Could it have been something else ?
It can be anything
Do I love everything ?
Unfortunately not, but all things can be loved by different people at different times: enemies, devils, gods and chocolate candies.
-
Sigurdur Gudmundsson
posted by beshtya
on Feb 10, 2012 -
8 comments
"We were so dumbfounded at the noise that was coming out of our instruments it took us a while to get a handle on what we were hearing, let alone thinking in terms of how any records would be structured." Music journalist Ned Raggett assembles the oral history of British experimental rock group
Disco Inferno's five EPs.
posted by Houyhnhnm
on Jan 23, 2012 -
17 comments
"everything is good that / has a good beginning / and doesn't have an end / the world will die but for us there is no / end!" Thus ends
Victory over the Sun (
part 1,
part 2), the "first Futurist opera".
[more inside]
posted by daniel_charms
on Dec 21, 2011 -
8 comments
This collection of street posters, mad scribblings, political screeds, religious rants, and paranoid raves was collected on the streets of New York City from 1985 to the present. Some time ago, it occurred to me that the streets are as full of art as, say, thrift shops are full of great paintings. So, inspired by Jim Shaw's collection Thrift Shop Paintings, Adolf Wölfli's visionary scrawls, and outsider music, I began carrying a portable razor with me whilst out on casual strolls. What began as a hobby has remained an obsession and this obsession is brought to you in living color here on UbuWeb.
Keep checking back as this page is constantly updated. I have hundreds of examples to share with you, as as time permits, they'll all eventually appear here.
-- Kenneth Goldsmith,
Assorted Street Posters
posted by beshtya
on Dec 2, 2011 -
13 comments
"The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term 'unoriginal genius' to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, 'moving information,' to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine." --
Kenneth Goldsmith on why "genius" is an archaic concept, and how literature in English has fallen half-a-century behind advances in visual arts and music
posted by bardic
on Sep 22, 2011 -
44 comments
The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. Until now, of course.
[more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Jun 28, 2011 -
17 comments
Berlin, circa 1921: The painter Hans Richter turns his talents to film and produces one of the earliest abstract films, Rhythmus 21. Clocking in at just over three minutes, it's a significant departure from the newsreels, romances, cliff-hangers, and penny-dreadfuls that made up the bulk of film production in the early ’20s—the first decade in which the film industry began to play a major economic and cultural role around the world. [more inside]
posted by scody
on Jun 14, 2011 -
9 comments
It started two months ago to the day, when
a stuttering/strobing video of angry man obscenely rapping over a spasmodic drumbeat was posted on YouTube from an unknown group who called themselves Death Grips, with the promise of an album and a mixtape within the year. The next day,
a new track went up, not furious like the day before, but the rapper sounded a bit hoarse now. More tracks were uploaded every few days, and on April 26th
the mixtape was on YouTube,
soundcloud, and available to download
from their website and other places. Still, little is known about the group, beyond that it's probably a trio and
Zach Hill is involved.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 8, 2011 -
16 comments
Daughter of Horror (original title: Dementia) was a 1955 avant garde film featuring a
noir style, a surrealist sensibility, and virtually no dialogue. A later version of the film even included an over-the-top voice over by none other than Tonight Show sidekick
Ed McMahon, but like Blade Runner the flick is better off without the narration.
Daughter of Horror is probably most famous for being the film playing in the theater overrun by
The Blob. And with a few more surrealistic elements and peculiar dialogue added, this could have been done by David Lynch in a later decade. The film, recently featured on Turner Classic Movies, is
available for free on archive.org.
posted by Celsius1414
on May 1, 2011 -
7 comments
Since the late '70s,
Gordon Monahan has been
making a
career of extracting the unheard from pretty much anything he can get his hands on.
Monahan's works for
piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art.
Such pieces include
long string installations activated by wind (Long Aeolian Piano, 1984-88), by
water vortices (Aquaeolian Whirlpool, 1990) and by
indoor air draughts (Spontaneously Harmonious in Certain Kinds of Weather, 1996). His work for
electronic tone generators and
human speaker swingers (Speaker Swinging, 1982), is a hybrid of science, music, and
performance art, where
minimalistic trance music based on the Doppler Effect contrasts with issues central to
performance art such as physical struggle and '
implied threat'.
John Cage once said, "
At the piano, Gordon Monahan produces sounds we haven't heard before."
[more inside]
posted by wcfields
on Apr 29, 2011 -
4 comments
"But this wasn't quite enough and so then I got the idea of having all thirteen of the lowest tones of the piano played together... In other words, I was inventing a new musical sound later to be called 'tone clusters'... Anyway, this was my professional debut as a composer." Henry Cowell's musical autobiography. Cowell was one of the most important figures in 20th-century American music,
described by John Cage as "the open sesame for new music in America." In this hour-long program recorded four years before his death in 1965, compositions from every stage in Cowell's career are contextualized and discussed by the man himself.
posted by No-sword
on Aug 8, 2010 -
10 comments
In those years I imitated him, to the point of transcription, to the point of devoted and impassioned plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, is literature. Whoever preceded him might shine in history, but they were all rough drafts of Macedonio, imperfect previous versions. To not imitate this canon would have represented incredible negligence.
