"English money you have me yearning...'

Merry Christmas!

Sorry to lower the tone a bit (again) with my post, but i've come across this Gappy Ranks track called 'English Money' and its bloody good.

In an acidbass kind of way it sort of encapsulates this Christmas spending frenzy, where London snows receipts and we all submit to the consumer fervor.

'I want some money...'

'I hear the fifty pound note calling...'

I promise my next post will be super-intellectual about the voice/speech/Lacan. For now, lets just enjoy some Gappy Ranks.

This is quite old, but what I find interesting is not just the quality of the very early sound recording, but the Radio 4 news reader's reaction to it. She gets the giggles because of the ridiculousness and lack of communicative merit to the recording, ironically, in turn losing her own ability at signified speech. I find the comparison between the two examples of non-sense worth thinking about

DeLanda on the Body without Organs

A long and in-depth talk on the body without organs, as well as several of the other things which were mentioned during the latest session, such as psychedelics, Spinoza's impersonal God, virtual diagrams and the question of the One vs. the Multiple (I really like the part near the end where he critizes Badiou and the student's are trying to dismiss it as false). Another important thing is Deleuze's use of science and mathematics, which is emphasized clearly in this talk, and which I think is important not to forget, since it is easy to just dismiss all of this as some kind of new-age thing, but that's far from the truth, as he points out.

Great session yesterday, particularly the discussion on the embodied voice in relation to Silverman (and D&G), which was something I hadn't thought of earlier. That will probably be useful for me when writing the essay(s).

A rich, improvised manifesto

I had to watch this several times before I turned it into bullet points. Writing as a feminist historian of science she shows that she must also write as a philosopher, and make general, bold, arrogant claims even as she works within the specificity of her immediate concerns. The first few minutes are unbelievably awkward and amusing to watch, because of the various miscommunications and interruptions between the philosopher and her interlocutor. But eventually when things get underway it becomes clear that she had a lot of things on her mind to unload..

- 'The non-anthropomorphic agency of artifacts.'
- Humans as ontologically constituted by the relationality between human and nonhuman liveliness
- Conviviality with nonhuman kinship networks of agency
- Humans do not produce machines, even in areas of direct human invention
- Nontranscendence of the nonhuman and nonanimal- 'life is a verb, and the actors aren't all human'
- 'Point of view' is a limited metaphor because it tends toward anthropomorphism
- Working within small, mundane places to name emergent ontologies
- A resistance to both universalism and relativism: 'a pox on both your houses, thank you.'
- Deadly 'fraternal sibling rivalries' of binary oppositions such as realism and social constructionism--'both supposed choices are a false choice'
- Crosstalk summoned by postcolonialism, intersectional feminist analysis, rearrangements of life and death in general
- Arguing against this kind of general relevance, and for a reveling in finitude
- Lack of translation does not prevent communication; it is its precondition because the condition of language is troping, troping is tripping, and there is no making sense in general, only in fact

AK-47 as Cryptogram

In application of further psycho-political meanderings, ala Avital Ronell's Support Our Tropes (1992), I was reminded of two clips involving the Washington D.C. based, underground show-biz provocateur, Ian Svenonius. In the clip above, Svenonius outlines the technology gap between the AK-47 assault rifle as mythopoeic symbol of revolution, and the brutalist psychogeographic disconnect which tactical smart-missiles provide.

Below is a segment of an interview with Genesis Breyer P.Orridge on Svenonius' talk show, Soft Focus. Although spanning variant topics, in this clip P.Orridge highlights the crypto-symbolic graphic translation of the AK-47, reifying its potency as mythopoeic talisman, as manifestation of the iconic Eye of Horus - God of the Sky, God of War.

Blackout feed: Crack Wars meets Crack W.A.R.

Unconscious Transmission System?

"Animal Trap" by Crack: W.A.R. (We Are Rock). Silent Fantasy, 2002
(Actually did not want to post the video because i know it is not theirs. But.)

...

a different Jagger

Invocation Of My Demon Brother - Kenneth Anger
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

soundtrack for Kenneth Anger's "Invocation of my Demon Brother" staring Anton LaVey, Bobby Beausoleil, and Marjorie Cameron

under/cover

hi guys,
posting something i did last night.
i have been wanting to make a cover for a long time. tried to cover fleetwood mac's "that's all for everyone" but failed miserably. too good to be ruined by me. recently i have become fascinated with the idea of a "bad" or inadequate cover:)) in addition to that i wanted to make a track where u could "hear" the "seams", do whatever. so i covered abba's "honey honey". i dunno what this is really. para-pop. pleasure in pain.

original:





my vers - listen HERE


yours badly,
maria

And one of my favourite theremin players:

"Music plus electricity equals the sound of the 20th century"

re: Maria's post below - here's a fantastic archive piece on Leon Theremin by Mark Sinker

All I want for Christmas...

