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  • Apr 12, 17

    "THE MUSIC BANK

    Jerry Cantrell lived with his mother and grandmother in Tacoma, Wash. Within one year they both passed away. Jerry took the little money his mom left him and spent it on guitars, amps and drugs. He went a little wild, as they say. Jerry met Mike Starr while playing in a band called Gypsy Rose. The band fell apart and Mike and Jerry decided to start their own band.

    Layne Staley was a upper-class boy from Bellevue who had a glam rock band called Alice ‘N Chains. Their biggest hit to date was about a gay rodeo cowboy.

    Alice ‘N Chains played a show down in Tacoma at the Tacoma Little Theatre. Afterward Layne was at a house party and met Jerry Cantrell. The two hit it off immediately. Jerry was homeless at the time. Layne was working the graveyard shift at a warehouse that had been converted into band practice spaces. So Layne invited Jerry up to Ballard to live at his practice space at the Music Bank. Jerry jumped at the opportunity."

  • Apr 05, 17

    "For many years now, the Musicophilia blog has been a source of tightly themed mixes showcasing the best of various genres, most notably postpunk, that are mind-bogglingly awesome. The mix for which the proprietor, named Ian Manire, is best known is almost certainly his gargantuan tribute to 1981, in which the music of that year was eventually broken up into nine distinct sub-mixes, those being “Feet,” “Convertible,” “Brain,” “Heart,” “Cassette,” “Computer,” “Fire,” “Amplifier,” and “Ice.”

    The easiest way to describe these mixes is that they were all but designed for the Dangerous Minds readership specifically. Sample names from the set include the Cramps, Flipper, Bad Brains, Klaus Nomi, the Birthday Party, Kraftwerk, Magazine, the Ramones, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Pretenders, Gang of Four, PiL, New Order, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, Grace Jones, and Echo & the Bunnymen. If these acts all seem a little bit too “been there before” for you, not to worry: the mixes also have ample room for the likes of the Comsat Angels, the Durutti Column, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Bush Tetras, Cybotron, Crash Course in Science, and the Embarrassment."

  • Mar 31, 17

    "In the past five months, Bob Dylan has released 39 discs of music, which is more than his studio albums combined, not counting the Bootleg Series and other compilations. Last November, Dylan released the 36 disc Live 1966 Recordings a rather astounding document of his world tour that year. It was a very good way to temporarily escape from the election results three days before it release. March 31st marks the release of Triplicate, Dylan’s third album of American standards which also is a three disc set.

    Dylan kept his fans waiting for more than 30 years for a live 1966 show with the lone exception of an incredible version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” recorded in Liverpool that was the B-side of “I Want You.” A few years later a mislabeled bootleg of the Manchester concert that year wrongly thought to be one of the London Royal Albert Hall concerts appeared Over the years other concerts or parts of concerts surfaced."

  • Mar 27, 17

    "A garden of musical curiosities—lush with rarities, outtakes, obscurities, and live performances spanning the globe—Youtube has fulfilled many a superfan’s dream of instant access to recorded musical history. One rarified bloom, the isolated track, can prove a divisive strain. Why, aesthetes and purists ask, rip a performance from its setting, place it before listeners in a way musicians never meant for it to be heard? Though at times expressed in ranty tones, the criticism has merit."

  • Mar 14, 17

    "Last year, Tony Conrad–an avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, and sound artist–died at the age of 76. In its obituary, The New York Times wrote:

    Mr. Conrad was relentless and rigorous in expanding the parameters of the fields in which he worked. His early musical compositions, like “Four Violins” (1964), were high-volume sustained drones. His first film, “The Flicker” (1966), created a pulsating stroboscopic effect with alternating black and white frames. It was preceded by a stern warning that the film could induce epileptic seizures in certain spectators and that audience members remained in the theater at their own risk.

    Another work that elsewhere gets special mention is “Music and the Mind of the World,” a piano composition comprising over 200 hours of recorded music. Influential but little heard, “Music and the Mind of the World” features “the sounds of practicing, banging on the keys, formal exercises, experiments with the harmonic sonority of the piano itself, and even ‘On Top of Old Smokey’.” Begun in 1976 and completed in 1982,“Music and the Mind of the World” is a “total encounter between an improvising performer and the central instrument of Western musical culture.”"

  • Mar 14, 17

    "rior to this, Reservoir Dogs used both “Little Green Bag” by George Baker and “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealers Wheel to great effect, and the soundtrack included the narcoleptic DJ patter by comedian Steven Wright, but it was just an appetizer for the full Pulp Fiction meal.

