This week: Putin’s got pussy issues, Occupy Fatigue, Daughter Disintegration, bye bye 2012ers, Celebrity Justice, The Case of the Sleepwalking Killer, Opera News, China Pills are Peeeeople, Stay Negative, and NASA goes Doctor Who.

Sorry burnt-out counterculture/conspiracy/’Mind and Spirit-section’/ McKenna wannabe – authors, the gold rush is officially OVER. Book your return flights from Guatemala, cancel your weekend retreats with gold-diggin’ 2012 consciousness gurus, and delete your last three years of patronising, and self-congratulatory blog posts, 2012 is over…it’s done. How do I know this? I read The Washington Post:

In a striking find, archaeologists in Guatemala report the discovery of a small building whose walls display not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that destroy any notion that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012.

These deep-time calendars can be used to count thousands of years into the past and future, countering pop-culture and New Age ideas that Mayan calendars ended on Dec. 21, 2012, (or Dec. 23, depending on who’s counting), thereby predicting the end of the world.

Let me just pause this delicious slice of copy, to let you know about a BLOW OUT SALE at your nearest bookshop. 99.9% off in the 2012 section, that’s 99…wait, they’re giving them away; what a deal!

…researchers have long assumed that the Mayans had worked out the cycles of the moons and planets much earlier, but no evidence of such work had ever been found.

But in 2010, an undergraduate student working with Saturno, Max Chamberlain, stumbled onto the house as the team began to excavate at a Mayan city, Xultun, which, despite being known since 1915, had never been professionally excavated. Over the decades, looters had dug deep trenches to access buildings. One day at lunch, Chamberlain announced his intention to find paintings by crawling through the trenches.

Let it be noted that the throngs of experts, channelers, and ‘academics’ (a mail-away degree ain’t worth the paper it was printed on) were disproved by a bachelors degree student. Just saying.

With the virtually unexplored city of Xultun containing hundreds of buildings stretching across at least 16 square miles of jungle, Saturno (the Boston University archaeologist who led the expedition) guesses that plenty of other surprises await excavation. “It might take another two decades,” he said.

He expects the world to still exist then and said he’d bet anyone a million dollars that it will. The Mayan calendar does start a new “long cycle,” later this year, but he equated that with the odometer on a car rolling over from 99,999 miles to zero: “You go, ‘Yay,’ but the car just doesn’t disappear.”

To quote my podcasting colleague Joseph Matheny, I’m “Laughing so hard my sides are hurting.”.

What will be interesting over the next few days, and following weeks, will be how the 2012ers react to this discovery. Will they attach it to what Michael Barkun refers to as ‘stigmatised knowledge’? Or will they somehow warp the discovery, bending it to fit their highly profitable worldview.

Only time will tell (pun intended).

(source: The Washington Post)

]]> http://sittingnow.co.uk/2012/05/12/whoops-2012-just-got-served/feed/ 0 http://sittingnow.co.uk/2012/05/11/behindcloseddoors-broadcast-034/ http://sittingnow.co.uk/2012/05/11/behindcloseddoors-broadcast-034/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 16:50:31 +0000 Ken Eakins http://sittingnow.co.uk/?p=5251

Tracklist

1.Temporal Fragments – 6.9 Hz
2. Deadbeat Echoes – Surge of youth
3. a.P.A.t.T – My Nuns Door Theme
4. shhh… – Slow Room
5. Corleone (w/ Mike Patton) – Tutto diveNterà Rosso
6. Brad – 20th Century
7. Murkage – Paperweight
8. Raised on Replicas – OMG
9. Stanley Odd – Broken Has Morning
10. Yppah – Film Burn feat. Anomie Belle
11. Beestung Lips – Sick History
12. Hidden Highways – My Rifle, My Pony and Me
13. Phelios and False Mirror -Entropy Reversed

If you want us to play your band/noise/whatever, drop us a line here.

Peace.

***Signal Ends***

Look at the artwork. It makes me want to smash my screen. It looks like one of those pictures they get a group of people with mental health problems together to make to encourage teamwork and discourage sadness. Look at the name. Call The Doctor. What a shitty name. It sounds like a comedy house band from a Carry On film. So, two significant failures before anyone gets near the band, which makes it a double shame because the song isn’t that bad at all. It’s not in anyway punk. Maybe if you took punk and ironed it and sprayed it with Febreze and told it to be home before midnight and then it nodded in agreement, but if this even came close to punk it would break down in tears.

I got sent the whole album to listen to but I don’t want to. The songs alright, it has a nice vocal hook on the chorus and the singer has a nice voice and it’s pretty good. But really…it’s 2012. This sounds like it was dug up 15 years ago. Who’s it for ? If I want pretty boy melodic punk I’ll listen to the Strokes. If I want girly punk I’ll listen to Peaches or something. If you want to listen for yourself its over here :http://callthedoctor1.bandcamp.com/

Kim Monaghan

Stupid and contagious?

