clair056

Looking forward to next Friday's Praxis records party in London, all aboard the MS Stubnitz boat (facebook events details here ) . Praxis released its first records in November 1992, and twenty years later is still going strong. Started by Christoph Fringeli in South London, and associated in the mid-1990s with the famous Brixton Dead by Dawn parties, it is now based in Berlin. It has stayed true to its mission of putting out sounds from the noisier, faster, more experimental, but still very much partyable end of electronic music. There's a great line up next week, with various people associated with Praxis and related projects at various times: - Bambule - http://soundcloud.com/touchedraw - Base Force One - http://soundcloud.com/praxisrecords/ - Controlled Weirdness - http://soundcloud.com/dj-controlled-weirdness - Dan Hekate - http://hekate.co.uk/ - DJ Stacey - http://soundcloud.com/noyeahno - DJ Scud (Ambush/Sub/Version) - Eiterherd - http://widerstand.org/ - FZV - http:/...

From Haruki Murakami's 'After Dark', 2004: 'The record ends. the automatic turntable lifts the needle, and the tone arm drops on to its rest. The bartender approaches the player to change records. He carefully lifts the platter and slips it into its jacket.  Then he takes out the next record, examines its surface under a light, and sets it on the turntable. He presses a button and the needle descends to the record. Faint scratching. The Duke Ellington's 'Sophisticated Lady' begins to play. Harry Carney's languorous bass clarinet performs solo. The bartender's unhurried movements give the place its own special time flow. Maria asks the bartender, 'Don't you ever play anything but LPs?' 'I don't like CDs', he replies. 'Why not?' 'They're too shiny'.... 'But look at all the time it takes to change LPs', Mari says. The bartender laughs. 'Look, it's the middle of the night. There won't be any...

The twelfth issue of Datacide, 'the magazine for noise and politics',  is out today, with 68 pages of stuff you won't find in any other journal. I have a couple of pieces in it, and the full contents are as follows: - Datacide: Introduction - Darkam: The Art of Visual Noise - Nemeton: Political News - Christoph Fringeli: Neo-Nazi Terror and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Germany - Cherry Angioma: Communisation Theory and the Question of Fascism - Christoph Fringeli: From Adorno to Mao – The Decomposition of the ’68 Protest Movement into Maoism (extended book review) - Split Horizon: Control and Freedom in Geographic Information Systems - Riccardo Balli: “Bolognoise ain’t a Sauce for Spaghetti but Bologna’s Soundscape” - Polaris International: Documents and Interventions - TechNET insert:    - Noise and Politics – Technet Mix    - No More WordS    - Listener as Operator    - The Intensifier    - No Sta...

Rita Tushingham and Michael York in Smashing Time (1967) 'Wild nights! Wild nights! Were I with thee, Wild nights should be Our luxury!' Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

The historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) died yesterday at the age of 95.  There's plenty to criticise in his political judgement  as he aligned himself with  the various phases of the Communist Party of Great Britain from its outright Stalinism to its proto-New Labour 'Marxism Today' period - even if it's not hard to understand why somebody who spent some of his teenage years in Berlin during the rise of Hitler joined the KPD . But his history writing on class and culture was often very nuanced and non-dogmatic. He also wrote extensively on jazz. One of my favourite short essays of his looks at the early days of jazz in Europe, reflecting on how its popularity related to changing class cultural practices. 'On the Reception of Jazz in Europe'  was originally published in 1994 and then republished as 'Jazz Comes to Europe' in the excellent collection 'Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz' (1998). Here's a few extracts: 'The spe...