Chanca Via Circuito’s remix is so simple and perfect.

Crash Course in Science – Pompeii Saved

Pompeii was not saved. Pompeii is a lie. Pompeii was saved by the mythology of the natural forces of the universe. Pompeii was saved by a lie, pompeii is not what a pompeii is what a pompeii does.

———>>>>> This way

Mechanical movements all the way up to celestial bodies. Dancing, music, and Mubarek are all products of a fundamentally mechanistically conceived universe. Where there is probability, there are merely new mechanisms to be designed. Eventually, even robots choose to smile.

Ballet Mecanique

This is so much wiredness.

I saw Shiver of the Vampire in Chicago (RIP Jean Rollin) maybe four years ago? Most likely a rental from Odd Obsessions. Even though I’m pretty sure I watched the movie sober, I don’t really remember a thing about it aside from the soundtrack, which was fantastic. It was composed by some French band called Acanthus whose members were all in high school, and according to one internet account, met during May ’68. Don’t know anything else about them, as far as I know their existence begins and ends with this film. The music is great though, on a doomy Pink Floyd tip.

Acanthus – Night Excursion

Soundtrack music is fantastic. Distilling musical vision into 45 second to 2 and a half minute gems.

Body Swap – Street Beverage Demo

There will be another show in September, also at the Knockout most likely. More details as they come.

The craziest thing I ever heard about Oren Ambarchi is that apparently someone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers is a big fan of this dude, and that apparently he jammed with them during an encore of theirs in New Zealand, and it bummed out an stadium full of their fans. That sounds like internet apocrypha, but I believe it anyway.

I think Grapes from the Estate is probably the most perfect record I have ever heard. It is mostly sparsely arranged tones and sine waves and such. But at times it gets impossibly complicated even if it still sounds sparse to someone who isn’t paying any attention. It all comes together for me on “Girl With the Silver Eyes”, which is the second track, but I have the double LP with one track per side, so I have maximum flexibility with my listening experience of this album, and I usually let that track serve as a conclusion.

You can’t really listen to this album on a computer; there is nothing to hear on a computer speaker. I heard an anecdote once that the key to selling expensive cars was a great stereo system. So how come no one tries the same thing with computers? Or homes? You could plug your computer or record player directly into your house, and the walls would be speakers. Or why even plug anything in? We have wireless internet connections, and wireless guitars, how come nothing like that for our audio sources? Everyone I talk to seems to agree that you can’t make money anymore from music. There was never much money to be made in the first place, and now there isn’t anything really. They are probably right, but it could also be that people are just waiting for a new way of experiencing music to buy into. I see lots of arguments about the ethics of downloading music. I won’t get into that because I don’t find it that interesting. I like talking economics – like in the Wire, the forces beyond any one actor’s control. The economics are that music is a surplus commodity, and that the fiction of intellectual property that made it profitable has become impossible to rigorously enforce. Ultimately I think people are going to need not new things to listen to, but new ways to listen to music if anyone is going to make money again.

Excerpt —>>

I think we’ve grown up in this era where rock bands, the rockists, they weren’t really proponents of music as they had kind of subsumed all expression, all art. They became poets, play actors, their records were art, and I think that was all based on the record cover, it was this extra dimension, it made this music physical but it also had to be filled with something. You had this big picture which lent itself this kind of importance, and then you had liner notes, and those inevitably became propaganda, just marketing.

So groups and musicians became more like cult leaders, more ritualistic, trying to recruit people into their cults. That’s really what’s interesting about rock, the people aren’t just content to play music, they have to be remembered, they demand all this kind of fealty from their subjects. To really be a fan you have to show your fandom, you have to own the t-shirt, you have to know the songs, what songs are on what record…

Follow them on tour…

You have to support them. It becomes a religious cult or a political party or whatever it is. As the record has diminished versus CD’s and now the MP3, the whole aspect of a group really diminishes. Groups are becoming much less powerful as cults, in fact I don’t think groups demand that kind of fealty anymore, people don’t really expect to give that kind of power to them

. . .

With all the Dischord groups, it’s almost like you grew up with this sense of urgency in your live shows. Every Dischord band had this incredible dynamic and it seems like it was pretty important to them. Is that maybe where that came from, just the DC scene in general, encouraging you to act out like that?

It’s all the Bad Brains. Every band in DC knew the Bad Brains were the most dynamic live band. Rites of Spring, obviously Fugazi, Minor Threat, Void. And it’s all really gnarly, physical, exciting. It’s meant to be exciting. And I think a lot of times it really was. That’s definitely the context we all came up in. And it’s interesting because it’s all like a process of unlearning to perform in another way. That’s just second nature to people from that generation in DC, to be very physical. But like British people are continental, being cool, like there’s this idea like why would I try too hard, it’s not very cool.

Just strike a pose and leave it at that…

Right, like Jesus and Mary Chain, or Oasis, any of those groups that just kind of stand there. And that’s cool too, that’s just a whole other approach…because they’re just much more focused on the record. That’s the thing, Dischord and DC, punk, hardcore, it all came out of a context where there was a feeling that there was no access, and there was all this anger and just like “how do we get across?” We had to do it physically with our bodies. In England, they’ve always had access. Now bands in America feel like they have access. There’s no longer any anger, no sense of a need to exert yourself because you can do it through YouTube or you can do it through the blogs, do you know what I mean?

In high school when I heard the Nation of Ulysses’ crazy guitar feedback, horn riffs from the aggressive side of jazz, and the crazy recording style on Plays Pretty for Baby I was a changed man. I wanted to hear more like that. Of course, there is nothing else that sounds like that album. As a result, I ended up drifting away from listening to a lot of punk rock, and got more into things like free jazz, dub, and house music. In other words, a great development. This video footage is from 1992, so it was towards the end of the band’s life, and they were just a four piece.

The Primitives – The Ostrich

Before Lou Reed was in the Velvet Underground he was a hack songwriter at Pickwick Records. John Cale & Tony Conrad were shocked to discover that Reed got his guitar sound by tuning all the strings to the same note, a technique they felt created a drone sound similar to what they were doing with La Monte Young. Pretty crazy stuff for a throwaway pop song.