Neon Bible - Arcade Fire

Neon Bible by Arcade Fire is officially out today ($9.99 if bought through their label) though many have been listening to some of the songs since December or so. When riding in the car, it is the one cd my daughter won't try to change so I'd say it has broad appeal.

The eagerly anticipated second album from Montreal's Arcade Fire exceeds all expectations. Neon Bible was written, produced, arranged, and performed by the Arcade Fire and recorded throughout 2006 in Quebec, New York, Budapest,and London with recording and engineering help from Markus Dravs (Bjork, Brian Eno) and Scott Colburn (Animal Collective, Sun City Girls). With string and orchestral arrangements by the band's own Owen Pallet (also Final Fantasy) and Regine Chassagne, Neon Bible is full of both half-assed punk rock mistakes and meticulously orchestrated woodwinds. Processed strings and mandolin. Quiet rumbles and loud rumbles. But mostly just eleven songs that the band thinks are really good!

link

Read more...

EDGE 203

EDGE 203

This EDGE edition, which includes graphics and links, is available online at here and includes these following stories and more.

Falling In Love
By Marvin Minsky
What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something that we want to understand, or is it one of those subjects that we don't really want to know more about? And should machines have feelings, too?

An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New 'Heresies'
By John Tierney
Stewart Brand who is now 68 and lives on a tugboat in Sausalito, CA, has stayed ahead of the curve for so long that as a publisher, writer, techno-guru, enviro-philosopher, supreme networker, he's become a cottage industry in academia. Read what he says about environmentalism and the direction in which it should be going. When Stewart talks, everybody tunes in.

Mosh Pit Meets Sandbox
By David Brooks, who declares Fatwa on hipster dads
Can we stop hearing about downtown parents who dress their babies in black skull slippers, Punky Monkey T-shirts and camo toddler ponchos until the little ones end up looking like sad-parody club clones of mom and dad? Can we finally stop reading about the musical Antoinettes who would get the vapors if their tykes were caught listening to Disney tunes, and who instead force-feed Brian Eno, Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens into their little babies' iPods? I'm over the 'hipster dad' stories, too, but only because it's been done to death. I don't know how I feel about an actual Hipster dad because I don't believe I know of any.

A Familiar and Prescient Voice, Brought to Life
By Dennis Overbye
Carl Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave, with "new" words on the boundary between science and religion. The respect people had for Carl Sagan bordered on cult worship-- but in a good way. Nice to hear that his words live on.

Read more...

All India Radio

ALL INDIA RADIO

I've recently discovered All India Radio, an Australian group, and I'm really enjoying their sound. If Boards Of Canada were from India, they'd be All India Radio. Well, almost. I should quote some reviews so you can get a better idea of what they sound like.

"Sigur Ros without the vocals meets Brian Eno and Transglobal Underground. Lo-fi & ambient soundscapes & eerie ethnic street sounds." - The Age Newspaper

And, DJ Shadow meets Boards Of Canada, ambient soundscapes and lo-fi beats with some Twin Peaks & Ennio Morricone weirdness thrown in for good measure. "This is some good shit. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in our imaginations" - Beat Magazine.

"A.I.R. takes you on a dreamlike journey-not unlike what one could imagine the results would be if K&D, Alan Parsons and Calexico were to hang in a studio for a week. Top notch" - Groove Palace Radio

I picked out some songs from their 002, Permanent Evolutions, and Echo Other CDs and bought them at iTunes after sampling them on CDBaby.com. Maybe it's something you might also enjoy.

link

Read more...

TERRY RILEY

One of Terry Riley's recent projects has him paired with the Kronos Quartet working for NASA. Thanks in no small part to Kronos leader David Harrington, Riley is commissioned to compose music based on radio waves collected by the Voyager space shuttle." [NASA] has done a couple of music projects before," explains Riley. "This one is based on Voyager's exploration, which flew by all of the planets. On board Voyager was a device called the Plasma Wave Receptor, which was invented by a Dr. Gurnett in Iowa. This [device] is able to receive radio waves the planets themselves broadcast, and each planet has a different sound wave."

Riley is the perfect candidate for NASA's space-age string quartets. Here on Earth, he's spent his time creating music light years ahead of his peers. Riley made his giant leap in the '60s with In C, a towering obelisk of a composition that cast an influential shadow over Philip Glass, Brian Eno and Pete Townshend (remember the intro to "Baba O'Riley" from. Who's Next?) and blurred the boundaries between classical music, avant-garde experimentalism and trance-inducing improvisation for all who followed.

Terry influenced not only Steve Reich, Philip Glass and their protégés, such as John Adams, but his influence spread out to certain European rock groups, such as Daevid Allen's Gong, Can and Tangerine Dream. In the case of these rock groups, I think sometimes Terry was the direct link."

He's been around for a long time and is still making beautiful music.

READ MORE »

Read more...

