nine's weblog: 2007

9.28.2007

Free Burma !!!

In the Quiet Land, no one can hear
what is silenced by murder
and covered up with fear.
But, despite what is forced, freedom's a sound
that liars can't fake and no shouting can drown.

(By Daw Aung San Suu Kyi)

Please, please support the people's protest.
Let it lead to freedom and peace for all.
Stop this horrible violence...

links:

* AVAAZ petition on Burma *
(AVAAZ is a community of global citizens who take action on the major issues facing the world today)

* Democratic Voice of Burma *
(a non-profit Burmese media organization committed to responsible journalism.)

* US Campaign for Burma *
(organization dedicated to empowering grassroots activists around the world to bring about an end to the military dictatorship in Burma.)

* Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Pages *
(dedicated to Nobel Prize laureate and mother of all activists for the the Burmese case)

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7.11.2007

EAT005, 006 & 007

" Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”

~ Thelonious Monk ~

Imagine this independent little recordlabel from Holland... Founded by friends for the love of making records and releasing music they want to hear and get heard. Three releases determined their almost quixotic approach to modern day electronic music. Bootstrapping (EAT001 & 002), Sound Pure (EAT003) and Attention Spam (EAT004) made some noise amongst peers and contemporaries and echoe on ever since.
Receiving credit and acclaim for these projects, Eat Concrete already moved on to different grounds. Stretching their spectrum in global ways and paying dues to music they grew up on, Eat Concrete now adds a beautiful trio of releases to their catalog. Two double disk albums and one 12". Twin Earth Atlantic, New Deal and Eat 007 cover a spectrum of music subtly lining out Eat Concrete's perspectives and intentions. All of a sudden the little eccentric label turned into one of the most sophisticated and daring Dutch recordlabels today.

Twin Earth Atlantic (...) is kinship in music at it's best. A dream compilation to any musiclover interested in new leftfield electronics, experimental hiphop and downtempo beats, Daedelus, Low Res and TAKE are just a few of the names to grace the line up. Twin Earth is symbolic to the great universal connectivity in music, brought together through the platform that Eat Concrete is today. A daring project, an exciting release, and a particularly beautiful album.

Eat's sixth, New Deal is a fat collection of dancefloor filling, mind boggling, techno-inspired dance tracks. A new deal to an old school... Spinning off from a genre dominating dancefloors across the world, coming from some twenty years of techno electronic music history, artists like Maarten van der Vleuten, Sensory Overload, 69db and BlipVert preserve an experimental edge making New Deal into and elevating an refreshing compilation.

EAT007 is one of those little Concrete gems. Offering four new productions by some of the label's closest friends and allies, EAT007 is Eat's own mix of modern electronica, experimental but inviting.
This surprising little 12" can give a pretty good idea of how this recordlabel and the people behind it will not be forced into some stream, style or standard. There's something highly dynamic and progressive about their way of music.

Listen to clips from all records, read more on these and previous releases, the label and the artists at eatconcrete.net. Visit Eat Concrete's MySpace and say hi!

more:

Eat Concrete Discogs

Eat Concrete's Last.fm

Eat Concrete contact

6.06.2007

Sixties Psychedelic Poster Art

The psychedelic movement of the sixties changed it all...
Social culture, music, fashion, design. All revolutionised under the hands of the hippies.

The full coloured, graphically mindblowing musicposters, with their blown up art nouveau like letters have become gorgeous symbols of their era, uniting music, design, time and place in graphics surpassing the "concertposter purpose"

Linked to hippie hotspots like the Berkeley Theatre and the famous Fillmore Auditorium, the Avalon Ballroom etc., psychedelic poster art is mostly associated with San Francisco. Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors are just some of the names connected to the movement, symbolising a very special place & time.

The American Poster Book (1988) is an overview of San Francisco's cultural and social milieu in the late sixties, devoting special coverage to five of the most influential poster artists: Mouse, Moscoso, Griffin, Conklin and Singer. Chronicled by Bill Graham, the designers and photographers themselves, this document is a true gem to the serious collector.

The Art of Rock (1987) is also a collector's dream. A compilation of over 1500 posters done by Paul Grushkin, the original artists and again Bill Graham. Grushkin's work is considered an authoritative source of rock poster art with its painstaking research of the Who, What, Where and When behind the pictures.

