Author Archives: cherry bomb

chelsea wolfe – halfsleeper (2010)

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All the parts of me that lived inside
Are drowning in the sea of waking life
They don’t know their colors don’t belong on the outside
They don’t know their colors don’t belong

Until they’re spread across the open road
‘Til they’re spread across the asphalt on the open road
‘Til they’re streaming in the wind like cassette tape or jellyfish
Long dark veins and records playing memories

All the things we yelled don’t mean a thing
When we’re spinning out on dark and metal wind
When we’re flying like we’re Mary’s angels through shattered glass
When we find the tall black shadow waiting there with outstretched hands

He has given me a dress of red and you a skin of gray
We’ll be twisting here for hours ’til the light will give us day

We’re spread across the open road
And we’re spread across the asphalt on the open road
And we’re streaming in the wind like cassette tape or jellyfish
Long dark veins and records playing memories

in exploded view (november 2007)

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the mess-age
is the medium

to be heard as just voice
one
must shatter,
shapeshift into
many

coalesce
then dissolve

before the sum
of the parts
can be tallied
and captioned
pasteurised
homogenised
in sterile packaging
for consumption

profiteers and peddlers, beware
however much you rub,
the spirit wasn’t bottled
and the gold in your vault
is as cold and dead
as you.

pierre henry – divinités paisibles (1962)

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RIP

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From Le Voyage: An electronic score based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
“A panorama of experimental music” series volume 2 (Mercury Records, 1968).

Tracklisting in English on sleeve translated into French on labels:
A1 Breath 1/Souffle 1
A2 After Death/Après la mort 1 (fluide et mobilité d’un Larsen)
A3 After Death 2/Après la mort 2 (mouvement en 6 parties)
B1 Peaceful Deities/Divinités paisibles
B2 Wrathful Deities/Divinités irritées
B3 The Coupling/Le couple
B4 Breath 2/Souffle 2

Premiered on April 25, 1962 in Cologne.
An alternate version – the stereophonic recording released here – was performed at the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris in June 25, 1963.

Date of release taken from Billboard magazine issue 80, number 11 from March 16, 1968.

laurie penny – cybersexism: sex, gender and power on the internet (2013)

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‘In ye olden tymes of 1987, the rhetoric was that we would change genders the way we change underwear,’ says Clay Shirky, media theorist and author of Here Comes Everybody.‘[But] a lot of it assumed that everyone would be happy passing as people like me – white, straight, male, middle-class and at least culturally Christian.’ Shirky calls this ‘the gender closet’: ‘people like me saying to people like you, “You can be treated just like a regular normal person and not like a woman at all, as long as we don’t know you’re a woman.”’

The Internet was supposed to be for everyone… Millions found their voices in this brave new online world; it gave unheard masses the space to speak to each other without limits, across borders, both physical and social. It was supposed to liberate us from gender. But as more and more of our daily lives migrated on line, it seemed it did matter if you were a boy or a girl.’

It’s a tough time to be a woman on the internet. Over the past two generations, the political map of human relations has been redrawn by feminism and by changes in technology. Together they pose questions about the nature and organisation of society that are deeply challenging to those in power, and in both cases, the backlash is on. In this brave new world, old-style sexism is making itself felt in new and frightening ways.

In Cybersexism, Laurie Penny goes to the dark heart of the matter and asks why threats of rape and violence are being used to try to silence female voices, analyses the structure of online misogyny, and makes a case for real freedom of speech – for everyone.

Laurie Penny. Cybersexism: Sex, Gender and Power on the Internet (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). PDF here.

ps22 school chorus cover jóga by björk (2009)

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“Coming to you live from PS22, here’s yet another amazing accomplishment from a first rehearsal. Yes, I am VERY proud to say that the kids learned this song in one sitting, and it is one of my favorite things I’ve ever heard on them. I really planned on working on the bounty of new material we’ve bitten off, but during rehearsal I could tell the kids were fiending for still another new song. So I looked over my iPod and came up with this song by Bjork called “Joga” off the album Homogenic.

“This is one of my 3 or 4 favorite Bjork songs and man oh man, the kids on this!! Just brilliant. I can’t believe how polished this sounds after learning it only today. I’m so happy about this one.”

shilpa ray – posted by anonymous (live, 2013)

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From the Deeper Down studio session (2013).

I’m pressed against a window
Flat
With a broken nose
Rhinoplasts and the bombs blastin’
Who’s scalping tickets for this show?

