Vispo, Being Clever & A Horror Music Mix

Knowing Too Much, RTomens, 2016

Merry New....whatever...eaten all the mince pies yet? I've got four left, all mine because LJ doesn't eat them. Consumed enough? Still enjoying those socks you were bought? That's an old 'joke', but perhaps people do still get socks for Xmas. And a cheap box set of smelly stuff for the girls, of course. Right, that's sexual stereotyping out the way. 

Here's me trying to look clever outside a cafe....in Crouch End...where a lot of clever people live...so I always feel like an imposter who expects to get found out any minute and kicked out (or rather, gently encouraged to leave) by the middle-classes. With that in mind, I laid these things out on the table in order to deceive them all....

Horror mixes...remember them? As I was saying to James Robert Moore this afternoon, they got done to death and I was one of the people doing it three or four years ago. I suppose people still make them. People are always still making things...like drum 'n' bass tunes...and hand-woven baskets. Here's one of mine, anyway...

Sell! Buy! The Art Of Typewriting, Jeff Nuttall's Performance Art / Ben Vida's Damaged Particulates

SELL! BUY! SELL!!! BUYYYY!!!!!

A conundrum, isn't it? To sell or buy or sell and buy or just sell or only buy - dilemma of the Western material world - discuss consumerism in the 21st century (existential angst of), report & write back. No, don't...

Sold stuff for £120 today, which is more than I expected to get for the CDs and vinyl - "Mmm, nice," said the shop assistant, holding Goldie's Timeless (dble vinyl) - yeah, "OK, so what? I've got the CD, don't you know there's a CD revival?" I never said, because as you know vinyl gets premium prices these days and I'm only too willing to exploit the fact.

So I mosey on down the road and come across one of those book warehouse outlet places where The Art Of Typewriting is sitting on the top shelf to my right as I walk in...£12 - result! The work is taken from the Sackner archive. You can see a film about Ruth and Marvin here. 

Here's a piece by me called Bourgeois Common Sense...there's a lot more vispo of mine here...

Re-reading Jeff Nuttall's classic, Bomb Culture (PDF file here) as I have been recently, it was a fine coincidence to come across Performance Art Scripts in the charity shop later - from dipping in, it looks like a great read...

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New from Shelter Press, Ben Vida's Damaged Particulates, two long form pieces which extricate seemingly infinite potential from sonic waveforms of grand variation in tempo and density as opposed to adhering to singular moods as many producers do - so good - you have to play the title track several times to even begin to appreciate the ebb and flow, the trickles, squiggles, ripples, dips and flights. It's reminiscent of pioneering computer music in it's clean, crisp, exuberant exploration of what a machine can do. The second piece maintains a steadier mood, classically building from delicate tones to a deeper, sustained texture.

Art / Quimper's Domino LP / Tod Dockstader

With Murder In Mind(3), RTomens, 2016

See the full series here

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Quimper's a new name to me. He followed me on Twitter. So it works (assuming attention-grabbing was the aim). Domino is a comp of material from 2012 to 2016 and displays an aptitude for various styles all created with a good deal of taste and skill, from light songs such as Soft Bodies to more ominous horror tales like Daddy Fell Into The Pond and Banshee. There are post (?) Ice Wave (ha-ha) songs and the string-driven, stomping Teeth. It's New Wave Industrial Fusion Detroitous, scuzzy, bright, clean, simple, complex and worth replaying to appreciate the breadth. I admire anyone attempting diversity whilst retaining an identity and doing it so well.

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Good news! Starkland are releasing previously unheard material by Tod Dockstader, selected from over 4,200 sound files left behind by Dockstader, who died in 2015. Read more about it here. 

Hybrid Digital Magazine available now!

Hybrid Digital magazine now available. A4, 32 pages, full colour on 100gsm Coated Matt (Cover on 160gsm Coated Matt). £10 (UK), £12 (Europe), £14 (World). Prices include P&P. Go here to purchase. Limited online availability.

Through images and texts, Hybrid Digital presents an alternate vision of 60s techno utopia; exploiting the glamour of this golden age whilst subverting it to suggest a more sinister agenda. This is the brave new world that was...and a future you hope will never exist...

Vispo: Mutant 1

2 & 3 on the other site

Vispo: Aw, Snap!

>>>>>>>>>>>vispo?!<<<<<<<<<<<

Art / Maja Osojnik video / Basic Rhythm / Pâtisserie Ponderings...

The above image is from my latest project; working title: Data Control, which'll be a booklet...only for sale to those willing to buy it so very limited edition, obviously...but, you know what, I don't care, haven't cared for all of about two minutes (since I deciding I don't care) because caring about how many people want to actually spend money on something you make is futile for artists & musicians too, probably it doesn't matter how much time & effort you put into making something...it's all for you, the maker....

Music: here's a new video for a track called Pale April from Maja Osojnik's album, Let Them Grow...I think it's a thing of great beauty/mystery (sound & vision)...what is that in the long grass by the lake....?

Basic Rhythm's Raw Trax album for Type offers more variations on the remake/remodelling of Rave/Jungle/whatever & it looks like 2016's going to be a year for that - but what do I know? There just seems to be a lot of it going on, as if the Rave New Era of old is ripe for some retrospective/futuristic dice'n'slice treatment....as if producers are possessed by the ghost of William Burroughs & his tape machine, cutting the past so the future leaks out. Anthoney J Hart (Basic Rhythm) has a sharp sense of rhythms that aren't basic, but deftly manufactured digital scissor-work. It may be my imagination but he does either use or reference (probably just nick & alter) Alex Reece's Pulp Fiction bass line on Maintain....anyway, I like it...

Life? I'm sitting outside Maison Bertaux (19th-century, London’s oldest French pâtisserie) in Soho this morning thinking 'It won't hurt to just think' instead of writing thoughts in my notebook as I usually do - but of course I then began to write the thoughts down, which are what you're reading, so that didn't work....well the cappuccino's A1 for starters, washing my tongue with quality flavour whilst the winter sun warms my mush and the newly-purchased Agnès Varda box set in the bag makes the French connection complete...with the coffee-supping, sun and cinematic excellence to look forward to (along with a visit to a couple of record shops) the world seems fine; my world, that is, not the world, which I've no intention of thinking about because when you do it always looks awful, especially since TV news programmes prey on the awful, especially Channel Four, which specialises in the awful and will seek it out and create a ten-minute leading feature on it whenever it can, thus ruining my dinner, not because I feel guilty, but because I have to switch channels in search of something less awful and that's usually You've Been Framed, which reminds me of how awful it is to keep watching the damned programme because it both annoying & sometimes funny & makes me wish I could be bothered to turn the telly off...back in the really awful world, artist Ai Weiwei frames himself as a drowned immigrant on a Lesbos beach (guess which channel we sat it on?), which provokes LJ to suggest that he's exploiting the situation, making him a 'culture vulture' of the worst kind, if you like...I'm sure his work's well-intentioned but I don't like his work full-stop so...

TTFN

Vispo/Collage / Intersystems / Novels: opening lines / Two LPs To Look Out For

In Plain English (detail) 

full picture & two variations over here

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Canadian 60s space-age lo-fi art cosmonaut collective Intersystems'

3 LPs now on CD with booklet if you can afford the package -

which I can't - but it's sound stuff - funny sounding stuff made from

story-telling/nonsense, concrete, DIY electronics bereft of typical

late-60s hippy-dream drift & more Dada/minimalist raw

visionary sonic happening - yeah!

***

Opening lines from novels selected in order of appearance (left to right) on the shelf where the latest acquisitions are put...

A couple of days later Pinchot phoned.

My father's name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Peter.

Everything is changing.

Go, traveler.

Rattle, gurgle, clink, tinkle.

***

finally...

outstanding albums to look out for in February

(by which time I know you'll have forgotten but...anyway)

Aphelion - Ipek Gorgon

Drawn With Shadow Pens - Yves De Mey

both are Include Me Out approved

TTFN

The Cage / Lee Fraser - Dark Camber

full picture here

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..................................on the day Pierre Boulez died it's fitting

perhaps

to mention Dark Camber by Lee Fraser.............................

though I'm not sure why....lemme think.................

perhaps there's a link/lineage from this acousmatic/electro-acoustic work

to Pierre Boulez..............back through the studio tape/electronic genius

of Bernard Parmegiani/Francois Bayle etc

connecting with Boulez's advanced/progressive attitude towards The New

out of a post twelve-tone modernist era into the introduction of

electronics into the post-classical world

& tape

& sonic manipulation of the senses

to digital synthesis?

it's not rock 'n' roll 

but I like it, like it, yes I do because

it's not rock 'n'roll....

Fraser has a PHD in electro-acoustic composition

but isn't it funny how I find the result of all that studying more thrilling than the

instant buzz of more commercial music? 

fast, loud kicks are good

but

here are endlessly mysterious sounds, the understanding, complete knowing of which I shall never probably achieve..........as Boulez said:

Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, 

full of new paths to discover, 

where mystery remains eternal

Lee Fraser played Cafe Oto last year & told me that the noise he made there was more in keeping with the music he would be making in the future....as if to wave goodbye to the studious world of electro-acoustic music in favour of 'pure'/raw electronic sound

shame

but what you hear on this album is difficult/impossible to 'play' live

& for some, perhaps, difficult/impossible to listen to

but not you

I'm sure

you can buy it here

Vispo: Body Writing

Vispo I made this afternoon as a sketch 

for something more complex 

before editing it down, 

cut 'n'paste, 

until settling for something simpler in the end.....

Vispo / The Snobby Sun & How You See Life

detail from a.................

............new vispo piece

on the art site...............

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                                         ........so I'm sat outside the cafe in Archway with a mediocre cappuccino & croissant to match - only three quid for both, mind, but it still tastes like a rip-off...and.....opposite, across the road, Planet Kebab next to Bargain Booze - that sums something up - what, I dunno.............

                                                                                                                    ............shit life?

fatten up the proles & keep 'em pissed! (mind you, there's a kebab place near us that sells good food, you know, bits of lamb on a stick with a tasty salad which, I think, is quite healthy, isn't it? unless you're a vegetarian...I like vegetarians....on a stick, between bits of pepper...yum)

                                                                                                             so fatten up the proles so all they can wear are tracksuit bottom trousers with elasticated waistbands made for the ever-expanding gut - yes!

sit lie on the sofa watching shit TV........

                                                           ........like I'm doing anything special! art? pfffffffffff - fuck off!

                                                           ........what am I? posh or something with my cappuccino & croissant?

                                                           .....ha-ha........

Winter sun in the city can't be arsed to get up & shine on people...it skulks low in the sky so only rooftops get the rays or lucky lower spots for a while when the shine aligns with gaps in buildings...sacred street level places, they should be marked with symbols or like Stonehenge or the pyramids marked for dance (or burial of the dead)..........special times of the year..........

                                                       .........here's the 143 - get on board - climb the hill to Highgate - over the brow & see posh houses all blessed by the selective sun 'cause even that is a snob! but down the other side to East Finchley station, up that hill & damned if the flats on the left aren't all lit up - normal flats, not posh ones......that'll teach me to try & make a metaphor for unfair life out of what the sun does in the city..............

                   I conclude, philosophically, as I walk up the hill towards Black Gull Books, that how we choose to see life is how it is until it proves us wrong.......then we have to admit as much......

TTFN

Vispo: There Is No Real / Mail Art

Six of my vispo pieces have recently been posted at MinXus-LynXus, a great mail art site. They're not adverse to work being emailed to them either, hence my inclusion. The one below is from a triptych called There Is No Real, the others on the site are from a larger project called What Does It Actually Mean? They've made the effort to actually discuss my work, which in this age of just-post-images is a minor miracle. A highly recommended site to bookmark.