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Brainpicker

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things to listen too

Thoughts on Waves

Background, context, and highlights from the transcript: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/16/sylvia-plath-ted-hughes-bbc-interview-1961/

Rare 1961 BBC interview with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Background, context, and transcript: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/09/sylvia-plath-spoken-word-tulips-bbc/

Sylvia Plath reads "Tulips": A Rare BBC Recording

Background and poem text: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/17/billy-collins-reads-marginalia

POEM TEXT

Billy Collins reads "Marginalia"

Background and transcript: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/23/raymond-chandler-ian-fleming-bbc/

Raymond Chandler in conversation with Ian Fleming: Rare BBC interview

Background, poem text, and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/09/charles-bukowski-reads-friendly-advice-to-a-lot-of-young-men/

Charles Bukowski reads his "Friendly Advice To A Lot Of Young Men"

Excerpt from https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/interactionofcolor

Background, context, and discussion <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/16/interaction-of-color-josef-albers-50th-anniversary/">here</a>.

Josef Albers and the art of seeing

Buy 'Innocents':
Deluxe CD: http://smarturl.it/innocents2cd?IQid=soundcloud.description
iTunes LP: http://smarturl.it/innocentsitunes?IQid=soundcloud.description
Double Gatefold LP + CD: http://smarturl.it/innocentslp?IQid=soundcloud.description

Hear more from 'Innocents':
http://innocents.moby.com

Moby on 'Everything That Rises':

“I just thought this song had a really odd, strangely beautiful quality to it, which is why I used it to open the record. I like the idea of starting absurdly small and then getting quite big and epic about two-thirds of the way through. Hopefully, people won’t turn up their stereos really loud at the beginning to compensate, because it does get quite loud at the end; but when it begins, it’s just so thin and strange. When you first listen to it, there’s a chance you’ll wonder what’s wrong with your stereo! 

It’s hard to talk about instrumentals because… they’re instrumentals: It’s difficult to say, “The song is about this,” because technically it isn’t about anything. And I never know what to name them, either, so I figure, why not pay homage to my favorite writers and borrow their titles? I’ve named a few of my songs after Southern Gothic stories, and this one comes from “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which is a Flannery O’Connor story.”

Innocents

Everything That Rises

Buy on iTunes

Buy 'Innocents':
Deluxe CD: http://smarturl.it/innocents2cd?IQid=soundcloud.description
iTunes LP: http://smarturl.it/innocentsitunes?IQid=soundcloud.description
Double Gatefold LP + CD: http://smarturl.it/innocentslp?IQid=soundcloud.description

Hear more from 'Innocents':
http://innocents.moby.com

Moby on 'The Last Day':

“Spike had become friends with Skyler Grey a few years ago. When I first started working on the record, we were coming up with list of possible collaborators, and her name came up. Skyler just has a remarkable gift for lyrics and melody, and her voice has such a distinctive, beautiful quality. 

For ‘The Last Day,’ we collaborated on the lyrics and the performance: I wanted the vocal to have this specific, delicate vulnerability to it. The last thing I did to this song was add six tracks of Sonic Youth/Glenn Branca-style feedback: I put in earplugs, did open tunings on some guitars, put them through two distortion pedals into the amp, and just recorded track after track of feedback to create this weird subsonic wash. In it, the loud feedback is mixed really quiet, which gives the song a kind of atmospheric space the song wouldn’t have otherwise.”

The Last Day (feat. Skylar Grey)

Abstrackt Keal Agram - Riviére

Uploaded on promotional goals only, for any request please contact us

You Deserve to Listen // 97seconds.com

Abstrackt Keal Agram - Riviére

Release Date: June 24, 2014
Contact: Bill (at) teamclermont (dot) com

Label: Cloud Recordings
-----
From the mixed-up files of W. Cullen Hart comes "Mosaics Within Mosaics" by The Circulatory System, a suitcase assemblage for 26 musicians, available June 24th on limited edition double LP, compact disc, and mp3 via Cloud Recordings or immediate streaming during your next convenient lucid dream cycle. Constructed by drummer Derek Almstead from over a decade's worth of Hart's intricate recordings and experiments, Mosaics Within Mosaics is a new phase Circulatory System album, because they all are. But it's also a highly traditional interconnected/musique concrète-dappled/post-SMiLE/harmony-drenched/imagistic/collaborative home-recorded entheogenic Wall of Sound fantasia from one of the form's inventors and unceasing innovators. 

