Dimension of spiritual widdler

Summary playlist for the last week from Transistor Telegram channel telegram.me/trnsstr • For feedback: @stasplkv

№29 Transistor Weekly Playlist

Les titres du moment (Nouveautés)

04.14.2017 Favorite New Music This Week (FNMTW)

Execute'em all 1

Buckminster Fuller presented a theoretical basis for technological utopianism and set out to develop a variety of technologies ranging from maps to designs for cars and houses which might lead to the development of such a utopia.

One notable example of a technological and libertarian socialist utopia is Scottish author Iain Banks' Culture.

The Culture Novels:


Consider Phlebas Set during the war between The Culture and the Idirans, this is one of Banks' most widely-praised science fiction novels. Its events also shape the Culture for hundreds of years afterward. The Idirans are a lizard-like, hierarchical people who want to colonize as many worlds as possible in order to convert as many creatures as possible to their religion. The Culture, on the other hand, wants to spread its more democratic-anarchic beliefs to as many worlds as possible. Essentially, the two empires are fighting to control the ideologies of colony worlds. Our protagonist, Horza, has grown disgusted with the Culture way of life and has become a spy for the Idirans. As the war reaches a howling crescendo, we follow Horza from a dying ring world full of cannibalistic cultists, to a ship full of criminals, and at last to final showdown deep within the catacombs of a dead world. This is action-packed world-building at its most alluring: full of cool fights and interesting philosophical debates. Plus, Banks pulls a typical counter-intuitive move by introducing us to The Culture through the eyes of an outsider who has grown disgusted with it.

The Player of Games Though the subject of this novel is gaming rather than war, we never stray far from one of Banks' central preoccupations: the psychology of combat. Gurgeh is a master gamer from the Culture, where the complete intermeshing of human and machine creatures has made computer games into some of the most complicated and beautiful of sports. Unsatisfied with what the Culture has to offer, Gurgeh ventures outside its volume of space to try his hand at a game beloved by the Azad. In the Empire of Azad, games are taken so seriously that if you win, you can become Emperor.

Use of Weapons This novel, a character study of a man coming to terms with a troubled past, is a version of the first novel Banks ever wrote (the early version remains unpublished, and Banks claims you could only understand it in "six dimensions"). It's the story of Zakalwe, recruited from his podunk non-Culture society to serve in the Culture's version of a secret intelligence agency, Special Circumstances (SC). Among other duties, SC Agents are often dispatched to infiltrate non-Culture or "primitive" societies and learn about them. We follow Zakalwe's mission into many such primitive cultures, while also following him back through his own memories of growing up on a planet whose culture echoes those he's spying on. SC Agents are souped up with a lot of cool powers, and this novel offers a generous helping of superpowered spy stuff, while also ravaging your soul with the story of a man trapped in his own memories.

Excession One of the most fascinating elements of the Culture is its ruling group (or the closest thing to that) — the Minds. The Minds are AIs who live for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of years, and plunk themselves into many different bodies: ships, halo worlds called Orbitals, and cyborgs called Avatars. (Well, the Avatars are really just extensions of a Mind, but if you want to get really detailed, just read this book.) Much of Excession is told from the point of view of a Mind in a former SC ship called the Sleeper Service, who journeys to an encounter with a giant, mysterious something that exists partly in subspace known only as the "excession." (I believe "excession" is supposed to be a cool noun form of "excessive.") The joy in reading this book comes from finally getting inside the computer brains of the ships, who communicate via data packets complete with internet-like headers. But there's plenty of excitement, too. Sleeper Service is also a weapon, and the Mind is racing to reach the excession before a warlike group called The Affront (who do some incredibly horrifying things to the creatures they conquer). There's even a weird romantic subplot involving the Sleeper Service's one human passenger, a depressed human female who once tried to kill her straying lover. Banks manages to juggle all these plots beautifully, and with his characteristic dark humor.

Inversions We've sung the praises of this book on io9 already. Read about it here.

Look to Windward This novel combines Banks' interest in Minds from Excession with his interest the trauma of memory from Use of Weapons. In large part, the novel is about a Mind called Lasting Damage who was inside a ship during the Culture-Idiran War. Hundreds of years later, Lasting Damage is still traumatized by memories of the war, and has placed itself in the control center of an Orbital full of civilians. So essentially, the Mind has gone from being a ship of war to an artificial world devoted to peace. But other war-damaged survivors have been unable to find peace. Such is the case with Quilan, whose wife was murdered when they were both soldiers in a civil war masterminded by the Culture. To get revenge, he's journeying to Lasting Damage on an assassin's mission that even he doesn't fully understand — it's a mission conceived by a dead Colonel's mind that's been uploaded into Quilan's, and that will culminate during the anniversary of the Culture-Idiran war. This is one of Banks' most mournful Culture novels, a strange meditation on post-tramatic stress as suffered by both machines and men.