On a recent episode of Coincidence Control Network, I reviewed Hit so Hard: The Life and Near Death of Patty Schemel. I viewed the flick at the Nashville Film Festival and this rock doc is just now starting to open in theaters. It tells the tale of the hard living drummer of Courtney Love’s band Hole.

One of the film’s draws is the footage that director P. David Ebersole assembled out of hours of Schemel’s own home movies from her Hole heyday. The scenes capture the chaos at the center of Hole’s life on the road and include a number of never-before-seen intimate appearances by Kurt Cobain.

After my report, Ken Eakins mentioned being interested in the story behind grunge more than he cared for the music itself at this late date. Pell and Matheny quickly agreed. I’m not sure how far these gentlemen are willing to go with this line of criticism, but, surely, they’d stop short of shrugging off Nirvana’s Nevermind? Surely we agree that Nevermind is imminently listenable 20 years later?

Of course, some grunge bands/albums now sound dated – and others sound rather bad – but I wouldn’t say either about any of Nirvana’s Grohl-era music. As my companera pointed out to me “It would be hard to find a teenager listening to Pearl Jam, but there are a lot who are still listening to Nirvana.” I would agree. And although Nirvana will never have a chance to prove that they had a long run of amazing music in them, I would say that kids today discover Cobain and Nirvana the same way they discover Zeppelin, the Stones, The Doors and The Beatles. For me, Nirvana is part of the canon and they deserve their place in it.

This BBC doc was made 10 years after Kurt Cobain’s suicide. In a sometimes scathing manner, it explores whether or not Nirvana’s music was really as great as it seemed to be in the early ’90′s.

What do you think?

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I got notice through about a new Lorn album, I got pretty excited. “Nothing Else” was a huge album with a fistful of tunes that blew away a lot of other shitty namby pamby albums that year because it had both power and skill. It fed the heart and the head AND you could actually dance to it…so a lot to live up to.

I was a little bit worried, on reading the press release, to hear that he has added live drums and vocals and has also gone for a warmer sound. One of the things I loved about “Nothing Else” was its cold beauty. It had an almost gothic elegance to some of the melodies and at no point did I think “This needs drums and vocals” (ie: it needs to sound like virtually every other electronica act out there). The first couple of tunes pass by without incident. They’re not bad but one is just intro and the other is just an idea really, so the first proper tune is “Weigh Me Down” which features live drums and vocals. And it’s really fucking good. Continuing the kind of dubstep but without the clichés thing that he did so well on the first album, he has created a catchy almost pop song that is instantly recognizable as him but could quite easily be gracing some fucking car advert or something if he’s not careful.

“This” is another sketch really and “Diamond” is sort of ruined by a horrible trumpet sound half way through. In fact this is one of my beefs with this album. There are a few inadvisable synth noises that cheapen the tunes they appear in which is probably what the press release meant when it said he was aiming for a “warmer” sound but …if it isn’t broke why fix it ? Midway through the album I started to notice that there are some seriously familiar things going on too. The beats from “Everything Is Violence” sound exactly something off the first album (until he garnishes it with a “live” drum solo) and while Lorn beats are a definite strength they do stick to a formula.

“The Well” is another good tune that is besmirched by a bad synth solo but it becomes a whole different thing when he lets everything drift off and decides to go all ethereal with a fuzzy sonar noise and a big Autechre style bass. This minute and a half and “Weigh Me Down” are easily the best moments on the album. “The Gun” is great sounding but is a bit too reminiscent of Kangding Ray for my liking and that’s where the whole vocal thing seems to be coming from.

For every good thing I find on this album (like the Cello bass on “Ghosst(s)) there is an annoying car alarm sound (like on “Dead Dogs”) that annoys me. Overall I like the album but not as much as “Nothing Else” but only time will tell, I suppose, on whether this is a viable follow up to that album.

Out soon on Brainfeeder http://www.brainfeedersite.com/

Kim Monaghan

Bassline house is a term I have only used in a derogatory sense before now. For instance if I was to have an encounter with someone and they performed unsatisfactorily I would say something like “You’re less use than bassline house” or if I was eating something that didn’t taste nice I would say “This tastes worse than bassline house.” That’s because previously the only bassline house I heard was flung out of shitty cars, converted to look like futuristic training shoes, driven by crudely carved lumps of fat disguised as human beings. But Dj Q is here to shut my stupid mouth for me and I’m glad he has.

On paper I should be behind bassline all the way. I loved drum n bass (thanks Chase and Status / Pendulum you fucking backward pricks), I loved Reso and about three of the dubstep tunes that appeared when it was first christened (not any of the hipster rubbish that sounds like techno crying). I even liked about three speed garage tunes so its about time someone gave me some reason to like bassline house. And this is it.

