Imagine that you wake from surgery, and your doctor hands you a portrait of the gallbladder that was just removed from you. In the photograph, your gallbladder is about to be eaten by a pelican, stacked on tomatoes. It’s a gift, made out to you in swirling calligraphy.
Some good news:
Kode9 has shared details of his first studio album since 2015, titled Escapology.
Out in July through his own Hyperdub label, the 15-track record is the first part of a duel-album project. It’s billed as the soundtrack to the Hyperdub boss’ new sonic-fiction work Astro-Darien, which is out through Hyperdub’s book imprint, Flatlines, in October. Astro-Darien was initially launched last year as a two-week audiovisual installation at London’s Corsica Studios.
Kode9’s real name is Steve Goodman, a lovely person whom I met once in London after he performed with the late lamented Spaceape, and the author of the book SONIC WARFARE. It’s very good. From the blurb, I would isolate this as a thing worth considering:
Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.
Making art out of the unbound – from our unseen internal organs, liberated and presented to us as art, and the not yet heard.
researchers are led to an extremely interesting conclusion: that there exists a mirror universe very similar to ours but invisible to us except through gravitational impact on our world. Such “mirror world” dark sector would allow for an effective scaling of the gravitational free-fall rates while respecting the precisely measured mean photon density today.
“In practice, this scaling symmetry could only be realized by including a mirror world in the model—a parallel universe with new particles that are all copies of known particles,” said Cyr-Racine.
Reading this Wirecutter review of “tabletop radios,” as I guess they’re called now, made me want one.
I use an old Echo Spot in the kitchen for radio, as well as for access to Amazon Music, and the sound quality doesn’t seem to me to be much different from the radio sets of my youth. When I was a kid, the radio was always on in the kitchen, and, growing up, it was my little lifeline to culture and discovery. John Peel, Annie Nightingale, Alexis Korner, Linton Kwesi Johnson. I’m sure it’s just memory and nostalgia that made me instantly think, wow, I’d love a radio on the kitchen counter with a proper dial. I don’t need one, obviously. But I’m bookmarking it anyway, against that time in the future when I don’t have access to the internet and still need that little lifeline to the world of sound.
I was not surprised by the number of notebooks in which Henry James recorded his ideas for stories – he had an intensely active mind, a vivid imagination and, being social – a constant diner-out – he was the recipient of all sorts of snippets, gossip and asides. And he was lonely, another trait of the note-taker. It is not a surprise that he did not get around to using all this material. Some writers struggle to come up with a new idea. Others keep notebooks.
…digital analysis of rock surfaces reveals how other ghosts of the deep past—this time from almost 2,000 years ago in North America—have been coaxed into the light. Writing in the journal Antiquity, Professor Jan Simek of the University of Tennessee and colleagues have published images of giant glyphs carved into the mud surface of the low ceiling of a cave in Alabama.
The motifs, which depict human forms and animals, are some of the largest known cave images found in North America and may represent spirits of the underworld.
Archaeologists have discovered rare rock art in an Iron Age subterranean complex, located underneath a house in Başbük, Turkey. The finding, reported Wednesday in the journal Antiquity, depicts a divine processional with eight deities across a 13-foot rock wall panel using a mix of cultural influences from the vast Assyrian Empire and local Syro-Anatolian deities.
The discovery is the first known example of a Neo-Assyrian-period rock relief with Aramaic inscriptions; it contains the earliest-known regional attestation of Atargatis, the principal goddess of Syria.
The Shkadov Thruster: stripmine Mercury, turn the product into a vast mirror belting one side of the sun, wait 200 million years, and the entire solar system is transported a hundred light years away. I came across this while reading a consideration of free-floating planets as interstellar arks, which caught my eye because I remembered being amused by THE WANDERING EARTH.
The piece includes one of my favourite observations about a Type 3 civilisation – and I am using this excuse to see if I can get Quotebacks working here:
In 2020, Valentin Ivanov (ESO Paranal) and colleagues proposed a modification to the Kardashev scale based on how a civilization integrates with its environment (citation below). The authors offered a set of classes. Class 0 is a civilization that uses the environment without substantially changing it. Class 1 modifies its environment to fit its needs, while Class 2 modifies itself to fit its environment. A Class 3 civilization under this scheme would be maddeningly difficult to find because it is indistinguishable from its environment.
(That only took fifteen minutes to figure out, bloody hell… I’m sure Quotebacks and WordPress used to play more nicely together, but I found the “insert HTML workaround)
“In 2011, the Boston-based artist Yu-Wen Wu looked up how she might walk from Beantown to Taiwan, to visit her ailing grandmother. She had looked up airline tickets, but they were astronomical. At the time Google Maps was still in its infancy, and so the site compiled and returned detailed results about how she could walk the continental U.S. and then kayak from the West Coast to Hawai’i on to Japan and finally to Taipei. (Google now will say it can’t find the route.) The 11,749-mile journey was estimated to take about 155 days and 5 hours. Wu saved these directions as a PDF and has now translated them into the format of a landscape scroll…“
You barely glimpse the heighliners, the vast container spaceships that famously travel without moving in the new film version of DUNE.
On rewatching the film, I noted that we barely see inside spaceships either, and it started to feel like a choice, so I went hunting. And sure enough, the director had a plan:
I tried to keep all the space-travelling as mysterious as possible, like almost bringing some kind of mysticism or sacred relationship with that part of the movie. Everything involving space is just evocated and very mysterious…
I insisted that we will never go inside the spaceships. Dune is really a project that was, for me, focusing entirely on Arrakis and the Fremen planet, and focusing on the ecosystem of the planet. It’s a story that is very grounded. It’s not a story about space-travelling. It’s so [much] more beautiful when we don’t see.
Apparently there was too much happy news, because a new theory has been aired suggesting that in 100 million years the universe will start contracting back into the infinitely dense dot of hot garbage it started out as. But we won’t be able to test that theory for another 65 million years or so.
There’s probably also a point to be made here about how, to use Twitter the way Twitter wants you to, you basically have to make it your job, but other people are getting to that for me.
