Peter Greenaway & Tom Phillips - A TV Dante

Peter Greenaway & Tom Phillips - A TV Dante (1983)

This ambitious program, produced by the award-winning film director Peter Greenaway and internationally-known artist Tom Phillips, brings to life the first eight cantos of Dante's Inferno. Featuring a cast that includes Sir John Gielgud as Virgil, the cantos are not conventionally dramatized. Instead, the feeling of Dante's poem is conveyed through juxtaposed imagery that conjures up a contemporary vision of hell, and its meaning is deciphered by eminent scholars in visual sidebars who interpret Dante's metaphors and symbolism. This program makes Dante accessible to the MTV generation. Caution to viewers: program contains nudity. (8 segments, 11 minutes each)


RESOURCES:

This UbuWeb resource is presented in partnership with Greylodge and Art Torrents

Philip Glass "Mad Rush"

Philip Glass "Mad Rush" from The Kitchen Presents Two Moon July

Warning: media reports on suicide can be fatal

* Bad science/frankenstein/boris karloff
*
o Ben Goldacre
o The Guardian, Saturday 28 March 2009
o Article history

This week, in my crescendoing tirade against journalism, we shall review the evidence that the media actually kills people. The suicide of Sylvia Plath's son has filled the news. The media obsessed - understandably - over genetics, when mental illness is probably the single biggest risk factor, but the coverage has been universally thoughtful, considerate, informed, and responsible.

This is not always the case. But before we get there, one important cause of suicide seems to have been missed. In The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe the hero shoots himself because his love is unattainable. The book was banned after men throughout Europe were reported to be dressing like Werther, copying his affectations, and taking their own lives in the same style.

But a myth about a book is not enough: you need research. And it has been shown repeatedly that suicide increases in the month after a front page suicide story. There is also evidence that the effect is bigger for famous people and gruesome attempts.

Overdoses increased by 17% in the week after a prominent overdose on Casualty (watched by 22% of the population at the time). In 1998 the Hong Kong media reported heavily on a case of carbon monoxide poisoning by a very specific method, using a charcoal burner. In the 10 months preceding the reports, there had been no such suicides. In November there were three; then in December there were 10; and over the next year there were 40.

And it's not pie in the sky to suggest the media should be careful in how they discuss suicide. After the introduction of media reporting guidelines in Austria, there was a significant decrease in the number of people throwing themselves under trains.

So organisations such as the Samaritans suggest that journalists avoid crass phrases such as "a successful suicide attempt". They suggest that journalists avoid explicit or technical details of suicide methods, for reasons you can now understand. They suggest that journalists include details of further sources for help and advice, since an article about suicide represents a great opportunity to target people at risk with useful information. And they recommend avoiding simplistic explanations for suicide.

From the weekly mass of reports that trample on this perfectly good common sense, one article from the Telegraph at the tail end of last year particularly sticks in my memory. It is very different from the coverage of Plath's son.

"Man cut off own head with chainsaw" was the headline. "A man cut off his head with a chainsaw because he did not want to leave his repossessed home." What the Telegraph published was a horrific, comprehensive, explicit and detailed instruction manual.

This information was so appallingly technical and instructive that after some discussion we have decided that the Guardian will not print it, even in the context of a critique. It gives truly staggering details on exactly what to buy, how to rig it up, how to use it, and even how to make things more comfortable while waiting for death to come. Suicidal thoughts are common. They pass.

Journalists get these kinds of stories from inquests, which are open to the public because we decided as a community, centuries ago, that it was important to be transparent about the judicial process.

Perhaps Plath's son will have a public inquest. Perhaps the media will cover it in the same way that the Telegraph covered the chainsaw case. I doubt they will, and I very much hope they won't. It's just hard to tell which is the journalist's true voice: the caring, compassionate, informed consolation, or the murderously detailed chainsaw voyeurism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...de-bad-science

Via DavidIcke.com

THE AMORPHOUS ANDROGYNOUS

The Peppermint Tree And Seeds of Superconsciousness

Moondog - All Is Loneliness

Moondog - All Is Loneliness

I Monster - Daydream In Blue

Daydream In Blue by I MONSTER has become a part of the soundtrack to our lives through huge presence on TV in adverts and through being sampled by artists such as Lupe Fiasco. It's a great record by a great band. For the original uncensored video version check out www.redemption-records.com

Ballardian: R.I.P. J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

J.G. Ballard - Shanghai Jim

Following J.G. Ballard from Shepperton to Shanghai and back, looking at the scenes of his life which inspired his autobiographical novels. This is a BBC original production which aired in 1991, directed by James Runcie. It chronicles J.G. Ballard's first trip to Shanghai after he first left it in 1946. He discusses his ilfe and his work especially his two autobiographical novels, _Empire of the Sun_ and _The Kindness of Women_. There are also bits there about _Crash_ and _Vermilion Sands_. A must for any J.G. Ballard fan.

Quality is far from perfect as this is a VHS rip

Lemon Jelly

Lemon Jelly (formed in 1998) is a British electronica duo from London, UK consisting of Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin.




Franglen and Deakin initially released three limited-circulation EPs, The Bath (1998), The Yellow (1999), and The Midnight (2000), which were then collected into a widely-released album in 2000, lemonjelly.ky, which was both a critical and a commercial success.

Their second album (and self-proclaimed first studio album), Lost Horizons, was released in 2002, and was another success.

Their last album, 2005’s ’64-‘95, featured a sticker to warn listeners that “This is our new album. It’s not like our old album.” The title comes from the fact that each track features a single sample drawn from years between 1964 and 1995, incorporating each sample in a variety of imaginative ways.

Some of their best or well-known songs are:

- The Staunton Lick
- Kneel Before Your God
- Space Walk
- Nice Weather For Ducks
- ’75 aka Stay With You
- ’90 aka A Man Like Me

They have also made mix sets for Radio 1’s Mary-Anne Hobbs’ ‘Breezeblock’ show, as well as for a variety of other shows (6 Mix, XFM’s ‘The Hijack’, The Blue Room, etc). They have remixed a number of other artists, including Badly Drawn Boy, Pet Shop Boys and Coldcut, as well as collaborating with William Shatner on a track from his latest album.

Fred Deakin is also co-founder and creative director of print and interactive design agency, Airside

Lemon Jelly - Lost Horizons

Tracklist:
1.Elements
2.Space Walk
3.Ramblin' Man
4.Return To Patagonia
5.Nice Weather For Ducks
6.Experiment Number Six
7.Closer
8.The Curse Of Ka'Zar

Lost Horizons

Scrapiteria

Scrapiteria is made up of collagists who work in the traditional cut and paste method. Each week, one of the members posts a new theme which they all intrepret in their own way.

Scrapiteria

The Reactable

The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

The instrument was developed by a team of digital luthiers (Sergi Jordà, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger and Marcos Alonso), working in the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona Spain. Their main activities concentrate on the design of new musical interfaces, such as tangible music instruments and musical applications for mobile devices. The reactable team was recently awarded with various prizes such as the "Ars Electronica Golden Nica", the "Premi de la Cuitat de Barcelona 2007" and two "D&AD Yellow Pencils" and the Icelandic singer Björk has successfully used the reactable during her last "Volta" world tour.

