Buy or die!

It seems that Kim Monaghan, our intrepid music reviews editor, and writer of steel has been straying away from the sitting now nest!:

‘Sitting Now regulars will no doubt be familiar with my alter ego, Daddy Tank. Well, that ego has continued to expand almost exponentially and is now too large to be contained in a couple of podcasts and some pseudo-literate review rants. My arrogance has blossomed and matured…it has become a record label.

I have encountered too many bands and musicians lurking in the half-light of the Internet, scavenging for scraps of respect and attention, while some of the utter shit that masquerades as music flourishes. This has, of course, always been the case but with the onslaught of piracy and digital downloading, good music and good musicians are at a nadir. If you are not writing auto-tuned disposable filth, and you don’t have a video fronted by a posturing day-glo imbecile, you will not sell your music.

If you feel, like I do, that an album, an EP or even a song is particularly good, and you also feel that this piece of art has made such a significant impact on you that the person who created it deserves some kind of reward, then visit http://www.daddytank.co.uk‘

The labels first offering, described below, looks to be a belter:

The first release on Daddy Tank Records is the mighty Pang with “Garden of Menace”. This amazing album has been floating around on the internet for free for a couple of years ( http://enoughrecords.scene.org/ ), and while those people who have been lucky enough to stumble across it are inevitably won over by its labyrinthine obsidian splendour, the numbers of people who have heard this album remain unacceptably low. Existing simultaneously in the genres of dark ambient, glitch and electronica, “Garden of Menace” is structurally perfect. Each individual track is endlessly fascinating, whether it is the eerie emptiness of “Hollows” or the post-apocalyptic “Dead Monism”, but the album itself is also a mind expanding and intellectually intoxicating masterpiece from beginning to end. The closest comparisons that can be made would be to Arovane, Bola and Autechre but ultimately “Garden of Menace” sounds only like “Garden of Menace”. If you like challenging, intellectual and avant garde electronic music this is a must have.

The album comes in a limited run of 200 copies, each copy will come with Pang artcard and Daddy Tank Records sticker. The first 10 copies sold will also come with a mysterious free promo item.

Mysterious? Limited?…these words are porn to a music geek. I hope you’ll join me in wishing Kim well for this exciting new project!

Now, get back to work dammit! This isn’t a bloody lounge….etc.

Ken Eakins

Isaac Bonewits with his wife Phaedra.

It is with a heavy-heart that I report the death of Isaac Bonewits. Isaac was a leading figure in modern-occultism, and a true rebel in the scene.

We had Isaac on our show last year, and he was a really nice, and funny, guy. Isaac is a man  that has actually gone out there and blazed a trail, and along the way educated and entertained all that have had the sense to listen.

Isaac’s wife Phaedra released this official statement:

Philip Emmons Isaac Bonewits, founder and Archdruid Emeritus of of Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship, one of North America’s leading experts on ancient and modern Druidism, Witchcraft, magic and the occult, and the rapidly growing Earth Religions movement, died today after a short struggle with cancer.

Mr. Bonewits first came into the public eye when he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in Magic and Thaumaturgy (1970). During his tenure there, Mr. Bonewits worked with many renowned professors including Nobel Prize Laureate Owen Chamberlain. The work he did for that degree became his first book, Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise on the Basic Principles of Yellow Magic (1971).

In 1983, he founded and became the first Archdruid of Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship (ADF) an international fellowship devoted to creating a public tradition of Neopagan Druidry. In 1995, he retired from a leadership role due to complications from eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome. ADF has grown to become the best-known Neopagan Druid group based in North America. At his death, Mr. Bonewits held the title of ArchDruid Emeritus.

During his forty years as a Neopagan priest, scholar, teacher, bard, and polytheologian, Isaac Bonewits coined much of the vocabulary and articulated many of the issues that have shaped the rapidly growing Neopagan movement in the United States and Canada.

Mr. Bonewits was internationally known as a speaker who educated, enlightened and entertained two generations of modern Goddess worshippers, nature mystics, and followers of other minority belief systems, as well as explained these movements to journalists, law enforcement officers, college students, and academic researchers.

