​25 Years of UbuWeb, the Internet’s Best Kept Secret

 

“Though you’ve likely stumbled across a post or two from UbuWeb during one of your internet excursions or referenced the site during college courses, perhaps it’s a good time to devote solid, focused energy on absorbing the profoundly deep lessons buried in the crucial online archive of art, music, film, literature and esoteric ephemera. This year marks UbuWeb’s 25th anniversary, but don’t expect a social media blitz, a plea for funding or a major web redesign. Defiantly utilitarian, it operates as a crucial resource while openly acknowledging in its About essay that its archive contains copyright-infringing content: ‘By the letter of the law, the site is questionable; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission. Most everything on the site is pilfered, ripped, and swiped from other places, then reposted. We’ve never been sued—never even come close.’ ...”

In Sheeps Clothing Hi-Fi (Video)

​How Soccer Lost America (Then Got It Back) - Brian Phillips

 

"A strange feature of American exceptionalism during the 1980s and ’90s was that we wanted to import everything but culture. This is one way to understand the bizarre anxiety and contempt with which much of the American sports media regarded soccer in the late 20th century: It was the wrong kind of product. ... American men in Bangladesh-made khakis could, without a whisper of cognitive dissonance, drive their German cars while listening to their Chinese-engineered radio consoles, where they’d spend drivetime deriding soccer as a foreign menace, a cosmopolitan threat to American strength—a 'game for beret-wearers,' as Ann Coulter once put it. ..."

The Ringer

The Ringer: The Death of the American Soccer Troll - Bryan Curtis (July 2018)

Promises - Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra (2021)

 

“... This month, Sanders returns with ‘Promises,’ his first major album in nearly two decades. It is a collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and is led by Sam Shepherd, a d.j. who produces electronic music under the name Floating Points. Shepherd, an Englishman in his mid-thirties, emerged in the late two-thousands, making boogie-influenced dance tracks. His music soon became more ambient and expansive, as though he were uncoiling his club-oriented songs and exploring where the synth squiggles and hazy textures might go if they were allowed to meander. ...”

New Yorker: Pharoah Sanders Takes on Electronic Music

NY Times: Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points Meet in the Atmosphere, Floating Points, Electronic Music’s King of Pain (Video)

The Nation: Pharoah Sanders’s Grand Return

W - Promises

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises [Full Album]

2015 December: Maleem Mahmoud Ghania With Pharaoh Sanders - The Trance Of Seven Colors (1994), 2016 January: Ptah, The El Daoud - Alice Coltrane & Pharoah Sanders (1970), 2016 November: Tauhid (1967), 2017 May: The Pharoah Sanders Story: In the Beginning 1963-1964, 2017 November: Let Us Now Praise Pharoah Sanders, Master of Sax, 2018 February: Anthology: You've Got to Have Freedom - Pharoah Sanders (2005), 2018 February: James Blood Ulmer & Pharoah Sanders - Live 2003, 2018 May: How Pharoah Sanders Brought Jazz to Its Spiritual Peak with His Impulse! Albums, 2019 January: Africa (1987)

​Titian: Women, Myth & Power

 

The Rape of Europa, 1559-1562

“Between 1551 and 1562, Titian created a series of monumental paintings for King Philip II of Spain. Celebrated as landmarks of western painting, the six poesie — or painted poetries — envision epic stories from classical Antiquity. Titian reimagined these familiar tales and used his modern style of painting to shape the future of western art. For the first time in over four centuries, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s fully restored Rape of Europa is reunited with its five illustrious companions in the exhibition’s finale and its only American venue on an international tour including to the National Gallery, London and the Museo del Prado, Madrid. This exhibition explores each painting's story, its drama, raw emotion, and complex consequences illustrated in each painting, reconsidering what the poesie meant in their own time and how they resonate now. ...”

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

NY Times: Can We Ever Look at Titian’s Paintings the Same Way Again?