The reactable intends to be:

• collaborative: several performers (locally or remotely)
• intuitive: zero manual, zero instructions
• sonically challenging and interesting
• learnable and masterable (even for children)
• suitable for novices (installations) and advanced electronic musicians (concerts)

The reactable hardware is based on a translucent, round multi-touch surface. A camera situated beneath the table, continuously analyzes the surface, tracking the player's finger tips and the nature, position and orientation of physical objects that are distributed on its surface. These objects represent the components of a classic modular synthesizer, the players interact by moving these objects, changing their distance, orientation and the relation to each other. These actions directly control the topological structure and parameters of the sound synthesizer. A projector, also from underneath the table, draws dynamic animations on its surface, providing a visual feedback of the state, the activity and the main characteristics of the sounds produced by the audio synthesizer.

Robert Moog playing the Reactable

Chris Brown playing the Reactable

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms is a 1940 motion picture which documents Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms. It is available from the Prelinger Archives, where it is in the public domain. The British scientist J. B. S. Haldane appears in the film's introduction and narrates the film, which contains Russian text with English applied next to, or over the top of, the Russian. The operations are credited to Doctor Sergei S. Bryukhonenko.

Keitai Girl

Yamaguchi Noriko is Under Our Skin

Emerging Japanese artist Yamaguchi Noriko gets under our skin thanks to what covers hers. Currently in her last year of an MFA program at the Kyoto City University of the Arts, this 22-year-old artist from Kobe tackles issues as diverse as technology, mythology and feminism through bodily transformation and endurance. Yamaguchi uses her body to challenge present-day social mores by quite literally camouflaging herself with materials such as red azuki beans, golden thumbtacks and silvery cell phone keypads which become a constructed second skin that acts as a meaning-laden barrier against the world beyond. The art world in Japan has already recognized Yamaguchi as an up-and-coming talent: in 2004, she was selected by famed photographer Hosoe Eikoh as a recipient of the Panel of Judges Award at the 21st-Century Asia Design Competition award held by the Kyoto University of Art and Design and again by Morimura Yasumasa as a winner of a young artists’ competition hosted by the Osaka Contemporary Art Center.

Yamaguchi’s work is awash in sexual politics due to the extreme modifications she enacts during performances or in front of the camera. In Keitai Girl (2003), the artist dons a skin-tight body suit reminiscent of metallic fish scales that is carefully crafted from cell phone keypads. Her face painted in the traditional powdery white makeup of Butoh, Yamaguchi wears large headphones and is draped from head to toe with wires seemingly ripped from a telecommunications command center, setting her adrift and alone in the ether. The suit, thanks to its digital keypads, begs to be dialed, thus showing the vulnerable position of the artist within the grasp of any number of anonymous hands that might reach out and “touch someone.” In fact, certain guests are given the telephone number of her body suit and can dial her up from their own cell phones and engage Yamaguchi in conversation during her performances. Thanks to the widespread use of cell phones, or keitai, in Japan, Yamaguchi created this suit—a full-body prosthetic that turns her into a walking and talking cellular device—to investigate the future development of the human body and its interaction with technology.

In another series, “Ogurara Hime,” or “The Princess of Ogura” (2004), Yamaguchi covers portions of her body with red beans to visually recreate the Japanese myth of Princess Ogura who became a human garden whose body sprouted forth azuki beans. Yamaguchi uses this ancient Japanese tale as a metaphor in her visualization of the female body as a site of production on a multitude of levels. In one image, long cords of red beans sprout forth from Yamaguchi’s head and attempt to take root in the ground just below her recumbent body. Her pale white flesh and exposed breasts become fertile ground that gives rise to crops and, perhaps more likely, to male desire and sexual objectification.

With her sexually charged examinations of the human body and its potential transmutations at the hands of technology and society, Yamaguchi Noriko’s skin trade is bound to remain on the Japanese art market for some time to come.

- Eric Shiner

MORE INFO

Her Website

A short film of Keitai Girl

Via Professor Strange

Dick Raaijmakers

• Dick Raaijmakers, [co]inventor of common things like: Chorus, Delay, Echo, Reverb, Ambiophonics, Surround, the sample, and already working with reversed tapeloops, reversable echo's and playing rhythm-tapes backwards, years before, The Beatles first discovered it in 1966, placing it on their newest album "Revolver". Besides that Dick Raaijmakers composed, arranged and released the first electronic pop tune on vinyl, back in 1956.

• Dick Raaijmakers was born September 1st in 1930 in Maastricht, which lies in the south of The Netherlands. He originally studied piano at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.

• Dick Raaijmakers [aka Kid Baltan], is one of, if not, THE most important composers of electronic music in the world. He's now in his late seventies, and composed the very first electronic pop tune in 1957 called: "Song Of The Second Moon". It delt with spacetravel, a theme that was popular due to the first man in space Yuri Gagarin. Back then he was asked by a Director who worked at Philips in Eindhoven to compose "popular electronic music" and "Song Of The Second Moon" was the first tune.

• It was never "officially" released because on the b-side it had an electronic version of "Colonel Bogey", from the film "Bridge Over The River Kwai", which the widow of the original composer Alford wouldn't allow being released, but maybe the Philips directors didn't like the song! The 7" was not released but found it's way to business relations around the world, since Philips pressed 2000 copies and gave them away as relationship presents to their customers back then, landing most of them in depots across the globe. Ironically, this was the start of worldwide recognition and fame, since the remarkable record was being played by radiostations across the globe [in that time, groundbreaking music! The electronic Era has started!], it was even used in Ballet!

• "Song Of The Second Moon" actually was created by oscillators, tone-generators, several Studer A-810 Tape Recorders and a scissor! It was an ingenious piece of effects and melodies with dozins of "frames" that had to be edited by hand and scissor, the old fashion "cut and paste".

• Due to copyright reasons relating to his work at the Philips Laboratories also known as NATLAB, he couldn't use his real name for his compositions, which would be released, therefore he came up with the idea to call himself "KID BALTAN", Dick his first name reversed, and NATLAB reversed to BALTAN. A groundbreaking legend was born!

• Dick Raaijmakers was part of a team that consisted of 3 other members †Tom Dissevelt [a Jazz composer], †Henk Badings and †Roelof Vermeulen who all took part in inventing normal things like: Chorus, Delay, Echo, Reverb, Surround, Ambiophony, Dolby, and they were the first people who invented the "sample", before the word "sample" was in the dictionary...! With these experiments at Philips NATLAB [Natuurkundig Laboratorium] in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Philips had a huge technological advantage over others like RCA and †Dr.Robert Moog.

