Dieter Moebius: A Primer

An immense loss of an extraordinary talent.  Moebius and Roedelius, after making a couple of brutal proto-industrial albums that would make Blixa Bargeld pee himself, invented Kosmische and took us all to outer space, inner space, and beyond.  RIP to this great talent.














Played piano and assisted in writing with Eno on this





























My Review of Harmonia 76's Tracks and Traces
My Review of Moebius's Blue Moon OST
My Review of Moebius's Tonspuren

A Crack in the Cosmic Egg

LEONARD

I cannot deny biology! I am still a person!  I still sweat! Still bleed!  I sweat and bleed for revolution, but I sweat and bleed no less!

Sheldon, frustrated, twists the iron into Leonard's forearm, but Leonard doesn't scream.  Sheldon's eyes widen.

SHELDON

Bazinga. 

- Kaleb Horton's unfilmed spec script for The Big Bang Theory

Dignity is a Negotiation With Culture

With all the news about innocent black men and women being mercilessly slaughtered by uniformed government officials and black places of worship burning carefree in the streets while white people pat themselves on the back about disliking a dissolved confederacy, it's interesting to reflect on this interview with Kerry Noble of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord.  CSA was part of the Christian Identity Movement of the 1980s and an avowed domestic terrorist/white supremacist group. Noble was at one time the #2 of this highly militarized group that believed the federal government was trying to eliminate Christian thought.  The group trained and planned for a massive violent revolution against the federal government, as well as against the Jewish, black, and gay communities, a notion that thankfully never came to fruition.

In the interview, Noble is sedate and affable when describing the siege.  He even praises the way the SWAT forces handled it, noting that many of the agents pulled them aside and expressed sympathy to their beliefs (whether that is eschatological Christianity or white supremacy remains to be seen, but it's easy to imagine both).  It was a perfect arrest amongst perfect gentlemen.  The special forces were even careful to respect their property, treating these white supremacist terrorists with full dignity.  Nobody killed and left to rot in the street.  No one caught in a crossfire or taken for a rough ride or found hanged in a cell or choked to death for sass.

I'm not saying that the CSA arrest is not the best case scenario of how a situation like this should go down, but it's a massive riposte to the determinism that preaches that we should expect aggression and violence from law enforcement officers who feel threatened by the public.  There were likely hundreds of opportunities for this siege against frothing white racists to turn into a bloodbath, and yet it didn't.  One can't help but wonder how much skin color was the deciding factor in that.   And you can't chalk this up to a sign of the times either; this incident took place 30 years ago at the height of the war on drugs when brown-skinned men across the country were having their doors busted, homes invaded, bodies broken, lives taken, and personhood erased, often when there weren't even any drugs in the house.

It should be noted that Noble did a complete 180 in terms of his personal views after his arrest on weapons charges.  Before that, he had planned to orchestrate a massacre of 50 or so LGBTQ men and women in a gay church in Kansas City but had a change of heart partway into the ceremony when he saw how devout and serious the gay parishioners were in their worship.  He now occasionally speaks on hate groups on behalf of human rights organizations.

Florian Kupfer- "Explora (Slave)"

Obey City ft. Kelela- "Airy"

This is probably the best thing Kelela has been involved in yet.  I think her challenge with the producers she chooses to work with is significant, but thus far she has really not shown herself to be up to the challenge.  I find myself wishing that they'd screwed with her vocs more or just provided an instrumental on most tracks.  I'm glad more R&B vocalists are veering into the art-pop route with avant-garde sounds, but it's rare to find someone whose voice can match the demands of the sonics  (Dawn Richard is probably the best example of someone who makes it work).

Blanck Mass- "Dead Format"

Holly Herndon- "Interference"

directed by Metahaven

Boxcutter- "Network"

Forcefeel- "Blvergen"

R.I.P. Susumu Yokota

If you haven't heard it yet, drop everything and go listen to his album Sakura now.  It's stunning.  As are scores of moments from his extensive back catalogue. Sad to lose such an immense talent.

"When Susumu Yokota is not making music, he’s making more music. So, there’s perhaps no one more deserving of this fitting primer (compiled by Chiller Cabinet’s Ben Eshmade) on the intimidating back catalogue of the often brilliant electronic genius. Those coming to this album in a wintry climate will not be disappointed. I can attest to the fact that the warm and inviting melodies perform perfect room tone for staring into the fireplace or out the window on a snowy day. Yokota’s compositions here assimilate the pastoral into the technological with deftness and considerable charm. Traditional Eastern instruments meet with Aphexy otherworldly atmospherics, haiku-like melodies, and the occasional wonderfully lost bottom-of-a-canyon/ top-of-a-mountain/ trapped in a dream echo vocal. Most impressive of all, Eshmade assembles Yokota’s work so it sounds like a continuum, from the deep space droning of Laputa‘s Labradford-esque “Iconic Air” to the Debussy remix “Purple Rose Minuet” off Yokota’s 2005 album Symbol to the youthful sugar high breakbeat bounce of “Illusion River”. Yokota fulfills the kind of utopian fantasy of Japan as alien grace and wonderment energy dome that Sofia Copolla’s Lost in Translation waxed all awed mute about. You can never be more than a tourist, a passenger at best, on his journey, but you’ll be thinking about the trip for years to come.."- Entry in PopMatters' Best Reissues of 2008

- my review of the Skintone Collection

My review of Mother

from a VHS made in High School

Ben Zimmerman- "Pausebreak pt. 1"

Retro-fetishization, part a zillion. Zimmerman made the sounds on his new album The Baltika Years (on Daniel Lopatin's Software label) in a painfully slow manner throughout the 90s on a Tandy Deskmate computer.  An interesting look at that process in the film below.

Flatliner- "Blasted Highway"

Auslander

It looks like the translation of Pikkety's coversation with Die Ziet at Medium has been (hopefully temporarily) been taken down over a copyright issue, but I've pulled some choice quotes from other parts of the web

"What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice."

"...The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem. There have been many ways to repay debts, and not just one, which is what Berlin and Paris would have the Greeks believe."

 "Think about the London Debt Agreement of 1953, where 60% of German foreign debt was cancelled and its internal debts were restructured.

"ZEIT: That happened because people recognized that the high reparations demanded of Germany after World War I were one of the causes of the Second World War. People wanted to forgive Germany’s sins this time!

"Piketty: Nonsense! This had nothing to do with moral clarity; it was a rational political and economic decision. They correctly recognized that, after large crises that created huge debt loads, at some point people need to look toward the future. We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents. The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead. Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this. 

Undiscussed: The fact that the journalist from Die Zeit thinks it's more appropriate that people forgive debt spent on a genocidal purge of unwanted populations than country in the midst of impoverishing defaults explicitly caused by the imposed austerity measures demanded by its creditors.  In other words, massacring people for the sport of war is all good, but trying to keep your country from collectively starving to death is no reason not to immediately reimburse the Eurozone elite.  The mental gymnastics of Capitalist realism are incredible sometimes.