Khomus

Jew’s harp, jaw harp, mouth harp, Ozark harp, trump harp, juice harp, maultrommel, vargan, khomus (komuz) – is thought to be one of the oldest musical instruments in the world; a musician apparently playing it can be seen in a Chinese drawing from the 4th century BC. Despite its common English name, and the sometimes used Jew's trump, it has no particular connection with the Jewish people or Judaism. This instrument is native to Asia and used in all tribes of Turkish people in Asia.



Nogon Shumarov, Altai singer and musician from the Katun river in the Altai Republic (Russia) talks about the khomus

Siberian shamans traditionally used khomus during their rituals. This instrument can be called by right the classic shaman’s instrument. They say that the sounds of khomus are heard not only by people and can lead to world of spirits. All this means that the traditions of Yakutian khomus making are very ancient, many thousand years. And these traditions were carefully saved by Yakut people till the present time.
Another reason is that all Yakutian khomuses are made from steel, whereas all other kinds of jew’s harp are made from soft alloys. That is why the sound of Yakutian khomus is the most powerful and clear among all other jew’s harps. From the other hand dealing with the steel demands from the master very high-class workmanship. Every Yakutian khomus is made with great accuracy, all of them are hand-made and hand-tuned. Every Yakutian master has his own secrets. That is why khomuses made by different masters have their own features.



Jew's harp music of Turkic peoples in the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia (1995)

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Gangsta City: lost free cinema of the ghetto

"Cabrini-Green is a Chicago Housing Authority public housing development on Chicago's Near North Side.
At its peak, Cabrini-Green was home to 15,000 people, living in mid- and high-rise apartment buildings.
Over the years, gang violence and neglect created terrible conditions for the residents and the name Cabrini-Green became synonymous with the problems associated with public housing in the United States."
[wiki]



Cabrini-Green is where the Candyman film is set: the ghetto par excellence and America's most dangerous place.
In the mid Nineties the city of Chicago received funds to redevelop the area: most housing projects were bound to demolition and over 5,000 people were forced to move away with almost no grant of relocation.
Right now I read the last Cabrini-Green high-rise has been closed: yet some inhabitants declared they are not ready to leave.
In 2006 a video called Gangsta City was supposed to be released documenting the final years of the Cabrini projects from the inside.

"Gangsta City is a full length feature documentary film filmed over 5 years (2001-06) entirely at the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago, IL. (…) Virtually the entire film has been shot by the residents themselves and virtually the entire soundtrack has been produced and performed by the residents themselves. This is a movie that is by Cabrini about Cabrini and for Cabrini. (…) It has been produced with virtually zero budget and no outside backing, funding or help. This is a true independent film. It has been shot with a Sony VX-2000, no other equipment has been used in the making of this film: one camera, one computer."
[via somanyshrimp.com]

This seven-minute trailer dates back to that time and as far as I know the film never actually came out:



Not to be confused with the episode of the History Channel TV series Gangland: appropriately called Gangster City, it's half an hour of brutally real footage commented by a bombastic voice-over. Stream it here.

Daniel R.Robinson jr.

"Song of the Stallion" is an album of guitar music and poetry. It is a compendium of Hindu, Middle Eastern, Western Classical and purely American styles of stringed instruments as applied to steel stringed guitar."The White Stallion with Golden Wings" is used to symbolize the guitar technique of the "running horse" and then "flight by wings"; and also the movement of man at his best towards the "Glorious Sun of Infinity."



Robbie Basho - Song of the Stallion (Takoma, 1971)

Track info

Trust None

Tin-pot gangsta's start moving Houston's favourite tipple to the streets of Chicago

DJ Sound

Vol 6 Dungeon Mix (1993)

"During the early 90's, there was an explosion of underground Memphis rap acts. D.j. Sound and his crew was a part of this explosion, however they somehow remained unsigned which at the time, they thought it was unfortunate. (Glad they were undiscovered), in the event of this historical explosion of discoveries in the late 90s. Volume 1 and volume 2 were d.j.style mixtapes, but volume 3 on up were all original d.j.sound tracks. D.j. Sound became more than a d.j. but a talented beatmaking producer and an executive at a young age. D.j. Sound needed m.c.s to lace or serenade the naughty notes and make some noise. Since Ridgecrest is located on the northside of Memphis,in an area we call "The Bay" was actually Frayser, he cleverly schemed and dreamed up a team of talented hand picked poets. He named this "dreamteam" the FrayserClick..a click of groups and soloist who were able to meet his requirements. D.j.sound released 11volumes in tha MTown dog and it was all over!"

Later Beef

Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970)

Bangs on Beef

Confessor

'Words of Praise' Fame City, Houston (1988)

Uncontrolled

Snakefinger

"The Man in the Dark Sedan" co-written with The Residents (1980)

"I can feel it in my plums"

Compilation of music and dialogue from series 1 and 2 of Eastbound and Down.

Eastbound & Download

Grimes

Louisville act Rachel's (core members being viola-player Christian Frederickson, former Rodan guitarist Jason Noble and pianist Rachel Grimes) became known in the early Nineties for making some kind of chamber music for post-rockers.
The 1995 "Handwriting" LP released by Quarterstick featured the track "Full On Night": the band would play it live again and again, letting the original composition slightly shift away from that Michael Nyman feel that made Rachel's famous to a more experimental and intense form.
The new version was baptized "Recension mix", then Matmos were asked to provide their personal take on it.
Quarterstick put out the result in the year 2000.