His personal papers will become part of the American Religions Collection at the Library of University of California at Santa Barbara.

One of his most influential contributions was the Advanced Bonewits Cult Danger Evaluation Frame (the “ABCDEF”), developed in 1979 as a response to the Jim Jones People’s Temple tragedy. It has been translated into many languages and used around the world to evaluate how dangerous or harmless an organization might be. It was the first such scale to use theories of mental health and personal growth to judge rather than theological or ideological standards.

His other books include Authentic Thaumaturgy (1979, 1998), The Pagan Man (2005), Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Witchcraft and Wicca (2006), Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Druidism (2006), Neopagan Rites (2007), and Real Energy (2007), which was co-authored with his wife, Phaedra, as well as numerous articles, reviews and essays. As a singer-songwriter, he released two albums, Be Pagan Once Again (1988), and Avalon is Rising (1992).

He is survived by his wife, Phaedra, his son from a previous marriage, Arthur Lipp-Bonewits of Bardonia NY, his mother Jeannette, his brothers Michael and Richard, and sisters Simone Arris and Melissa Banbury.

I’m sure I speak for everyone here at SittingNow in wishing Phaedra, and his family, our deepest condolences.

RIP Isaac.

Ken Eakins

Screenshot of hacked YouTube

Google-owned video hosting giants YouTube were hacked earlier today, and fingers are pointing at 4chan.

The social networking news-site Mashable has this to say:

Today, members of the Internet communities 4chan and and other enterprising computer whizzes hacked YouTube using a vulnerability in the site’s comment system. While the hack was used on a variety of videos, striking music videos featuring teen pop idol Justin Bieber was the most popular activity.

Twitter lit up with complaints about the problem, Google support got some concerned posts on its forum, and we received tips in our inbox. The event caused quite a Sunday-morning stir.

The bug allowed users to inject HTML (the code that most websites are built with) that could be executed on the site, whereas HTML within comments is supposed to be restricted. The hackers did everything from force pop-up messages to appear over the site declaring that it had been hacked to redirecting Bieber video pages to sites hosting pornography and malware.

Google disabled comments within an hour of the start of the attack, then corrected the exploited bug within two hours, according to a statement sent to The Next Web.

Internet community 4chan has been waging a small cultural war against Justin Bieber, and its members exploited the bug to target the artist’s videos specifically. Last week they conspired to try and send Bieber to North Korea.

**update**

Chatter on 4chan is showing further evidence of their involvement in the vandaism:

This seems, at least to me, to be the work of  a certain ‘Tetris Online playing community’ rather than the mighty chan. Time will tell, and we’ll keep you posted.

Ken Eakins

What?? This guy seems legit!

seriously!

Burroughs' was an early adopter of the iPod

If, like me, you’re a big fan of William Burroughs, then you’ll have heard him bang on (a lot) about cut-ups. He borrowed the idea from another very cool guy Brion Gysin, and together they paved a new path for experimentalists to explore the randomness of the universe. Now it seems some uncovered tape cut-ups are being exhibited in London:

28th May – 18th July 2010

Dead Fingers Talk is an ambitious forthcoming exhibition presenting two unreleased tape experiments by William Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators.

Few writers have exerted as great an influence over such a diverse range of art forms as William Burroughs. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Junky, continues to be regularly referenced in music, visual art, sound art, film, web-based practice and literature. One typically overlooked, yet critically important, manifestation of his radical ideas about manipulation, technology and society is found in his extensive experiments with tape recorders in the 1960s and ’70s. Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs is the first exhibition to truly demonstrate the diversity of resonance in the arts of Burroughs’ theories of sound.

listen to your present time tapes and you will begin to see who you are and what you are doing here mix yesterday in with today and hear tomorrow your future rising out of old recordings

everybody splice himself in with everybody else

The exhibition includes work by Joe Ambrose, Steve Aylett, Alex Baker & Kit Poulson, Lawrence English, The Human Separation, Riccardo Iacono, Anthony Joseph, Cathy Lane, Eduardo Navas, Negativland, o.blaat, Aki Onda, Jörg Piringer, Plastique Fantastique, Simon Ruben White, Giorgio Sadotti, Scanner, Terre Thaemlitz, Thomson & Craighead, Laureana Toledo and Ultra-red, with performances by Ascsoms and Solina Hi-Fi.