Following The Circulatory System (2001) and Signal Morning (2009), Mosaics Within Mosaics carries on the quietly audacious work of Athens, Georgia experimental pop figurehead W. Cullen Hart, co-founder of the beloved Olivia Tremor Control. The third album under The Circulatory System flag comes, as always, draped with Hart's layered paintings, a creative voice that has evolved in almost exact parallel to his music. The back of the set likewise comes sealed with the small logo belonging to the Elephant 6 Recording Co., another Hart design, and the album's credits contain many of the musicians that familiar logo has come to imply.    

Between the band's signature double-drum blasts, the mosaicscapes are detailed by a series of intimate small ensembles drawn from the extended community orchestra of Hart's longtime collaborators, including woodwind trios and quartets by Olivia Tremor Control compatriot John Fernandes (Old Smokey, Dreamboat), a wollensack balloon solo by Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel), and contributions from Derek Almstead (Faster Circuits), Heather McIntosh (The Instruments), Peter Erchick (Pipes You See, Pipes You Don't), Eric Harris (Frosted Ambassador), AJ Griffin (Laminated Cat), Jeremy Barnes (Neutral Milk Hotel, Hawk and a Hacksaw), and others. 

Alongside Hart's open-hearted wonderings ("When You're Small"), Martian harmonies ("Neon Light"), comes a playfulness rarely visited since the early Olivia days ("Over Dinner the Cardinal Spoke"). With ever-shifting mixes built to highlight the many approaches to each piece, Mosaics Within Mosaics is perhaps the first album to capture the extra-dimensional scope of what it sounds like to be W. Cullen Hart. The album's 31 songs are prone to suddenly turning into songs in noun-form only, reassembling before one's ears into holographic self-revisions of themselves. All are sewn together by the title sequence of vignettes, a series of wordless Joseph Cornell-like puzzleboxes as beguiling and welcoming as anything in Hart's considerable catalogue.   

"Mosaics Within Mosaics" is a world to dive into with good headphones or from a comfortable spot (both physically and mentally) in the exact center of a well-apportioned stereo field. Arrangements spin into close detail, whirl through transparent layers of overdubs, and reveal cross-sections of drum parts, birds, tropical bells, reamplified feedback, air organ, tape loops, laughs, rocks, dripping water, kazoo, and _____. Listen closely, you might hear yourself.   

As always, The Circulatory System and their self-operated Cloud Recordings welcome all recordings of your dreams and other correspondence at PO Box 821, Athens, GA, 30603. 

Circulatory System - "Stars And Molecules"

DROP033 Z-Cat - Magical Dust

Me'Shell Ndegeocello - Earth

Excerpt from Jeff Goldsmith's Q&A with Ray Bradbury, recorded at Comic Con 2010. Discussion and other highlights here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/04/ray-bradbury-comic-con-interview/

Full audio here: http://www.theqandapodcast.com/2012/06/ray-bradbury-q.html

Ray Bradbury on Predictions and the Secret of Life

Ray Bradbury on Libraries

Ray Bradbury on Loving Life

David Foster Wallace's iconic 2005 Kenyon College graduation address. Context and transcript here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/12/this-is-water-david-foster-wallace/

Part 2 here: http://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-2

David Foster Wallace: "This Is Water" (part 1)

Cultural critic Henry Giroux surveys a political horizon of hate, brutality and populist authoritarianism - as capitalism empties the civic institutions at the base of democratic society, the neoliberal logic of isolation and fear lays the groundwork for rising nationalism, racism and trial runs for fascist rule of what's left of society.

Henry is author of The Terror of the Unforeseen from Los Angeles Review of Books.

https://larbbooks.org/product/the-terror-of-the-unforeseen/

It's the end of the world for many people: On the horizon of apocalyptic nationalism.

"The arrows of adverse criticism cannot scratch, let alone pierce, the shield of what disappointed archers call my 'self-assurance.'"

