See You In A Week...

These Germans Goin Hella Dumb!

Declassified Documents Available Streaming

You can stream the new EP for free, without downloading it, here.

Steve Reich Finally Wins a Pulitzer for Double Sextet

You've probably seen or heard something about this. Its caused quite a buzz within the music community. Well as it turns out there is not yet a recorded version available for sale. In light of the situation Newsweek has put up the entire piece to stream for free here along with a short interview with the composer. Enjoy!

Tax Dollars at Work (ReBlogged From The Rest is Noise)

Can it really be true that the Department of Homeland Security has been sponsoring research into what it describes as "Brain Music" — "a form of neurotraining ... that uses music created in advance from listeners’ own brain waves to help them deal with common ailments like insomnia, fatigue, and headaches stemming from stressful environments"? When I first read the story, on AC Douglas's blog, I assumed it had to be an April Fool's joke that had got lost in the shuffle, but it seems to be the real deal. You can listen to an MP3 of a brain-wave composition that is supposed to engender a state of "alertness," and which a DHS operative describes as having a "Mozart sound." To me, it sounds like something fit for Dick Cheney's torture chamber. Plus, Alvin Lucier did it better in 1965.


Originally posted here.

A combination of just about everything I enjoy...

I stole this from my fellow instrifer Ryan. I just found out he does a sweet black metal/noise zine called Doomsday Malitia. If your interested in picking up a copy you can send him a message through myspace (click his name)

Fennesz

Took the words right outta my mouth towards the end...

Woah Man...

I want to see him do this with origin next.

The artist has only to remain true to his dream and it will possess his work in such a manner that it will resemble the work of no other man--for no two visions are alike, and those who reach the heights have all toiled up the steep mountain by a different route. To each has been revealed a different panorama.

-Alfred Pinkham Ryder

A Good Man

Many artists we write for here at Tiny Mix Tapes, as well as other sites such as Pitchfork and Pop Matters and Stereogum, have much to thank for file-sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay. They may not give them the immediate revenue that some artists and labels crave, but it gives them something else that’s more important: fans. Fans that will go to shows, fans that will pay for merch, fans that will support them in any way they can. I am personally acquainted with an artist (who shall remain unnamed), whose own success was through the inadvertent leaking of an album to file-sharing sites such as What.cd and TPB. He is now selling out shows across the country. There are no doubt others who have had similar success. This verdict says a lot about what is wrong with the music industry’s mentality towards piracy: All they see now are falling profit margins and the bottom line, lost sales where there never were any to begin with. They don’t see that most people aren’t just sales numbers. Some are slowly figuring this out and are now learning to earn their revenue off ticket stubs and merch sakles amongst other things. Others are still worshipping this dying god, and will do everything in their power to save it, up to the point of manipulating the government to serve them (which we will be reporting on next week). At the end of the day, while they may be morally in the right, their argument for maintaining this pyrrhic campaign is tired, and people have begun to move on.
Originally posted by Ze Pequeno
Tiny Mix Tapes

Declassified Documents Available Free

My new EP is available for download here. Thanks to everyone involved.

If your interested in buying a physical copy you can email me at peterjlamons@yahoo.com
There will be photos of the layout soon.

Enjoy

Sunn O))) Leaks Monoliths & Dimensions, For A Few Hours Anyway

By Andy Beta here

The advance listening sessions for Monoliths & Dimensions, the new Sunn O))) album (and 7th in ten years), couldn't have fallen on a better day: a desolate and bleak Friday, the sky a monolithic gray, an oppressive drizzle drubbing down. We could've been in Seattle, the former hometown for Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson's art project-cum-heavy metal machine music outfit. Nevermind that O'Malley now calls Paris home, while Anderson and clan reside in the climes of L.A.: the rainy northwest remains their locus solus. Most of M&D was tracked there, and the group drew heavily from local players, from the arrangements of composer Eyvind Kang to the music conservatory connections of Earth's Steve Moore, who in turn brought aboard such players as Stuart Dempster (who has been commissioned by John Cage and the Deep Listening projects of Pauline Oliveros) and Julian Priester (reedman with Sun Ra and in Herbie Hancock's seventies sextant).

"It's spanning generations now with this record. Those guys are old-timers, in their 70s," remarks O'Malley, when we caught up with him and Anderson after the session. The new group of musicians, he noted, are far afield of "metal" and its trappings. "They've been making experimental free music since the 60s. It's cool to feel you are part of this longer tradition by having these guys involved." Add to the core ensemble such luminaries as Hungarian growler Attila Csihar and Australian guitarist Oren Ambarchi, and these days Sunn, not only bridges generations, but whole continents.

Good thing the music is massive enough to hold such weight. On nomenclature alone, the band fully plumbs its jazz and group ensemble roots. The title itself mimics a Sun Ra album (Monorails & Satellites) and the opening number, "Aghartha," namechecks one of those amoebic, roiling, abyss-staring Miles Davis live albums from the mid-70s. That telltale bowel-tickling "draaaang" and drone of the band opens the album, only to part midway through to let in Attila's growl of "I search for the riddle of clouds," with eerie foghorn sounds and atonal strings (scored by Kang) making the massive track feel like some ghost ship, at once pitch-black and luminous.

When I ask Anderson what his baby daughter likes in his record collection, he grins: "What she really likes is a lot of jazz. I've been playing a lot of Eric Klaus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, she likes a lot of that. She likes Chick Corea records." And if his Miles Davis tee shirt doesn't drive that point home, then "Big Church" (a play on Live-Evil track "Little Church") does. There are differences, obviously--rather than build upon a chug of tarry guitars, an Austrian female choir sets the track's tone.

As the disc progresses, perceptions change. Where one expects guitar chords, horns intone instead. I tell O'Malley that instead of the slab (which their previous efforts have always evoked, and which their new album's cover art, culled from a Richard Serra painting, seem to reinforce) there are instances when it's revealed to be a scrim instead, startling in its spacing and transparency. He states that the disc's intent was to couple their telltale sound with "the integration of acoustic instruments," citing the work of current French "spectralist" composers who deploy computers to exact acoustic timbres, composing backwards, as it were. The results play with the listeners' perceptions and the illusion of sound.

On the closing "Alice," such notions come to a head. "Steve, Oren, and I are really into Alice Coltrane," says Anderson breaking down the process: "So let's challenge ourselves to make a track that is inspired and influenced by her, let's challenge ourselves to not create a track that is not 25 amplifiers and cabinets to 10. Let's create something that breathes, that has space and silences." And amid the pulsing crush that remains Sunn's métier, odd timbres blossom, with harp and flute arising at the track's climax. Suddenly, heaviness becomes lightness. One startled critic, upon reaching disc's end, quips: "The silence is overwhelming now."

Eat Your Heart Out Paper Rad

Concert on April 7 in Templeton, CA

Ill be playing this show so if your in the area come check it out. Everyone else on the bill is really good so it should be a fun night.

The Human Quena Orchestra (Pennsylvania)

Graves House (California)

Dustin Ransom (Florida)

Peter Lamons (California)