From the Wong Kar-wai film In the Mood for Love (Chinese: 花樣年華). The Chinese title, meaning “the time of blossoms” (a metaphor for the fleeting time of youth, beauty and love) derives from this lovely song of the same name by Zhou Xuan from a 1946 film:
pink martini – qué sera sera (1997)
parenthetical girls – windmills of your mind (2008)
From the album Entanglements, a cover of the Noel Harrison song.
joy zipper – what difference does it make? (2011)
Joy Zipper cover of The Smiths from the compilation “Please, Please, Please: A Tribute To The Smiths” (American Laundromat Records).
smog – i break horses (peel sessions, 1997)
Bill Callahan: ‘Spend a night with an owl and you’ll see more blood than sleep. A song like “I Break Horses” has often been misconstrued. Some people tell me, “Ah, I get it– we are all murderers under the skin!” That’s not it. I don’t give a shit about people’s dark sides. I wrote that song to help a friend try to understand how a guy she had a one-night stand with could possibly not return her phone calls the next day or ever again. There is also a lot more going on with that song, but that was the impetus. It is rooted in Good.’
(SOURCE)
kayla l – caring is creepy (2011)
Cover of The Shins’ song off Oh Inverted World.
living next door to alice (in W-LAN) (2010)
i’m never really here
never really not here
this is the in-between
where we un-appear
in the web of day to day
it’s the back alleyway
that sucks us in
mind that gap, gal, you say,
it’s no zero-sum game.
ja-nee
it’s a dirty crack habit
but i’m not paying, pal!
i’m chasing that rabbit
i’m hunting that quark
i’m ripping, unzipping
tumbling through the dark
i’m pulled, i’m polluted
the vertigo’s heady
the jostling vacuum
blaring and unsteady
warrens of voids
streaming past
screaming future
endlessly new
have i seen this already?
uh-huh, it’s not pretty
these blown-up dead pixels
no taste, so not witty
they stink like nothing
on earth
in asunderland
nothing rots
i’m always here, not-here
it’s off with me ’ead
when bored, i bore deeper
through holes yet unread
i need more; drop a fresh tab
hop a window
and i tiptoe
past the daemon
with a keygen
while it snores
unlock the door
to
another tube flickr-ing
twittering, bickering
low resolution
there’s no revelation
there’s no revolution
just revaluation
search optimisation
and too many shares
i spin rumpelstiltskins’
straw dogs into gold
using worm-riddled troll jam
i scavenge ‘twixt threads
i needle this grey gunk
i snip it to shreds
i bump and i juggle
grind bones badly bred
i flip and i giggle
i slough off my shame
i slurp it up, spew it out
flooding the drain
logged in or logged out
i have no real name
if I do it is M.U.D.
and i’m out of my death
and where is my body?
my own flesh and blood
it sleeps with the ‘fiches
not holding its breath
see, it doesn’t do digital
it keeps crashing
so it’s chained to the terminal
wired to the grid
with a stay of execution
logged on or logged off
the haunted dimension
buzzes in my marrow
drowns out my dreams
howls me back
out of bed
out of the car
out of the street
from the supermarket
from the sunset
from supper
in a stupor
on my phone
into my inbox
unto my outbox
onto the blog
*welcome to [UR(hel)L]*
you can’t turn off a never-present stranger.
(2010)
holly herndon – chorus (2014)
Holly Herndon / Akihiko Taniguchi – Artist / Video Director Statements
Holly Herndon: “So much of Chorus was constructed by spying on my own online habits. It felt fitting to invite Akihiko, who I had been spying on online for a long time before my approach, to contribute the visual treatment of the piece.”
Akihiko Taniguchi: “I was interested in exploring the textures of daily necessities and the embodiment / physicality of the computer and Internet. One of the most striking contemporary images is that of the desktop capture, which is seen commonly on YouTube as part of software tutorials. I like the shots of desktops that are poorly organized and ‘lived-in’.
Referencing one of my earlier pieces “study of real-time 3D Internet”, I considered how it corresponds to the personal environment outside of the screen and how particular it is to my identity and my friend’s identities. I asked several friends to photograph their desktop environments and then rendered these images with custom 3D software, shooting video by moving throughout this virtual space. This video is a collection of records of life of friends and their Internet environments.”
Herndon: “I love the idea of depicting the mundane and quotidian in high definition, and how evocative and individual each of these spaces are. Thinking about intimacy and the laptop is familiar territory for me. I’ve also been thinking a lot about privacy, particularly in light of the ongoing revelations regarding the NSA, which add a more sinister sub-narrative to Akihiko’s piece.
The most crucial conversations happening in technology at the moment focus squarely on our work space, our email, our iSight and our smart phone, and how much we can honestly claim those spaces to be ours at all in an era of indiscriminate and imperceptible surveillance.”
___
In this audio-visual talk recorded at Ableton’s Loop summit for music makers in 2016, Holly Herndon describes the role process plays in her creative vision. Drawing on her experience as a recording artist, her studies at Mills College and Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Holly discusses the conceptual frameworks surrounding her process-based composition methods. Using audio and video examples from her recent work she reflects on how government surveillance, internet age aesthetics and collaborations with Mat Dryhurst, Metahaven and others inform her mission to capture the ‘sound of now’.
And here’s an interesting interview from 2015.
james baldwin and margaret mead – a rap on race (1971)
“In honor of the release of James Baldwin: I Am Not Your Negro documentary, we’ve decided to share the rare audio version of the classic conversation between Margaret Mead and James Baldwin from 1971. Long out of print, original LP sells for 3 figures. Courtesy The Charles Woods Collection. For educational purposes. No rights given or implied. Feel free to comment/share/subscribe. Share original link whenever possible.”
akira rabelais – iv (2015)
From The Little Glass (2015). Achingly beautiful piano.
low – words (1994)
chelsea wolfe – halfsleeper (2010)
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)
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.
nadine shah – fool (2015)
“And I guessed your favorites one by one
And all to your surprise
From damned Nick Cave to Kerouac
They stood there side by side…
Let the other girls
Indulge the crap that you excrete”
laura marling – soothing (2016)
“Soothing” is the directorial debut of Laura Marling taken from her 2017 album Semper Femina.
julie london – have i stayed too long at the fair (1965)
Julie London, with backing by the Hi-Lo’s.
pierre henry – divinités paisibles (1962)
RIP
___
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.
bill callahan – the breeze (2009)
The most delicate Kath Bloom cover.
laurie penny – cybersexism: sex, gender and power on the internet (2013)
‘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)
“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)
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
obs vinyl fair, 1 july 2017
At A Touch of Madness, Cape Town. Photo: Andy Lund
lisa hannigan – willy (2011)
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)
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.
__
The blurb of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life by Giorgio Agamben. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. (Stanford University Press, 1998).
tindersticks – a night in (live, 1995)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SNatwThnFI
Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, 1995.
perfume genius – die 4 you (2017)
anna von hausswolff – funeral for my future children (live, 2013)
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.
kimya dawson – will you be me? (2004)
From My Cute Fiend Sweet Princess.
mozart – sinfonia concertante – second movement, andante (1779/2010)
Doctor and Miss Heisenberg and Schrödinger’s Cat perform the second movement, andante, from Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major, K.364, for violin and viola. Piano accompaniment.
fleurmach 