An Array of Utopian Flowers
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Reclaiming Land, Culture, & Narrative Through Black, Indigenous, & Queer Stewardship
Posted on October 3, 2022 | 1 Comment - Historic Political Transitions in Honduras, Colombia, and Haiti
Posted on September 26, 2022 | No Comments - Cultural Fire: Native Land Management and Regeneration
Posted on September 20, 2022 | 3 Comments - Tales of the Fifth Dimension – The Fifth Fedora Anthology
Posted on September 19, 2022 | 1 Comment - How to Establish a Food Forest with Jim Gale
Posted on September 11, 2022 | No Comments
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WilderUtopia in 102 Languages
‘Medicine Walk’ Featured in SBLitJo
Santa Barbara Literary Journal released ‘Bellatrix: Volume 3’ in June 2019, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Buy the book!
Sound Archive
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Sampling of Found Sound – Composer Pierre Henry
Posted on October 17, 2019 | No CommentsThe Art Of Sounds is a 2007 documentary on French electronic music pioneer Pierre Henry (1927 – 2017). Henry, along with his colleague Pierre Schaeffer, creating a form they dubbed musique concrète – an approach to electronic music based on using recorded sampling (also known as ‘found-object’) as source material. -
Pauline Oliveros and her Beautiful Canopies of Sound
Posted on April 15, 2019 | 2 CommentsPauline Oliveros was a vital creator of new music, a renowned electronic art music innovator and composer, an accordionist, the founder of deep listening and other experimental practices, a genius inventor of sound-making software, and a fearless champion on issues of gender, race, ability, and sexual orientation. Following is an essay on her "Sonic Meditations." -
Big Noise from Big Band Drummer Gene Krupa
Posted on April 10, 2018 | 1 CommentGene Krupa (1909 – 1973) pioneered orchestral jazz and Big Band from the flamboyant drum side, pounding tom-toms, high hats, and cymbals through the 30s, 40s, and 50s, as one of the most remarkable percussionists out there. -
Iannis Xenakis and the Notion of a Cosmic Utopia
Posted on February 21, 2018 | No CommentsIannis Xenakis, the Greek-French experimental composer and protege designer for the famous architect Le Corbusier, advanced theories of the vertical "Cosmic" city as the only sustainable way forward. Here, he wrote this essay in 1966, decrying decentralization (read: suburban sprawl) in favor of building up, up, up...5 million inhabitants to be housed in a single megastructure, a hyperbolic paraboloid of more than 3,000 meters high and 50 meters wide. -
Tribute to SomaFM’s Darkwave channel ‘doomed’
Posted on January 22, 2018 | 7 CommentsSomafm.com has streamed an inventive radio channel pioneered by Rusty Hodge featuring, as they called it "Dark industrial/ambient music for tortured souls." The service was recently discontinued until October Halloween season, which to the Gothic-Ambient-Industrial music crowd signifies the end of an era. Following is a sample of sounds from the dark side. -
Arnold Schoenberg’s Sound, Ecstatic, Innovative, Aware of Catastrophes
Posted on June 5, 2017 | No CommentsA recent concert featuring the works of revolutionary Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg in his exiled home Los Angeles showcased his challenging and revolutionary oeuvre, channeled through classical forms such as fugues, sonatas, and waltzes. -
Transformations: Stephen Scott’s Bowed Grand Piano, Plucked
Posted on February 10, 2017 | 2 CommentsCelestial, dark atmospheric, a legendary Odyssey down a road to nowhere, in search of Minerva, the Roman Goddess of Wisdom and Poetry, Stephen Scott's bowed grand piano soars into the imagination, and transforms in the spirit of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'. -
LA’s ‘Hopscotch’ – Experimental Opera of the Freeways
Posted on December 28, 2016 | No CommentsThe streets of Los Angeles played host last year to an audacious experiment in mobile opera called 'Hopscotch.' The recording will be released on January 13, and a concert will take place on Friday, January 20 (7:30 pm) at the University of Southern California’s Newman Recital Hall. -
Nico, Warhol Muse, from the Dark Side of the Street
Posted on November 24, 2016 | 1 CommentAt one time billed as the Moon Goddess and Andy Warhol It-Girl, singer Nico's dark, avant-garde music and deep, hypnotic voice were first heard in the Velvet Underground. She continued to work sporadically as a solo artist after leaving the Velvets, though a longtime heroin addiction and methadone dependency sidetracked her career. Check out the documentary on her life, Nico:Icon. -
Once a Classical Giant, Then Obscure, Felix Draeseke Rediscovered
Posted on November 3, 2016 | 1 CommentStephen Vessels continues his series on rare examples of underappreciated classical music composers from around the world. Felix Draeseke of Germany, once dubbed a "giant" by Franz Liszt, fell into obscurity until only recently. -
Fela Kuti, Revolutionary Insurrectionist, Talismanic Afrobeat Pioneer
Posted on September 3, 2016 | 3 CommentsFela Kuti, Nigerian music legend, political insurrectionist and provocateur against the corporate and missionary sell-out of African wisdom and religion, ending up in jail and tortured...and loved by the African people. Here, Jamaican-born, Africa-based writer Lindsay Barrett puts us on Fela's life path, his wild and unstructured Afrobeat sound, the commune, the wives, and the push against the Nigerian military dictatorship. -