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Titian Room Restoration

New Criterion: Of bodies chang’d

YouTube: Work of master painter Titian reunited for the first time in more than 400 years

 

Venus and Adonis, about 1553–1554.

Why New York Is Unearthing a Brook It Buried a Century Ago

 

Tibbetts Brook was dammed in the 18th century to create a pond that still exists in Van Cortlandt Park. Part of the brook was buried underground around 1912. 

“New York is a city surrounded by water, from the open ocean to bays to rivers. But there is also an enormous trove of water hidden below its streets and high-rise buildings — hundreds of subterranean streams, creeks and springs that were buried long ago and all but forgotten as the city grew. Tibbetts Brook is one of them. Its final stretch was diverted into a drain in the Bronx around 1912 and sent down to the sewer pipes below to make way for development of the marshland where it used to run. For decades, environmentalists and local activists campaigned to resurface the long-buried stream. Now, a changing climate is making what they struggled to achieve necessary. ...”

NY Times

W - Tibbetts Brook

W - Van Cortlandt Park

Daylighting Tibbetts Brook

 

The original course of Spuyten Duyvil Creek and its junction with Tibbetts Brook, and the island of Paparinemo (now Kingsbridge, Bronx)

​Late nights in Lisboa

 

“Contrary to the prevailing idea that Portugal lies at the margins due to a disadvantaged economic positioning in the EU, that small country on the Atlantic coast was actually central in the making of modern Europe. That is, it was from ports such as Lisbon that the subjects of the Portuguese Christian kings, only a generation or two removed from the rule of the remains of the Umayaad Caliphate, sailed south hoping to circumvent the trade routes that snaked through the much wealthier and African and Asian kingdoms of the time. On their way to the Indian Ocean, they set up trading posts along the African coast that would eventually turn into outposts for the brutal European expansionism, enslavement, and resource extraction that would define the next 500 years. ...”

Africa Is a Country (Audio)

Francesco Rosi - Hands over the City (1963)

 

“Rod Steiger is ferocious as a scheming land developer in Francesco Rosi's Hands over the City, a blistering work of social realism and the winner of the 1963 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion. This expose of the politically driven real-estate speculation that has devastated Naples's civilian landscape moves breathlessly from a cataclysmic building collapse to the backroom negotiations of civic leaders vying for power in a city council election, laying bare the inner workings of corruption with passion and outrage. ...”

Criterion

Wonders in the Dark

Guardian: Hands over the City DVD review – Philip French on Francesco Rosi's Neapolitan political drama

W - Hands over the City

YouTube: The Limits Of Our Investigation

2013 July: Salvatore Giuliano (1962), 2021 July: Christ Stopped at Eboli: Memories of Exile

​25th Anniversary Countdown (2 of 13): LX(RMX)

 

“Disquiet.com 25th anniversary countdown, day 2 of 13. In 2012, I had the pleasure of engaging eight musicians to explore the sounds of Lisbon, Portugal. These were: Steve Roden, Robin Rimbaud, Pedro Tudela, Kate Carr, Shawn Kelly, Marielle Jakobsons, Paula Daunt, and João Ricardo. The project was done with an old friend of mine, Jorge Colombo, the phenomenal illustrator, photographer, and designer, to accompany an exhibit of his at the time. In the spirit of Fernando Pessoa (whose The Book of Disquiet provided the name for Disquiet.com), who wrote under (from within) numerous different heteronyms (or authorial identities), each participant did two tracks: one under their own name, and one under their pseudonym. ... More details at disquiet.com/lx-rmx. Design by Brian Scott of Boon Design.”

Disquiet (Audio)

Speaking with the Multifaceted Street and Studio Artist Will Power

 

“Active on both the streets and in his studio, Will Power fashions stylishly seductive images, often fusing elements of graffiti, street art and fine art. His talents can now be viewed not only on the streets of his native New Jersey and throughout NYC, but in the group exhibition, On and Off the Streets: Urban Art New Jersey, that continues through February 27 at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey. While selecting studio works to feature in the exhibition, I had the opportunity to interview Will. ...”