Matter If you're in the UK, you should go out and grab this latest Culture book now. If you're in the US, you'll have to wait until Feb. 27. UPDATE: Our review of Matter is here.

Banks introduces the Culture in this essay. This is a long and rich world-building exercise, originally posted by Banks' friend Ken MacLeod on a newsgroup. I suggest you read the whole thing, but here are few interesting tidbits.

On the galactic setting where the Culture exists:

    The galaxy (our galaxy) in the Culture stories is a place long lived-in, and scattered with a variety of life-forms. In its vast and complicated history it has seen waves of empires, federations, colonisations, die-backs, wars, species-specific dark ages, renaissances, periods of mega-structure building and destruction, and whole ages of benign indifference and malign neglect. At the time of the Culture stories, there are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring civilisations, hundreds of minor ones, tens of thousands of species who might develop space-travel, and an uncountable number who have been there, done that, and have either gone into locatable but insular retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or disappeared from the normal universe altogether to cultivate lives even less comprehensible.

On the ships and their Minds:

    Culture starships - that is all classes of ship above inter-planetary - are sentient; their Minds (sophisticated AIs working largely in hyperspace to take advantage of the higher lightspeed there) bear the same relation to the fabric of the ship as a human brain does to the human body . . . The Culture's largest vessels - apart from certain art-works and a few Eccentrics - are the General Systems Vehicles of the Contact section. (Contact is the part of the Culture concerned with discovering, cataloguing, investigating, evaluating and - if thought prudent - interacting with other civilisations; its rationale and activities are covered elsewhere, in the stories.) The GSVs are fast and very large craft, measured in kilometres and inhabited by millions of people and machines. The idea behind them is that they represent the Culture, fully. All that the Culture knows, each GSV knows; anything that can be done anywhere in the Culture can be done within or by any GSV. In terms of both information and technology, they represent a last resort, and act like holographic fragments of the Culture itself, the whole contained within each part.

On law:

    The Culture doesn't actually have laws; there are, of course, agreed-on forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we would recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited to parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself in the information network; these are the normal forms of manner-enforcement in the Culture.

On politics:

    Politics in the Culture consists of referenda on issues whenever they are raised; generally, anyone may propose a ballot on any issue at any time; all citizens have one vote. Where issues concern some sub-division or part of a total habitat, all those - human and machine - who may reasonably claim to be affected by the outcome of a poll may cast a vote. Opinions are expressed and positions on issues outlined mostly via the information network (freely available, naturally), and it is here that an individual may exercise the most personal influence, given that the decisions reached as a result of those votes are usually implemented and monitored through a Hub or other supervisory machine, with humans acting (usually on a rota basis) more as liaison officers than in any sort of decision-making executive capacity; one of the few rules the Culture adheres to with any exactitude at all is that a person's access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire for it.

On why most people in the Culture live in Orbitals:

    The attraction of Orbitals is their matter efficiency. For one planet the size of Earth (population 6 billion at the moment; mass 6x1024 kg), it would be possible, using the same amount of matter, to build 1,500 full orbitals, each one boasting a surface area twenty times that of Earth and eventually holding a maximum population of perhaps 50 billion people (the Culture would regard Earth at present as over-crowded by a factor of about two, though it would consider the land-to-water ratio about right). Not, of course, that the Culture would do anything as delinquent as actually deconstructing a planet to make Orbitals; simply removing the sort of wandering debris (for example comets and asteroids) which the average solar system comes equipped with and which would threaten such an artificial world's integrity through collision almost always in itself provides sufficient material for the construction of at least one full Orbital (a trade-off whose conservatory elegance is almost blissfully appealing to the average Mind), while interstellar matter in the form of dust clouds, brown dwarfs and the like provides more distant mining sites from which the amount of mass required for several complete Orbitals may be removed with negligible effect.

Also, Banks has given himself a Culture-style name. It's Sun-Earther Iain El-Bonko Banks of North Queensferry.

B∆SS˚BrrrrrrRNZzzzz˚KΩLD

A selection of cover songs recorded by Louise Steel, as featured on her Youtube channel ww.youtube.com/louisesteelmusicsite

Light Up The Dark In You - Gabrielle Aplin (Cover by Louise Steel)

This is taken from the youtube video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0u7lXy7pDg&feature=youtu.be&t=18m22s&ab_channel=iamOTHER , If you are the artist and want this to be removed Send me a message and I will gladly remove it. I mainly put this here for my own use so i can have the song on my phone but people have seem to take interest in it.

Alaska - Maggie Rogers

Rag'n'Bone Man   Human ( Hexenmixer )

Pre-order the album 'Aforger' out October 14th on LP/CD/DL here: http://phonofile.link/aforger

In a digital age where memories are mimicked by pixels and identity is as malleable as static, Douglas Dare’s new album Aforger questions the boundaries between reality and fiction. 

