[This is beyond awesome. -egg]

Nimbus MkIII – a ‘pareidolic robot’ that identifies forms and…:

Nimbus MkIII – a ‘pareidolic robot’ that identifies forms and faces in clouds. (via Pareidolic Robot – di12)

BEYOND THE BLOCK & A NEW RUPTURE MIX:
This weekend we gave away physical copies of my latest mix CD. Today I’m offering it online. The mix is directly inspired by transnational Mexican sonidero culture, and uses its format to air the voices and stories of a group of dedicated rent strikers out here in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Here’s a download of the mix and the story of how it came to be–

This past Saturday, friends & I threw a community-minded block party at Rainbow Park in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. The basic idea was to air live music that reflects the population here (Latino, Chinese, Arab…), to bring folks together into a space with great sound as community groups offer info and services.
It takes much painstaking organization, discussion, and collaboration to create an open-ended space, any inclusive moment wide with margins of possibility. I think we managed to do it. Hundreds showed up, listened, participated.

[BTB – kids at Nuria Montiel’s print vinyl station, photo by Sound Liberation Front]
Planning for ‘Beyond The Block’ began in late spring and continued — with weekly meetings! — until this Saturday. Our we grew over time, expanding to include people from Beyond Digital, Dutty Artz, The Arab American Association of New York, CAAAV, La Unión, La Casita Comunal de Sunset Park, Sound Liberation Front, and various local artists and community members. Manhattan electronic music school Dubspot donated a grip of top-quality gear. On the day of the event, dozens of volunteers came to help everything flow.

[Undocumented youth activists. Ty Ushka’s instagram.]
We made posters for Beyond The Block in four languages: Spanish, Mandarin, English, Arabic. Musicians/DJs held extended conversations with community organizers working towards social justice. Various worlds shrank. We focused on local, person-to-person outreach — that’s why you didn’t see mention of this event on any blogs for example. Our digital hype/ “social networking” skills were put towards helping our partner organizations located in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge activate & amplify the word through their networks.

[Beyond The Block flyers by Talacha]
If the dominant mode of musical experience in 2012 is a web-sped diet of consume and move on, then Beyond The Block is interested in learning about the slow social manifestations of all this music that moves us, and asking how our excitement over these sounds can contribute, in a direct way, to the communities where its heartbeat comes from. And besides, I’ve lived in Sunset Park ever since I moved back to the US in 2006.
As we wrote in the mission statement:

Can a hype block party double as an opportunity to spread information about stop & frisk, immigrant rights, police surveillance, and housing? We say yes. As the championing of diversity, a global outlook, and a celebration of the local become increasingly common in today’s dance music scenes, we see an ideal opportunity to use the energy & open-ended vibe of a great party to connect musical ideas to their real-world analogs — to create a space where we can talk about – and dance to – an incredible musical selection while sharing useful information for our communities that are impacted by issues pertaining to undocumented workers’ rights, transnational identity, health care, police violence, housing and more.

How did it go? Fine late summer sun shone on nonstop music performances across a variety of styles and languages — including teen rappers from around the block, Omnia Hegazy’s English-Arabic guitar songs, Los Skarroneros’ Marxist ska-punk, Uproot Andy DJing, and a perfectly-pitched closing ceremony by Cetiliztli Nauhcampa Quetzalcoatl in Ixachitlan. (This last group had me wishing that DJ Javier Estrada was there, indigenous time rise up).

[photo by Neha Gautam]
In addition to the music were things like: a handball court transformed into a realtime street art gallery, Nuria Montiel’s incredible pushcart art station that let kids transform vinyl records in printing devices, a dozen or so community groups sharing info, $1 spicy grilled octopus from the Chinese food cart…
As fellow organizer Larisa Mann/DJ Ripley wrote, “the face-painting and mural-painting folks were total troopers mobbed by excited kids all day, the community organizations & folks at the tables were full of useful information and good humor and the basketball and handball NEVER STOPPED.” When Ashland Total Freedom came walking up I had to pinch myself. As it turned out, everything really did happen. We’re working on a website but until then you’ll have to peer into the soul-sucking abyss of the Zuckerborg to see it.

