I originally stumbled upon Michael Durham’s Business Reply Pamphlet at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. The link from there led to Centennial Society, Durham’s biting, and perhaps intentionally navigationally crap site. It required the work necessary to get the goods. Much like the infodesign-articulated situations in his work, where skyscraper molotovs and a 15 story xerox drops end in break room orgies, board room campfires and sprouting sunflowers in urinals.

Durham’s work charts the path of idyllic creation through joyous destruction. Ontological-anarchic propaganda that would make anyone in their right mind want to smash the state and bow-hunt squirrels in the bowels of corporate towers.

Once I actually found the work at his site, I was further amazed to find that he actually disseminated Business Reply Pamphlet just as that: his own reply to corporate culture, stuffed into random pre-paid business reply envelopes.

This wasn’t the only type of guerilla warfare Durham was engaged in. Documented onslaughts of Walgreen’s coupons, bible disclaimers, terror alert, billboard and on-shelf product alteration hacking, his Fallen Rappers Pez dispenser project (submitted to Pez with resulting communiqué). Every project surges with the same urgency that kept a Fight Club quote resounding in my head:

“Imagine, stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.” —Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 16

Michael Durham is a change agent, monkey-wrenching controls on the elusive rails of Freedom.

view: Business Reply Pamphlet / Welcome to Geneva! / A Day At The Mall / Fallen Rappers
via: Centennial Society / Michael Durham / WFMU

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Since posting that Chris Cunningham ad, something kept striking me as elusively familiar about it. I’d seen similar effects before. The smeariness I mean, not the bullet time pans. I was wandering down countless memories of smearing things in unison with xerox lamps when it hit me. Ira Cohen. Specifically, his photos of Hakim Bey in the CD booklet for the spoken word version of TAZ, using his signature technique of capturing reflected images in the bent liquidity of flexible mylar mirrors.

With roots firmly planted in the beat and acid generations, Ira Cohen has spent a lifetime creating and collaborating in the avant and exploratory circles of cognescenti. Thurston Moore, Sunburned Hand of the Man and DJ Spooky to name a recent few.

While digging up some mylar examples, I stumbled upon a portrait of Jimi I hadn’t seen before, and a long excerpt from his 1968 short film, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. I’d never seen his brilliantly trippy analog tech in motion. Now that Arthur Magazine has reissued it on DVD I plan to look closer. Especially considering it includes such extras as new works (Brain Damage), the amazing original Angus Maclise score, plus two alternate tracks by Sunburned Hand of the Man and Acid Mothers Temple!

The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda: excerpt (16.7MB, mov.zip) via The Wire
Angus Maclise: Soundtrack (80MB, mp3.rar) / via Mutant Sounds
DVD available at Arthur Magazine

Collection of photography at Cynthia Broan Gallery
Various performances and readings: s|b tube

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On 7/7/07, while most related attention was centered on Live Earth, the Boredoms were performing 77BOADRUM, as the last show of their North American tour. The event was comprised of 77 drummers on 77 full five piece, 3 cymbal drum kits arranged in a spiral pattern beneath the Brooklyn bridge. Yamataka Eye orchestrated changes from the center of the 4 Boredoms positions, spiraling out to the 74 additional drummers, 10 of whom served as second tier relays to queue the rest, culminating in a 77 person call and response percussive overload — in classic Boredoms family tradition.

The event was also a celebration of Tanabata, the Japanese star festival. Tanabata typically occurs on the 7th of July. “7 is the number when we try to express sun as sound,” says eYe. “When I look at the sun, I see number 7.”

Vice Records (who released Seadrum/House of Sun) promises “a week of programming featuring Boredoms and 77BOADRUM…” Nothing yet, but I keep checking. In the meantime there’s Pitchfork’s detailed lineup and suberb recap, a NY Times Article, the other lisa’s photos, and clips at s|b tube...

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Digging for a link to the Ekstroem glacier audio in the previous post serendipidously landed me on the ABC.au home page where i found breaking news that a giant squid, measuring about six meters long, had just washed up on the west coast of Tasmania.

Full article: Giant squid washed up in Tasmania

It was only months ago that I stumbled upon a documentary about researchers eagerly tracking down mere footage of one in the depths of the North Pacific —cheering when they’d captured video of a blurred tentacle swiping at their surveilled bait.

And I thought the synchronicity of arriving at work the next day to find posts about this squid being found was weird…

Oh, and serendipidously really should be a word.

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Another entry in the acoustics of frozen water thread.

This time from a recording made by researchers studying seismic activity on Ekstroem ice shelf on Antarctica’s South Atlantic coast in 2002. Christian Müller, Vera Schlindwein, Alfons Eckstaller and Heinrich Miller registered acoustic activity from a nearby iceberg that when sped up, revealed audible changes in pitch and tone.

Ekstroem Iceberg (WAV, 23.6MB)

Marc Weidenbaum of disquiet sums the discovery up nicely.

Please don’t mistake this for a figment of casual animism. The point here isn’t to attribute sentience to an iceberg; at best in that regard it’s an exercise in enthusiastic anthropomorphism. The point is to revel in the rich sonic attributes of nature, attributes that we can only appreciated thanks to the mediation of technology.

post thread via Disquiet, The music of sound and ABC.au

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Mocean belongs in every home. Starting with mine (please).

From the organic interfaces site:
We live in water for the first nine months of our lives. Deep within our minds, the thread that weaves the substance of our existence resonates. Being close to water, to play with it, is an innate desire.

Mocean frames a time and a space to explore our lost memory in a literal way.

more here

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Jacob Kirkegaard: Eldfjall (mp3, 23.1MB)
via TouchRadio Podcacst 12

Jacob Kirkegaard - Eldfjall Live at Observatori Festival, Valencia:
“The sounds I here perform with were recorded in two ways: with an acoustic microphone and with an accelerometer. For the acoustic recordings I used a Sanken CSS-5 which I held very closely to the tiny bubbling surface. The accelerometer was inserted approximately 4 cm into the earth and picked up a denser timbre than the acoustic microphone. As opposed to the Eldfjall CD release (where I chose to let the sounds stand by themselves), I here mixed the different sounds with each other to create a more organic sound and a narrative. I began the concert with creaking ice from different lakes in Iceland. These were also recorded with accelerometers. None of the sounds have been processed.”

More TouchRadio

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Ernst Haeckel’s masterpiece, Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) is available for hi-resolution download at Kurt Stüber’s site. I recall getting lost in the single plate archive when I first stumbled on the site many years ago. I don’t remember the hi-res PDF (272 MB), but it’s a welcome addition and an already great resource.

Art Forms in Nature: The Prints of Ernst Haeckel

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