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John Foxx & Gary Numan Remix Competition
03.04.2011
08:15 am
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The London-based events company Back To The Phuture have a competition open until the end of the month to remix living synth legends Gary Numan and John Foxx. While the prizes for this competition are only really relevant to people living in the UK (free tickets to the Back To The Phuture concerts on April 1st and 2nd in Manchester and London, playback of the winning remixes at the concerts) I thought this would be worth sharing here for all the Foxx and Numan fans who might want to have a crack of the whip. From the press release:

This is the first time in their prolific careers that Gary Numan and John Foxx have decided to share the creative side of making music with fans. The competition involves entrants making the best remix of either ‘Scanner’ by Gary Numan or ‘Shatterproof’ by John Foxx & The Maths. The winner will get a pair of VIP passes to Back To The Phuture, plus signed copies of the latest Gary Numan album ‘Jagged Edge’ and John Foxx album ‘Interplay’. The winning remixes will be played at Back To The Phuture (at the massive Troxy in London and Manchester Academy). Entries will be judged personally by Gary Numan and John Foxx and an endorsement from each will be given – not a bad boost to any up-and-coming producer’s career!

Gay Numan “Scanner” plus stems:
 

 

John Foxx & The Maths “Shatterproof” plus stems:
 

Upload ‘Scanner’ remixes to this SoundCloud page: http://soundcloud.com/groups/bttp-gary-numan-remix-competition

Upload ‘Shatterproof’ remixes to this SoundCloud page: http://soundcloud.com/groups/bttp-john-foxx-remix-competition/tracks

More details on the Gary Numan Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/GaryNumanOfficial?v=app_10442206389

If you are a UK resident, and want to know more about the Back To The Phuture gigs (featuring Numan and Foxx Live, support from Recoil, Motor and Mirrors, and DJ sets from Mute’s Daniel Miller and Wall Of Sound’s Mark Jones) then go here: www.crowdsurge.com/backtothephuture. More info on Back To The Phuture at: http://www.backtothephuture.net.

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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03.04.2011
08:15 am
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Gold Blood: New Wave Cold Wave
03.04.2011
08:09 am
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Gold Blood are the electronic duo of Michael Wright and Emile Bojesen. No ordinary synth-punk act are they - by day Emile is a college lecturer and Michael makes gorgeous electronic disco as Brassica. When these two got together, it was murder. Sounding quite unlike anything else around at the moment (but with nods to pioneering acts like Liaisons Dangerous, early Human League and John Foxx) what sets them apart is their combination of lush, analogue synths and a kinetic, hyperactive vocal style derived from Bojesen’s other job fronting hardcore act Chariots.

Gold Blood released their debut 6-track Twilight Language EP last year on Manchester’s Human Shield records, to some very good reviews, and they have just followed this up with the “Gets You Laid”/“Say Something” 7” on Ex-Yat records. “Say Something” is available as a free download from rcrdlbl.com, as is the exclusive track “The Friction”. Yes, there are other bands doing similar things right now, but none of them sound as distinctive as this. In fact, I would say that you’ll either love or hate this straight away, but fans of cold/dark/minimal-wave should definitely check it out.
 
Gold Blood - Say Something
 


 
Gold Blood - The Intruder
 

 
The Twilight Language EP is available to buy from Boomkat.

More info, and more free MP3s, at goldblood.co.uk.

 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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03.04.2011
08:09 am
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Wolfgang Riechmann’s ‘Wunderbar’ in a video mega-mix
03.04.2011
05:32 am
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Here’s something from the Dangerous Minds’ archives that was originally posted on March 4, 2011. Be sure to check out our archives for a shitload of goodies.

Wolfgang Riechmann was part of the German electronic scene of the 1970s centered in and around Düsseldorf . He started composing music in the 60’s in a group called Spirits of Sound with Wolfgang Flur who later became a founding member of Kraftwerk.

Riechmann released only one album, the brilliant Wunderbar, just one month before he was tragically stabbed to death in a random act of violence.

In Wunderbar, which was released from Sky Records in 1978, the influences of the so-called Berlin school (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze etc.) and the so-called Düsseldorf School (NEU!, Kraftwerk, La Düsseldorf) can be recognised. The main elements of his compositions are simple sequencer and drum patterns, filtered through Riechmann’s personal harmonies and simple (even simplistic) but mature melodies. The music in Wunderbar has been described as ‘‘modern, electronic pop, in a league with Kraftwerk and NEU!.”

The following video consists of all six tracks of Wunderbar.

1. Wunderbar (5:40)
2. Abendlicht (4:21)
3. Weltweit (7:00)
4. Silberland (7:41)
5. Himmelblau (8:38)
6. Traumzeit (1:11)

The video is a collage of vintage European erotica that contains some nudity that most viewers will find more campy than sexy. But I think it works nicely with Reichmann’s music.
 