Street Art NYC

Hip Hop Is My Religion: About

​Museum rivalry ‘could make Dutch Vermeer show last of its kind’

 

Girl with a Pearl Earring will be loaned to the Rijksmuseum from the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

“Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has announced a ‘first and last’ exhibition of all the paintings by Johannes Vermeer that are fit to travel, as its director claimed growing museum rivalry makes such international cooperation unlikely in the future. Vermeer, whose most famous work is Girl with a Pearl Earring, dating from around 1665, is thought to have painted 35 masterpieces, of which 23 were shown together 26 years ago at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Taco Dibbits, the Rijksmuseum director, said his institution would surpass that number but he did not expect such a collection to ever be possible again owing to the age of the works and the intense competition among galleries to draw in visitors. ...”

Guardian

2009 September: Vermeer's Masterpiece, The Milkmaid, 2011 February: Vermeer: Master of Light, 2013 October: Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, 2015 December: This Is Not a Vermeer ™, 2017 January: The Art of Painting (1665–1668)

 

Detail from The Little Street, circa 1658.

​Best Ornette Coleman Pieces: Songs of Limitless Creativity

“Ornette Coleman is regarded as one of the great pioneers of free jazz, a genre that emerged in the late 1950s and continues to influence music today. Perhaps his most famous record is The Shape of Jazz to Come, a prophetically titled album that remains an essential listen for anyone looking to learn about free jazz. ... If the record sounds fairly tame and accessible to our ears today, that’s because of its impact. Shape literally changed the way jazz musicians thought about jazz. At the time, though, Coleman’s approach of taking away chordal instruments (e.g. piano) and emphasizing melody over harmony was completely alien. Coleman called his philosophy for improvisation ‘harmolodics.’ Unlike his peers, for whom improvisation was driven primarily by harmony, Coleman considered harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time, and phrases as separate entities worthy of investigation. ...”

udiscover (Video)

2019 July: Complete Science Fiction Sessions (2000), 2020 July: How Ornette Coleman Shaped the Jazz World: An Introduction to His Irreverent Sound, 2020 July: How Ornette Coleman Freed Jazz with His Theory of Harmolodics

December: Geminid Meteors & Comet Leonard

“This month’s night sky features two appearances that are sure to capture your attention. One is the annual display of Geminid meteors, which always challenges August’s Perseids for the title of ‘Best Meteor Shower.’ Our Sky Tour podcast gives you all the details you’ll nee for when and where to look.The second celestial headliner is Comet Leonard (officially designated C/2021 A1), which was discovered last January and is just now reaching its peak brightness. ... The western evening sky is packed with planets right now. As twilight gives way to full darkness, Venus is unmistakably bright low in the southwest. Well to its upper left you’ll encounter a bright, easy-to-spot 'star' that’s actually the planet Jupiter. ...”

Sky & Telescope (Audio)

Who is the best player from each of England’s 48 counties?

 

"England’s system of counties is rarely discussed in relation to professional football. If you say you support Surrey or Lancashire or Worcestershire, you are clearly talking about cricket rather than football. England’s second sport is played by sides who take their names from the county they’re based in, but football is contested by teams almost universally named after cities and towns. There are, of course, Notts County and Derby County; Notts literally being the name of the county and Derby representing the county of Derbyshire. Things become more complex when you consider Stockport County, named because Stockport was once a ‘county borough’, independent from control of any wider county, and across the border in Wales there’s Newport County, originally named Newport & Monmouth County, after the historic county of Monmouthshire. ..."

