Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Lets talk about music

I recently received this message from a friend who I had given music to.

"peace brother. I am sitting here (finally) going through the CD u gave me of dub/reggae/soul. This is is a great catalog. I only had a little bit of it. I tell you what, I know alot of these names from way back in my Rastafarian days. U diggin' deep into the crates. U went back with the Linval Thompson, Yabba Yu, and so on. Never even heard of Burial, deadbeat, disrupt so thx plenty for putting them on my radar as you have. Heard of Richie Havens but couldn't pick his music out of a line up for the life of me. Mulatu Astake....DAMN!!!!!! Good Looking Brother!!! That's what the f'ck is up!! I'm feeling it!! Bim Sherman..never heard of him that I can recall, so U got 1 up on me since u got the music haha (Danger's hot) Goldenlocks too). Desmond Dekker's classic, early bob marley partner. Lee Perry, goeas w/o saying. I got Beastie Boys first issue of their mag w "The Upsetter" on the Cover. THey idolize Scratch (so do I). Saw him perform at the Cubby Bear b4 (Burning Spea!
r too).
Al Hirt...HOTT! sleeping on that neva heard of him. "Girl" is the shit. also, the Harlem Hendoo was sampled by none other than DELASOUL on I think "Buhloone Mindstate" album (their third after 3 feet high and Dela Dead albums. That Harlem Hendoo is Bangin'. Timi Yuro .. WOW. Thanks brother. I got mad files for you whenever your ready."

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations

We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were divided, were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while To Let To Let To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants and their unholy interment under the gravel.  A frouzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewed ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar - rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides - addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, 'Try Barnard's Mixture'. 

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Back Issue Mix CD

I just got around to uploading 2 mix cds that I had made and given away last spring. So if you attended Vega Estates' group show last April and picked up a mix from me, this post is not for you. However if you just joined my mailing list and are enticed by the last cd I mailed out, then you should download this seamless double cd. Aquatic Music Box is a featherweight, an eclectic and quirky mix of ambient, electronic, minimal jazz and paired down soul music. Its' counterpart, Wintry Day & Night is a brooding Charles Dickens novel, full of long modern classical compositions.

Aquatic Music Box

Wintry Day & Night









Monday, September 15, 2008

Thursday, September 11, 2008

John Fowles: The Magas

pp 237-238
 'I say you are watching a star a star and you are watching a star. It is that gentle star, white star, gentle star . . .'
  He went on talking , but all the curtness, the abruptness of his ordinary manner had disappeared. It was as if the lulling sound of the sea, the feel of the wind, the texture of my coat, and his voice dropped out of conciousness. There was a stage when I was myself looking at the star, still lying on the terrace; I mean aware of lying and watching the star, if not of anything else. 
  Then came a strange illusion; that I was not looking up, but down into space, as one looks down a well. 
  Then there was no clearly situated and environmented self; there was the star, not closer but with something of the isolation a telescope gives; not one of a pattern of stars, but itself, floating in the blue-black breath of space, in a kind of void. I remember very clearly this sense, this completely new strange perceiving of the star as a ball of white light both breeding and needing the void around it; of, in retrospect, a related sense that I was exactly the same, suspended in a dark void. I was watching the star and the star was watching me. We were poised, exactly equal weights, if one can think of awareness a a weight, held level in a balance. This seemed to endure and endure, I don't know how long, two entities equally suspended in a void, equally opposite, devoid of any meaning or feeling. There was no sensation of beauty, morality, of divinity, of physical geometry; simply the sensation of the situation. As an animal might feel. 
  Then a rise of tension. I was expecting something. The waiting was a waiting for. I did not know if it would be audible or visible, which sense. But it was trying to come, and I was trying to discover its coming. There seemed to be no more star. perhaps he had made me close my eyes. The void was all. I remember two words, Conchis must spoken them: glisten, and listen. There was the glistening, listening void; darkness and expectation. Then there came a wind on my face, a perfectly physical sensation. I tried to face it, it was fresh and warm, but suddenly realized, with an exciting shock, not at anything but the physical strangemess of it, that it was blowing on me from all directions at the same time. I raised my hand, I could feel it. The dark wind, like draught from thousands of invisible fans, blowing in on me. And again this seemed to last for a long time. 
....
pp 239-240

  But the fountain changed, the eddy whirled. It seemed at first to be a kind of reversion to the stage of the dark wind breathing in on me from every side, except that there was no wind, the wind had been only a metaphor, an now it was millions, trillions of such consciousnesses of being, countless nuclei of hope suspended in a vast solution of hazard, a pouring out not of photons, but noons, consciousness-of-being particles. An enormous and vertiginous sense of the innumerability of the universe; an innumerability in which transience and unchangingness seemed integral, essential and uncontradictory. I felt like a germ that had landed, like the first penicillin microbe, not only in a culture where it was totally at home, totally nourished; but in a situation in which it was infinitely significant. A condition of acute physical and intellectual pleasure, a floating suspension, a being perfectly adjusted and related; a quintessential arrival. An intercognition. 

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Balance Check Mixed CD


The latest installment of my Free Mixed CD project is Balance Check, edition of 70; which were mailed to recipients who replied to announcements I made via email, Twitter and Facebook.  If you want to be added to my mailing list, send me an email cole@colepierce.com.  I plan to send out 2 or 3 mixed CDs a year to my mailing list.  The print version of Balance Check has been distributed, but I uploaded the mp3 version, which you can download here





Part I
Zauber - Ellen Allien
Bird In Hand - Lee "Scratch" Perry & The Upsetters
Night and Fog - Claude Vasori
Ribbons - Four Tet
Auntie's Lock/Infinitum - Flying Lotus
Ursulan Uni - Paavoharju
Haiiro - Twerk
Geschichten Von Interesse - Bersarin Quartett

Part II
Okwukwe na Nchekwube - Celestine Ukwu
Clear space - Susumu Yokota & Rothko
Flyin Shoes - Townes Van Zandt
Past Has Not Passed - James Blackshaw

Part III
Untitled - William Eaton
Surf Song - James Yorkston
Womb Duvet - Origamibiro
Cloud My Memory - V. Sjöberg New Jazz Ensemble
Oahu 2.1 (edit) - Freiband & Machinefabriek with
2001: A Space Odyssey (edit) - Arthur C. Clarke



Balance Check

August, 2008

Pierce Press