[painting produced on the day, Ty Ushka’s instagram]
The point is not to brag about this event. The point is to remind ourselves: this is possible. A few dedicated individuals can leverage a lot. Music can start & sustain conversations. You can throw a block party like this wherever you live, too. Getting the permits and such wasn’t that hard (despite NYC’s somnambulant bureaucracy); sharing the workload made everything easier; post-meeting tacos & micheladas formed their own satisfying world.
But about this new mixtape…
As the planning went on, I started thinking about ways to extend the outburst of energy that comes – then goes! – with putting on a party. Something that could spread slowly, perhaps in online worlds, after we tended to the here-and-now on one exquisite September day.

[Beyond The Block flyers by Talacha]
In helping to make this block party happen, I ended up working closely with people involved in the rent strike on 46th St. The mixtape idea clicked into place all at once: I would select made-in-the-USA cumbia instrumentals, and have those sounds serve as a backing track to the rent strikers explaining, in their own words, what is happening, why they are struggling. Most of the three rent striking buildings’ residents are Latino immigrants, many from Mexico. I mentioned my idea at a meeting — people were into it. Pues… ¡Vámonos!

[photos taken by rent strikers]
Noelle Theard introduced me to some of the principal rent strikers, then she and Dennis Flores, who had already been working closely with the strikers, conducted incredible interviews. As the Spanish-speakers among us will hear, one of the other great things about these interviews is how very different each person’s perspective on the rent strike is. It ranges from deeply personal accounts — say, of dirty water dripping on Eulogia’s stovetop — to broad political analysis examining the banks’ roles, to philosophical reflections on rights and dignity and how a just struggle can empower. If you don’t understand the Spanish then hopefully the deep cumbias will communicate.

The ‘Sunset Park Rent Strike Speakout Mix’ was directly inspired by Mexican sonideros. Sonideros (DJs/sound-people) talk on the mic and select tunes, narrating the party and activating the music, cracking jokes, taking requests to dedicate shoutouts to (often-distant) friends, family, lovers. They literally speak community into existence. Dozens of sonidero parties rock NYC each month, from private weddings to all-nighters in inconspicuous venues under the BQE. (Here’s an introductory article on cumbia sonidera in the New York Times from 2003, and an excellent Spanish language e-book published by friends over at El Proyecto Sonidero.)
Another nice thing about the voices gathered here is how they reflect the high level of women involved in the struggle for housing justice in Sunset Park. (With notable exceptions like DF’s Lupita de la Cigarita, sonidero culture skews heavily towards men on the mic).
But I’ve said enough. Here you go:

DOWNLOAD : Sunset Park Rent Strike Speakout Mix [25 minutes, 61MB] (mixed by DJ Rupture, produced by Noelle Theard & Dennis Flores)

Junkbot bug assemblage sculptures: The Litter bug:

Mark Oliver‘s Litter Bug series is a collection of assemble-sculpture insects made from urban found objects and laser-cut metal and wood. They’re extraordinarily beautiful — right up my street. They don’t appear to be for sale, and more’s the pity.

Arthropod sub-species of the Insecta class.
A creature whose instinctual and physical qualities have adapted so uniquely to the modern urban environment that it has rendered itself, by nature of camouflage, virtually invisible in it’s normal habitat.

When seen in isolation ‘Litter Bugs’ appear to be composed of everyday ‘found’ objects.

The Litter bug

(via Neatorama)

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/right-wing-media-2012-9/

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/the-vice-presidential-debate-joe-biden-was-right-to-laugh-20121012?stop_mobi=yes

[Nice little video-ridden exploration of hauntology. -egg]

Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future:

You may argue that pop culture has always drawn heavily on nostalgia, and you’d be right, but things have changed. What was once a dim memory, a wobbly VHS tape, a slice of warped vinyl, or a bootleg DVD or CD trading hands amongst enthusiasts has become a towering digital midden so huge that it threatens to impede our view of the future. The growth of online media channels means that the near-entirety of our cultures’ pasts have been excavated and placed on display for anyone to watch, hear, or read in an instant. Hence, hauntology.