 
Previously on DM: Brad Laner on Wolfgang Riechmann

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.04.2011
05:32 am
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Frank Zappa dealing dope on ‘Miami Vice’
03.04.2011
04:59 am
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In this episode of Miami Vice called “Payback” which aired on March 14, 1986, Frank Zappa plays Mario Fuente, the head of a drug ring dealing “weasel dust.”

I spent 13 years snorting weasel dust and the best part of the experience was the anticipation prior to snorting the first line. It was straight downhill after that.
 

 
Via Exile On Moan Street

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.04.2011
04:59 am
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‘Melody’ a film starring Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin
03.03.2011
11:44 pm
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Histoire de Melody Nelson, a 27 minute rock opera released on vinyl in 1971, is generally considered to be Serge Gainsbourg’s magnum opus, albeit one that is somewhat smaller in scale than most operatic masterpieces. It tells the tale of a wealthy middle-aged man who crosses paths with a younger woman, practically killing her when his car collides with her as she is bicycling, and his subsequent erotic obsession for the girl. At the time of its release, the music, lyrics and production of Histoire de Melody Nelson were considered innovative, adventurous and provocative and still to this day continue to enthrall listeners and influence countless musicians.

Dangerous Minds’ Richard Metzger has previously written about Histoire de Melody Nelson in his typically tantalizing fashion and you can read it here.

Melody, a film based on Histoire de Melody Nelson made for French TV, was directed by Jean Christophe Averty with Gainsbourg and his lover Jane Birkin in the lead roles. Averty’s visual style was acutely attuned to Gainsbourg’s surreal sensibilities and the fusion of film to music and lyrics works wonderfully.

Here is Melody in its entirety:

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.03.2011
11:44 pm
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Chris Morris retrospective at Cinefamily
03.03.2011
10:23 pm
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Beginning tonight in Los Angeles, the might Cinefamily is presenting a three-day encore run of Chris Morris’s Four Lions, and a full retrospective of his classic British television shows:

The word “genius” is thrown around rather casually these days when describing talented folks who do a very good job of what they do—but Chris Morris is one of those rare people to whom the term genuinely applies, and we absolutely mean it when we say Chris Morris is a comedic genius. For twenty years, he’s been the foremost boundary-pushing satirist in British comedy, giving us savagely funny fare like the proto-Daily Show news parodies The Day Today and Brass Eye, the Lynch-meets-SNL absurdity of Jam, and the acidic hipster/Vice Magazine critique of Nathan Barley—and now, his riotous feature directorial debut, which skewers the modern-day jihadist movement! Chris’s unshakeable wit is often aimed at topics deemed controversial, but it always provides a social criticism underneath the sensationalism, lampooning hysteria and groupthink with heroic levity. We here at the Cinefamily have been Morris fans since before we can remember, and we’re thrilled to present not only an encore three-day run of Four Lions, but a full retrospective of Morris’s creations in British television!

My fellow Los Angelenos, don’t miss this rare chance to see Four Lions in a cinema setting, but gosh, which TV series to catch? The Day Today? Brass Eye? Jam? Nathan Barley? That’s hard because I’m such a big Chris Morris fan. I’ve shoved DVDs of all these shows into the paws of many a friend for about a decade now, but I still think I’d give Nathan Barley the (slight) edge when it comes to picking which of his series to watch in a room full of people. A communal experience of Jam would be great, too, but Nathan Barley’s vicious hipster satire would go down quite well with the Cinefamily audience, I think. No matter how you slice it, it’s an embarrassment of riches. The man can do no wrong in my eyes.
 

 
Below, my December 2010 interview with Chris Morris:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.03.2011
10:23 pm
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Arthur Lee’s 1973 album ‘Black Beauty’ is finally being released
03.03.2011
08:00 pm
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Love, the 1973 incarnation.
 
Arthur Lee’s lost album Black Beauty is finally receiving an official release after nearly 40 years of being in bootleg limbo. Newly launched label High Moon Records is releasing it on June 7.

Originally planned to be released by Buffalo Records in 1973, Black Beauty was shelved when the label went bankrupt. It was recorded by one of Lee’s various incarnations of his band Love: Robert Rozelle, Bass Guitar ~ Joe Blocker, Drums ~ Melvan Whittington, Lead Guitar.

High Moon founder George Wallace stated in a press release that Black Beauty is “that rarest of rock artifacts: a never-before-released, full-length studio album, from an undisputed musical genius.”

You can listen to tracks from Black Beauty here.