Background and context:  http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/18/vladimir-nabokov-james-mossman-interview/

Vladimir Nabokov on literature and life (1969)

Narration: Virginia Woolf, from BBC radio broadcast (“Craftmanship”), 29 April 1937

Duration: 9:50

Instrumentation: chamber orchestra (1-1-1-1, horn, harp,
piano, 2-2-2-2-1), tape, and electronics

Written for Royal Academy of Music Performers
Michael Alexander Young, Conductor

A Eulogy to Words is a multi-media composition for chamber orchestra, pre-recorded electronics, and tape, featuring the audio document of Virginia Woolf’s BBC Broadcast from 29 April 1937 (“Craftmanship” from a part of series called “Words Fail Me”). The Society of Authors in London, who hold rights and ownership of this document, had granted permission for me to use this recording in my composition. A Eulogy to Words was premiered at the Royal Academy of Music’s Composers Platform concert on 21 November, 2012. Below is the transcript from the surviving audio file:

…Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use that without remembering “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old.

You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.” To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a whole new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper you’d pick up, would tell the truth, or create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing on the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still – do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were un-‐lectured, un-‐criticized, untaught? Is our modern Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Well, where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-‐teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.

If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-‐a-‐million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look once more at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems lovelier than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride
and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-‐roving, a-‐roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live – the mind – all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think before they use them, and to feel before they use them, but to think and feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-‐conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English – hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans.

They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as good as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity – their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-‐sided, and they convey it by being many-‐sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that they survive.   Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination…

A Eulogy to Words

Background and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/18/tolstoy-reading-rare-1909-recording/

The fascinating story of A Calendar of Wisdom, with selected highlights: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/15/a-calendar-of-wisdom-tolstoy/

Leo Tolstoy reads from "A Calendar of Wisdom," 1909

"first u put it out there and then it comes back . . ."  that is Crist Cornelison speaking.  She and Dino Porritt are The Velvet Babies.  on CD Baby and iTunes.  Support them, they are really cool people!


The Velvet Babies :  "nrg"

Story: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/18/sophie-blackall-debbie-millman-interview/

Excerpt from Design Matters with Debbie Millman: https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/design-matters-with-debbie-133

Subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/design-matters-debbie-millman/id328074695

Sophie Blackall on Design Matters with Debbie Millman: The Whale at Coney Island

Background and transcript: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/21/ernest-hemingway-1954-nobel-speech/

Portrait of Hemingway by Yousuf Karsh

Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1954

Full conversation and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/06/wendy-macnaughton-caroline-paul-design-matters/

Excerpt from https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/carolinepaulandwendymacnaughton

True love, depression, and purpose

On true love

Excerpt from Orwell's fantastic 1946 essay outlining his 11 "golden" rules of tea perfection: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/14/george-orwell-a-nice-cup-of-tea/

TRANSCRIPT / DETAILS

George Orwell on how to make the perfect cup of tea

2013 SVA Commencement Address. 

Transcript, highlights, and discussion: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/13/greil-marcus-sva-commencement-address/

Greil Marcus on the artificial divide between "high" and "low" art

An inspiring commencement address delivered to the graduating class at San Jose State University. Transcript and discussion: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/15/debbie-millman-look-both-ways-fail-safe/

MORE

Debbie Millman: Fail Safe

Annotated highlights and discussion: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/29/joss-whedon-2013-wesleyan-commencement-address/

Be All Your Selves: Joss Whedon's 2013 Wesleyan Commencement Address

Background and transcript: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/31/james-earl-jones-reads-walt-whitman/

James Earl Jones reads Walt Whitman

T.S. Eliot reads from his celebrated classic, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/04/t-s-eliot-reads-t-s-eliot-the-ad-dressing-of-cats-1947/

T.S. Eliot reads "The Ad-dressing of Cats" from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

James Joyce reads from the Aeolus episode of Ulysses, the only passage he found to be “declamatory” and thus suitable for recital.

Background and context: http://exp.lore.com/post/53132569188/as-open-culture-explains-this-rare-1924-recording

James Joyce reads from Ulysses

from 'Bataille de Battle' CD, Singing Knives Records, 2008

Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides - sample from Bataille de Battle, 2008

The late Sopranos star reads the late Maurice Sendak's most controversial book.

Background and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/21/james-gandolfini-reads-maurice-sendak/