Speaking in Sonic Tongues – dublab’s DJ Nanny Cantaloupe
Posted on June 26, 2016 | No Commentsdublab innovates music, arts and culture with it's freeform internet radio broadcasts in an age where access to mind-bending creation is both limited and expanded. Premiere sonic explorer, Mitchell Brown <> pioneered the movement with his ambient-abstraction-universe-sampling mix-match radio show "Glossolalia." -
Vasif Adigezalov’s Mad Mugham Laboratory of Classical Music
Posted on June 20, 2016 | No CommentsStephen Vessels continues his series on rare examples of underappreciated classical music composers from around the world. This stop, Azerbaijan's Vasif Adigezalov, best known for incorporating traditional modal mugham music into his works. -
Appropriating the Media Barrage with Negativland
Posted on April 22, 2016 | 1 CommentSound, video, and fury presented on the passing of Richard Lyons, also known as Pastor Dick, co-founder of culture-jamming avant garde music collective Negativland, the third member to die in the last year. -
Digital Meets Tribal in Fourth World “Possible Musics”
Posted on March 18, 2016 | 2 CommentsComposer/Trumpeter Jon Hassell proposes that Western music (and culture), must simultaneously look forward with technology and innovative forms, while cultivating a relationship to the rich multiplicity of the earth's tribal musics. -
Postcommodity’s ‘Repellent Fence’ Land Art Spans the U.S. Border
Posted on February 20, 2016 | 5 CommentsPostcommodity is a collective of American Indian artists from different backgrounds and mediums, combining to create giant musical instrument installations, video, sound and sculpture. Their Repellent Fence installation floated Scare-Eye Bird Repellent balloons over the border between Arizona and Sonora. -
Brian Eno: A Visual Music of Ambient Melody
Posted on January 14, 2016 | 5 CommentsThe principal innovator of Ambient and Generative Music, multi-media composer and producer/collaborator with David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2, Brian Eno is most fascinated by chance music by performers who 'don't completely understand their territory' -
Gershwin’s Reluctant Kaleidoscope of America in ‘Rhapsody in Blue’
Posted on January 1, 2016 | 4 CommentsWith reluctance, George Gershwin, commissioned by the self-styled King of Jazz in 1920s New York, composed his "musical kaleidoscope of America," Rhapsody in Blue. Stephen Vessels curates the discussion. -
The Supreme Love of the Church of John Coltrane
Posted on December 4, 2015 | 1 CommentDiscover the African Orthodox Church of St. John Coltrane, Founded on the Divine Music of A Love Supreme. Evicted in 2016 from its original Fillmore neighborhood in San Francisco from gentrification, it has moved to the Western Addition/NOPA, which once was once the epicenter of the city's jazz scene. -
Pursuit of Beauty: William Alwyn’s Classical Romanticism
Posted on August 11, 2015 | No CommentsRising from the East Anglian shadows of Benjamin Britten, William Alwyn's prolific compositions and pioneering film scores from the 1940s-50s set him apart in 20th Century classical music. Stephen Vessels curates the discussion. -
Is Classical Music, and the Desire for Rebellion, Dead?
Posted on August 2, 2015 | No CommentsDo today’s elite lack the patience and culture for classical music? Or is it a matter of cultural dominance of the popular, the fame producing, and capital revenue streams which have sacrificed painstaking complex creation? John Halle opines. -
Sound of the Earth in Microtones: Harry Partch
Posted on July 18, 2015 | 2 CommentsHarry Partch, leader of the Geo-Fauvist (wild-earth) composers, and 20th Century pioneer in working systematically with microtonal scales, also built custom-made instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions. Watch the documentary The Outsider, The Story of Harry Partch. -
German Composer’s Paean to a Healing Work of Renaissance Art
Posted on March 18, 2015 | 1 CommentOne of the 20th Century's most influential composers, Paul Hindemith created the neo-classical-folk-inspired symphony Mathis der Maler, based on the life of the mysterious 16th Century painter Matthias Grunewald, whose masterpiece associated Saint Anthony and the Virgin Mary with the miraculous cure of the epidemic skin disease called St. Anthony's Fire. -
Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Emotions Broke Noisy Ground
Posted on March 7, 2015 | 2 CommentsThe first band ever to be called "industrial," Throbbing Gristle's confrontational live performances and use of disturbing imagery, mixed with pre-recorded tape samples and special effects, created a distorted sound performance, quite ground-breaking in its time. Spinoff bands Psychic TV and Chris and Cosey continued to shock and beautify into the 1980s. -
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Cosmic Pulses of Sound from the Dog Star
Posted on November 28, 2014 | 5 CommentsOn the inimitable and controversial Karlheinz Stockhausen, German composer who fused science fiction with classical music, whose 20th Century groundbreaking creations expanded the bounds of electronic music and serial compositions from the brightest star Sirius.