• On February 23rd 1965 Dick Raaijmakers got a letter from Polaris Productions Inc. New York. He was asked by American Film Director/Producer †Stanley Kubrick, if he could compose and produce electronic music for his forth-coming film: 2001 A Space Odyssey. Mr.Raaijmakers declined Mr. Kubrick's request.. [copy of the letter, sent by Polaris Productions Inc. can be found in the CD-Box]

• In 1967 he writes his last electronic composition and expands his horizons towards several other things in music, art, film, motion, sound, light as a designer, author, musician and artist.

→ 1953
• Working for 2 years on essambly line at the Philips Radio & Television department in Eindhoven.

→ 1954 - 1960
• Employed by Philips NV in the field of electro-acoustics.

• Co-inventor, creator and pioneer of today's normal things like: Chorus, Delay, Echo, Reverb, Surround, Ambiophony, Dolby and he is one of the first people, who invented the "sample", before the word "sample" was in the dictionary...!

→ 1956
• Composes, co-produces and arranges the world's FIRST electronic "poptune" on vinyl called: "Song Of The Second Moon", which was released on the Philips Record Label "Phonogram" back in 1957...

→ 1960 - 1962
• Research assistant at the State University in Utrecht.

• Developer/consultant of the "Philicorda", an electronic organ. [1962]

→ 1967
• He writes his last electronic composition.

→ 2004
• Awarded with the Johan Wagenaarprijs 2004 for his entire oeuvre.

→ ACHIEVEMENTS

• Compositions: ↓

From 1957-1967 Raaijmakers composed electronic works for films such as: "5 Canons", "Flux", and "Ballade" [Erlkönig].

In 1956 he produces, composes and arranges world's first electronic "poptune" on vinyl called: "Song Of The Second Moon", which was released in 1957 on the Philips Record Label "Phonogram".

In 1960 he composes, produces and releases "Mechanical Motions".

In 1961 he co-produces and releases "Intersection". [with †Tom Dissevelt]

In 1963 the legendary LP "Fantasy in Orbit" is released.

In 1969 he created so called instruction-works for string ensembles, in wich the relationship between tone and tone-production was explored: "Nachtmuziek", "Schaakmuziek", "Kwartet", "Kwintet", "De lange mars".

From 1967 till 1972 Raaijmakers developed Phono-kinetic objects, a trio of ideophones scaled up to museum requirements and displayed in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam [1971] and in 1973 in the Gemeente Museum in The Hague.

In 1976 De grafische methode tractor was created, followed in 1979 by De grafische methode fiets: works intended for presentation in an auditorium, derived from the work of the French researcher of motion and film pioneer, Etienne-Jules Marey [1830-1904].

In 1977 he developed a series of models of electro-chemical batteries and of primary electric archetype-forms for presentation at museums. In this year as a result of the death of Mao Tse Tung, he created "Mao leve!" [Long live Mao]: "an audio-visual exercise in artificial sentiment".

From 1981 - 1984 he designed and realized a series of "versions" [operations] for tape, film, theatre, percussion ensemble, museum and performance based on a single theme: "Nightowls", one of the first sound movies of Laurel and Hardy from 1930: "Shhh!", "The microman", "The soundman", "Ow!" and "Come on!". This series has been performed in the Holland Festival 1984, in which Raaijmakers was the 'featured composer'.

In 1983 he developed "Ping-pong", a stereo-radio-report of a table-tennis game between the composers Louis Andriessen en Cornelis de Bondt.

In 1984 the performance "Extase" [in memoriam Josine van Droffelaar] was realized.

In 1984/1985 he designed an eight-part artwork of glass, transparent film and mechanical motion devices, for the Rijkskantorengebouw in Arnhem.

In 1985 he designed an artwork using neon and color technique, for the new building of the Stedelijk Conservatorium in Groningen.

• Publications: ↓

In 1978 Raaijmakers wrote the essay "De kunst van het machinelezen" [The art of machine reading], in the literary journal Raster-6, concerning the artistic, that is visual, aspects of appearance of technical constructions in our world.

Since 1979 Raaijmakers prepares a book dealing with the visual representation of motion with the help of technical devices. [in 1985 part I "De methode" [The method] is published by Bert Bakker in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

In 1984 Raaijmakers wrote the essay: "De val van Mussolini" [The fall of Mussolini] in Raster-29.

Since 1989 he works on the publication of "Kleine mechanica van de open vorm" [Small Mechanics of the open form].

• Compact Discs: ↓

In co-operation with NEAR a 3 cd-box appeared with "The complete tape music" [CV-NEAR 09/10/11]

Works together with Basta Music and many others to recover found "artifacts" that †Tom Dissevelt secretly left behind and that where found in 2004, co-creating the 4 cd box: "Popular Electronics", which is released by Basta Music.

• Prizes: ↓

In 1985 Dick Raaijmakers received the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize [by the Amsterdam Art Fund] for the performance Extase.

In 1992 he was awarded the Prize for Visual Arts by the foundation Beeldende Kunsten Amsterdam.

In 1994 he receives the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize again, now for his compositions "Der Fall/Dépons" and "Die Glückliche Hand/geöffnet".

In 1995 he was awarded the Ouborg Prize [by the city of The Hague] for the remarkable way he unites different forms of art.

In 2004 awarded the Dutch Johan Wagenaarprijs 2004 for his entire oeuvre.

• Other: ↓

In 1992 Dick Raaijmakers destroyed twelve microphones by cooking, crushing and burning them. The goal of the experiment was to demonstrate that a microphone can never be a musical instrument.

He is also fascinated by soundproducing installations, where the vibrations of speakers, launch metal balls and metal plates, which will bounce off the speaker, creating new reinforced vibrations, creating it's own dynamic, replacing the composer!


Dick Raaijmakers aka "Kid Baltan": a musician, an author, a creator, an inventor, a pioneer, a foreseeing technologist, a [r]evolutionaire and truly an icon and legend in time, since our heritage must never be forgotten...


• MORE ON DICK RAAIJMAKERS CAN BE FOUND ON A UNIQUE CD-BOX

• The 4 cd box of BASTA MUSIC contain: exemplary materials on the Philips laboratory, electronic scoring for film, the three featured artists: Dick Raaijmakers aka Kid Baltan, †Henk Badings and †Tom Dissevelt, and extensive track notes, beautifully designed. The CDs concentrate only on the popular and functional productions of the studio, meaning ballet music, industrial film soundtracks and experimental productions of what was intended to be "popular electronic music", that is non-academic electronics pitched somewhere between science fiction beeps and swoops, tunes, lounge and jazz.

• The box contains: 2 ballet scores by †Henk Badings, "Cain and Abel" [1956] and "Evolutionen" [1958], plus "the world's first attempt at popular electronic music" - a single by Kid Baltan [1957] with an unpublished B-side for 3 ondes martinots and backward piano, †Tom Dissevelt's extraordinary "Intersection" for electronic sound and jazz orchestra [1961], plus a few other pieces from 1959 & 1960.

• Also featuring concert and film soundtrack music [1957-1966] including a pretty wild 16 minute unpublished industrial film track by Dick Raaijmakers [using his own name] and works of the lesser known composer †Henk Badings and composer †Tom Dissevelt, whose "Fantasy In Orbit" was bootlegged many times. Pioneering works from the years 1956 to 1963.