The Athletic - Michael Cox

Doll’s House - Courtney Harris

 

“Have I always loved small things? I’ve asked myself that question many times over the past few years as my obsession with all things miniature has grown and grown. I was certainly interested in tiny objects before the doll’s house arrived at the MFA in 2017 thanks to the generosity of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, but its appearance and immediate integration into our galleries fanned the flames of my growing love for everything small. An object like the doll’s house is full—literally and figuratively—with opportunity. Opportunities for research, for study, for connection, for exploration. With nine rooms and more than 200 silver miniatures, it begs for repeat visits. This house has become a living object to me—one I come back to time and time again. I probably speak, write, and think about this artwork more than any other in the Museum. ...”

MFA

2013 April: Dollhouse

Why the Discredited Dossier Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation

 

“Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have stepped up an effort to conflate the so-called Steele dossier with the Russia investigation following the indictment of a researcher for the document on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. about some of its sources.Mr. Trump and his supporters have long sought to use the flaws of the dossier to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the nature of numerous links between Russia and the Trump campaign — as a ‘hoax.’ But the available evidence indicates that the dossier was largely tangential to the Russia investigation. Here is a look at the facts. ...”

NY Times

Why the Discredited File Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation

NY Times: Trump Tested Positive for Virus Days Before Debate, 2 Ex-Officials Say

African Guitar Heroes

 

Dr Nico Kasanda

“Let’s kick it off with Djelimady Tounkara, one of the best instrumentalists of his generation, who happens to play the guitar. The former member of the Rail Band of Bamako has managed to make his instrument take on the accents and triplets he previously learnt on the ngoni, the Mandingo lute, and even makes it flirt with flamenco and Afro-Cuban sounds. While Mali is not lacking in six-string talent (the eternal Ali Farka Touré, father of Saharan-accented deep blues, Kante Manfila, Zani Diabaté, and Mama Sissoko, who was part of Super Biton of Ségou’s best days), the best sounds are coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Listen to our African Guitar Heroes playlist on Spotify and Deezer. ...”

PAN (Audio)

​Wild Things – The Creatures EP (1981)

 

“Wild Things is the first release by British duo the Creatures (singer Siouxsie Sioux and drummer Budgie). It was issued on 25 September 1981 by Polydor Records as two 7″ single records in a ‘double-album’ style card cover, and is usually referred to as an EP. It peaked in the UK Singles Chart at No. 24, and the pair performed ‘Mad Eyed Screamer’ on Top of the Pops. … The initial idea for Wild Things, and the Creatures, came about during the recording sessions for the Siouxsie and the Banshees album Juju. While bassist Steven Severin and guitarist John McGeoch took a break, Siouxsie and drummer Budgie created the song ‘But Not Them.’ ...”

Wikipedia

Genius (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Mad Eyed Screamer (Live), So Unreal, Wild Things

2017 April: "Hong Kong Garden" / "Voices (On The Air)" (1978), 2017 September: "Playground Twist" (1979), 2018 October: Juju – Siouxsie and the Banshees (1981)

Gilbert Sorrentino - The Orangery (1978)

 

“... The Orangery is one of [Gilbert] Sorrentino’s most memorable collections of poetry. Each poem includes the word ‘orange,’ the ‘preconceived constraint’ upon which the poet planned this book. Orange appears and reappears as a color, a fruit, a memory, an intrusion, a word seeking a rhyme, or an unexpected presence. On first publication William Bronk wrote, ‘In The Orangery Sorrentino makes things which are hard, gaudy, and sometimes scary. They are stark artifacts of our world. . . . They are made to last.’ The poem titled ‘King Cole’ takes two lines from a song that Nat King Cole made popular—’Wham! Bam! Alla Kazam!/ out of an orange colored sky’—and focuses on the nonsense words. ...”

