Dieter Moebius & Hans Joachim Roedelius, London 2007 [photo: Mark Pilkington]
With the reformed Harmonia playing their first live gigs in over thirty years, it seemed like a good time to online this piece I wrote for Plan B magazine.
It appeared in their 30th issue, Feb 2008.
Cosmic Outriders: The Living Music of Cluster and Harmonia
by Mark Pilkington
From immense kosmische dronescapes to sugar-rush rhythms and merry electromelodies, it’s almost impossible not to find traces of their unique sound in contemporary electronic music, whether you’re listening to the fairground ditties of Plaid and Boards of Canada, or the wilful experimentation of Autechre, Nurse With Wound or Matmos. Yet almost 40 years after their first performances, there are still far too many people out there who haven’t heard the music of Kluster, Cluster and Harmonia.
Continue reading ‘Cosmic Outriders: the music of Cluster & Harmonia’
Monday 12th May
12:00 - 18:00 - SYMPOSIUM
Hauntology Now
At the Museum of Garden History, Lambeth, London SE1 7LB
£8
[For an introduction to musical hauntology, see The Electric Seance by John Coulthart]
In the past two years, the concept of ‘hauntology’ has emerged as a name for the zeitgeist. The shades of the past become more vivid than anything turned up by the present.The spirit of the times is itself spectral. Faced with the apparent triumph of global Capital and the collapse of cultural innovation, artists and critics impatient with postmodern culture’s ‘nostalgia mode’ are forced back to a time before the End of History. They engage in mourning and melancholia for what has disappeared and what never came to be. Everyday life becomes ghostly… a saturated culture is unable to forget that things were not always like this.
Continue reading ‘Hauntology now’
The CIA has made available its guide to the psychology of intelligence data analysis. The cover features a tasteful Rorschach blot of an eagle… no, wait, it’s a skull… or an elephant.
Or could it be… oh my god…
Intelligence analysts, in seeking to make sound judgments, are always under challenge from the complexities of the issues they address and from the demands made on them for timeliness and volume of production…
How many times have we encountered situations in which completely plausible premises, based on solid expertise, have been used to construct a logically valid forecast–with virtually unanimous agreement–that turned out to be dead wrong?
A central focus of this book is to illuminate the role of the observer in determining what is observed and how it is interpreted. People construct their own version of “reality” on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. What people perceive, how readily they perceive it, and how they process this information after receiving it are all strongly influenced by past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms, as well as by the specifics of the information received.
Grab it here
via Ben Goldacre
Ken Hollings and Mark Pilkington have been asked to co-curate an event for arts org Rational Rec, and we’re excited to present an evening that explores the common grounds between our numerous and divergent interests.
Unnatural Histories
An evening of experiment and worship, invoking the anomalous and the uncanny.
Tuesday 6 May 2008
At The Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 44 Pollard Row, London E2 6NB (map)
From 8pm. £5 door.
* Ken Hollings and Oort perform A Prayer to Gojira:
Ken will read a specially prepared text to appease the god lizard, backed by deep space resonance and Monster Island exotica from Oort (guitars, synths, theremin and electronics from Otto Amon, Richard Guest, Zali Krishna, Bruce Woolley).
*Chronicler of the esoteric Gary Lachman discusses the homonculus and the golem as mediaeval precursors to artificial life.
* Film screenings:
- Hibernator by London Fieldworks
- An Insidious Intrusion by Tessa Farmer and Sean Daniels
- Audiovisual archaeology from Ghost Box recordings.
- The Sound of Microclimates by Semiconductor
* Panel discussion on the evening’s themes with all our contributors.
* Stalls from Dreamflesh, English Heretic, Ghost Box, One Eye Grey, Strange Attractor and more
See you there!
A fantastic blog from the Te Papa museum in NZ, home to the recently defrosted colossal squid, with a beachball-sized eye (all the better for seeing you with) and a 4cm beak that will reduce you to calamari in seconds.
Why do we so love monster squid?
Answers on a postcard to the comment box please.
