July 19, 2011
Teknivals (a portmanteau of ‘tekno’ and ‘festival’) are large free parties which take place worldwide. They take place most often in Europe and are often illegal under various national or regional laws. They vary in size from dozens to thousands of people, depending on factors such as accessibility, reputation, weather, and law enforcement.
The parties often take place in venues far away from residential areas such as squatted warehouses, empty military bases, forests or fields. The teknival phenomenon is a grassroots movement which has grown out of the rave, New Age Traveller and Burning Man scenes and spawned an entire subculture. Summer is the usual season for teknivals.
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July 19, 2011
A sound system is a group of DJs and engineers contributing and working together as one, playing and producing music. The sound system concept originated in the 1950s in Kingston, Jamaica. DJs would load up a truck with a generator, turntables, and speakers to set up street parties.
The sound system scene is generally regarded as an important part of Jamaican cultural history and as responsible for the rise of modern Jamaican musical styles such as ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dub.
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July 19, 2011
Blue Lines is the debut album by British electronica group Massive Attack, released in 1991. It is generally considered the first trip hop album, although the term was not coined until years later.
A fusion of electronic music, hip hop, dub, ’70s soul and reggae, the album established Massive Attack as one of the most innovative British bands of the 1990s and the founder of trip hop’s Bristol Sound. The album also marked a change in electronic/dance music, ‘a shift toward a more interior, meditational sound.
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July 17, 2011
My Neighbor Totoro is a 1988 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli. The film follows the two young daughters of a professor and their interactions with friendly wood spirits in postwar rural Japan. The art director was Kazuo Oga, who was drawn to the film when Hayao Miyazaki showed him an original image of Totoro standing in a satoyama (foothills). Oga’s was recognized as ‘updating the traditional Japanese animist sense of a natural world that is fully, spiritually alive.’ ‘Set in a period that is both modern and nostalgic, the film creates a fantastic, yet strangely believable universe of supernatural creatures coexisting with modernity. A great part of this sense comes from Oga’s evocative backgrounds, which give each tree, hedge and twist in the road an indefinable feeling of warmth that seems ready to spring into sentient life.’ Oga’s style became a trademark style of Studio Ghibli.
As is the case with Disney’s other English dubs of Miyazaki films, the Disney version of Totoro features a star-heavy cast, including Dakota and Elle Fanning as Satsuki and Mei, and Timothy Daly as Mr. Kusakabe. ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ helped bring Japanese animation into the global spotlight, and set its writer-director Hayao Miyazaki on the road to success. The film’s central character, Totoro, is as famous among Japanese children as Winnie-the-Pooh is among British ones.
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July 13, 2011
Earworm, a loan translation of the German ‘ohrwurm,’ is a portion of a song or other music that repeats compulsively within one’s mind, put colloquially as ‘music being stuck in one’s head.’ Use of the English translation was popularized by James Kellaris, a marketing researcher at the University of Cincinnati, and American cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin. Kellaris’ studies demonstrated that different people have varying susceptibilities to earworms, but that almost everybody has been afflicted with one at some time or another. The psychoanalyst Theodor Reik used the term ‘haunting melody’ to describe the psychodynamic features of the phenomenon. The term Musical Imagery Repetition (MIR) was suggested by neuroscientist and pianist Sean Bennett in 2003 in a scientifically researched profile of the phenomenon. Another scientific term for the phenomenon, ‘involuntary musical imagery,’ or INMI, was suggested by the neurologist Oliver Sacks in 2007.
People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are more likely to report being troubled by ear worms – in some cases, medications for OCD can minimize the effects. The best way to eliminate an unwanted earworm is to simply play a different song. Supposedly, some songs are better for this purpose than others, such as the theme song to ‘Gilligan’s Island’ or ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight.’ Arthur C. Clarke’s 1956 short story ‘The Ultimate Melody’ offers up a science fictional explanation for the phenomenon. The story is about a scientist who develops the ultimate melody—one that so compels the brain that its listener becomes completely and forever enraptured by it. He succeeds, and is found in a catatonia from which he never awakens.
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July 13, 2011
Jordan Roseman aka DJ Earworm is a San Francisco/London-based mashup artist who has achieved recognition for his technically sophisticated, songwriting oriented music and video mashups. His annual ‘United State of Pop’ mashups, short mixes featuring the top 25 songs of the year according to Billboard magazine, have reached the Top 100 for national radio play. He began making mashups recreationally in 2003 using ACID (he announced in 2008 that he had switched to Abelton Live). After encouragement from DJ Adrian at Club Bootie, Roseman created the moniker DJ Earworm (‘earworm’ referencing a song that repeats uncontrollably in one’s mind) and began releasing mashups.
DJ Earworm has a unique mashup style that consists of a compositional, songwriting approach. He gradually layers samples on top of one another, matching keys and subtly altering melodies. His mashups often convey an entirely new meaning than the original material, such as a political message in ‘No More Gas.’ He has been contrasted with mashup artist Girl Talk, who has a more DJ-oriented style. He is the author of Audio Mashup Construction Kit (2006), a how-to manual for creating mashups.