• †Raymond Scott's "Manhattan Research" which it in many ways resembles and which was also produced by Basta. This was a critical and interesting period in the history of early electronics, and the Dutch productions have until now been rather ignored. They were important and here they have been given the best presentation anyone could want.


Part 1 - Dick Raaijmakers interview from 1988. He let's the viewer hear an electronic tone on a tape-recorder, and he shows how he used to make "handcrafted samples", also known as the old fashion way of "cut & past" from back in the days [50 years ago]. He also talkes about the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts and the letter he received from him. [also some nice old fashion "bleebs", can be heard. In the last section of this part, he also speaks of Karl Heinz Stockhausen. In Dutch!



Part 2 - Dick Raaijmakers interview from 1988. He shows some examples of his re-edited taperecorder and let's the viewer hear a piece of his works from "5 Canons", he composed around 1965, which he worked on for 3 years non-stop.. In Dutch!

Norwegian Woo: The Beatles / Lebowski connection

by Brian McCloskey

Did you know that The Beatles wrote a song about The Big Lebowski in 1965?

I once had a girl, or should i say, she once had me

This obviously refers to the Dude’s seduction by Maude. It can also refer to the Big Lebowski’s tenuous hold on Bunny. Or to the Knudsens’ failure to keep her down on the farm. Or to Walter’s inability to hold onto Cynthia. (And Cynthia was the name of John Lennon’s first wife.)

She showed me her room, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?

Maude invites the Dude to her studio, which is a very big room. Also, who peed on the Dude’s rug? Woo(d).

She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.

This refers to the second entry into the Dude’s apartment of Jackie Treehorn’s thugs; when they open the door, the Dude’s chair (which had ineffectually blocked the door) falls away.

The Dude is more of a sprawler than a sitter; even when he is in a chair, he tries to make himself horizontal; for example, in his recliner or in the back seat of Maude?s limousine.

Other significant chairs / seats in the movie (not a comprehensive list): the seats at the bowling alley, the car seat behind which the Dude finds Larry’s homework, the seats at Crane Jackson?s Theatre, the sofa at Larry’s house (Larry’s father, of course, has no need of a chair), the sofa onto which the Dude collapses at Jackie Treehorn’s pad, the chair out of which the Dude is knocked when struck by the Sheriff of Malibu’s coffee mug…..and, of course, the Big Lebowski’s wheelchair.

I sat on a rug…

This was a valued rug. That rug really tied the room together. All the Dude ever wanted was his rug back.

The Dude sits on a rug while flying through the air in the dream sequence.

…biding my time…

The Dude abides.

In eight words - I sat on a rug, biding my time - John Lennon encapsulates the heart of The Big Lebowski
(The Big Lebowski himself, of course, will not abide another toe.)

…drinking her wine.

Careful man, there?s a beverage here.

We talked until two and then she said, "it’s time for bed"

Again, Maude’s seduction of The Dude.

Also, the Dude, Walter and Donny talk until the three friends become just two….then Donny goes to his final resting place ? which is supposed to be the ocean bed.

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.

Maude gives the Dude the brush-off while she’s giggling on the phone with Sandra and Knox Harrington. And the whole story makes the Stranger laugh to beat the band.

I told her I didn’t…

The Dude is unemployed.

…and crawled off to sleep in the bath.

The Dude is relaxing in his bath when the nihilists attack him with the marmot.

And Walter has to rest on the shabbath.

And when I awoke I was alone

The Dude wakes alone after being knocked out by Maude’s goons.

Cynthia’s Pomeranian can’t be left alone or he eats the furniture - maybe even the sort of furniture which gives Norwegian Wood its title.

this bird had flown.

Maude is first seen flying over the Dude’s head. This is also obviously a reference to Bunny’s disappearance, both from her home outside of Moorhead and from the Big Lebowski?s house.

Presumably, it is also a reference to The Eagles.

So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood.

The Dude’s response to pretty much everything is to fire up a joint.

Plus, the nihilists set fire to the Dude’s car, Donny is cremated ? and there is a big fire in the West Wing.

Coincidence?

Via The Dudespaper

Led Zepellin -The Song Remains the Same 1976

The Song Remains the Same (also known as TSRTS) is a concert film by the English rock band Led Zeppelin. The recording of the film took place during three nights of concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City, during the band's 1973 concert tour of the United States. The film premiered on 20 October 1976, at Cinema I in New York and at Warner West End Cinema in London two weeks later.It was accompanied by a soundtrack album of the same name. The DVD of the film was released on 31 December 1999 (source and more information : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_Remains_the_Same_(film)



Directed by Peter Clifton
Joe Massot

Produced by Peter Grant

Starring John Bonham
John Paul Jones
Jimmy Page
Robert Plant

Music by Led Zeppelin

Cinematography Ernest Day

Editing by Humphrey Dixon

Release date 20 October 1976

DISC ONE

DISC TWO

Via CALLE NOSTALGIA

I Monster - A Dense Swarm Of Ancient Stars

I Monster are a British music group comprising of Sheffield, England-based musicians and producers Dean Honer and Jarrod Gosling. They formed in 1997 and released their debut album ‘These Are Our Children’. In 2001 they signed to Instant Karma/Sony Records and released the single ‘Daydream In Blue’ which became a UK top 20 hit. The song has since been used on numerous TV ad campaigns and in 2007 was sampled heavily by Chicago rap artist Lupe Fiasco (who simply replaced the vocoder parts of the song with rap). The band’s sophomore album ‘Neveroddoreven’ followed in 2004. This featured two further singles ‘Who Is She’ and ‘Hey Mrs’. I Monster have completed their third album which is called ‘A Dense swarm Of Ancient Stars’ and will be released in the March 2009. This will be preceded by a new single ‘A Sucker For Your Sound’ which will be released on January 19 2009.

I Monster - A Sucker For Your Sound

The Best - I Monster

Скачать с rapidshare.com

Luxury Stranger

“Dreams of slavery and masturbation…”

“Perverse, passionate and dark lyrics matched with disparate, agonisingly powerful music.”

“Perverse, passionate and dark lyrics matched with disparate, agonisingly powerful music.”

Luxury Stranger is a three piece, dickensian mod band based in Nottingham, UK and is the ‘brain child’ of Simon York. As from December 2008, Luxury Stranger are signed to Major Digital (an off-shoot of germany’s Major Records).

Likened to The Chameleons, with influences drawn from dark post-punk and new wave, vocalist/guitarist Simon York was previously signed to Roadrunner Records, under a different guise. They currently have one album released, Desolation .