Inspired by recent events and revelations encountered in his life these songs depict Dare at his most vulnerable, whilst simultaneously reflecting our own obsession with reality and technology back at us.  

Aforger was mixed at the iconic Abbey Road Studios and produced by long-time collaborator Fabian Prynn. In the following conversation Douglas strips back the personal journeys and realisations which preceded its recording.

In a conversation with Douglas Dare on July 11th 2016:

The album title plays with the idea of a forger – someone creating imitations or copies, and reimagines them as the creator of something that’s no longer real. Prior to writing the record, I came out to my father and came out of a long relationship, both were hugely challenging for me and questioned my idea of identity and reality. These thoughts leaked out into the record and formed the core of Aforger. I was determined not to write a break-up album or repeat what I’d done before..

I grew up on quite an isolated farm in Dorset, surrounded by fields and not much besides. My mother taught piano from home and we didn’t have a computer, or the internet or mobile phones. In fact, my family still chooses not to use these things. It’s worlds apart from my life now in London where technology seems to dominate everything I do.

After finding out my boyfriend had been leading this double-life, I became obsessed with the question of what is real and George Orwell’s 1984 felt appropriate for me to re-read. Orwell explains this idea of reality control and Doublethink, and it struck a chord with me. The idea that truth can be steered or changed, and we might be able to believe two contradictory things at once. In my case, ignorance was my protection from the truth and ignorance really is bliss, until you’re no longer ignorant.

Binary talks about the idea that technology is allowing us to live on after we’re gone. A relative of mine whose parent passed away kept a picture of them on their phone as a background image. A friend saw this and asked ‘how can you have that there to constantly remind you of your loss?’ They replied, ‘no I have to, it shows me that they’re still here’. This resonated with me and I thought ‘okay, this is just an image to me but to them it’s more than a reminder or a reassurance, it’s a reality’. At the same time, I was finding myself haunted by the digital reminder of my ex-partner and wishing they would disappear. I had to realise that it’s all just pixels on a screen. 

I think New York can be thought of as this fabricated, magical place. I was there with my boyfriend after touring the U.S., but when I came back to London I discovered all these lies and began questioning everything. I even questioned whether New York actually happened or not. New York is a song that’s literally describing that very real feeling of not knowing who or what to believe any more – scary and magical at the same time. 

Lyrically I wanted to be as honest as possible. The album deals with so much dishonesty, so I felt the lyrics had to be the counterbalance. I was inspired by Björk’s album Vulnicura and how everything is almost awkward in its honesty. Like my first album, Aforger started as poetry, but I consciously tried to be less poetic. For instance, Oh Father is an example of complete unambiguity. It’s certainly the most personal song I’ve put out there, and the realisation that people may hear it makes me feel very vulnerable. That’s the most real feeling of all for me right now.

Douglas Dare - New York

Hedia - Your Mind (ft . Kristen Marie) Mgk & Pvt Bootleg

AR027
@tunnelvisions1
www.facebook.com/tunnelvisions1

Akumandra:
www.facebook.com/akumandra

Artwork by Diego Cintora 
Mastered by Alexander Torti in New York

Download

Tunnelvisions - Raga

DOWNLOAD THE ALBUM: http://smarturl.it/SanJuniperoSCORE
Black Mirror – San Junipero (Original Score)
Clint Mansell

01. San Junipero (80s-90s-00s-??s)
02. Faith, Hope, Fear & Falling In Love
03. Tick Tock (Clock Of My Heart)
04. Night Drive
05. Property Of Tucker Systems
06. In Sickness, In Health
07. Life Eternal
08. Waves Crashing On Distant Shores Of Time
09. Endless Summer
10. San Junipero (Saturday Night In the City Of The Dead)

Black Mirror - San Junipero - Soundtrack Preview (Official Audio)

Debut 12" from Gothenburg's very own OK! (300 copies) 

Buy: http://westcoastrecs.tictail.com/product/wcr005-oktoberklubben-12

‘Everyday’ is a total banger in the Balearic frame. The bassline comes on like ‘My Jamaican Guy’ and the world vibes roll. 

@Apiento (TestPressing.org)

Awesome debut 12" on West Coast Recordings (Sweden). Rad organ heavy beach grooves with slo-mo party pumper vibe and a perfect vocoder line after the break. 

@The-Dream-Chimney

Stunning breezy disco track arriving from Gothenburg with some connection to those great Studio releases from a few years ago. Recommended!!

@PhonicaRecords

"This exciting two tracker  – “Everyday” starts out chugging, grooving all “hammondy” vibes – slowly building to ecstasy w/ guitar riff and more – switch sides for more slow funky business – that suddenly gets all pop vocoder madness. Excellent all over the place record that does not miss to join the dots in the right places.