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July 12, 2011
Artist’s Shit (Italian: ‘Merda d’artista’) is a 1961 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, each 30 grams, with a label in Italian, English, French, and German stating: ‘Artist’s Shit; Freshly preserved; Produced and tinned in May 1961.’ At the time the piece was created Manzoni was producing works that explored the relationship between art production and human production, Artist’s Breath (‘Fiato d’artista’), a series of balloons filled with Manzoni’s breath, being an example.
A tin was sold for €124,000 at Sotheby’s in 2007. The cans were originally to be valued according to their equivalent weight in gold — $37 each in 1961 — with the price fluctuating according to the market. One of Manzoni’s collaborators, Agostino Bonalumi, claimed that the tins are full not of faeces but plaster; but some cans have leaked and confirmed they are indeed faeces — though whether human or animal has not been verified.
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July 12, 2011
Donnie Darko is a 2001 American psychological thriller written and directed by Richard Kelly, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The film depicts the reality-bending adventures of the title character as he seeks the meaning and significance behind his troubling Doomsday-related visions. In October 1988, teenager Donnie Darko has been seeing a psychiatrist because of his troubled history. Donnie sleepwalks, and he has visions of Frank, a menacing, demonic-looking rabbit. On October 2, Frank draws Donnie out of his room to tell him, in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds, the world will end. While Donnie is outside, a jet engine crashes through his bedroom. The next morning, Donnie wakes up on a golf course. He returns home to find police and firemen inspecting the wreckage. No one knows where the jet engine has come from, since there were no planes flying in the vicinity, and no airline reported losing an engine.
Music is used heavily in the film. One continuous sequence involving an introduction of Donnie’s high school prominently features the song ‘Head over Heels’ by Tears for Fears, Donnie’s sister’s dance group, ‘Sparkle Motion,’ performs with the song ‘Notorious’ by Duran Duran, and ‘Under the Milky Way’ by The Church is played after Donnie and Gretchen emerge from his room during the party. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division also appears in the film. The opening sequence is set to ‘The Killing Moon’ by Echo & the Bunnymen.
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July 12, 2011
Richard Kelly (b. 1975) is an American film director and writer. He won a scholarship to the University of Southern California to study at the USC School of Cinema-Television. He made two short films, ‘The Goodbye Place’ and ‘Visceral Matter,’ before graduating in 1997. His first feature film, ‘Donnie Darko’ (2001), a psychological thriller, was given a budget of just $4.5 million, received major critical acclaim. His fourth film, and second feature, ‘Southland Tales,’ (2006) is a science fiction dark comedy-drama, which was unsuccessful critically and financially. His most recent feature, ‘The Box’ (2009), is a psychological horror film.
Although Richard Kelly’s films differ considerably in setting and characters (‘Donnie Darko’ is about a suburban teenager, ‘Southland Tales’ is an L.A. epic, and ‘The Box’ is about a married couple in Richmond, Virginia), they share similar themes of time travel, existentialism, and spirituality. Kelly’s style is composed of Steadicam based tracking shots and camera movement in general, satirical elements (as seen sparsely in ‘Donnie Darko’ and much more prominently in ‘Southland Tales’), comedy, drama, and enigmatic plots. Music also plays a large role in Richard Kelly’s films; for example, the closing segment of ‘Donnie Darko’ is a montage of several characters awakening from their lucid dreams to Gary Jules’s version of the Tears for Fears song ‘Mad World.’
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July 12, 2011
Southland Tales is a 2006 science fiction dark comedy-drama film, written and directed by Richard Kelly. The title refers to the Southland, a name used by locals to refer to Southern California and Greater Los Angeles. Set in the then near future of an alternate history, the film is a portrait of Los Angeles and a comment on the military-industrial news-tainment complex. The film features an ensemble cast. Original music for the film was provided by Moby. The film was a critical and financial failure.
The film opens on El Paso and Abilene, Texas, both of which fall victim to twin nuclear attacks on July 4, 2005—a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions which launches America into World War III. The PATRIOT Act has extended authority to a new agency known as US-IDent, which keeps constant tabs on citizens and heavily censors the media and the Internet.
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July 9, 2011
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning ‘to flow’—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is sometimes described as intermedia.
The origins of Fluxus lie in many of the concepts explored by composer John Cage in his experimental music of the 1950s. Cage explored notions of indeterminacy in art, through works such as ‘4’ 33″,’ which influenced Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas. Maciunas (1931–1978) organized the first Fluxus event in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York City and the first Fluxus festivals in Europe in 1962.
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July 8, 2011
Max is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling ’74. During its 20-year history, it has been widely used by composers, performers, software designers, researchers, and artists for creating innovative recordings, performances, and installations.
The Max program itself is highly modular, with most routines existing in the form of shared libraries. As a result, Max has a large userbase of programmers not affiliated with Cycling ’74 who enhance the software with commercial and non-commercial extensions to the program.
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