Random Ten Songs on MP3 Player

1. Wings Made Out of Noise - Neon Blonde
2. Everybody Daylight - Brightblack Morning Light
3. Viscera Eyes - The Mars Volta
4. Lantern Marsh - Brian Eno
5. Two Organs - Jim O'Rourke
6. It Took The Night To Believe - Sunn O)))
7. Dead Queen - Espers
8. Something Came Over Me - Throbbing Gristle
9. Cold Criminals - Pink Mountaintops
10. Some Boys - Lydia Lunch & Thurston Moore

Read more...

Web Trail | Impending Iran attack?, Low-Fat bOING bOING, Bare Care, Pass the PDR, Busted, Iknow Eno

Inevitable Iran Attack? The official excuse for the attack is the possible nuclear weapons program in Iran: ex-CIA agents Paul Pillar and Ellen Laipson as well as retired United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix state that if Iran were really trying to build atom bombs, then the most effective way to stop this would be a guarantee from the US and Israel not to attack Iran. [MORE...]

The popular bOING bOING is a good website in part because they have something for everyone. But there are some topics that just don't interest me - particularly the tech stuff that's way over my head. And that's where bOING bOING LITE comes in.

McSweeney's Career Days is very funny with a Memo
To: All Employees
From: Paul Pell, President and CEO, Die Mold Industries Inc.

Bush BUSTED!

Please Call Home is the working title of a feature-length documentary about the Big House -- the Macon, Ga., residence in which the Allman Brothers Band lived during the early '70s.

About 35 UC San Diego students stripped to their underwear – and in some cases, wore nothing but poster boards – yesterday to persuade university administrators to adopt more stringent labor codes for the manufacturing of all university licensed apparel. [More...]

And goes running for the shelter... - Alcibiades Dream a clinical, but honest account of a drug user in college.

Did You Know?
Brian Eno did the Windows 95 startup sound.

Read more...

I will NEVER tire of the song, The Way You Dream from the 1 Giant Leap documentary.

It features the singing of REM front man Michael Stipe and Asha Bhosle and slipped under my radar when it was originally made in 2000, but found it's way to me a few years ago. When I first saw the documentary I was actually haunted by this song for weeks. Do you ever hear a song or see a good film and it stays on your mind for days? Love when that happens. This particular song weaves its way throughout the doc. And there are many other good songs, too.

Imagine taking musical and spoken voices from around the world and blending them into a poetic, sonic mix. 1 Giant Leap is a Giant Loop of planetary sounds and soulful reflections on everything from Sex to the Sacred.

1 Giant Leap DVD features: Kurt Vonnegut, Dennis Hopper, Ram Dass, Tom Robbins, Anita Roddick, Brian Eno, Michael Stipe (REM), Robbie Williams, Neneh Cherry, Speech (Arrested Development), Stewart Copeland, Baaba Maal, Michael Franti, and many more.

Download this song and prepare to be enchanted. You'll thank me later. - 1 Giant Leap - The Way You Dream

Read more...

Friday Random Ten - Haven't done this in a while. If you'd like to play along, shuffle 'em up and show us your ten in the comments or on your site.

1. Hide And Seek - Imogen Heep
2. Kashmir - Led Zeppelin
3. Rollin' and Tumblin' - Jeff Beck
4. Glosoli - Sigur Ros
5. Positively 4th Street - Bob Dylan
6. Heard Somebody Say - Devendra Banhart
7. Lay My Love - John Cale & Brian Eno
   
8. And It Stoned Me - Van Morrison
9. I Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd
10. Bitch - Rolling Stones

Read more...

Web Trail
The Full Moon will arrive next week, and I'm curious to find out if you have any rituals you perform for the Full Moon or the Solstice. I know there are a lot of spiritual people and sweet spirits who visit here and I'd love to get some feedback from you.

Summer Solstice
Celebrate the Summer Solstice on June 22, 2005, 12:13:48 AM EDT. Some Solstice revelers will gather at Stonehenge to watch the sunrise. Wouldn't it be nice to be there for that outstanding vision?

A Capricorn Full Moon Gathering is being planned locally for the Solstice and June Full Moon in Capricorn.

Asheville Naked Bike Riders had a small, but fierce group of cyclists this year. If as many riders as cops show up each year, it'd be a roaring success.

I've been listening to the experimental and uncompromising Brian Eno online. His first release in 25 years, Another Day On Earth goes wide Wednesday, June 15.

Quote For Today
I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art. ~Kahlil Gibran

Read more...

{Clock Of The Long Now}

Some of you know about Stewart Brand's Clock Of The Long Now. If not, you may want to see what this visionary has been up to lately.



Brian Eno recently released a cd of bells sounds he designed for the 10,000 Year Clock and profits will go to the Long Now Foundation. You can hear the cd here.



Also initiated by the Long Now Foundation, The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary counterpart of the historic Rosetta Stone.



He does everything in such grand fashion.

Read more...