@publicpossession

Oktoberklubben - Un Universo Para Los Dos

Lean Before The Interview (Feat. Assembler Code)

O Vai

It's one of my favourite bhajans. Fell in love with it years back when I heard the nightingale, K.S. Chithra's version.

Hey Govinda Hey Gopal  Bhajan

"On The Level" is from Mac DeMarco's forthcoming album, This Old Dog, out May 5th, 2017, on Captured Tracks. All iTunes pre-orders come with Instrumentals of This Old Dog and instant grat downloads of lead singles, “My Old Man,” “This Old Dog,” and "On the Level."

Pre-Order Digital here: smarturl.it/thisolddog
Pre-Order Physical here: www.omnianmusicgroup.com/products/this-old-dog

This Old Dog

Mac DeMarco // On The Level

A Love That Don't Diminish

Hoops - "On Letting Go"
Off the forthcoming debut 'Routines', out May 5th on Fat Possum

Pre-order: smarturl.it/Hoops.Routines

Upcoming Tour Dates:
4/26 - Bloomington, IN @ Landlocked Music
4/27 - Indianapolis, IN @ LUNA Music
5/02 - Glasgow, UK @ The Hug and Pint +
5/03 - Leeds, UK @ Headrow House +
5/04 - Manchester, UK @ Soup Kitchen +
5/07 - Birmingham, UK Hare & Hounds +
5/08 - Bristol, UK @ The Louisiana +
5/09 - Brighton, UK @ Green Door Store +
5/10 - London, UK @ The Lexington +
5/14 - Atlanta, GA @ Shaky Knees Music Festival
5/15 - New Orleans, LA @ Gasa Gasa *
5/17 - Dallas, TX @ Three Links *
5/18 - Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall*
5/19 - Austin, TX @ The Sidewinder *
5/21 - Santa Fe, NM @ Meow Wolf*
5/22 - Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar *
5/23 - San Diego, CA @ Casbah *
5/24 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo *
5/25 - San Francisco, CA @ Brick & Mortar Music Hall *
5/27 - Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios *
5/28 - George, WA @ Sasquatch Music Festival
6/01 - Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St. Entry *
6/02 - Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club *
6/06 - Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups
6/07 - Washington, DC @ DC9 ^
6/08 - Brooklyn, NY @ Baby’s All Right ^
6/09 - Allston, MA @ Great Scott ^
6/10 - Philadelphia, PA @ Boot & Saddle ^
6/12 - Montreal, QC @ Brasserie Beaubien ^
6/13 - Ottawa, ON @ Pressed ^
6/14 - Toronto, ON @ The Baby G ^
6/15 - Detroit, MI @ El Club ^
6/16 - Cincinnati, OH @ Urban Artifact Brewery
6/17 - Indianapolis, IN @ The Hi-Fi

+ w/ CYMBALS
* w/ PARTS
^ w/ Joy Again

Tickets: hoopsband.blogspot.com/p/tour-dates.html

Hoops

Hoops - On Letting Go

JOSEPH OF MERCURY

Find You Inside

Can't stop tuning to this song-Fusion at its best
Would love to try singing this song

Thaye Yashoda - Morning Raga

Set in raga Dés, India's National Song, Vande Mataram in its original tune has had many different versions but then nothing like the original right?

So here I have played my take on the original version of this beautiful song.

Buy this from: 
http://indianmusicfan.bandcamp.com/track/vande-mataram

Subscribe to YT: https://youtube.com/AboutIndianMusic
Connect on Facebook: http://facebook.com/FluteVijayKannan

Vande Mataram - Happy Indian Independence day - Bansuri - Indian Flute

Karnatic Fusion
Voice: Sudha Ragunathan, Ranjani Ramakrishnan

Thaye Yasoda-Morning raga

The Featureless Ghost remix of Obsession off the forthcoming Tannhäuser Gate EP. The EP will be released late March on Function Operate.

http://soundcloud.com/featurelessghost
http://www.facebook.com/FeaturelessGhost
http://www.facebook.com/functionoperate
http://www.functionoperate.com
http://functionoperate.bandcamp.com
http://soundcloud.com/functionoperate

Obsession (Featureless Ghost remix)

ENVIRONMENTAL AVIATION.

MUTAGENIC PSYCHOACOUSTIC MEMETICS.

CAVEMAN FUNK.

SPACEMAN SKANK.

DINOSAUR DEATH RATTLE.
BIG BASS GHOST DANCE.

PUBLIC RITUAL.


PRACTICE DEATH

BECOME THEE MOST HIGH

REMEMBER THE ESCHATON

DISMEMBER THE HIVE

LEAVE THE TYPE G STAR GRAVITY WELL

GROW  STARSEEDS

B∆SS˚BrrrrrrRNZzzzz˚KΩLD

ENIX † INRI