At the heart of the musical micro-genre of hauntology is the sense of atemporality that underpins our present culture. Whether it’s musicians pastiching multiple past styles and genres in a single track, the endless cycle of remakes and sequels in cinema, or historical genre mashups in pop literature, our future is looking increasingly like our past, which now looks like the future, which looks increasingly like the past, and so on.

Back in 2006 Mark Fisher (author of the essential Capitalist Realism and the K-Punk blog first applied the name “hauntology” to an emerging field of music that he identified with the crackle-steeped, dubstep dérives of South London’s Burial and the music of the Ghost Box label. That label’s founders Jim Jupp and Julian House fused pop concrète, soundtrack and library music with sharp design and a swarm of esoteric pop-cultural references to create a parallel reality built upon memories of a very British past.

The term “hauntology” itself had first been discussed by the post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida, as a play both on Karl Marx’s introduction to the Communist Manifesto, “a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”, and on the word ‘ontology’ (say it with a French accent). Derrida outlines the opaque art and science of ghosts in Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance.

Most hauntological music has taken a playful approach to the past. Ghost Box’s nostalgic avant-electronica has appealed to more esoteric and largely British tastes, but Burial, Broadcast and The Focus Group’s Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (2009) and, more recently, Demdike Stare’s pulp-horror beats and library loops, have opened the pool of references and aesthetics out to a wider audience.

Hauntology may a thing of the past, but this of course means that it will always be with us. Time’s arrow is now a circle; how do you measure where a circle begins, or ends?
Well, I’m going to have a go. In a bid to map at least a fragment of its vast territory to those of you unfamiliar with it, I present a brief, personal survey of Britain’s haunted cultural landscape. Our ride on the ghost train will be all too brief, but these few stations will provide enough launching points for you to explore on your own.

We are, and always have been, a nation of ghosts. Few understood this fact better than a triumvirate of Victorian and Edwardian authors, who between them formed the basis for so much of the horror that was to follow.

MR James, whose shade celebrated its 150th birthday earlier this year, is still regarded by many as the finest ever writer of ghost stories in the English language. A professional historian, James was acutely aware that the shadows of the past could prey heavily upon the present.
Several of his tales were adapted for television in the 1970s, to be screened at Christmas, as if it wasn’t grueling enough for most families already. This is perhaps the most disturbing of all the MR James TV adaptations: Lost Hearts (1973)

Welshman Arthur Machen maintained a career as a pragmatic Fleet Street journalist while dreaming up unsettling, timeless, and elegantly-crafted supernatural tales.
Like James, Machen drew attention to a past in danger of being buried by modernity, but his focus was on the landscape that he feared would soon disappear beneath bricks and mortar, and on the ancient others who, largely unseen, share that landscape with us. Once these Others were known as the Good Folk, or the Little People, and were treated with the utmost respect, until the Victorians tried to tame and belittle them as faeries. Machen knew better than that and presented them in their true guise: often beautiful, often terrifying and sometimes very hostile. The Shining Pyramid is one of the most explicit and bizarre expressions of this conflict between ancient and modern:

“Haunted, you said?”

“Yes, haunted. Don’t you remember, when I saw you three years ago, you told me about your place in the west with the ancient woods hanging all about it, and the wild, domed hills, and the ragged land? It has always remained a sort of enchanted picture in my mind as I sit at my desk and hear the traffic rattling in the street in the midst of whirling London.

Machen’s spirit lives on in the work of contemporary artist Tessa Farmer, whose narrative sculptures centre around a species of hostile faeries. Some years after she had begun working on her sculptures, Tessa discovered that she was Machen’s great-granddaughter. The faeries live on, in her blood.
James and Machen’s contemporary Algernon Blackwood also shared a fascination with haunted landscapes, especially the great wildernesses of Europe and the Americas, which he deployed to chilling effect in The Willows (1907):

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapesth, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in colour as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.

Incidentally, The Willows by Belbury Poly was the third release on the Ghost Box label.
As the Situationists were conducting their first psychogeographical explorations of urban environments in the 1950s and 1960s, Englishman Tom ‘TC’ Lethbridge was devising his own, simultaneously more mystical, more scientific and more Surreal, experiments with contacting the genius loci, the spirit of place, using pendulums, dowsing rods and other means of unconscious operation.