From Jorge Luis Borges' eulogy for Macedonio Fernández. Borges' relationship with Macedonio was complicated, as recounted in
The Man Who Invented Borges, a fine essay by Marcelo Ballvé. Macedonio's most famous work, the posthumous-by-design work (he believed literature should be aged like good whiskey) The Museum of Eterna's Novel has finally been translated and published in English translation,
here is an excerpt from the novel (one of the ninety or so prologues). The introduction to the novel, written by its translator Margaret Schwartz, has been put online by the publisher (parts
1,
2,
3,
4,
5). Schwartz also sat down for a
short interview. You can download an mp3 of a
great hour-long panel discussion on Macedonio and a
master's thesis on Macedonio by Peter Loggie [pdf]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 21, 2010 -
7 comments
"The written word hasn't kept up with the age. The movies have outmanoeuvered it. We have the talkies, but as yet no Readies." So wrote Rob Brown in 1930 in his book
The Readies. Putting his money where his mouth was, he made a prototype readie, which has since been lost.
Brown's story is recounted by Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times. Brown expert Craig Saper has created a
replica Readie online, which includes amongst others texts by Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, F. T. Marinetti as well as translations from Horace by Ezra Pound.
[Some of the texts shock modern sensibilities]
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 28, 2010 -
17 comments
A favorite of
John Cage and Gyorgy Ligeti, the latter describing his music as "so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed but at the same time emotional...the best of any composer living today,"
Conlon Nancarrow's
musical ideas were nevertheless too complex and technically demanding for human performers, and his political ideas too radical and leftist for McCarthy-era America. Expatriated to Mexico, the Texarkana-born avant-gardeist
lived most of his life in isolation, in a cluttered, dusty
studio surrounded by records, piles of books, empty Vodka bottles, newspapers, cigarette cartons, and the tools of his trade: 2 old player pianos and a custom-built
piano roll press.
[more inside]
posted by swift
on Feb 15, 2010 -
16 comments
Tango With Cows is an exhibition by the Getty Museum of the book art of the Russian avant-garde from 1910 to 1917, which included a performance of sound poetry,
all captured on video, both of Futurist poems, other historical sound poems, and contemporary works. Among performers are Christian Bök and Steve McCaffery. The exhibition takes its name from
the book of ferro-concrete poems, one of
21 books can be downloaded as PDFs, most are by Alexei Kruchenykh but there are also works by Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burliuk, Andrei Kravtsov, Vasily Kamensky and Velimir Khlebnikov. These were all Futurists.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Feb 2, 2010 -
12 comments
Seattle-based German artist Trimpin makes sculptural musical instruments. He was
profiled in a mini-documentary by Washington public TV station KBTC a couple of years ago. Here are videos of some other works of art he's created,
Fire Organ,
Liquid Percussion,
Cello, Sensors and Record Players,
Contraption at Seattle-Tacoma Airport,
MIDI-controlled Player Piano and
Sheng High.
Kyle Gann wrote
an essay by that placed Trimpin in the tradition of John Cage, Harry Partch and other avant-garde American musical inventors. The audio of a nearly hour and a half long 1990 interview with Trimpin by Charles Amirkhanian can be
downloaded from the Internet Archive. Another,
more light-hearted interview in connection to his show at this year's SXSW, where a documentary about him premiered (
trailer).
posted by Kattullus
on May 4, 2009 -
5 comments
Connecticut's
Have a Nice Life is responsible for one of the year's most
acclaimed, highly conceptual albums this year, Deathconsciousness.
The two discs (entitled The Plow That Broke The Plains and The Future, respectively) feature music spanning over five years of collaboration between the two artists, and are accompanied by a 75-page booklet on medieval Italian heretics in lieu of liner notes. Combining elements of
shoegaze,
new wave,
ambient drone,
post-rock,
experimental industrial,
avant-garde dark metal, and
electronic music, and citing references such as
My Bloody Valentine and
Joy Division to their credit, the original and only pressings sold out
within hours. Full stream of all 85 minutes available
here. Direct mp3 samples
here and
here.
[more inside]
posted by Christ, what an asshole
on Jun 28, 2008 -
34 comments
Owen Hatherley, has three blogs where he expounds on culture and architecture from an English Leftist perspective,
sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy,
The Measures Taken (which has longer essays than the previous blog) and the group film blog
kino fist. To give you an idea of the range of subjects he covers, here's a sampling of his blogposts:
Towards a Communist Couture? Sartorial Socialism from Huey P Newton to Honecker,
Zuckendes Fleischer (on pre-WWII American cartoons),
Industrial Island Machine - Vorticism and the absence of an English Avant-Garde,
Hurrah for the Black Box Recorder (on songwriter Luke Haines and The Daily Mail),
The Children’s Book as a Revolutionary Object (with a bunch of pictures from Soviet avant-garde children's books),
Architectural Drawings of the 1960s,
Art is a branch of Mathematics (Taylorism and Russian SF classic
We),
Brechtian Productivism in an age of Mechanical Stagnation and
Notes towards an attempted refutation of the 'Associational Fallacy' (on architecture). All of the blogs are heavily adorned with pretty pictures, some not safe for work.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 13, 2007 -
7 comments
Asemic is a magazine of asemic writing, which is writing without semantic content. The editor is Australian Tim Gaze, who's made the asemic books
Aussie Runes and The Oxygen of Truth, volumes
1 and
2. "Only words lie; asemic texts cannot lie."
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 13, 2007 -
74 comments