    After that, there’s still flashes of brilliance–Jackie Brown is a safe but excellent collection of mostly ‘70s soul–but the soundtracks by themselves don’t stand up as cultural objects in the post-CD era. Instead, there’s moments like the 5.6.7.8’s “Woo Hoo” and Tomoyasu Hotei’s “Battle without Honor or Humanity” from Kill Bill, and the goosebump-inducing use of David Bowie’s “Cat People” in an otherwise period centric, WWII-set Inglourious Basterds."

  • Mar 02, 17

    "Another rapper-slash-actor (slash-poet-slash-composer) has entered the world of protest music from a decidedly different sphere. Now internationally famous for his musical Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work doesn’t speak truth to power as much as it makes power speak its truth. Hamilton, writes Mary Grace Garis at Bustle, “is a searing reminder that America is very much founded by immigrants facing persecution, and that our freedom, likewise, was fought for by immigrants.”"

  • Feb 09, 17

    "Avant-garde composers of the 20th century have left a vexing legacy, beginning perhaps with one of the century’s first minimalists, Erik Satie (1866 –1925), whose career illustrates a central paradox of experimental music: it can seem to most of us totally inaccessible, alien, and frustrating, yet it is also a pervasive influence on the sound of our everyday life."

  • Feb 08, 17

    "It features 58 tracks and runs about 4 hours and 15 minutes. If you want a direct link to the playlist, click here. If you need Spotify’s software, please download it here."

  • Feb 28, 15

    "Carbon Based Lifeforms - Hydroponic Garden (2003)
    Label: Ultimae Records ‎-- inre009
    Genre: Electronic
    Style: Acid, Downtempo, Ambient
    Tracklist:
    01. Central Plains [00:00 / 08:06]
    02. Tensor [08:06 / 13:50]
    03. Mos 6581 [13:50 / 21:01]
    04. Silent Running [21:01 / 28:07]
    05. Neurotransmitter [28:07 / 35:34]
    06. Hydroponic Garden [35:34 / 44:46]
    07. Exosphere [44:46 / 49:51]
    08. Comsat [49:51 / 57:00]
    09. Epicentre (First Movement) [57:00 / 01:02:57]
    10. Artificial Island [01:02:57 / 01:08:08]
    11. Refraction 1.33 [01:08:08 / 01:16:25]"

  • Feb 27, 15

    "Carbon Based Lifeforms - Hydroponic Garden (2003)
    Label: Ultimae Records ‎-- inre009
    Genre: Electronic
    Style: Acid, Downtempo, Ambient
    Tracklist:
    01. Central Plains [00:00 / 08:06]
    02. Tensor [08:06 / 13:50]
    03. Mos 6581 [13:50 / 21:01]
    04. Silent Running [21:01 / 28:07]
    05. Neurotransmitter [28:07 / 35:34]
    06. Hydroponic Garden [35:34 / 44:46]
    07. Exosphere [44:46 / 49:51]
    08. Comsat [49:51 / 57:00]
    09. Epicentre (First Movement) [57:00 / 01:02:57]
    10. Artificial Island [01:02:57 / 01:08:08]
    11. Refraction 1.33 [01:08:08 / 01:16:25]"

  • Feb 25, 15

    "Psychedelia and analog electronics collide with a thrilling bang, as fidgety beats and shadowy voices shape the contours of an enthralling bad dream."

  • Feb 25, 15

    "The highest apex of psychedelia, be it art, music, drugs or literature, is to induce a prolonged consciousness shift that affects the consumer far beyond the time that they were privy to the act. Moon Duo‘s third full-length LP, Shadow of the Sun, was written entirely during one of these evolving phases. Working in a rare and uneasy rest period for the band, devoid of the constant adrenaline of performing live and the stimulation of traveling through endless moving landscapes, offered Moon Duo a new space to reflect on all of these previous experiences and cradle them while cultivating the new album in the unfamiliar environment of a new dwelling; a dark Portland basement. The effect was akin to the act of descending from a train after a long and arduous trip, only to see it (and all your subsequent realities) speed off into the horizon without you. It was from this stir-crazy fire that Shadow of the Sun was forged.