After working within a strictly guitar based rock band, playing with some top names in music (including Mansun and 10cc) and finally coming away from the band - Simon began solo work as a musician, artist and actor. Experimenting with electronic instruments and layered vocal textures, creating both giant and subtle soundscapes, Simon worked at first under the guise of The Earl of Sound but ended up killing off this character and returning to the name Simon York…
“I loved the Earl but he had to die. He took over my personality, he was a scoundrel - a dangerous and womanising creature…” (Simon York)

Leafcutter John

Since his first release on Planet-Mu records in 2000, London-based Leafcutter John (aka John Burton) has developed a strong musical identity using processed instrumental and environmental recordings. His third album The Housebound Spirit (Planet-Mu, 2003) won an Honorary Mention at the 2004 Ars Electronica Awards and was featured on The Wire Magazine’s top 50 records of 2003.

He writes his own music software, has given talks and exhibited software across Europe (including the ICA) and is also a regular guest speaker at the London College of Communication. He had also a teaching post at DIEM (Danish Institute of Electronic Music) in Aarhus, Denmark during 2005.

John has also been involved in the Contemporary Art scene, with his latest project at the Serpentine Gallery where he was invited by artist Tomoko Takahashi (short-listed for the 2000 Turner prize) and the Serpentine to produce a live show based on Tomoko’s solo exhibition. ‘My Play-station’ was performed in the entire gallery where he turned the installation into a sound source involving 3 live sound collectors and the audience.

Leafcutter John has played live at Festivals and one-off events throughout Europe, emphasising his interest in audience interaction.

Generative design in 4096 bytes or less

A byte is the basic unit of measurement of information storage in computer science. In many computer architectures it is a unit of memory addressing, most often consisting of eight bits. A kilobyte (KB) is made up of 1,024 bytes. A megabyte (MB) is made up of 1,024 × 1,024 i.e. 1,048,576 bytes… Byte

Will Wright's Spore game was finally released 3 weeks ago and I still need to find some time trying it out myself. I've been closely following the development of this ground breaking game, not only because it'll hopefully introduce a large number of kids (and adults) to the core concepts of evolutionary theory and see them applied in practice (important in a time where Intelligent Design is being pushed in schools instead), but also because much of the game is based on generative & procedural techniques.

This systematic, rule based approach to game design has never been applied to such an extent and level of detail before. The 2006 video below is a conversation between Will Wright, Brian Eno and Stewart Brand (another hero of mine) about the the application and implications of different generative techniques in a wide variety of creative applications. It also has a part where Will demonstrated an early prototype to explain the core ideas of Spore… Highly recommended viewing!

Another interesting thing about Spore is that in order to realise & implement many of his generative ideas, Mr. Wright employed a large number of people with a background in the demoscene. The videos below should be testament to the incredible talent and skills present in this art subculture & community, still largely outside (by choice) of the spotlight on the usual generative art scene. Maybe this has to do that evolution and competition have always been core ingredients of the demoscene, and yes, more than often technical feats have been in that cultural foreground. Yet I think the sheer compression ratio of ideas achieved & required by many demoscene productions is a highly creative feat in itself, which should not be underestimated. This is especially true for the extremely low file size limits of some demo competitions.

Below I've selected some outstanding recent productions of the 4K category. Before viewing the videos below please remember that each entire piece (visuals & audio) is generated in realtime and its filesize is 4096 bytes (4KB) or less. Compared to the already compressed filesize of the videos the original realtime versions still are 2000-3000 times more efficient whilst being able to be reproduce itself at much higher resolutions without any additional cost. But whilst impressive, it's not even the filesize that really matters here. The important distinction is that these media are generated dynamically and the software just contains the necessary configuration and rules for reproduction. The small filesize then just helps this reproduction, i.e. in the case of Spore, an entire species' generative “DNA” fits into the header of a small image file which can easily be shared with others.

Texas by Keyboarders (2008)
download realtime version at Pouet.net

Receptor by TBC (2008)
download realtime version at Pouet.net

Atrium by TBC & Loonies (2008)
download realtime version at Pouet.net

Nucleophile by TBC & Portal Process (2008)
download realtime version at Pouet.net

Kindernoiser by RGBA (2008)
download realtime version at Pouet.net

Via PostSpectacular

Leonard Cohen

Dress Rehearsal Rag - Leonard Cohen

Pink

John Lennon - Plastic Ono Band - Home & Studio

Working Class Hero

John Lennon - 1970 - Plastic Ono Band - Home & Studio (Green Grape)

The definitive collection of Plastic Ono Band outtakes.

download

Jimmy Page- Lucifer Rising (1973)

Here's a rare item, recorded under interesting circumstances by Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, but never officially released until recently.

During the early 70's, Page's well-known interest in occultist Aleister Crowley led him into the trajectory of avant garde filmmaker and fellow Crowley devotee Kenneth Anger. At the time, Anger was usually recognized as a former child actor and author of the 1958 book, Hollywood Babylon. A small, but growing audience, however, knew him as the auteur behind a series of abstract films of occult significance. Beginning with Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-56,) Anger began filming carefully choreographed and highly stylized occult ceremonies in an arresting visual style, which owed much to the grand visions of early Hollywood. Scorpio Rising (1963,) gave these ceremonies pop culture cache by relating them to motorcycle culture and rock 'n' roll. Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969,) documented Satanic cadres within the California hippie scene.

Anger's ties to the rock and roll scene predated his association with Page. In 1967, Anger fell in with model and actress Anita Pallenberg, who was dating Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. Anger was accepted into the Stones' entourage, and the Stones - particularly Jones and Mick Jagger - became fascinated with their new friend's liberated attitudes and occult philosophy. Anger's tenure in the Stones' inner circle saw the transformation of the Stones' public image from that of British R&B bad boys into a more decadent, overtly satanic vibe. The 1967 album, Their Satanic majesties Request, is a direct product of Anger's influence. The cover art, for example, is patterned after "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome's" technicolor visual style. Although the Stones would soon tire of Anger, their interest in occult themes and lyrics would continue on through 1968's "Sympathy for the Devil," and 1973'sGoat's Head Soup, culminating in Tattoo You's cloven-hoofed innersleeve photo from 1981.

Page met Anger at an auction of Crowley ephemera, and learned that the director had been working for several years on a film he called "Lucifer Rising." Filmed throughout Europe and Egypt, "Lucifer Rising" was a celebration of the end of the Christian epoch and dawn of a Luciferian Age of Light, as fortold in the writings of Aleister Crowley. Much of the film had been completed at one time , but most of Anger's footage had been stolen by Anger's boy-toy, musician Bobby Beausoleil, when Beausoleil joined the Manson Family in 1967.

Anger had re-shot enough footage to complete the film, but was running short on cash and had no editing equipment, or even a place to work were the equipment made available. Page, intrigued by Anger's reputation and the Crowleyite angle of "Lucifer Rising," gave Anger free access to his house in London, as well as the basement full of film editing equipment Page had amassed there.

Anger hired Page to compose and perform a soundtrack for the film. Page initially showed great enthusiasm for the project, recording several ethereal but sinister arabesques, built around ambient synthesizer washes and heavily treated guitar synthesizer tracks.