Inspired by the expelled Surrealist painter Brion Gysin, and yet never meant as art but as a pseudo-scientific investigation of sounds and our relationship to technology and material, the experiments provide early examples of interactions which are essential listening for artists working in the digital age.

In the case of the work in the exhibition the contributors were asked to provide a “recording” in response to Burroughs’ tape experiments. The works, which vary significantly in media and focus, demonstrate the diversity of attitudes to such a groundbreaking period of investigation.

Now this I am looking forward to.

Ken Eakins

That's enough acid to send an army insane!

National Geographic‘s ‘Explorer’ series are examining the myths and effects of LSD:

LSDs inventor Albert Hofmann called it “medicine for the soul.” The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers. Outlawed in 1966, LSD became a street drug and developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius, or a descent into madness. Now science is taking a fresh look at LSD, including the first human trials in over 35 years. Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this “trippy” drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future. Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD under the microscope.

(via: National Geographic)

Pranked again...you'd think they would have got wise to this by now

From Yahoo News,

‘WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) — A Walmart store announcement ordering black people to leave brought chagrin and apologies Wednesday from leaders of the company, which has built a fragile trust among minority communities.

A male voice came over the public-address system Sunday evening at a store in Washington Township, in southern New Jersey, and calmly announced: “Attention, Walmart customers: All black people, leave the store now.”

Shoppers in the store at the time said a manager quickly got on the public-address system and apologized for the remark. And while it was unclear whether a rogue patron or an employee was responsible for the comment, many customers expressed their anger to store management.’

I doubt this is the PLA, but I love it when people get up in arms about a blatent prank (even if it is a bit risque in this case):

Ken Eakins

...I know...

Brutal-Koala-Jedi-Action seemed relevant to this post

Here we go again:

The Australian Human Rights Commission has threatened legal action against a widely read but controversial US-based website over an article that encourages racial hatred against Aborigines.

But online rights group Electronic Frontiers Australia said trying to stamp out the deplorable content would only create the “Streisand” effect, whereby an attempt to censor online content only brings more attention to it.

The same page was in the news in January when, in a rare move, Google Australia agreed to remove links to the article from its search engine following legal action from Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt

Once again ED is attacked, and once again people miss the point of the site.

The Internet really is srs bsns.

(via Sydney Herald)

Ken Eakins

Night of Pan in London

Brian Butler, the guest of our latest podcast (see the frontpage), is screening his new film ‘Night of Pan’ for free at London’s Horse Hospital tomorrow night.

As well as an appearance by Butler himself, the film features seminal film-maker Kenneth Anger as the Magus, and Buffalo 66′s Vincent Gallo as Pan.

Brian will be performing live music on the night with Death in Vegas’ Richard Fearless, who will also be DJing the event.

Check this mini-version of the film:

The event kicks off at 7:30, admission is free, but we recomend getting there early to avoid disapointment.

The Horse Hospital : Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1HX

Ken Eakins

DO WANT...on Verizon!

4chan site owner m00t has posted to the 4chan blog, and Twitter, that Verizon wireless, are blocking both in and outbound web-traffic to 4chan.

Unlike a recent scare involving AT&T last year, m00t believes that this time it’s for realsies, from the 4chan blog:

Over the past 72 hours, we’ve been receiving reports from Verizon Wireless customers having difficulty accessing the image boards. After investigating, we found that Verizon is dropping traffic to/from boards.4chan.org, only on port 80 (HTTP). No other subdomain/IP/port is affected, which leads us to believe this block is intentional. A call was placed to their support staff last night, and we were told that the ticket would not be looked at until Monday at the earliest, and: “You’ll need the customer to call to request it be unblocked…”

Note: Users with mobile browsers that proxy (BlackBerry, Opera) won’t necessarily have issues accessing the boards.

We’ll watch this story with interest as it unfolds, as it could point to the first in what some belive to be an upcoming war for Net Neutrality.

Ken Eakins