Marcus Boon: Writings Philip Corner: A Long Life, Endless as the Sky "I have a very hard time believing in the past," says Philip Corner, speaking from his home in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where he has lived since 1992. "In some way it's just not real to me. I've always had a sense of things being outside of time. It doesn't matter historically when something was written. I've even indicated in some things where I've come very close to a universal principle, of putting in the score that this can be done again under a different title, under a different composer's name." Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader - A Review I was a teenage Semiotext(e) reader. When I first arrived in New York in 1982 aged 18, the newly published "Polysexuality" issue of the journal, with its bulbous leatherman on a motorbike on the cover and its "sadistic" blurred interior typeface, embodied a vision of art and knowledge that promised to open up secret worlds hidden in the gloom of Reagan's America and Thatcher's UK. Outside of the music of Reynols and Kagel, the experimental music scene in Argentina remains largely unknown. The economic crisis in Argentina has worsened the situation by shutting down festivals hosted by the Experimenta label that allowed some kind of dialog to occur between local musicians and the rest of the world. At this stage, even posting CDs abroad has become prohibitively expensive. So much for the joys of IMF funded globalization. Tropical Truth is the long awaited translation of Brazilian Música Popular Brasiliera (MPB) singer Caetano Veloso's autobiography - although Veloso himself resists this word, noting that the real subject of his book is the history of tropicália, the late sixties explosion of Brazilian avant rock by figures like Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes and Tom Ze. The time of tropicália, 1967-1972, also spans a key period of Veloso's own career, from his self-titled 1967 LP, which featured songs like "Tropicália" and "Superbacana", to his marvelous, still under-appreciated 1972 record Araça Azul, with its extraordinary mix of musique concrète, Brazilian regional folk-song, heavy metal and sweet, surrealist pop. In a recent seminar in New York, post 091101, French philosopher Jacques Derrida noted a link between music and forgiveness. He described an exchange between philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, who has written passionately of the impossibility of forgiving the Germans for the Holocaust, and a young German, who wrote an eloquent, unevasive response to Jankelevitch, describing his own feelings of guilt regarding an event that occurred before he was even born, and inviting him to visit him in Germany. "I am come to tell you that I am Osama, risen from the dead like a phoenix," says a matter of fact voice on Montreal-based psychedelic/improv musician Sam Shalabi's extraordinary new release, Osama. The title word summons up the ghost of the hidden or deceased Al Qaeda leader in act of apparent provocation, but it also turns out to be Shalabi's first name. Michael Snow's Digital Snow DVD Reviewing, or even getting an overall picture of five highly productive decades of work by 72 year old Canadian film-maker, musician, writer, photographer, painter, sculptor and sound poet Michael Snow, is a daunting prospect. The recent release of a retrospective DVD-ROM devoted to cataloging and showcasing Snow's work in just about every media known to man, comes as welcome relief to the novice approaching Snow's work for the first time, and also provides an unusual example of a "multimedia" artefact, whose ability to skip and connect different media is actually warranted, and not just a gratuitous adding on of "interactive" bells and whistles. I am standing on a street-corner in New York's Chinatown, on a winter afternoon. The voice in my CD Walkman's headphones tells me that there is a black door on the right, and that I should open it and get inside. I turn and sure enough, there it is. I enter a rundown tenement building next to a Chinese beauty parlor. "Now walk to the third floor", the voice says. So I follow the recorded footsteps up the stairs, while the voice explains to me that in apartment number 3, lives a former Chinese triad boss, who likes to play cards in his apartment. "Visual. Concrete. Sound" announces the sleek, minimalist homepage of UbuWeb, giving little indication of the vast store of sonic, visual and textual treasures that lies within: thousands of MP3 and real audio soundfiles that archive a vast area in the international history of oral and sound poetry, sound art, and concrete poetry"Visual. Concrete. Sound" announces the sleek, minimalist homepage of UbuWeb, giving little indication of the vast store of sonic, visual and textual treasures that lies within: thousands of MP3 and real audio soundfiles that archive a vast area in the international history of oral and sound poetry, sound art, and concrete poetry. Once upon a time, there were enormous halls, which could be found in many cities, where you could go and listen to the raw blast of Just Intonation tuned drone music every week, under a cascade of multi-colored lights. It was said by those who had visited these halls that this was the loudest sound in the world, and people crowded into these halls week after week, to be saturated in sound and light, and have ecstatic experiences. I am not talking about the lofts of downtown Manhattan where in the early 1960s, La Monte Young, John Cale, Tony Conrad and friends created the colossal drones of the Theater of Eternal Music, from which the Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine and most of what is best in late twentieth century Western culture issued forth. Nor am I talking about the communes and basements of West Germany and Switzerland in the 1970s, where Can, Amon Duul and Ashra Tempel and company took keyboard driven raga rock into interstellar overdrive. Michael Harrison's Revelation: A Review New York based composer/pianist Michael Harrison cut his teeth as La Monte Young's piano tuner for The Well Tuned Piano