Analysis of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Poems

Rogue Embryo

W - Gilbert Sorrentino

amazon

​An 1873 map shows rural Brooklyn on the cusp of big changes

 

“I can’t help but get lost in the Beers Map of Gravesend. Drawn in 1873 by cartographer Frederick Beers, it’s an impressive survey of one of the original six towns of Brooklyn—founded in 1643 by English-born Lady Deborah Moody and her group of Anabaptist followers, according to heartofconeyisland.com. What amazes me most is how rural this pocket of southern Brooklyn was in the 1870s—and how much change was right on the horizon. (If you can’t magnify the map above, try visiting this link.) First, look at that craggy shoreline of Coney Island. At some point, as Coney transitioned into the beach resort dubbed the People’s Playground in the next few decades, all those inlets and little islands were filled in and straightened out—including Coney Island Creek, making Coney no longer an island. ...”

Ephemeral New York

2009 April: Coney Island, 2010 July: Nathan's Famous, 2011 March: "An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders", Owen Smith, 2013 August: Donna Dennis: Coney Night Maze, 2013 October: Last Days of Summer at Coney Island, 2014 July: Coney Island - Directors: Steve Siegel and Phil Buehler (1973), 2015 May: The Case for Riding the Subway to the Last Stop, 2016 December: Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008, 2017 August: Here's What Coney Island Looks Like In The Empty Pre-Dawn Hours, 2019 August: Pierless, 2021 July: The 1916 stunt that made Nathan’s Famous a Coney Island hot dog icon

Road - Fred Frith Trio (2021)

 

“Road is a live album recorded as a double CD by the Fred Frith Trio, with Fred Frith on electric guitar, Jason Hoopes on electric bass, and Jordan Glenn on drums. It was released on October 15, 2021, on Intakt Records. ... The first CD is somehow more accessible—at least, the first part of the suite—compared to what Fred Frith usually releases. It starts with some jazz-rock parts, sounding like an instrumental version of Frank Zappa or King Crimson, but then it moves more and more towards experimental jazz, luring us into it and helping us understand the connections and progressions, stepping into the Trio’s other dimension. Fred Frith often blurs the line between jazz and rock, but in this case, it really makes a good entry point into his world, and the sound—even though it was recorded live—is just amazing, purely electrifying. ...”

Best of Jazz (Audio)

W - Fred Frith Trio

Discogs

Bandcamp (Audio)

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021)

 

“Has a book ever come into the world when at least four other books were already in print attacking it? Admittedly, these broadsides were against earlier incarnations of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which appeared in this newspaper two years ago, followed by a podcast, public forums, lesson plans for schools and a Pulitzer Prize for the originator, Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project asserted that the full origin story of the United States begins not with the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, but with that of the White Lion and its cargo of captive Africans in Virginia the year before. This declaration provoked a Twitter firestorm of angry accusations from critics and combative replies from Hannah-Jones. ... The appearance now of an expanded version of the project in book form is sure to provoke yet more assaults. I picked up ‘The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story’ with some apprehension. Not because I disagree with the project’s basic aim, but because I had been troubled by some overstatements and factual errors in the newspaper version, such as the claim that there were ‘growing calls to abolish the slave trade’ in Britain in 1776. ...”

NY Times: A Landmark Reckoning With America’s Racial Past and Present

NY Times: The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over U.S. History (Audio) (Nov. 9, 2021)

SLATE: The New 1619 Project (Nov. 16, 2021)

amazon: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

2021 April: The 1619 Project

 

A panel by Jacob Lawrence from his series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” (1954-56)

​In Willem de Kooning’s Loft at the Dawn of Bohemian New York

 

“When I first met her, I did not recognize her. The truth is, I did not even care for her. It was in Elaine and Willem (Bill) De Kooning’s loft—in 1943 or 1944—on an icy New York winter’s day. I was going to the Art Students League. Bill was about forty, she and I were in our twenties, and I had just come from the first loft I had ever laid eyes on, which I then had no idea I would ever call my own. Coming from Europe, I believed in abstraction. The Art Students League and the few galleries up and down Fifty-Seventh Street showed figuration—pensive and sad or acid and lurid, of men and women in sweatshops, in subways, and on farms, the exploited exhausted by the Depression—or modern French masters. But the first art show I ever saw in my life had been a Paul Klee exhibition in the Buchholz Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, where they also showed the severe, neat Cubism of Juan Gris. I was hungry for more abstraction. ...”