‘Any scientist who is not a mystic is not a scientist’
Word is circulating that Dr Albert Hofmann has died, aged 102. The good doctor didn’t make it to the conference held in his honour in Basel last month - quite understandably - though I went under the auspices of the Beckley Foundation, with whom SAP are publishing a book of essays by and about Dr Hofmann in a few weeks’ time.
You can read all about the Basel con at Gyrus’ Dreamflesh site.
Those who met Albert in recent years described him as being remarkably clear-headed, a blessing he attributed to time spent hanging upside down each day for many years. I don’t think there’s much I can say that won’t be said more eloquently elsewhere, other than that, without Dr Hofmann’s serendipitous discovery, you most likely wouldn’t be reading this now.
So long Dr Albert. And thanks…
From Doesenation
Albert died at home at 9 AM Basel time from a myocardial infarction, quick and relatively painless. Two caretakers were there with him at the time. The only people who were told were people from Burg, the village where he lived, and Peter and others were surprised the word of his death had gotten out so quickly. It’s the age of the internet…
Albert had been increasingly thinking of death these last few months. He had stopped leaving his home, where he said he could feel the spirit of Anita, his wife who died December 20, 2007. He didn’t come to the World Psychedelic Forum a month ago, but did entertain some visitors at his home. We spoke on the phone the day after the Basel conference and he was happy and fulfilled. He’d seen the renewal of LSD psychotherapy research with his own eyes, as had Anita. I said that I looked forward to discussing the results of the study with him in about a year and a half and he laughed and said he’d try to help the research however he could, either from this side or “the other side”.
Now it even more falls on younger generations to transform LSD into a legal medicine and beyond that into a tool for personal growth legally available to all.
Left: Neurons in a (mouse) brain.
Right: The universe with illuminated galaxies, simulated by a team of astrophysicists.
From Clifford Pickover’s Reality Carnival
The universe is a mouse?
British electronic music pioneer Tristram Cary has died aged 83 in Australia, where he moved in the 1970s.
Responsible for designing the legendary EMS VCS3 synth, Cary produced the soundtrack to Hammer’s Quatermass and the Pit (1967), and numerous other film and TV programmes, including Dr Who. Many young ears that grew up listening to Cary’s alien soundscapes will have gone on to make electronic music of their own. He also wrote and recorded some mesmerising electronic and music concrete scores, some of which are available on the Soundings compilation CD.
Cary was born in Oxford on 14th May 1925. He served in the Royal Navy from 1943-6, specialising in radar and thereby receiving training in electronics. During his war service he independently developed the idea of what was to become tape music, and began experimenting as soon as he was released from the Navy in late 1946. From 1954 he found himself able to live by score commissions, and from that time produced a large variety of concert works and scores for theatre, radio, film, TV, public exhibitions etc.
More at Synthtopia
Last week also saw the passing of another electronic music pioneer, the American Bebe Barron, who created the groundbreaking soundtrack to Forbidden Planet with her then husband Louis Barron. She was 82.
Many animals can sense the Earth’s magnetic field, so why not people, asks Oleg Shumilov of the Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems in Russia.
Shumilov looked at activity in the Earth’s geomagnetic field from 1948 to 1997 and found that it grouped into three seasonal peaks every year: one from March to May, another in July and the last in October.
Surprisingly, he also found that the geomagnetism peaks matched up with peaks in the number of suicides in the northern Russian city of Kirovsk over the same period.
Shumilov acknowledges that a correlation like this does not necessarily mean there is a causal link, but he points out that there have been several other studies suggesting a link between human health and geomagnetism.
Something else to worry about, over at New Scientist
Erik Davis has posted a nice account of our recent excursion into the labyrinthine tunnel system beneath the streets of Paris. It was a wild, disorientating, mucky and often extremely gruelling night, but an experience I would recommend to anyone who gets a chance.
There’s an excellent map on this site, but I would strongly advise going with someone who knows what they’re doing, as it’s no exaggeration to say that you might never see the light of day again if you get lost down there. As well as a seemingly endless fractal network of tunnels there are large, deep holes in the ground that lead to… hell knows where, but I wouldn’t want to be there. In an eight hour foray we only saw one small section of this city beneath the city – it even once had its own cinema – there are centuries of history down there, and I can’t wait to go back.
Paris By Eternal Night