My favourites in the poster world are definitely Lee Conklin, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson, probably in that order. In Lee Conklin's work I love the styled lettering and the Hieronymous Bosch' feel. He did many posters for the Fillmore and the famous concert promotor Bill Graham. I love these very much:

More Lee Conklin

Victor Moscoso's work has an extreme visual intensity and maximum optical effects. Vibrating edges, contrasting colors and deliberate psychedelic lettering are demanding elements in his style. Moscoso designed a series of posters for the Avalon Ballroom, the Matrix and Family Dog. Perhaps due to his academic training he's sometimes mentioned as one of the few who managed to bring psychedelic art to formal art museums and exhibitions.

His "flower pot" (family dog 86) is a great example of his ability to "formalize" some of the visual aspects of psychedelic art, e.g. the contrasting colors or the apparent movement of still forms.

Victor Moscoso - Family Dog 86 aka "Flower Pot"

Some other fine examples of Moscoso's work:

More Victor Moscoso:

Wes Wilson is also part of the San Francisco "big ones". Creating the first Family Dog Posters and many many Fillmore posters for Bill Graham. I love his round flowing lines, psychedelic coloring and big lettering.

More Wes Wilson

_________________________________________________________________________________

Major psychedelic gratitude goes out to the people @ POoter's PSycheDelic ShAcK & Wolgang's Vault !!! All images appear by courtesy of www.wolfgansvault.com.

More links:

www.professorposter.com

www.rockument.com

Finally: a little contemporary interpretation of a psychedelic "poster" ;)

5.09.2007

Maneki Neko

Lovely Lucky Cats.

Quirky and kitschy, traditional but also a great little gadget. I love the superstitious japanese culture of happiness & good luck charms.

Japanese Maneki Neko, the beckoning cat, brings fortune, welth and good luck to it's owner. Usually the lucky cat holds a couple of attributes like a red collar and a bell, and almost all hold a gold coin. You have plastic ones on batteries endlessly beckoning fortune in.

Some believe, the longer the paw the bigger the happiness, so you can find silly Maneki's with a real long arm. The "beckoning" is probably loosely based on a cat's washing gestures...

too long armed Maneki Neko

The asian gesture of beckoning is quite opposite to the western, holding your hand palm out, beckoning downwards instead of our way of beckoning "upwards"...

Maneki Neko brings fortune and prosperity, so you can often see them in stores, businesses, pachinko ♥ parlors and other merchant and moneymaking places. They are often made as piggy-banks as well.

Put Maneki Neko on a little red pillow or cloth in a prominent place, mine sits triumphantly on top of my desk. It makes me happy every time I see it, so the luckbringing works just fine...

ancient portrait of Maneki Neko
on a japanese woodblock print,
around 1850.

Huge Maneki Neko in Tokoname, Japan.

Maneki Neko Club

Maneki Neko Wiki

3.09.2007

Spaceways Radio

Carlos Niño might just be the Sound of LA.
Niño is the primary producer and conceptual mind behind AmmonContact (together with Fabian Ammon, a unique production duo, releasing mostly instrumental, jazz-influenced, soulfull hip hop) , the founder of LA based creative music ensemble Build an Ark, credited for bringing soul-jazz singer Dwight Trible to prominence as well as helping Daedelus develop his musical talents. Carlos Niño is one of the original DJ's and programmers at dublab.com and involved in the (LA) music scene for over 10 years as a DJ/producer/composer/musician/writer/arranger.

Starting out as a DJ/host for KPFK Pacifica Radio, it's kinda amazing he still finds time to do a weekly show at KPFK called Spaceways Radio. A little experimental, but always just about the music, this episode Niño digs up everything between obscure field recordings, Sun Ra, his LA peers and some of his new project with Miguel Atwood Ferguson, Fill The Heart Shaped Cup and much more.

Broadcasted every friday from 8 till 10 pm, you can listen online through KPFK.org.
If you're not on pacific time you can listen to the latest episode of Spaceways Radio online through kpfk's audio archive >> here<<

For more info on the show (playlists etc) go >> here <<

KPFK.org

Carlos Niño on discogs