    Evolving the sound of their critically acclaimed first two full length records, Mazes (2011) and Circles (2012), Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada have developed their ideas with the help of their newly acquired steam engine, Canadian drummer John Jeffrey (present on the band‘s last release, Live in Ravenna. Moon Duo used the creative process as a flickering beacon of sanity in an ocean of uncertainty while in these land bound months. The unchartered rhythms and tones of this album reflect their strive for equilibrium in this new environment, and you can hear that Shadow of the Sun is the result of months of wrangling with this profound, unsettling way of being. Exploring the record, a listener will perceive the song "Night Beat," with its off-kilter dance rhythm, as an attempt by the band to find meaning and acceptance in this new, shifting ground, while “Wilding" delivers a familiar Moon Duo sound, taking refuge in a repetitive, grinding riff-scape. Elsewhere on the record, the band recognizes that no journey is possible without being on the road, paying tribute to the cosmic trucker boogie saint in “Slow Down Low” and “Free the Skull.” From the narcoleptic dancefloor killer “Zero,” the record spirals perfectly into a resplendent daydream, the ecstatically pretty “In a Cloud,” which is a spectacular moment to witness."

  • Jul 13, 14

    "Live at The Rainbow, London
    December 31st, 1977"

  • Jul 08, 14

    "Lana Del Rey is pushing the envelope, and here’s her message, delivered with a languid pout: 21st-century America is a rotting corpse, deadlocked culturally, economically, and politically, and since there’s nothing we can do about it, let’s enjoy ourselves as the body-politic disintegrates, perhaps by savoring some toothsome bites of the past: candy-colored Super 8 films, juicy jazz tunes and clips of sultry screen sirens. The future is a retrospective.

    All of this echoes the ancient danse macabre, the dance of death, the motif that sprang out of the medieval horrors of war and the plague. It’s a plea for fevered amusement while you’ve still got time.

    Queen of the Damned

    You might call Del Rey a musical Queen of the Damned: the expression of a generational sense that America has lost its way, and there’s little hope for redemption. Del Rey’s haunting sense of exhausted sadness is perfect pitch for an era when climate change threatens the planet, bloodsucking financial predators steal the future of our youth and consumer culture deadens everyone. The kingdom of wealth is sterile and limiting; perhaps the kingdom of death is preferable. Del Rey’s pose of expectant pleasure at the coming apocalypse strikes a resonant chord — a cool bravado that eases the pain. In her romantic fantasies, you can almost hear strains of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, a love story in which young lovers seek peace through annihilation.

    Del Rey and fellow avatars of the death-and-the-maiden trope —one of the oldest in art — have been creeping onto the cultural scene since the global financial meltdown of 2007-’08, and not just in America. In Lars Von Trier’s 2011 film “Melancholia,” Kirsten Dunst’s character Justine welcomes the end of the world by offering her sprawling naked body to a rogue planet hurtling toward earth. “Life on earth is evil,” murmurs Justine. “No one will miss it.”

    All of this is no surprise to students of psychoanalysis. It was a woman, Sabina Spielrein, who gave Sigmund Freud the inspiration for his theory of the death drive, writing of young women who dream of lying in a coffin, yearning to return to the womb through the tomb. It is women who are most acutely aware of the limitations of society’s institutions and its life-denying strictures: scripts for marriage, motherhood, and career still don’t accommodate women’s desires and creative potential. Why not just imagine sinking into a blissful abyss with your lover?

    For millennials, the desire to reject an inhumane future in favor of a sensual plunge into undifferentiated nature is mirrored in Del Rey’s videos, where she is often submerged in water, as if suspended in Earth’s amniotic fluid. The world can be saved only when life returns to its primal source.

    This potent combination of women, sex and death is going to be one of the calling cards of late-stage capitalism. We are experiencing fearsome global dislocations and distorted social and economic systems that are killing our life-affirming instincts. The death drive is perennial, but when a society seems to hover on the eve of destruction, these Eves of the Apocalypse — suicidal brides, young women fixated on pain and death — emerge to speak our well-founded anxieties. They signal that just now, the death drive is very strong.

    The sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote of “anomic suicide,” a desire for death that comes from confusion and lack of social direction in the face of hard economic times and societal upheaval. When young people can’t find legitimate aspirations, they feel lost and disoriented. They begin to lose any sense of the limits of desires and become mired in a sense of chronic disappointment. A bankruptcy of expectations leads to a nostalgic fixation on the past and inability to actively meet the future.

    What Lana Del Rey is selling is what a big chunk of America’s youth is feeling: contemporary capitalist society is a deathly bore.

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