LitHub

The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942-2011 - Edith Schloss

From Willem de Kooning’s loft to the threat of the wrecking ball: The history of 827-831 Broadway

W - Willem de Kooning

 

Willem and Elaine de Kooning with a state of Excavation in his Fourth Avenue studio, c. 1949.

​Coffee or Chai? At 2 Kolkata Cafes, ‘Adda’ Is What’s Really on the Menu

 

The Indian Coffee House in Kolkata, India, has a storied history as a place for intellectuals to gather, and debate.

“KOLKATA, India — At one of the cafes, to ask for chai is to invite a gaze of withering contempt from the turbaned waiter, as if blasphemy has been committed: It’s called the Indian Coffee House, stupid. At the other cafe, exclusively chai is served, slow-cooked over coal fire in the same dark kitchen for 103 years with the silent care of performing an old ritual. The history of this place, the Favorite Cabin, is visible in the layers of soot covering the walls, in the arched windows that filter the light in a soft aura of a bygone time, in the little attic overhead that’s an open burial vault for all the chairs broken under some storied customer who got carried away during a passionate debate. ...”

NY Times

W - Masala chai

Legendary DJ John Peel Makes a List of His 20 Favorite Albums

 

“Before there were influencers, there was John Peel. The BBC radio DJ and journeyman music writer’s tastes helped define listening habits for generations — from his early championing of Pink Floyd and Captain Beefheart to his early championing of The Smiths and Nirvana, to… well, most everything he played, wrote about and recorded in his legendary John Peel sessions from the 1960s until his death in 2004. For someone with such influence, Peel had a singularly humble attitude about his own importance and that of music tastemakers generally. ...”

Open Culture

2012 June: John Peel

​The Art of Reading: An Illustrated History of Books in Paint

 

“‘Why do artists love books?’ This volume takes this tantalizingly simple question as a starting point to reveal centuries of symbiosis between the visual and literary arts. First looking at the development of printed books and the simultaneous emergence of the modern figure of the artist, The Art of Reading appraises works by the many great masters who took inspiration from the printed word. Authors Jamie Camplin and Maria Ranauro weave together an engaging cultural history that probes the ways in which books and paintings represent a key to understanding ourselves and the past. Paintings contain a world of information about religion, class, gender, and power, but they also reveal details of everyday life often lost in history texts. Such artworks show us not only how books have been valued over time but also how the practice of reading has evolved in Western society. ...”

Getty

amazon

Thanksgiving with John Ehle

 

“The Land Breakers, by John Ehle (1925–2018), the first in the author’s ‘Mountain Novels’ series, is a story of America’s founding, set in the mountains of Appalachia and full of the hardscrabble food of the early settlements—wild turkey hen, deer meat, corn pone. These dishes are historically accurate, like Ehle’s work, but diverge from those traditionally associated with the early American table, at least those represented on holidays like Thanksgiving. Ehle’s novels depart from our traditional patriotic fare in more ways than one: they’re mythic, like all origin stories, but hold a broad view of who should take part in them, and honor the country’s origin without diminishing its moral complexity. To me his food suggested an opportunity for a better Thanksgiving, a project which also allowed me to make cornbread in a skillet, serve an entrée in a gourd, and offer an authentic recipe for buckeye cookies found nowhere else on the Internet. ...”