Over time, however, Page's obligations to Led Zeppelin and the cooling of his friendship with Anger put the soundtrack on indefinite hold. After four years of little or no progress, Anger fired Page in 1976 - the day after Page's girlfriend had evicted Anger from Page's London house. Page's soundtrack was never released, except as the bootleg, until recently when a fan of Anger's secured copyright to both the film and its soundtrack, releasing the Lucifer Rising soundtrack as a limited edition EP on the Boleskine House record label. Until that, the only excerpt of the soundtrack most Zeppelin fans had ever heard was the brief, bowed-guitar and synth intro to the song, "In the Evening" on In Through the Out Door.

When "Lucifer Rising" was finally released in 1980, it featured a Wagneresque, guitar-driven soundtrack, written and performed by Bobby Beausoleil. Beausoleil is serving a life sentence for the 1969 murder of music teacher, Gary Hinman, and recorded the soundtrack (shown above) from his studio in prison.

You can probably still hear the complete soundtrack via the Prog Not Frog blog:http://prognotfrog.blogspot.com/2007/12/jimmy-page-lucifer-rising-uk-1973.html

Here's "In The Evening," with the intro Page adapted from his Lucifer Rising soundtrack


...and here's an excerpt of Anger's completed film, with the Bobby Beausoleil soundtrack. It's excellent in its own right:

Via Etched In Black

DOWNLOAD

Jimmy Page on Lucifer Rising

When did you first meet Kenneth Anger?

"I'm trying to think. I can tell you when I first became aware of him. I was already aware of Anger as an avant-garde filmmaker. I remember seeing two of his films at a film society in Kent. It was Scorpio Rising and Invocation Of My Demon Brother, and I think the other half of the evening was taken up with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; it was rather a fun evening. And I was already aware of Anger because I had read and researched Aleister Crowley. There was an article in Life magazine from the mid-fifties: Anger had been to Sicily, he'd been to Crowley's abbey there, he was traveling with Kinsey, of Kinsey Report fame.

"In 1923 Crowley had been expelled form Sicily. Mussolini's people had whitewashed the walls of the abbey because Crowley had decorated the walls accordingly, for his better intentions. When Anger visited it had belonged to two brothers. Once was a facist, the other a communist, and between them they had built a wall in the centre of the room that was a temple. So anyway the whitewash was still there, so there was this karma that continued on as the brothers hated each other. Anger had gained access to the building and started to scrape the whitewash off the walls to reveal the murals and frescoes.

"So I knew Anger's films and then I read this article. Then I saw some letters that he wrote to Gerald Yorke, who was a good friend of Crowley's. He was pleading with Yorke to drum up some funds to save the abbey. I could see Anger was passionate about this stuff. So that, along with his creative output, made him somebody I would like to meet. Eventually he came to my house in Sussex and I went to his flat in London."

When was this?

"In the 70's. We were on speaking terms even though I managed to outbid him on stuff he wanted (Crowley memorabilia at auction) and vice versa. And when I was at his apartment he outlined this idea for a film that became Lucifer Rising, that he had already started shooting in Egypt. It was then he asked me if I would like to take on the commission and do the music and I agreed to that"

So you produced the music without seeing the film?

"Yes. I said to him originally that I'd like to see it but, this is a key element to the story, he said, 'I always put the music on after I've made the film'. That was exactly the same with Scorpio Rising and Invocation."

How did you feel about this method of operating?

"Well it worked with this one. When I did the music for Death Wish it was an entirely different approach. But with Lucifer... that was the way Anger worked and I thought, 'I'll take this on as a challenge' and went home and cooked up some interesting music."

Did you have any idea what the film was about?

"Anger sort of outlined that it was about the deities of Egypt. He told me all the characters. Donald Cammell was in it and he went on to make Performance. Donald Cammell was the son of a very close friend of Aleister Crowley."

Could you explain what Lucifer Rising is about?

"Well, no. I'll let [Anger] do that. It's his film."

Could you give me your interpretation?

"Within the framework of it Anger was saying there's a dawning. You have Isis who would correlate to the early religions. Isis is the equivalent of man worshipping man, which is now where we have Buddha and Christ and all the rest of it, like the three ages. And then the child is Horus, which is the age of the child. Which is pretty much the New Age as it was seen."

How did you go about putting the music together?

"I had an idea of what Anger wanted. So I went about creating this music in my home studio and I employed a variety of instruments and effects. I had this tampura, which is an Indian instrument that produces a majestic drone. This was one I had brought back form my early travels in India and it was about 5 1/2 ft tall and it was a really deep, resonant beast. So this was the first thing I wanted to employ on it. I thought of this being quite a hypnotic, trance-like piece. Then I had a Buddhist chant that was phased: everything wasn't quite what it appeared to be. I played some tabla drums, not very well I might add, but the effect of it was really good. So that's how the whole thing started to develop. I had synthesiser and Mellotron. And right at the very end there's an acoustic 12-string cascading in with these great horns that sound like the horns of Gabriel. It was a good piece."

I understand there was some significance in the amount of instruments and the musical scales that were employed?

"Well, yes, to a degree, but whatever metaphysics I was employing at the time were of the moment and not necessarily to be held up to scrutiny now. Don't forget that this was going to be something which I knew was going to be shown in arts labs and underground cinema and brotherhoods, if you like. Although really Kenneth wanted this project to manifest in the mainstream cinema - at least that's what he told me."

Did any of your unused Lucifer Rising soundtrack appear in Led Zeppelin's music?

"No! Because the thing is, the one thing I wanted to do with it was avoid using guitar. As I've already said, there was a fraction of guitar right at the end, just a little taste. One piece from Lucifer Rising I plucked out and put into Death Wish. I can't remember what it's called... an abstract sort of piece. It's quite good, actually."

You produced the first 31 minutes of music for the film, what happend next?

"So you can imagine having seen these 31 minutes of film and my music for all intents and purposes fitting like hand in glove, I was keen to see Anger complete this film. Because up until then he had only done shorts and he had this vision of a 93-minute film. So the next logical step was to give him the facilities to continue, which is what I did.

"Kenneth had turned the basement of the Tower House into an editing suite and the housekeeper was there one day and found him giving people a guided tour and there was an argument. Kenneth took umbrage that he couldn't show people around and the next thing I knew I started getting all this hate mail directed at my partner and myself at the time. It was quite pathetic actually, because it was like newspaper articles that were cut out and underlined in red ink and I guess that if that was supposed to be some kind of curse, it fell flat.

"He'd stored some stuff at my house and after all the nonsense and letters I did think about returning all his possessions in a hearse, but then I thought that might be a tad dramatic."

Did it come as shock when Anger sort of exploded/imploded?

"You have to remember, at the time I was really busy working with Zeppelin. I remember I was in the States playing the film in my room in the Plaza hotel and I got complaints from six floors above which I thought was marvellous. I kept playing it again and again."

Back to the Angry one...

"So Anger stormed off and the next thing I know he says he's going to use Bobby BeauSoleil and I said, 'Do what you want'. So he replaced my music. I thought, 'this is absolutely ridiculous; the man has had a brainstorm, a man who I had so much respect for. Now I almost see it as being a bit sad. This was going to be his masterpiece, but he didn't manage to pull it off.