... is a theremin.

the idea that this is an electronic instrument the playing of which does not include direct (tactile) contact AND the fact that two major theremin virtuosos - clara rockmore & lydia kavina - were/are women...almost makes me want to write an essay about it. at the moment I'm just numbly fascinated tho.

in a way theremin sounds very "analogue", to an untrained ear maybe even like a wind instrument (and dolar has written about wind instruments and women! - p. 45-46 in "A Voice..."). at the same time as it is electronic it is eerie. familiar and yet so strange. becomes even stranger when you actually see how it is played.

I think of a woman's hands. or lap. electronic instruments and women do not really go together. even in 2010, it is rather joanna newsom or smth like this that comes to mind when thinking of a girl and her instrument. cliche but - it is all about the gentle touch, the organic voice. and on the other end of the scale we have kraftwerk, man-machines, vocoders and synths.

but I'd say that THIS is somewhere IN BETWEEN:





handsfree,
maria

Poto and Cabengo

"Poto and Cabengo are twin girls from Southern California who don’t communicate with those around them but have invented a language of their own. In his first American film, Jean-Pierre Gorin weaves a personal documentary around an account of their fate; the film deals with his own exile and the white underclass in San Diego, as well as with the American dream and language itself. In the end the twins are ‘normalised’ by being subjected to a ‘learning process’, which significantly robs them not only of much of their imagination but also of their fascination." (http://www.documenta.de/index.php?id=1331&L=1)
Does anyone now this film...? it's a while ago that I've been seeing it but i remember it as fascinating .. it's not at the library though.. :(

All of us are by nature wild beasts.

Our duty as human beings is to become like trainers who keep their animals in check, and even teach them to perform tasks alien to their bestiality. (Ton Nakajima)

This is a quote from 'Tropical Malady', directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, kindly recommended by Hae-Jin. Now I also know that the VIENNALE 2010 trailer was made by him. It made me think about another trailer of this small film festival, from 2008, made by Godard. Both very beautiful i think ...

'Empire' by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and 'Une Catastrophe' by Jean-Luc Godard.

Have you heard about Kuduro?

I first heard about it 10 years ago in the house of a friend in the outskirts of Lisbon, he had a cd of Helder o Rei do Kuduro (The King of Kuduro). I couldn't get it by then, we (the portuguese whites) were too appart from any African music (due to the recent past of the still unspoken colonial war). It came from Angola and grew on an outskirt just nextdoor to my house. By now, it influences Portuguese mainstream music, proliferated internationally by bands such as Buraka Som Sistema that have on the past year put a song together with M.I.A.
But i'd say the kings are Helder, Puto Prata and every small outkast project.
It is extremely powerfull to listen, sing along and dance to.


here's a wiki text on Kuduro:

Kuduro (or kuduru) is a type of music originally born in Angola in the 1980s. It is characterized as uptempo, energetic, and danceable.

The roots of kuduro can be traced to the late 1980s when producers in Luanda, Angola started mixing African percussion samples with simple calypso and soca rhythms to create a style of music then known as "batida". European and American electronic music had begun appearing in the market, which attracted Angolan musicians and inspired them to incorporate their own musical styles.An Angolan MC, Sebem, began toasting over this and is credited with starting the genre.

The name itself is a word with a specific meaning to location in the Kimbundu language, which is native to the northern portion of Angola. It has a double meaning in that it also translates to "hard ass" or "stiff bottom" in Portuguese, which is the official language of Angola. Kuduro dancing is similar to Dancehall dancing of Jamaica. It combines traditional Angolan Kilapanga, Semba and Zouk with Western house and techno. As Vivian Host points out in her article, despite the common assumption that "world music" from non-Western countries holds no commonalities with Western modern music, Angolan kuduro does contain "elements in common with punk, deep tribal house, and even Daft Punk. It is thus the case that cultural boundaries and limitations within the musical spectrum are constantly shifting and being redefined. And though Angolan kuduro reflects an understanding and, further, an interpretation of Western musical forms, the world music category that it fits under tends to reject the idea of Western musical imperialism.The larger idea here is that advancements in technology and communications and the thrust of music through an electronic medium have made transcending cultural and sonic musical structures possible. According to Blentwell Podcasts, kuduro is a "mixture of house, hip-hop, and ragga elements," which illustrates how this is at once an Angolan-local and global music. Indeed, this "musical cross-pollination", as Vivian Host calls it, represents a local appropriation of global musical forms, such that the blending of different musics creates the music of a "new world."