The Paris Review - Valerie Stivers

The Paris Review - Category Archives: Eat Your Words

Madame Bovary and the Impossibility of Re-reading - Anjali Joseph

 

“The first time I read Madame Bovary I was fourteen or fifteen. My family lived in England; at school I was learning French. Denise King, my French teacher, lent me her copy of the book, which was the one she’d used in university. I think it was a Gallimard paperback, but not a pocket edition. It had a primrose yellow cover with no picture. The paper was thick. Denise, as an undergraduate, had looked up all the words she didn’t know, and written the English in the margin. The novel is not written in very complicated language but it was a stretch for me at that point. I wasn’t very comfortable with the past historic tense which is usually only used in written French. The reward for wading through the book was a story about a depressing guy named Charles in rural nineteenth century Normandy. ...”

Literary Activism

LA Review of Books: Reading Madame Bovary in the Provinces

The Paris Review: Trust and Betrayal by Lydia Davis, amazon: Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

2012 August: On Cataloguing Flaubert, 2013 March: Sentimental Education - 1(1869), 2016 December: Three Tales (1877), 2017 August: The Sentimental Education (1869), 2018 May: In Which Our Tragic Effects Remain Purely Professional, 2019 March: The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (1911)

Negativland Is Still Culture Jamming and Taking on Our Masters

 

“It's understandable that you might know Negativland only for the controversial moments of their career -- the mockery of U2, which got them into legal trouble, or their satire on the soft-drink industry in the album Dispepsi. And maybe you've even heard about their pranks on the news media. If you're a longtime Bay Area resident, maybe you've caught their radio show, Over the Edge, on KPFA, though you might not have known who the masterminds behind it were. If that describes your level of awareness, here's something else you need to know: Negativland is a great band. ...”

KQED

UbuWeb: Our Favorite Things (Video)  1:18:11

2009 March: Negativland, 2012 January: Negativland (sound collage), 2012 December: No Other Possibility (1989), 2013 November: No Business (2005)

​Drone Music, Stretched and Sliced

 

“In late 2017, when David First announced a drone-music performance in Brooklyn, I circled the date on my calendar. ... The nearly two-hour work he performed in Brooklyn in 2017, ‘The Consummation of Right and Wrong,’ was more consistently active and surprising than a lot of contemporary drone music. Yet it still carried that genre’s powerful, cumulative effect, with the easy instrumental interplay that is only possible from a well-drilled working band, recalling Mr. First’s past engagements with jazz. The final version of ‘Consummation,’ released this month by Important Records, is even more impressive. One major reason is that it’s no longer a continuous extravaganza. The album’s first 98 minutes are now divided into discrete ‘scenes,’ which fade in and out. ...”

NY Times (Video/Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs

vimeo: The Consummation of Right and Wrong (9:50 excerpts) David First/The Western Enisphere (Live)

Off the Beaten Track - African Head Charge (1986)

 

“In 1986, when African Head Charge released this album it was a newly remade ensemble lead by a percussionist and including a live kit drums, melodica/keyboardist, and bass backed by samples and tape loops. The resulting album still sounds modern, fresh, and innovative in the electronica plethora. Programmed chants and unexpected sounds (barking dogs, breaking glass, etc.) are salient features of this rhythmic, international dub. Particularly strong tracks are the title cut (featuring Jah Wobble on bass) and the ambient selection ‘Language & Mentality,’ crafted around an Albert Einstein monologue of the same name. These lengthy and dense loops and samples are showcased in attenuated, flowing rhythm beds. Largely made of slinky rhythms from a segmented funk, Off the Beaten Track is both a landmark recording in the use of sound-bite technology and an excellent example of the integration of live instrumentation and programmed music. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

​Solskjaer Out at Manchester United After a Loss Too Far

 

“Manchester United had not done it after a humiliation by Liverpool. And the club’s executives had managed to tolerate the sight of Manchester City’s cruising to victory at Old Trafford while barely breaking a sweat. After each defeat, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the manager who had overseen both calamities, somehow remained in his post. He could not, though, survive a third. Solskjaer had promised, two weeks on since that defeat against Manchester City, that his team would react, that it would use the embarrassment as fuel for the rest of the season. ...”

NY Times