The titular tune (you simply won’t get this kind of quality alliteration in other reviews) is the weakest of the two because it goes all dark and moody, and while it is effective Reso would just laugh at it then destroy it with a mere raised eyebrow. The other tune however “Swing” is great. Nothing unexpected, nothing too daring just a great big bassline that bounds around like Clifford the big red dog would if he was made of bass.  There are sped up vocal samples and rave horns and some Mr. Oizo noises….basically its just speed garage but the whole thing made me want to get fucking trollied and dance like a fucking trollied idiot. I didn’t though I sat and wrote a review about it while having a cup of tea because I’m sensible.

Out now. Buy it.  http://ninjatune.net/shop/labels/girls-music

Kim Monaghan

If you haven’t heard Tomahawk, you’re half a (wo)man, it’s as simple as that. Featuring Mike (Fantomas/Mr Bungle) Patton on vox, Duane (Jesus Lizard) Dennison on the geetar, John (Helmet/Battles) Stanier, and now Trevor (Fantomas/Mr Bungle/Melvins) Dunn on bass; to be honest, the lineup alone should have you running to your rekkid store to buy their back-catalogue.

It’s seemed like an eternity since the band released their native American songbook inspired ‘Anonymous’ back in 2007, an … eternity, so you can imagine, this video came as a massive relief to me:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As if that’s not enough good news, Patton’s label ‘Ipecac Recordings‘ has just released a retrospective 12″ vinyl boxset of the first three albums, entitled ‘Eponymous to Anonymous’, so you really have no excuse not to catch up do you?

I can only hope that Tomahawk will be returning to these fare shores in support of this release, we’ll let you know as soon as we do.

Ken Eakins

Filmaker, and activist extraordinaire, Michael Moore, has released a song (wait…what??) for the Occupy Wall street movement’s upcoming release, called ‘Occupy This Album’:

my contribution to “Occupy This Album”, a compilation CD (99 songs!) featuring David Crosby & Graham Nash, Steve Earle, Tom Morello, Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco, Third Eye Blind, Immortal Technique and Jackson Browne to be released Tuesday, May 15th. All proceeds from this album will go to fund the Occupy Wall Street movement (all the musicians and songwriters have donated their time and music).

They asked me if I’d like to record a poem or maybe make a music video of some of the songs. I said, “I could just sing a song.”

When the laughter died down, I recorded this.

I hope you enjoy my first try at this new profession (though I have no intention of giving up my day job).

And thank you, Bob Dylan, for your contribution, and for approving this, my debut

I admire your passion Mr Moore, but I’d stick to your film-making, and activism.

If you want to check out a cool Occupy-themed protest song, I point you in the direction of SittingNow/CCN’s Joe Nolan:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him...

This week: The Balsa Wood Titanic, The Phantom of Winnipeg, May Day and Occupy’s Second Wave, Kim’s Favorite Bedtime Story, the Dark Knight of Sterling Heights, MI and The Pornographic Jihad.

Personnel –  Joe Nolan, Nicholas Pell,  Joseph Matheny, and Ken Eakins.

Pell is a dapper mofo.

Links

• The Titanic Strikes Back – Link
• Winnipeg/Phantom  - Link
• Clouds will save us from global warming. – Link
• Terrorists hide their plans in porno vids. Who knew? – Link
• Kim’s favourite bedtime story – Link
• Occupy May Day – Link
• The Bee Sting Rises – Link

Musical Interludes

ARNOLD!

Cya next time ladies and gents.

]]> http://sittingnow.co.uk/2012/05/02/coincidence-control-network-file-022-3/feed/ 0 Alterati,CCN,Coincidence Control Network,joe nolan,Ken Eakins,kim monaghan,May Day,Mein Kampf,nicholas pell,Occupy,Phantom of Winipeg,Porno This week: The Balsa Wood Titanic, The Phantom of Winnipeg, May Day and Occupy's Second Wave, Kim's Favorite Bedtime Story, the Dark Knight of Sterling Heights, MI and The Pornographic Jihad. Personnel –  Joe Nolan, Nicholas Pell,  Joseph Matheny, and... This week: The Balsa Wood Titanic, The Phantom of Winnipeg, May Day and Occupy's Second Wave, Kim's Favorite Bedtime Story, the Dark Knight of Sterling Heights, MI and The Pornographic Jihad. Personnel –  Joe Nolan, Nicholas Pell,  Joseph Matheny, and Ken Eakins. Links The Titanic Strikes Back - Link Winnipeg/Phantom  - Link Clouds will save us from global warming. - Link Terrorists hide their plans in porno vids. Who knew? - Link Kim’s favourite bedtime story - Link Occupy May Day - Link The Bee Sting Rises - Link The Bee Sting's super-motivational introduction: Musical Interludes ARNOLD! Cya next time ladies and gents. SittingNow Media no