News, happenings and passing fancies from Strange Attractor and other organisms
As part of the SA Salon’s closing night jamboree on 29 January 2010, The Man From Uranus beamed down to Viktor Wynd Fine Art inc for a majestic performance of Outer Space exotica and synth jazz.
And now as a special gift, From Outer Space to You, here’s a recording of the entire 25 minute performance:
Man From Uranus @ SA Salon (18MB)
More on the Man From Uranus
Warning: may result in spontaneous dystopian premonitions.
Thank Ben Furstenberg!
The Urthona vs the Asterism album Murmurations (Further 05) has been popping up in strange places. An advertorial feature on eco-breaks in Somerset mentions it when describing the starling swarms that inspired the recording:
The starlings murmuration is the Somerset equivalent of the northern lights. Westhay Moor often plays centre stage. This phenomenon is based on one million birds playing by the same rule – don’t be the first to go down to roost. The result is a swirling mass of utter beauty. The sound is spectacular, too. It’s even sparked a “heavy rural” album by Urthona.
The album has also garnered a great review by Ectogram’s Alan Holmes over at Freq:
side one’s 24 minute “River Severn Bore” incarnates the relentless natural power of the said tidal current, layers of distorted guitar and analogue electronic drones melting into a fluid and enveloping rush of sound… By the end of the piece, the grainy sonic surfaces become so visceral, you can literally scratch them with your nails, like a feral snotty nephew of John Cale’s pre-Velvets drone experiments or perhaps Merzbow at his most ‘rock’.
Nice!
Listen to a snippet or buy the CD here: Murmurations
The 13 March 1997 Phoenix incident doesn’t get a mention in Mirage Men, but this article by a journalist who spent months investigating the case for Readers’ Digest raises some valid questions.
The lights certainly belonged to something/s, though I lean towards a misguided, Independence Day-inspired hoax rather than a psyops job. Either option remains a possibility however, while the media storm and trail of blown minds that followed would be an A+ result for whoever was responsible.
People either thought they saw a gigantic vehicle visiting from another world, or else a formation of planes that was behaving oddly. Were there observers in the ‘extraterrestrial craft’ category of witnesses who trained binoculars on the lights that night? If so, I never found them. Everyone I know of who studied the lights through binoculars came away insisting that the lights were five separate objects that appeared to be planes.
Read the full article Part one / Part Two
As my book Mirage Men (the dummy cover – not the image left! – and subtitle will be changing soon) finally makes its first steps towards publication in July 2010, the MOD announce that not only are they closing their UFO hotline, but they will destroy any future UFO reports 30 days after receiving them.
The indefatigable Dr David Clarke and Joe McGonagle have obtained the relevant documents through a FOIA request, and David discusses them over at his blog. As David points out, the situation is analogous to the US Air Force’s closure of Project Blue Book in 1969, an attempt to wash their hands of the UFO problem.
Of course, this didn’t stop the UFOs from coming – world sightings would peak with the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind less than a decade later – and, as I show in Mirage Men, certain departments of the Air Force may have deliberately staged some 1970s UFO incidents and, by the mid 1970s, were certainly encouraging people to believe that UFOs were both real and extraterrestrial in nature.
What will result from the MOD’s recent decisions only time will tell, but I agree with David that it may well turn out to be a ’somewhat short-sighted policy’.
PS. As an aside, my favourite aspect of the latest batch of MOD UFO releases is that part of what was blacked out on the documents was not Top Secret information about the alien menace, but insults about the civilians making the reports. This surely says more than anything else about official MOD attitudes towards the UFO problem.
via David Clarke
Ken Holling’s BBC Radio Three documentary on the role of video games in shaping modern warfare is now available via BBC iPlayer.
Via Ken: contributions from Tim Lenoir, Ed Halter and Tom Chatfield on the relationship of games and simulations to Past and Future War; P W Singer of the Brookings Institute on current deployments of UAVs and robots; some vintage archive material from RAND’s Tom Schelling on the Cuban Missile Crisis as a game; plus Michael Macedonia and Jim Korris on the founding of STRICOM and the Institute of Creative Technologies, the amazing Jim Dunnigan on Clausewitz and Kriegspiel, Skip Rizzo on ‘Virtual Iraq’ and a rare interview with the legendary Jack Thorpe – responsible while seconded to DARPA from the USAF for devising SIMNET, the first real-time, practical version of cyberspace. Acronyms totally rule on this one.
Get blasted on iPlayer
The time is right for psychedelia to undergo a critical and reflexive self-examination. Quite understandably given the legal situation, it has adopted a defensive attitude, seeing itself as a persecuted and misunderstood minority which, nonetheless, possesses privileged access to the truth. To question any of its tenets is to risk being branded ‘anti’, but not to do so, I would argue, is to leave ourselves open to the much more serious accusation of embracing irrationalism.
SA pal, Shroom! author and folk musician Andy Letcher is interviewed over at Psychedelic Press UK, a new/ish site that seems to be building up a potent head of steam.
Do some cave art markings represent a Paleolithic alphabet?
I’m not entirely sure why we should be surprised that early humans, who could after all paint stunning and complex artworks, were also capable of communicating visually, but hey…
What’s really interesting, however, is this chart, which suggests that their pictographic system was used over a wide geographic area. Was this an ‘internationally’ recognised system, or are these the primal building blocks of visual language?
What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites (see illustration). Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful – perhaps even the seeds of written communication.
…The real clincher came with the observation that certain signs appear repeatedly in pairs. Negative hands and dots tend to be one of the most frequent pairings, for example, especially during a warm climate period known as the Gravettian (28,000 to 22,000 years ago). One site called Les Trois-Frères in the French Pyrenees, even shows four sign types grouped together: negative hands, dots, finger fluting and thumb stencils (a rare subcategory of the negative hands).
Full story over at New Scientist
A live recording of Ken Hollings reading from Welcome to Mars at the Strange Attractor Salon on 29 January 2010 is now available.
Ken was accompanied by Bruce Woolley on Moog Etherwave Pro theremin and Moog Voyager, Mark Pilkington on Chimera Synthesis BC8 & BC16 and by Simon James, in absentia, who provided the original score for the DVD projected as part of the performance.
The audio can be found at archive.org or you can grab it directly here: Welcome to Mars [approx 35 mins, 72MB]
[photo by Agent Jbot]
“It is absurd to be put in this position, when I’m just some bloke,” Mr. Patel said.
A native of London now living on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, Mr. Patel suddenly finds himself an unlikely object of worship, proclaimed the messiah Maitreya by followers of the New Age religious sect Share International.
He was raised as a Hindu and had never heard of the group. He has no desire for deification. But he may not have a choice.
From The New York Times, via The Anomalist
[Above pic is of the Maitreya taken in Nairobi in 1988 - he doesn't look much like Mr Patel... and more on the Maitreya from Share International]