Fan made video of the song “Midnight Sun” from Black Beauty:

 
Via The Daily Swarm

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.03.2011
08:00 pm
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Tracey Emin - Sex, Success and Celebrity
03.03.2011
06:49 pm
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Is Tracey Emin any good? That’s the question at the heart of Anne-Claire Pilley’s documentary about the celebrated and controversial artist. Tracey Emin - Sex, Success and Celebrity, which was made to coincide with the 2008 retrospective Tracey Emin: 20 Years, pits two opposing voices against each other: neo-classical sculptor Alexander Stoddart, who claims Emin’s work is “horrendous, exploitative, and insincere,” a mix of “cynicism and sentimentalism”; and Guardian scribe and novelist, Bidisha who believes Emin is “a charisamtic, powerful woman,” who produces “real art work of value and tremendous beauty.”

Emin is a fine subject for this kind of documentary, as she has divided audiences and critics since her first solo exhibition at the White Cube Gallery in 1993, and while many may think the argument over Emin’s talent is redundant, her retrospective, Tracey Emin: 20 Years, proved it was very much alive and kicking. Laura Cumming in the Guardian, wondered whether the show was “self-pity or self-parody”:

Tracey Emin: 20 Years is an assault of a show. There is no escape from the agony. The corridors are lined with images of abuse, betrayal, sickness and abortion, tales from hell retold in embroidered banners and neon. The galleries are crammed with martyr’s relics: hospital tags, bloody plasters, painkillers, failed contraceptives, the famous bed with its stained knickers and stubbed fags - supporting evidence to further jeremiads in prose and video. The soundtracks bleeding from one room to the next alone would make you scream, except that Emin does it for you: at the top of her lungs and naked in Norway, in homage to Edvard Munch.

It has to be a joke, this video, doesn’t it? Emin couldn’t possibly expect us to take this absurd literalism seriously - or could she? This is a question for any visitor to her retrospective. Go round it solemnly by all means (and I never saw so much respectfulness as in Edinburgh), but every now and again ask yourself whether Emin mightn’t actually be sending herself up.

While, Lynne Walker in the Independent said, “Tracey Emin’s work crude and self-centered? That’s missing the point”:

...despite the graphic content of some of the work, the sequence of pictures of women with splayed legs, or the in-your-face curses and more enigmatic phrases on the beautiful and hugely detailed blankets, to dismiss her work as crude or self-centred is to miss the point. That’s just one aspect of Emin. By far the most touching examples of her work are Uncle Colin – the piece that, at least on the day I spoke to her, she would most like to save if all else were to be destroyed. A favourite relative whose sudden death traumatised her is immortalised in text and photos, just as the spirit of her grandmother hovers over the colourful There’s a Lot of Money in Chairs – mainly stuffed down the back of them, in this case. The bird drawings sing off the wall, while one of the most fascinating exhibits involves tiny photographic reproductions of work she destroyed in 1990.

It’s brave of Emin to expose so much of herself over such a long period. A short DVD, Why I Never Became a Dancer, tells a bigger story, while the reproduction, on a smaller scale, of Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made from 1996 is such a personal insight that it provokes wry smiles and even a tear.

Tracey Emin - Sex, Success and Celebrity was made as part of the BBC’s Artworks (which has a ghastly opening title sequence) strand, and includes interviews with Emin, and various contributors, and discussions on Emin’s works including Uncle Colin, Why I Never Became a Dancer, A Conversation with My Mum and It’s Not The Way I Want to Die.

Before you watch, here are 10 facts about Tracey Emin, as found on her website.

1. Tracey Emin might not be the kind of artist your granny would like. Her autobiographical style of work is all about exposing the kind of things about herself that most people would be too ashamed to reveal.
2. Her confessional subjects include abortions, rape, self-neglect and promiscuity, sometimes expressed with the help of gloriously old-fashioned looking, hand-sewn applique letters. Her dad quite likes the sewing, because it reminds him of his own mum.

3. One of her installations, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963-1995 is a tent, into and onto which she has sewn all these people’s names.

4. Some see poetry in the titles of her work. They include: You Forgot to Kiss My Soul; Every Part of Me Is Bleeding; My Cunt is Wet With Fear; and I Need Art Like I Need God. There is no Still Life With Bowl of Apples, as far as we know.

5. Emin has been accused of cynically exploiting the public’s darkest levels of voyeurism.

6. But her honesty can be disarming. She once told Observer interviewer Lynn Barber that the first thing she did when she started making money was to buy medical insurance, because: “I’m sickly and I get run down and I have very bad herpes, and I like knowing that the doctor’s there.”

7. Emin’s first move into the public eye was opening a shop in London’s Bethnal Green called, er, The Shop, with fellow artist Sarah Lucas. Emin’s stock included letters she’d written and ashtrays with pictures of Damien Hirst’s face stuck to the bottom of them.

8. Emin was the inspiration - if that’s the right word - for a latter day art movement called Stuckism, which is devoted to advancing the cause of painting as the most vital means of addressing contemporary issues. The movement was founded by her ex-boyfriend Billy Childish, to whom she had once said: “Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!”