Lines round the block in
circles
A Human Centipede
I wanna be the victim
who gets the most sympathy

Don’t reward my participation
Or teach me about masturbation
I could fake your newest sensation
Steal someone else’s imagination
Microdermabrasion

Oh I’ve gotta feeling
I don’t have to be real
No I’m not real

I’M NOT EVEN HERE

Headlines talkin’ and your
Picture’s Squawkin’
You haven’t said a word
Hysterical Historical
How did you get your foot in the door?

Mass killin’s thrillin’
Public’s appealin’ on TV
And when you have your say
Starlings
What are you gonna say to me?

Don’t reward my participation
Or teach me about masturbation
I could fake your newest sensation
Steal someone else’s imagination
Crystal Blue Persuasion

What is the meaning?
I don’t wanna hear?
No I can’t hear.
No I can’t hear
I’M NOT EVEN HERE

lisa hannigan – willy (2011)

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A cappella Joni Mitchell cover.
Watch the rest of this spellbinding Earphoria session here.

Willy is my child; he is my father
I would be his lady all my life
He says he’d love to live with me
But for an ancient injury
That has not healed
He said I feel once again
Like I gave my heart too soon
He stood looking through the lace
At the face on the conquered moon
And counting all the cars up the hill
And the stars on my window sill
There are still more reasons why I love him

Willy is my joy; he is my sorrow
Now he wants to run away and hide
He says our love cannot be real
He cannot hear the chapel’s pealing silver bells
But you know it’s hard to tell
When you’re in the spell if it’s wrong or if it’s real
But you’re bound to lose
If you let the blues get you scared to feel
And I feel like I’m just being born
Like a shiny light breaking in a storm
There are so many reasons why I love him

animation explaining giorgio agamben’s “homo sacer” (2014)

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Clear explanation of this important concept.

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy’s most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.

In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit.

The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign’s status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective “naked life” of all individuals.

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The blurb of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life by Giorgio Agamben. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. (Stanford University Press, 1998).

anna von hausswolff – funeral for my future children (live, 2013)

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NPR Music Field Recordings.

“There’s no denying there’s a spiritual quality to the music of Anna von Hausswolff. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that the Swedish singer and musician plays the pipe organ, an instrument that fills cavernous church sanctuaries and holy spaces with rich layers of sound. But it’s also her songs on this year’s superb record, Ceremony, that take on an otherworldly transcendence mixing moody orchestrations with engrossing, almost poppy melodies. So when Soundcheck had the opportunity to film von Hausswolff in New York City, as a co-production with NPR Music’s Field Recordings series, it was only natural to seek out a pipe organ in a church that could accommodate. Filmed and recorded inside the spacious and regal Christ Church – a United Methodist church on Park Avenue – von Hausswolff’s rendition of “Funeral For My Future Children” is outright stunning.

gaia holmes – hope

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Though it seems so dark
and the ceiling of the world’s a wound
and so many hours have been bruised,
and so many lives have been broken,
there are stars up there tonight
and we must name them,
we must love them,
we must whistle them down like dogs
in faith of their shine
and they will be loyal.
They will show us where their bones are.
They will teach us
their soft, bright tricks of devotion.

And even on the blackest nights,
when hope and protest
are knotted in our throats,
when our smiles have been tarred
and buckled with the weight and stain
of shadows,
we have to remember they are there,
those glittering sky-hooked prayers,
prickling and humming,
embedded in that thick and lovely blue,
guarding us from spite,
keeping the moon from slipping,
herding the pale lamb-like dawns
into our sleeping houses
where they flow
through all our rooms
fluent and loving as milk.
_
From here. Check out more poetry by Gaia Holmes on her blog. Thank you to Michelle McGrane (Peony Moon) for the introduction.

björk – notget (2017)

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If I regret us
I’m denying my soul to grow
Don’t remove my pain
It is my chance to heal

We carry the same wound
But have different cures
Similar injuries
But opposite remedies

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directed – by warren du preez & nick thornton jones
creative direction & masks – by björk & james merry
cgi & vfx creative – wicked pixels
cgi & vfx creative director and cgi artist – gavin coetzee
produced – by campbell beaton
2d flame – framestore london
d.o.p. – john mathieson
editor – owen oppenheimer @ the quarry
colourist – simona cristea @ rushes
production design – josephe bennett
make up – andrew gallimore @ clm
hair – martin cullen @ streeters