My favorite listening of late has been the brilliant Christian Renou who has released a library of recordings under the name Brume. 

Renou is a sound sculptor, which may sound a tad pretentious, but is an appellation that makes perfect sense when you listen to his breath-taking, disturbing, suspenseful and incredible music. 

Here are two genius tracks to give you just a small flavour of his work.
 

 
More Brume after the jump…
 

Smarter than your average bear, the multi-talented writer David Quantick recently popped up on BBC’s Newsnight Review to rattle cutlass with the Music Industry. 

Quantick is best known as the co-writer of the award-winning The Day Today, with Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, worked on Chris Morris’ Brass Eye, wrote and created the world’s first internet sitcom Junkies and most recently penned the rather excellent Miliband of Brothers for Channel 4.

In this short clip, pirate Quantick states:

The Music Industry is like the Mafia, but less efficient. And record industry executives are loud, nasty and bad for you like cocaine in human form. Remember the slogan ‘Home taping is killing music’? Well piracy isn’t the problem. What’s killing music is the Music Industry.

As Quantick points out, it’s about time these odious wastes of talent and their money grasping, hypocritical, fuckwit pop stars learned to live off a proper working wage. Just like most people do. It maybe a simplistic argument, but it cuts through the bull usually given out in defense of sheer naked greed.  And if the Muisc Biz and its popsters can’t live off what it makes, well, as Mr Q. says:

Let bands earn what they deserve to earn. Take pop music away from Simon Cowell and the 79p download sites, because if the Music Industry dies, then like child labor, corporal punishment, and James Blunt’s career, maybe it deserves to die.

 
Did you miss him? Didn’t think so… Operation Rescue founder, Randall Terry demonstrates how to hold a racist, hateful press conference complete with anti-Koran shenanigans, so that people will pay attention to him again.

Via Right Wing Watch

 
Ten years ago, I’d have laughed at this. In 2010, it’s not so funny:

From a press release posted today on BusinessWire:

Left Behind Games CEO, Troy Lyndon says, “Retailers are showing more interest in LB Games, our Christian video game products. Over the past several weeks, we have been unveiling our proven, proprietary church-marketing system which is designed to increase sales for retailers who carry our products. Over the past two years, we’ve invested in the development of the Christian video game market by giving away more than 50,000 PC games to our network of Pastors who share our desire to provide healthier video game alternatives to their youth. Soon, our investors will no longer have to support a pioneering effort with vision alone, but also with progress evidenced by solid sales and income.”

Have you ever actually seen the Left Behind: Eternal Forces game? It is it some spectacularly bone-headed shit, described here on the All Things Considered blog in a post titled Grand Theft Auto: Book of Revelations:

This is a game that’s actually been out for a while. I read an early review on it when it was going gold (ready for mass production), and was filled with Christ-love. I was so taken aback by the message of tolerance delivered in this game, that I had to pause my viewing of The Passion of the Christ while breezing through some of the recent Promise Keeper literature which had been stuffed into my Jesus/Santa mailbox.

In the game, titled Left Behind: Eternal Forces, you are a person left behind on Earth after the Rapture has come and taken all the true believers to Heaven. If you don’t know what this means, then you’re a doomed sinner, so put your head between your legs and kiss your forked tail goodbye. 666 Satan hearts you.

The point of the game is to convert people into disciples in order to combat the Anti-Christ. Those who cannot be converted you must kill. The bad guys are rock stars and Arab-esque people.. [Emphasis added].

WTF, right? Take comfort in the fact that Left Behind: Eternal Forces is so lame, it’s unlikely to convert anyone to anything. Even your inbred hillbilly cousin Jimmy-Joe would think this game sucks and yet there are still people all across this great nation dumb enough to buy into this shit. They even sell it at Wal-Mart. Watch the game’s trailer, below.
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares

 
A short and sweet film by The Selby about some urban hipsters and surfers opening a taco stand and juice bar in the aging community of Rockaway Beach, Queens. I used to go surfing at this very spot.

Via theworldsbestever

 
Keith, well we all know about Keith Richards’ appetite for destruction, with a particular emphasis on smack, but Mick, too??? From the NME:

Mick Jagger’s former partner Jerry Hall has claimed that he regularly used heroin in the 1970s.

Hall, who has four children with The Rolling Stones frontman and split with him in 1990, says she managed to wean him off the drug.

Telegraph.co.uk reports that Hall wrote in her new autobiography: “Mick had told me he took LSD every day for a year in the ‘60s. He also admitted he was smoking heroin. I was disgusted. I told him I couldn’t see him if he took drugs, saying, ‘Go away and don’t come back until you’re straight’. He succeeded – he had amazing will power.”

Jagger himself has previously remained secretive about his use of heroin, denying that the drug was his when it was found by police at his Chelsea home in 1969.

Sir Mick, thus far, has made no comments on Hall’s claims.

 
This, the fifth episode of the Dangerous Minds Radio Hour finds your host Brad Laner going it alone (Richard will return for the next episode) and delving into some expansive jams by some stalwart DM heros along with some recent discoveries. These are sounds for those of us who are unconcerned with filing our musical tastes within convenient corporate marketing categories and who hold music in too high esteem to assign it mere lifestyle accessory status. Hope you dig it.

Yes - “We Have Heaven”
Henry Cow - “Industry”
Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - “Kandy Korn”
Gato Barbieri - “Antonios Das Mortes”
Junip - “Loops”
The Funkees - “Akula Owu Onyeara”
Michel Chion - “Dies Irae” (from Requiem)
The Beatles - “Revolution (take 20)”

 
Download this week’s episode
 
Subscribe to the Dangerous Minds Radio Hour podcast at Alterati

 
Nice to hear that Dangerous Minds pal, “raving, unconfined nut” and legendary countercultural figure, Paul Krassner, will be receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from prestigious writer’s organization PEN, on Saturday afternoon, December 11, at the Oakland Public Library in Oakland, CA. Knowing Paul, I’m sure he’s is as thrilled as he is amused by this wonderful recognition.

Also, if you happen to be lucky enough to live in Los Angeles, then next Sunday, you are in for a treat. Michael Simmons, writing in the LA Weekly:

Paul Krassner has led a remarkable life: Lenny Bruce’s collaborator, editor of The Realist , co-founder of the Yippies, stand-up agitator and investigative satirist. All of it is chronicled in his autobiography, 1993’s Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture, an essential bible for troublemakers and recommended reading for those seeking aid, comfort and laughs amid our glut of bad news. Krassner never endeared himself to the powers-that-be and the book’s title designation was courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As George Carlin said, “The FBI was right: This man is dangerous—and funny, and necessary.” An expanded Confessions… is being published in paperback this October and will be available by Kindle and Nook as an eBook from New World Digital later this year. (One can see Paul reading sections on paulkrassner.com.)

As a combination book launch and benefit for candidates for the Peace & Freedom Party, Krassner will perform tonight with comics Marc Maron, Rick Overton, Ann Randolph, Jimmy Dore, Kelly Carlin, Gary Gordon, Jann Karam and MC Paul Lyons. The Peace and Freedom Party was founded in 1967, the same year as the Yippies, and are fielding candidates on the California ballot in November for U.S. and State Senate and Congress. If you want your vote to stand for justice without corporate pursestrings attached, voting for Peace and Freedom folk is a choice—not one endorsed by the L.A. Weekly , but a choice nonetheless.

Powerhouse Theatre, 3116 Second St.; Santa Monica CA, October 3rd, reception starts at 6pm.

Below, a fun interview I did with Paul Krassner in the Summer of 2009. I always enjoy seeing Paul (and his lovely wife, Nancy) immensely: