::::AlterRed::The Time it Takes to Smile:::: [ music ]

A friend of mine and his band have a new album out and it’s a skullthumping mix of mad piano and darkwave synthy beatiness.

Now, when I say friend I mean “guy i know through facebook through a guy I used to know in Cardiff” – but we’ve had some cool conversations so I’m definitely leaning more towards friend than acquaintance. Still, it’s not like we hang out playing GTA and getting wasted. For starters, with him in London and me in the darklands of Scotland, the commute would be a motherfucker.

To celebrate the new album they’ve made their first two releases pay-what-you-like on bandcamp. Why not go grab yourself a download link? Also, if you like their page on facebook absolutely nothing of consequence will happen, although it does make it easier to keep up with their antics.

The album isn’t actually released till the 28th of June but it’s available to stream right now on bandcamp and I’m really quite fond of it. The lyrics and vocals avoid the cliches of darkwave (Deathboy, I’m looking at you) and the piano work keeps things fresh and manic. Its official release will be followed by a UK tour which promises such mad hedonism that entire town centers may be closed down in a state of emergency. You may well be seeing his face, makeup streaked with sweat and blood, on a forthcoming episode of Crime Watch.

Don’t believe what the powers that be tell you. He’s really a lovely guy.

Concerning the tour: The Nottingham date will be at The Maze, not at the Britannia Boat Club.

::::R.U.?:::: [ photo:collage ]

::::Stan Brakhage::Metaphors on Vision:::: [ book ]

Metaphors on Vision is a collection of writings by non-narrative film-maker Stan Brakhage particularly concerned with his personal approach to film. His work is beautiful and striking and his influence on the cinematic avant-garde should not be underestimated. I thoroughly recommend clicking through to the book and also checking out some of his work.

::::via::::

::::Atari Teenage Riot::Death Star:::: [ music ]

Fuck me, there’s a lot of music on EITHER/OR/BORED today.

::::Steve Mason::Fight Them Back:::: [ music ]

Steve Mason, formerly of the beta band, has a new album out: Monkey Minds In The Devil’s Time

Here be the first single off it. Fight Them Back.

Be sure to check out the interview with him in the march issue of The Skinny where he accuses David Cameron of trying to turn Britain into some kind of wasteland.

::::London Pirate Frequencies:::: [ documentary ]

:::: Cyberpunk, Postmodernism, and Beyond Part 1:::: [ lecture ]

To Whom It May Concern…

To whoever was up on EITHER/OR/BORED today looking at my post on the underground film ‘Pull My Daisy’ – I notice that the link to the film was broken, so i fixed it. In fact, it is now embeded on the page.

For everyone else, the post in question can be found here.

Decoder (1984) [ video]

This post should be better, more indepth, with more links. Maybe at some point in the near future.

Sometimes, very rarely, it is possible to watch entire films on youtube without them being cut into a million pieces. This is one of those instances…

This rarely seen, rarely known, underground film staggered out of the mess that was Berlin in 1984 (whether the release date was a deliberate reference to Orwell’s novel or merely synchronicity i do not know). You can look at as a critique of society, of media, of totalitarianism. As a treatise on the power of symbols, the way in which they pervade and control our lives and the ways in which they can be highjacked for alterior ends. I suppose it is all of those things. It’s a messy film made on not much of a budget and featuring such countercultural luminaries as William Burroughs and Genesis P. Orridge in cameo roles.

It is possible to get hold of this film on DVD but it ain’t cheap. There are other ways to get hold of it but I won’t be going into them here

This might be your only opportunity to watch this astounding piece of cult filmmaking so, you know, pull the sofa up to your PC, turn out the lights and click play.

NYPD occupy the occupants of occupy wallstreet’s skull with their billy clubs

Nothing like a bit of police brutality to segue nicely into the weekend.

F Is the New H

article about fentanyl use in Seattle – a highly addictive, completely synthetic opiate, that is more powerful than heroin.

Then, in the summer of 2009, he started hanging around with a girlfriend who liked opiates. He’d heard that fentanyl was back in the city, so he went back to it. “I was kind of doing it recreationally for a while, but your tolerance builds almost immediately, after just a week,” he says. (The half-life of fentanyl is only about two hours, experts say. The half-life of heroin is around six.) “I would start to go into withdrawals on a daily basis.”

via longreads

northern irish punk scene

documentary on the northern irish punk scene, snarfed from the ‘tube by Matt – who appears to be on fire.

Pioneers of the downtown scene

Cool piece on both the SoHo art scene in new york during the 70s and a series of retrospectives on some of those artists happening in London soon.

*snip*

At the end of the 1960s, SoHo was a district of abandoned workshops, moribund sweatshops and acres of empty floorspace. It began to be populated by artists who had little money, few prospects, and lived and worked there illegally, at first. Loft-style living is now an estate-agent cliche, but in 1970s SoHo it was the real deal. Today, the area is just chi-chi. The artists moved in, then the galleries, then the money. Pioneering artists are now moving to Detroit, the rust-belt city whose stunning, ruined architecture can be had for a song. They’re building communities there, starting again. Who knows where this might lead?

Pioneers of the downtown scene

notes from ‘Skateboarding, space and the city’ (Iain Borden)

I recently excavated an old shortlived blog of mine on which there are about three posts worth saving. Here’s the first one. These notes were taken during a period of my life which was spent on the dole, skating into town everyday, hitting a few spots, knocking on friends, and generally putting myself about. I have a few poems from this period that seems to embody it quite well. Got them in a notebook somewhere. I’ll dig them out. The notes i was taking were research for an as yet unrealised screenplay.

“On one level this activity appears as urban escapism… it was a repositioning of the urban… The modernist spa e of surburbia was found, adapted and reconveived as another kind of space, as a concrete wave.” (refers to erly surf-style skating) (p.33)

“New hillside housing tracts lost their hideous urban negativity and emerged from the metamorphosis as a smooth uncrowded ribbons of winding joy.” (33)

“This recombination of body, image, thought and action lies at the heart of skateboarding – an integration of abstract and concrete, object and performance…”

“the third stage [of skating up a bank that goes vertical] is that stalling space-time where the skater reaches the top of the trajectory, hangs momentarily, and begins the kick-turn – for the skater, this is a highly phsyical yet simultaneously fantastical and dream-like experience, where space-time are confronted and frozen in a dynamic, yet stable instance.” (35)

“these aural salvos remind us that ‘space is listened for, in fact, as much as seen, and heard before it comes into view,” that hearing mediates between the spatial body and the world outside it, and that it is therefore not only in a cathedral or cloister that ‘space is measured by ear’. This is ‘sensuous geography’ created by a phenomonal experience of architecture, a ‘sensory space’ constituted by an “unconsciously” dramatised interplay of relay points and obstacles, reflections, references, mirrors and echoes.” (35)

note: ‘sensuous geographies’ (Paul Rodaway)

“…’working the surface’ involved thinking less about the pool wall as a concrete wave, and more as an element which, together with the skateboard and skater’s own body, could be recombined into an excited body-centric space.” (36)

You know it makes sense!

S.C.U.M. manifesto

This looks like an absolute riot. I can’t wait to read it all!

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of
society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded,
responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government,
eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy
the male sex.
It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males
(or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must
begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious
purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male)
gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set
of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a
walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient,
emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are
emotional cripples.

– S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Valerie Solanas

via Matt Dalby