"All that remains now is the myth, certainly as far as the collaboration of my music and Kenneth Anger goes."

Do you think that, considering the subject matter, Lucifer Rising is actually filmable?

"Well you have to forgive me because I don't really know what his overall concept was going to be. I'm only familiar with the first 30 minutes which was, in essence, only a third of the film. So I can work out my interpretation of that and I would say that it was very much of its time. Although the underlying theme of it will resurface, I'm sure, at some point along the way."

How do you mean?

"Well, just what he was trying to put across. That's all I'm going ot say about it."

Have you watched the film recently?

"You know I've seen it [Classic Rock provided Jimmy with a bootleg of the film featuring his soundtrack instead of BeauSoleil's], but it wasn't a great copy. It didn't sound as good as it sounded when I had it going full blast at the Plaza. It certainly had a charm about it."

Are you sad that it isn't available to the public?

"It's not the fact that I'm disappointed that some of my music wasn't heard. In the context it was really interesting. But I was really keen to see Anger pull this thing off; maybe it was just too big."

Prior to your collaboration with Anger did you have an interest in underground films?

"Well I had an interest in Underground everything. Art college was a hotbed of everything that was alternative, whether it be poetry, music, film certainly art."

Did you use what you learned at art school into your music?

I would say so. I'd been quite involved in what had gone on in art labs prior to Lucifer Rising. It's not well known but I remember in The Yardbirds we did a number called Glimpses. And Glimpses was something that involved the bow. The bow guitar wasn't a novelty to me; I really considered that it was making music. The manifestation of that is in The Song Remains The Same with the bow and the whole imagery with the hermit. Anyway, with Glimpses I was playing with tapes. I had all these sound effects, like the Staten Island Ferry, all these crunching noises and horns; there might have been Hitler's speeches in it as well. All this stuff which you could have taken out of the Filmore East and put into an art lab. When they used light beams as burglar alarms I had an idea of using tape recorders that were triggered by the interruption of light beams. You could have a dancer affecting the music. The combination was whatever the dancer would be inspired by, by the ambience of the audience and their own imagination.

"So the fact that I got involved with Anger was really just a step along the road of my interest in what was quite alternative."

Boleskine House

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Although Boleskine House was only Aleister Crowley's for a relatively short time, it may forever be considered his house and the Mecca for Thelemites as well as aspirants and students of the works of the Beast 666.

Boleskine House, front and looking down across Loch Ness.

At one time Boleskine House was owned by Jimmy Page, lead guitarist of the rock band Led Zeppelin. Last Yule a good friend, true brother andassociate of mine visited Boleskine House in Scotland, spoke with Mr. Malcolm Dent, who had lived there and taken care of the house and property for Page, and he had had a cozy chat with the newest owner who purchased it for private residence at a cost of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

More at Encyclical Letter

The Boathouse - Where Led Zeppelin was formed

Jimmy Page bought the Boathouse in Pangbourne in 1967 when he was just 23 years of age and played as the lead guitarist in the band The Yardbirds.

It was only a year later when Jimmy decided that he wanted to split from the band and form a new one of his own.

It was later in 1968 when he was introduced to Robert Plant, an up and coming vocalist from the Midlands. After hearing Robert sing at the Birmingham Teacher Training College, Jimmy later invited him to stay at the Boathouse to discuss his proposals for the new band.

Jimmy in the lounge	The lounge today

Soon after, John Bonham and John Paul Jones too joined and the four of them spent time at the Boathouse jamming and preparing for gigs.

Although they performed initially under the old Yardbirds name, it wasn't long before Jimmy had come up with a new name for the band.

This would be Led Zeppelin and this would be the name of the band that would take the world by storm over the next decade, regularly breaking tour attendance and album record sales, worldwide.

The Independent Review: LED ZEPPELIN - The rise to heavenly heights

Lingchi (Death by a thousand cuts)

Lingchi, or slow slicing, involved the public dismemberment of the victim. As such, it became iconic to westerners as an image of exotic Chinese cruelty — albeit iconic in a mythicized form, the accounts conflicting, undependable, Orientalist. (Many different ones are collected at the Wikipedia page.)

Lingchi is especially notable — apart from fathering the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” in the English lexicology — for its overlap with the era of photography.

Fou Tchou-Li’s death was captured on film, and the images famously captivated Georges Bataille for the expression of seeming ecstasy on the face of the dying (or dead) man.

Bataille was said to meditate daily upon the image below in particular — “I never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.”

Agony and ecstasy? A sequence of images, strong stuff in spite of their low quality, describing Fou Tchou-Li’s execution can be viewed here. Notice, however, that it’s not the one pictured here — the scholar who maintains this page claims the man’s identity became confused by western interlocutors. The different, unnamed man who as “Fou Tchou-Li” riveted Bataille is pictured here.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag explained the mystical nexus of pleasure and pain Fou Tchou-Li’s torture suggested to the French theorist, aptly comparing it to graphic but pre-photographic exaltations of torture in the western artistic tradition, such as Saint Sebastian:

To contemplate this image, according to Bataille, is both a mortification of the feelings and a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge — a complex response that many people must find hard to credit. … Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure in the sight of this excruciation. But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation — a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility.

It’s no idle point to say that all this reads quite a lot into a single frame that may not be all that representative of the moment, though that wouldn’t necessarily diminish Bataille’s gist. More, these are western interpretations of — projections upon — an image marked as fundamentally outside in a tableau irresistibly blending the colonizer and the colonized.

The execution was ordered in the last days of the Qing Dynasty, which had long been substantially beholden to European states, especially the British; the prisoner was apparently administered opium to numb the pain, the very product Britain had gone to war to force China to accept.

Via ExecutedToday.com

Klaus Schulze

Klaus Schulze

Born in Berlin on August 4th 1947, Klaus Schulze is one of the most important and prolific electronic artists from the 70’s and a true pioneer in the use of the synthesizers.

Klaus Schulze started playing guitar and drums in rock bands during the 60’s. In 1968, he joined the avant-garde free rock trio Psy Free, which was influenced by Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and the American West Coast psychedelic rock scene.

After the split of the band in 1969, Klaus Schulze joined the new incarnation of the experimental band Tangerine Dream, with Edgar Froese and Conrad Schnitzler. This lineup recorded the debut album “Electronic Meditation”, which is considered one of the most advanced experimental works in the history of modern music. One of the peculiarities of this 100% improvised masterwork is that the band didn’t use electronic devices such as synthesizers at the time but conventional rock instruments.

In 1970, Klaus Schulze got married and shortly later he also quit Tangerine Dream to join the krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel with Manuel Göttsching, recording the band’s debut album “Ash Ra Tempel” (1971), which was produced by the legendary German producer Conny Plank. Göttsching would collaborate many years later in Klaus Schulze’s solo album “In Blue” (1995).