Lethbridge also originated the notion of the ‘residual haunting’, outlined in his 1961 book Ghost and Ghoul. This is the idea is that, under the right conditions, a powerful event – perhaps a death or an accident – can somehow be imprinted into a building or a landscape, leading to a haunting. This manifests as a kind of replay of the event, such as in the famous case of the Roman legionnaires marching, from the knees up, through a pub basement in York.

This concept would form the basis for a key hauntological text, Nigel Kneale’s 1972 television play, The Stone Tape.

Here, as in many of Kneale’s works, science and the supernatural collide as parapsychologists investigate a haunted mansion. State-of-the-art 1970s technologies – oscilloscopes, oscillators and tape recorders, also the tools of contemporary electronic musicians – are used to capture the tragic memories that haunt the building.

In the mystic haze of late ’60s Britain, TC Lethbridge’s ideas would converge with the ley line theories of Alfred Watkins, giving birth to the ‘Earth Mysteries’ movement (http://www.pauldevereux.co.uk/html/body_leylines.html), and feeding the minds of New Wave psychogeographers Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd (Hawksmoor), Alan Moore (From Hell), and others whose ideas subsequently flowed into the hauntological timestream:

Another of Nigel Kneale’s classic TV plays, Quatermass and the Pit (1955), about the excavation of a Martian spacecraft beneath Hobs Lane tube station in London, was a key reference point for Mount Vernon Arts Lab, whose 2001 album The Seance at Hobs Lane was a sonic touchstone for Ghost Box, who reissued it in 2006:

First releasing 7 inches in the mid-1990s, MVAL founder Drew Mulholland was heavily inspired by the far out electronic sounds created for the film and TV of his childhood (including Tristram Cary’s music concrete atmospheres for the 1967 Hammer film adaptation of Quatermass and the Pit), and particularly the BBC’s legendary Radiophonic Workshop:

Another key player in MVAL’s haunted pantheon was the brilliant pop producer Joe Meek. Obsessed with flying saucers, spiritualism and the occult, during the 1960s Meek pumped dozens of exuberant-yet-melancholy pop tunes out of his cramped apartment on London’s Holloway Road.

Despite scoring some major chart successes – most famously Telstar – Meek’s burning ambition was routinely thwarted by the politics of the music business, while his own erratic personality, exacerbated by a serious drug habit and his homosexuality (still illegal at the time), drove him to a tragic end, shooting his landlady, and himself, at the age of 37.

For his album Seance at Hobs Lane, MVAL’s early ditty Scooby Don’t, was transformed into a synthesised funereal march, Hobgoblins, by another key hauntological progenitor, Coil. Here’s the before and after.

Coil’s music was always steeped with references, both explicit and hidden, to books, films, people and ideas that drew on similar pools of spectral pop culture.

Perhaps none better encapsulates this than ‘Going Up’ from their final album The Ape of Naples, finished after the death in 2004 of the group’s founder, John Balance. The song transforms the opening title theme of a wildly popular, camp 1970s British department store comedy, Are You Being Served, into a transcendent, ascendant afterlife hymn for elegantly-attired spirits everywhere.

Who knows where our pasts will lead us next? Some fear that the sheer weight of available archive material is so overwhelming, and so alluring, that new generations of artists and musicians will be unable to escape from their retrospective orbits. This may be true for a while, but the future will find a way to leak through and catch up with us. And, rather than an all-consuming black hole, the vast weight of the past will slingshot us into a new, weird, and always-haunted future.

Dedicated to new ghosts: John Balance (2004), Peter Christopherson (2010), and Trish Keenan (2011)

photojojo:

We just had to show you these photos from the…:

photojojo:

We just had to show you these photos from the Thai Yi Peng celebration! The lanterns are made of a type of rice paper, and then a tiny candle is balanced in the middle.
Paper Lantern Constellation Marks the Yi Peng Celebration in Thailand
via Demilked, Taradol Chitmanchaitham