FULL EPISODE at https://www.patreon.com/empirefiles

With over 100 dead or missing in the US-backed government crackdown, we interview Pablo Simanca, a leading student organizer from Cali, the epicenter of the protest movement facing the worst repression. Learn what these historic protests are about, the details of the fascistic military crackdown, and the role the US Empire plays in facilitating it. 

PLUS: Abby and Mike share their frightening first-hand experiences reporting from Colombia in 2018.

Colombia On Fire w/ Student Leader From Protest Epicenter

Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has. Text version is published here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/

The Original Underclass -Alec McGillis and ProPublica - The Atlantic Magazine

The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. If Congress is quiescent and the public listless, Donald Trump can set the country down a path toward illiberalism, institutional subversion, and endemic graft. Full Text can be found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/

How to Build an Autocracy - David Frum - The Atlantic March 2017

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

Read text version here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

When Your Child Is A Psychopath - The Atlantic - Barbara Bradley Hagerty

It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

Strivings of the Negro People - The Atlantic - W.E. Burghardt Du Bois

A prominent evangelical writer explains how his movement lost its way and fell hard for Donald Trump.

The Last Temptation - Michael Gerson - The Atlantic

Une Nuit

Lᴏɴᴛᴀɴᴏ Series | Shuta Yasukochi - By The Sea (@shuta-yasukochi)

(Limited Edition Cassette / Digital) - Release date 25/1/2019


Copyright © 2019 ROHS! RECORDS, All Rights Reserved

Buy Cassette / DL

previews. Shuta Yasukochi - By The Sea (Album) | Lᴏɴᴛᴀɴᴏ Series

Dj GHELLO 14-12-2019 live @ JOLLY club(MN) only vinyl

What a strange, odd, mixed-up year it has been.  The yellow spanner of Covid-19 really wrecked a lot of plans. I was all booked to travel to Estonia to record, but it had to be cancelled.   Very noticeable was the sunlight, perhaps it was because there was few jet trails, but when the day was cloudless the sunlight could be absolutely dazzling, it had the strange effect of making it feel like we were living in paradise.     Because of the restrictions I am so glad the woods is only within a moderate cycle distance from my home.  I am very fortunate that I have two fairly good places to record relatively close by.  I even found a wild sand dune area not even five kilometers away,  I hope to record more there in the future.   Disc 1 track 2 is from a much longer recording, it is probably one of the best recordings made during the 2020 season, I had made a few recordings, near the stream, then a bit less close, then a bit further away and another even further away, as I wanted a sound where the stream was a suggestion rather than really dominating the sound picture.  The Blue Tits nested in a cavity block in the wall of my home, there is an vent on the inside of the block, so I only needed to place the microphone up to that to get a fantastic close perspective recording.  
I include two recordings of the Blue tits as they sounded so different when I recorded them a week later.  Sometimes I would get great results by leaving the old Marantz recorder hidden in a bushy place while I go not too far away to record with the new recorder, I love how I had no idea of what it has captured for me, only later when the track loaded on the computer did I get to see if it captured anything worthwhile.  This was the case with Blackbird - alarm calls (Track 3 on disc 2).  I think the peaks came in at about minus six db.  This year was my first time to use Contact microphones and a Hydrophone.    
At the beginning of April my dad Desmond died, he was 89, a great age.  Apart from Covid, we could see he wasn’t going to live much longer, he had been deteriorating noticeably for months up to that.  Why then are the covers for the two discs so strange ?  
A birdsong production should have birds on it !   My dad was big into sun power and indeed wind power even long before it became popular.  Over by my workshop he had placed a few sun power panels on the wall, these were wired into a small room to a panel on the wall with six switches.  I thought it a good way to remember him by including a picture of part of his panel for disc one front cover.  I was going to include the six switches in the picture, but my heart of hearts said no, it didn’t look good, too much scruffy brown, but I include it in the zipped folder (If you are buying it on Bandcamp)so you can see what I am talking about.  I had almost chosen it, as it occurred to me one morning that the six switches are like the levels of lockdown (I hate that term, but I have to use it here) thankfully we didn’t have a level six, maybe that is like in a movie I saw where the authorities came and boarded up a house with the people still inside.  In the end I used the part of the photo with the meter.   
The butterflies . . . Dessie we call him, was always interested in butterflies, that is where I got my interest in nature, as a child he used to bring us for walks up along the canal to see the wild flowers and butterflies.  The picture comes from one drawer of his small collection of Irish butterflies he put together maybe around the late 1940’s or 1950’s ??  Very few of them are even in one piece now, this drawer just looked the part, it was all mixed up and spoiled like the year had been, the summer we never really had, at least not the way we wanted or had planned it.

How to Build an Autocracy - David Frum - The Atlantic March 2017

TheAtlantic