9. White Cube curator Jay Jopling spotted her in 1994 and the big time called. She came to wider public attention during a live Channel 4 Turner Prize debate in 1997. A very inebriated Emin mumbled incoherently that “no real people” would be watching and that she wanted to go be with her mum and friends.

10. Two years later, “Mad Tracey from Margate” (her words) was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for an installation entitled My Bed, a testimony to her self-neglect and over-indulgence. She didn’t win, but Charles Saatchi paid £150,000 for it.

 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.03.2011
06:49 pm
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Terry Southern on Rush Limbaugh: ‘Unspeakable slime and putrefaction’
03.03.2011
05:08 pm
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In 1968 Esquire magazine hired Terry Southern, William Burroughs, Jean Genet and John Sack to cover the volatile Democratic Convention in Chicago.
 
Some voices from the counterculture are so sorely missed in these turbulent times. Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, George Carlin… wouldn’t you just love to hear what they would have to say about the Tea party, Sarah Palin or the GOP’s misguided anti-union putsch? Sadly we never will, but thanks to Nile Southern, we can read exactly what his father, the celebrated satirist, novelist and screenwriter, Terry Southern thought about Rush Limbaugh. Although these unpublished observations were made in the 1990, they still seem pretty fresh today, if you ask me!

12/3/93

Mr. Howard Stern
c/o Simon and Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y. 10020

Dear Howard Stern:

As a long time admirer of your wit, and your enduring integrity re the First Amendment, I was intrigued by your recent expression of the interest in the “actual weight” of the outlandish pumpkin head of the total A-hole, R. Limbaugh. By grand good chance, a friend of mine is a professor in bio-physics here at the university, and, with some sophisticated instruments, and his professorial savvy, he was able to take the measurements necessary for the calculations directly off the video screen. Howard, you will be interested to learn that the weight came in at a whopping 58 ½ pounds; that’s right, fifty-eight and a half pounds of unspeakable slime and putrefaction – perhaps the most concentrated conglomeration of homophobic spleen, racist venom, rancid anti-fem menstrual corruption, all infested with coprophillic and child-abuse fantasies ever to accrue in a single enclosure – Howard, they say that stench of this monstrous vessel will send the needle of an E-Meter right through the side of the goddamn box! Can you believe that he is allowed to regurgitate this foul muck under the guise of public buffoonery? It is outrageous; in his case, I would be obliged to shut down the First Amendment pronto. And yet, you, apparently are so unaware of him as to express only a passing curiosity about the “actual weight” of his pumpkin head. This was disappointing, because you, Howard Howie Stern, have the ideal forum from which to blast this vomitman A-hole. Should you, hopefully, decide to do so, let me tell you that one of the best ways to get his goat, to set him hopping, so to speak, is to confront him (and his moronic viewers) with a few of what he calls his ‘action-warthogs’. Evidently there also exists video tape footage of this horrendous coupling. Howard, they say the imagery will make an ambulance attendant puke.

I’m enclosing a short piece which I think may amuse you. With all best wishes for your continuing and most highly deserved success,

Terry Southern
East Canaan, Connecticut

*******

March 23, 1995

The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY

To The Editor:

Readers of every stamp and kidney are increasingly perplexed by your failure to respond to the xenophobic rant of the so-called ‘radio commentator’ RASH LAMEBRAIN. To dismiss his remarks as merely the dotty musings of a curmudgeon/buffoon (a la Major Hoople) is to be unaware of the scope and focus of their calculated savagery – which has now progressed from comparing the President’s daughter with a dog, to ridiculing persons dying of AIDS. Why hasn’t at least one of your great champions of truth and decency (Lewis, Rich, Quindlen) been allowed to counter his unopposed spew of sleaze and putrefaction? The fact that they have not is painfully reminiscent of another era of fear and silence in recent American history.

Terry Southern
East Canaan, Connecticut

*******

The Most Delightful bit of poetic justice I’ve seen lately happened when, immediately following the Okla City disaster, the crypto curmudgeon/buffoon Rash Lamebrain started barking his mad dog mantra “Bomb the Arabs! Bomb the Arabs!” only to discover the next day that the initial suspects of the deed were the very mirror image of himself – two mindless rednecks. The irony was absolute.

Terry Southern,
East Canaan, Connecticut.

Thank you Nile Southern/Michael Simmons!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.03.2011
05:08 pm
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Dune Coloring & Activity Book
03.03.2011
04:26 pm
Topics:
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Some pages from the Dune Coloring & Activity Book published in 1984. Written by Arlene Block and illustrated by Michael Nicastre, the coloring book offered hours of enjoyment to Dune-loving kindergartners. Connect the dots to see what Paul can’t live without!

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More images after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.03.2011
04:26 pm
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