In 1971, Schulze left Ash Ra Tempel to pursue a solo career as an electronic musician, though a year later he would still collaborate in the album “Join Inn”. Klaus Schulze released his debut solo album “Irrlitcht” (1972) on Rolf-Urich Kaiser’s Ohr label, where Schulze mainly experimented with the Teisco organ and Solina string keyboard, based on an interpretation by the Colloquium Musica Orchestra. Schulze recalls about his beginnings as a keyboardist: “At the end of ‘71 I didn’t know anything about keyboards, I didn’t know which note was A or E. Remember, that “keyboards” at this time meant either piano, electric piano or organ. I had just an old, small, used, electric Teisco organ. And I had my drumming experiences, and I had a few special ideas: A kind of dream that I couldn’t explain then, or now. So I started something new. And then I developed and improved, because I love to make music. At this time I studied mainly German literature, but I said “forget it. I want to do music”, which was a very emotional decision. A leap in the dark”.

In 1973, Klaus Schulze released the double album “Cyborg”, where he started working with an EMS VCS3 synthesizer, and later “Picture Music”. That same year, he also collaborated in the Ash Ra Tempel’s one night reunion album “Join Inn”, along with Manuel Göttsching, Hartmut Enke, and Rosi Müller.

“Black Dance” (1974) featured the vocal collaboration of Ernst Walter Siemon and was the first Klaus Schulze’s album oriented primarly to synthesizers, featuring an EMS Synthi A, an ARP Odyssey, and ARP 2600.

In 1975, Klaus Schulze embarked in the production of the Japanese progressive rock band Far East Family Band, who’s keyboard player was no other than the later renowned Kitaro. Schulze produced the albums “Nipponjin” (1975) recorded in Tokyo, and “Parallel Worlds” (1976) recorded at Virgin’s Manor studios in Oxfordshire. It was precisely under the influence of Klaus Schulze that Kitaro decided later soon to go on a solo career as a keyboardist and synthesist.

At the same time, Klaus Schulze released the improvised album “Timewind”, which has been widely recognized as a masterpiece of electronic music. At this stage, Schulze had became an expert in analog synthesis and his work was classified by the press as “mathematical” and “scientific” for it’s technical sophistication. The album, which gained the Grand Prix International, was originally inspired by Richard Wagner’s music and featured two tracks of symphonic structures of elaborated rhythms displayed over a continuous base of synth loops that created a dark and gothic atmosphere. During this period, Klaus Schulze became one of the most acclaimed electronic musicians and a pioneer of the space music and kosmiche genres.

Klaus Schulze

In 1974, Schulze also took part in a series of improvised kosmiche albums of Rolf-Urich Kaiser’s Kosmiche project, Cosmic Jokers. From these sesions, Kaiser released in 1974, apparently without the permission of the artists involved, the albums “The Cosmic Jokers”, “Planeten Sit In”, “Galactic Supermarket”, and Sci-Fi Party”. Klaus Schulze denies from these albums and has catalogued them as “not serious”.

In this period, Schulze also collaborated in other projects such as Walter Wegmüller’s “Tarot” (1973), and Sergius Golowin’s “Lord Krishna Von Goloka” (1973). In 1976, Schulze got involved in one of the most interesting projects from the 70’s, the album by the Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamash’ta “Go”, along with other prime figures of the music like Steve Winwood, Al DiMeola, Pat Thrall, Rosko Gee, Michael Shrieve and Michael Quartermain. That same year Schulze also released the albums “Moondown” and “Body Love”, using for the first time his Moog modular system, and he also started touring Europe extensively.

Klaus Schulze set up his own IC label and video studio in 1978 in the woods near the small town of Celle, where he wrote the music for the sci-fi classic “Dune”, released a year later. This was the first of numerous TV and film soundtracks produced throughout his career, including “Angst” (1984), “Havlandet” (1985), “Walk the Edge” (1985) and “Le Moulin de Daudet” (1994).

In 1979, Schulze started a series of more mainstream and dance oriented albums under the moniker of Richard Wahnfried (a mix of Klaus Schulze’s son name and the name of composer Richard Wagner’s house), including “Time Actor” (1979) where he used the G.D.S. synthesizer computer, “Tonwelle” (1981), “Megatone” (1984), “Miditation” (1986), “Trancelation” (1994), “Trance Appeal” (1996), and “Drums ‘n’ Balls” (1997). The first of these albums featured the collaboration of the members from the space rock band Hawkwind, Arthur Brown, Vincent Crane plus cello player Wolfgang Tiepold and Santana’s percussionist Michael Shrieve.

In 1980, Klaus Schulze released the album “Dig it”, which was his first digital music album and was recorded with the collaboration of the precise drummer Fred Severloh, who had also worked with Robert Schroeder. At this stage, Klaus Schulze’s music started moving into the territories of digital and sequential ambient music and acquired a Fairlight synthesizer. He also recorded some avant-garde oriented stuff, such as the album “Audentity” (1983) where collaborated the musicians Rainer Bloss (keyboards), Wolfgang Tiepold (cello) and Michael Shrieve (percussion).

Klaus Schulze

In 1984, Klaus Schulze founded a new electronic music label called INTEAM, where he later soon released the collaborative album “Aphrica” along with Rainer Bloss and Ernest Fluchs, which was later taken from the market because the the record company had forgotten to make a record contract with Fluchs. For the album “Dreams” (1986), Schulze counted with the support of an ensemble of musicians formed by Nunu Isa (acoustic guitar), Ulli Schober (percussion), Ian Wilkinson (vocal), Harald Asmussen (bass) and Andreas Grosser (keyboards). With this last one he also recorded a year later the collaborative album “Babel”.

In 1988, while visiting a technician friend, Schulze met the synth pop band Alphaville at their Lunapark studio and after two hours with the band he decided to repeat his experience as a producer for the band’s album “Breathtaking Blue” (1989).

In 1990, to start a new decade, Klaus Schulze gave another turn in the direction of his music when we embarked into MIDI composition with the release of the album “Miditerranean Pads”, which featured the collaboration of Georg Stettner (keyboards) and Elfi Schulze (vocals). This abstract, beautiful and experimental album is still considered a masterpiece from Schulze’s discography. He later started getting interested in the techniques of sampling, which is noticeable in the album “Beyond Recall” (1991). During the 90’s Klaus Schulze’s name gained respect for the new generations of electronic music lovers after his long-time alliance with ambient artist Pete Namlook with the “Dark Side of the Moog” series, having released up to 10 volumes since 1994. Maybe under the influence of this new collaborative work, Schulze later released under the moniker of Wahnfried the techno and trance oriented albums “Trancelation” (1994), “Trance Appeal” (1996) and “Drums ‘n’ Balls” (1997). That same year, he also released “Goes Classic”, a curious work of electronic interpretations of classical music pieces, including the ones from F. Schubert, J. Brahms, E. Grieg and Beethoven. Following this interest for the classical music he also wrote the opera “Totentag” in 1994.

In 1996, Klaus Schulze rebuilt completely his studio, incorporating new digital technologies but still keeping part of his analog keyboards, including the Alesis Andromeda 6 voice synthesizer, two EMS Synthi A synths, the Memory Moog and two Minimoogs.

Via Intuitive Music