From: Ambient Landscapes from a Female Noise Detective
Definitely how today feels. A beautifully melancholy audio capture of 2019.
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Big fan of Old Tower. I like a bit of dungeon synth, and Old Tower is very good at the haunted atmospheres.
Comments closedWhat I need is a post-death internet service. This is something people have been talking about a lot over the last few years. I don’t know if any true solutions were found for the thing that, this morning, I think I’d like the most. A year after I die, I’d like to post to Twitter or something. Hell, who even knows if Twitter will be there by then. He said, as if he were likely to outlive any internet service. Maybe it should go to my newsletter system instead.
But: just a message, a year after I die. Saying, hi, I died a year ago, but I just wanted to tell you something.
Which, yes, is unsettling enough on its own, I know. It’s not unamusing to me, obviously. But.
Hi. I died a year ago, but I just wanted to tell you something. I loved being with you all, and I hope you’re all making the most out of life, because we only get one go on the ride. Hold on tight.
But I think mostly I probably just want to scare the shit out of people.
…
I’m not buying an URL for a digital haunting service DON’T LOOK AT ME
(written 12 September 2017, recovered from Morning Computer)
Comments closed…what the artist really needs is only occasional relief from the necessary loneliness of his creative situation.
I have, for a long time, been moving slowly through an old book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF SAMUEL BECKETT by John Calder. It is hard going in places, and demanding, with, naturally enough, dated language. But, looking back today, I find I have highlighted a lot of sentences and passages.
He saw art as an encumbrance, a deflection from a will that should be concentrated entirely on hating God.
I mean, if you have no great interest in Beckett, it’s unlikely to be for you, unless philosophy is really your thing. It does, however, get into his method from time to time:
Above all he weeded out, in the later work, any superfluous implantations, thereby achieving a prose of maximum economy where adjectives were sparingly used and anything in the present time of the speaker that was not within eyeshot or hearing would not be present, except as memory.
And this, which I found fascinating, as a devotee of the plays:
Beckett’s rehearsal notebooks, which have been preserved at Reading University, contain the author’s drawings of the Godot stage movements in the productions he directed: cruciform designs abound, both in the walks of the characters and the crossed heaps of bodies when Pozzo falls in the second act and is unable to rise. Besides crosses, there are many circles to describe how the characters should move around the stage, and the origin of these is Dante’s concentric circles of hell. So the visual language and the spoken combine to create a new dramatic vocabulary, in its way as stylized as Chinese opera, every gesture having significance. The audience should find its initial fascination with this new non-naturalistic, sometimes balletic and mimetic, drama gradually turning into curiosity and the desire to know more, as it begins to realize the symbolical quality of the play.
Hard going, occasionally somewhat asking to be put in a corner to think about what it just said, but rewarding.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SAMUEL BECKETT, John Calder (UK) (US)
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And I think this completes my collection of available physical editions by Phurpa, thanks to the wonderful Zoharum, whose output you can check out at their Bandcamp or at zoharum.com, Phurpa are… well, here’s their own description: “Before Buddhism reached Tibet, practices involving shamanic rites derived from various ancestral cults became known as Bon. Phurpa, led by contemporary artist Alexei Tegin, is a Moscow based group in this tradition.”
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Simon Reynolds on how those of us who remain on the Isles Of Blogging have actually fallen out of the habit of linking to each other. Fair point.
Interesting playlist by Caterina Barbieri.
How To Disappear (As Much As Possible) and Deal With the Consequences
Analysis Of The Musical Cryptograms / The Heavenly Ladder – which I find quite unlistenable, but check out the notes:
Comments closedAdolf Wölfli
(Bern, February 29, 1864 – Waldau, November 6, 1930)
was a Swiss artist who was one of the first artists to be associated with the Art Brut or outsider art label. Wölfli was abused both physically and sexually as a child, and was orphaned at the age of 10. Institutionalized in 1895 at Waldau psychiatric asylum near Bern (Switzerland) where he spent the rest of his adult life. He suffered from psychosis, which led to intense hallucinations. Wölfli started drawing in 1899, but no work prior to 1904 has been preserved. In 1908, Wölfli started developing what would become a potentially endless narrative stretched across 25,000 pages interrupted only by Wölfli’s death in 1930. His images also incorporated an idiosyncratic musical notation. This notation seemed to start as a purely decorative affair but later developed into real composition which Wölfli would play on a paper trumpet.
This is great. From the Bandcamp notes:
… gently rocking waves of sound, or like a babbling sonic stream of fractured audio debris. It also sounds a bit like the equivalent of sunlight dancing on the ripples of a lake’s surface.
‘eau’ is not really a song, or a composition. Well, technically it is, but it functions more like an atmosphere that fills the space. Just let it play (on repeat…) and let the sounds hang in the room…
This was one I needed to own in a physical edition. Maybe you do too.
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