in the 1980s, and as the only pianist aside from Young authorized to perform the epic piece. A long time student of the late Indian raga masters Pandit Pran Nath, and, more recently, Ustad Mashkor Ali Khan, Harrison has continued Young's exploration of just intonation tuning on a specially redesigned "harmonic piano" with a pedal that allows Harrison to modulate pitches around any key, allowing the piano to play 24 pitches per octave. The life of a Honduran shrimp fisherman is not an obvious theme for a piece of cutting edge post-glitch, beatless, wordless electronica, but that's what Montreal-based Tim Hecker's new Mille Plateaux release, Radio Amor is about. "I was totally obsessed with the idea of fishermen in the Caribbean," recalls Hecker. "Fucked up, crapped out transmissions that weren't receiving totally. Disjunctures in every form. Just the loneliness of being at sea - the idea of the heat, the shitty radios they have on their boats, the sea." If that's the case, this is probably the most un-tropical piece of music about the Caribbean ever made - no beats, just surging drones and distorted tone clusters, laced with static and noise. Speaking before this Electronic Music Foundation sponsored retrospective of his work at the newly opened Chelsea Art Museum, sound art pioneer Alvin Lucier recalled a remark made by Stravinsky, who called compositions which were based on classical models, but which were so original as to appear totally beyond them, "monstrous originals". Lucier commented wryly that he set out to produce such monsters - and Music for Solo Performer, which was first performed in 1965, indeed remains such a monster. William Burroughs called Morocco's northern port city of Tangier Interzone back in the 1950s, and described it as "the market where all human potentials are spread out." Musically speaking, this remains a pretty good description of the Djemaa el Fna ("the place of the dead"), the large square at the center of the southern Moroccan city of Marrakech. "I really enjoy the sound of hummingbirds," says Toronto-based composer Sarah Peebles. "In New Mexico there are a lot of them and I recorded them. That sound is really interesting and when you cut it up and slow it down, to me there's a transformation that occurs, especially since I have a memory of when they were flying by." Three Recordings By Henry Flynt: A Review These three releases continue the rediscovery and renaissance of minimalist hillbilly fiddler extraordinaire Henry Flynt, which began last year with the release of New American Ethnic Music volume 1 on Baltimore improv impresario John Berndt's Recorded records, , and Graduation, a startling collection of jazz-rock-hoedown pieces that was originally slated for release in 1980. "Is it OK to talk about what we think about this civilization?" asks 61 year old hillbilly minimalist fiddler and philosopher Henry Flynt, in his broad southern accent, as we drink coffee in a restaurant in New York's Soho, where he lives. "It's the aftermath of a wreck. It's just in a condition of destruction. I'm trying to think of a more polite word than putrefaction. Everything that is organic is dead and decomposing, and everything that's not organic is twisted and fused." Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. By Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco. A review. Although a great deal of lip service is paid to the importance of new technologies in contemporary music, most analyses of such technologies amount to treating them as manna from heaven - gifts that fall out of the sky which are then picked up by musicians and entrepreneurs and used to jumpstart technocultures. 12k/LINE: Zen and the Art of the Drum Machine "Minimalism Keeps Getting Starker", announce the sleeve-notes to Chronologi, a compilation of recordings from the first four years of Brooklyn based Taylor Deupree's ultraminimal label 12k. So stark that Deupree recently started a separate side label, LINE, with Washington DC based sound artist Richard Chartier to explore mostly beatless realms of virtual silence. Chartier's recently issued Of Surfaces must rank alongside fellow LINE artist Bernhard Gunter's work as one of the quietest CDs ever made. For the first two and a half minutes, you think that there's been a mistake. Catherine Christer Hennix's The Electric Harpsichord Although Catherine Christer Hennix once told me that "The Electric Harpsichord" should be listened to at a volume of 100 db in order to bring out the full range of overtones contained within the piece, and although she has said that the piece is in fact infinite and thus unsuited to the time-constrained formats of the recording industry, listening to the CD of "The Electric Harpsichord" on a home stereo remains an extraordinary experience.
The titles of New York based Raz Mesinai a.k.a. Badawi's three ROIR CDs Bedouin Sound Clash, Jerusalem Under Fire and the newly issued The Soldier of Midian all take a warrior stance that sounds pretty provocative in the wake of September 11 and it's aftermath. The music itself is aggressive too: the first two records filled with righteous nyabhingi drums stalking through digi-dub loops and heavily processed vocals, while Soldier explodes with Middle Eastern percussion, Persian horn samples and dulcimer licks cut up with a major dose of studio tricknology. Naming the Enemy: AIDS Research, Contagion and the Discovery of HIV (1996) Susan Sontag, as is well known, has written a book called AIDS and its Metaphors, addressing on the one hand, the medical condition called AIDS; on the other hand, the social meanings that the medical condition takes on. The last decade has seen a thorough evaluation of these social meanings by critics, and groups like ACT UP, who have contested the social meanings of AIDS on the streets and in the courts. Although these remain issues to be struggled with on a daily basis, they are issues of which the community of people intimately affected by AIDS are aware.
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LINKS: Harvard homepage for The Road of Excess.
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