nearer the present and more polluted and ruined, Zanzibar more about pop cultural overdrive, the pressures of overcrowding. Both excellent.

Frederick Pohl and CM Kornbluth, The Space Merchants  and Gladiator At Law

Possibly my favorite s.f. book ever - certainly the most reread. Another one set in an overcrowded, ecologically ruined future, this time a world dominated by advertising agencies. Written in the 50s circa Vance Packard and The Hidden Persuaders but surprisingly not dated at all and probably has renewed interest because of Mad Men and our culture of branding, Facebook ads, micro-targeted propaganda etc.   Pohl and Kornbluth wrote a bunch of really excellent books both separately and together – they belonged to this cabal of NY-based, mostly Communist or left-aligned writers who called themselves the Futurians, so the anti-capitalist slant of Space Merchants makes sense in this light.   Gladiator At Law, also excellent, is set in a similarly dark, corporate dominated future, where the masses are kept happy by a revival of  Roman style bloodsports

Walter Miller, A Canticle For Leibowitz 

Absolute classic set in the Dark Ages several centuries after world war three, with monks who preserve the lost knowledge and painstakingly copy onto parchment the circuitry diagrams for machines they no longer know what they were for. Beautifully written and wry

Alfred Bester, the Demolished Man, and Tiger, Tiger (also published as The Stars My Destination)  Two more classics. The Demolished Man involves a future where telepathy has been developed and so has teleportation ... and to be honest my memory of the plot/scenario momentarily fails me, but it’s.... great!   Tiger, Tiger – ditto, I recall more particular amazing scenes.  A great stylist, though, is Alfred Bester and generally accredited as a master.

Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

The book that was turned into Soylent Green but about 10 times superior to the movie. A very grim and gritty, well imagined scenario of overpopulation and resource depletion in New York circa 1999. ‘Soylent’ is not “made out of people” as in the hokey Charles Heston  movie but is just one of the dreary processed foodstuff that people subsist on along with krill burgers and weed crackers. The rich go to “meatleggers’ and “meateasy’s” where they can get some dog or if they are really wealthy and connected, a sliver of beef steak.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Originally wrote this for purposes irrelevant to go into at this juncture - but would obviously add to the list: Philip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle (and a couple of other PKDs), several J.G. Ballards (The Drowned World, High Rise, others), an Aldiss or two (Greybeard, Hothouse) Lem's Solaris and Fiasco definitely, possibly Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex. And I suppose Fahrenheit 451 is undeniable.

Ooh, and most of John Wyndham - particularly The Chrysalids (that should be a movie, I think) and The Midwich Cuckoos and Chocky, but you can't deny The Triffids.

Out of recent years reading in the genre, I don't think anything would get added to this core list, which was consolidated in my mid-teens - except for Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men, which I just read a few months ago, and is a visionary work.

Short stories is a whole other ball game...

Major science fiction writers that I have never read: Asimov, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein (not entirely sure actually that it's zero with him - but certainly nothing has stuck in the memory), a number of other surprising ommissions...

beatriz potty

mouth music marvels from Ms Ferreyra



(voice - Mercedes Cornu)

chimescape (19 of ???)

sex sweet waste stick cheerful straight

the great and the good singles


when it all went down the pan



reputedly about Vanessa Redgrave

that was so terrible i have to cheer myself up with some ace B-sides

radiophonia australasia

rausch

chimescape (18 of ???)

Harry Partch instruments from I•HATE•THIS•FILM on Vimeo.