RACHEL'S / MATMOS, FULL ON NIGHT (Quarterstick, 2000)

Further exploration on this side were captured even better in these tour CD-Rs, originally available only at gigs and now digitally reissued.


RACHEL'S, SIGNIFICANT OTHERS (self released cd-r, 2002)


RACHEL'S, TECHNOLOGY IS KILLING MUSIC (self released cd-r, 2005)

Cold but touching, descriptive but expressionist, quite in the vein of their outstanding "Systems/Layers" album, probably their best stuff.

Charlie Chaplin

Speech from 'The Great Dictator' (1940)


At the time the movie that this speech was given at the end of, some of the largest corporations in the U.S. were supplying Hitler with any and everything he wished to wage war with. Henry Ford had supplied trucks for the North African operations and had been supplying Hitler with $50,000 a year for quite awhile... Hitler had anti semitic books on tables outside of his office that he had anyone that visited him take a copy of to read. The Ethyl corporation supplied the octane booster of the same name for the use in aircraft and American Oil was shipping fuel by the tanker loads. Prescott Bush's father in law was a major financier of the Nazi cause and G.M. subsidiary Adam Opel built the engines for the first jet aircrafts that were used by the Luftwaffe against Allied forces and G.M. was repaid for damages by bombing of the subsidiary at the end of the war. Davis oil company was smuggling mercury out of Mexico off of both the Atlantic and Pacific coast to the Japanese and Germans to use in the primers in small arm bullet primers. That is some of what I recall off of the top of my head after a long tiring day but there is much much more incidents of allies supporting the Nazi cause not just at the beginning but throughout the war. The speech given by Charlie Chaplin at the end of "The Great Dictator" was used to justify Hoover to label him as a Communist and his campaign for a second front in European theater of war made him also a target of McCarthy at the wars end with Chaplin being denied reentry into the U.S. after a trip to Europe in 1952.

Request: Rome

s/t (Thrill Jockey, 1996)

Rome was Richard Smith – bass, melodica, Elliot Dicks – drums, drum brain, Adam Gruel – synth. Rome is focused on space and depth in the literal sense. Richard uses several manipulative machines on his bass-delay, pitch shifter, electo magnet to alter not only the tone but the time. Adam recycles Richard’s live bass through a condenser mic on a cheap Yamaha sampler- originally designed as a toy to mess with short phrases- and then feeds the line through various effects, including delay. The results are gorgeously amorphous soundscapes undergirded by the familiar muscle of dublike bass lines. This textural exploration is not without form; however this form is far removed from the verse chorus verse more commonly found in rock. They do however retain the visceral energy of rock with the pulse provided by the drums of Elliot Dicks.

HERE

Ha!

The Mindscape Of Alan Moore

[don't worry playlist icon disappears after a minute or so]

80 minute documentary from 2003 which chronicles the life and work of Alan Moore, author of several acclaimed graphic novels, including From Hell, Watchmen and V for Vendetta. A portrait of the artist as contemporary shaman, someone with the power to transform consciousness by means of manipulating language, symbols and images. The film leads the audience through Moore’s world with the writer himself as guide, beginning with his childhood background, following the evolution of his career as he transformed the comics medium, through to his immersion in a magical worldview where science, spirituality and society are part of the same universe.

Apan

[Treason]

(FYI BTW) "before his death" ...in reference to Christopher Story aka Edward Harle

Blue Collar (1978)

"They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white - ANYTHING to keep us in our place."

The directorial debut of screenwriter Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver). Starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto. Both a critique of union practices and an examination of life in a working-class Rust Belt enclave, the film concerns a trio of Detroit auto workers: Zeke Brown (Pryor), Jerry Bartowski (Keitel), and Smokey James (Kotto). Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, the trio hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters. They commit the caper, but find a few scant bills in the union safe. More importantly, they also come away with a ledger, evidence of the union's illegal loan-lending operation and ties to organized crime syndicates. They attempt to blackmail the union with the information, but the union retaliates strongly and begins to turn the tables on the three friends. Meanwhile, a federal agent attempts to coerce Jerry into informing on the union's corruption which could make him enemies with his co-workers as well as the union bosses. wiki

The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins

Half hour documentary from 1967 about the great Bluesman by Les Blank ...notes

"...A short film about the Texas blues singer Lightnin' (Sam) Hopkins. Built around what I gather was the return of Hopkins to his home town for a visit sometime in 1967, as much a celebration of a mode of life as it is a study of a kind of music. It is also fairly conventional film making (the conventions of documentary poetic realism), but in Hopkins and his friends it has a quality of life rather than a fabricated group image for a subject. Almost everybody in "Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins" seems to be a performer. But Hopkins himself controls the film's moods. Not so much in his exposition of the meaning of the blues as in what he makes of them when he sings and plays his guitar." New York Times, 1967

youtube link

Nigga Creep

DEMONS TAKIN OVER ME (1995)

Classic Memphis devil shit

R.I.P.

Request: Liima Versions

Liima - Version 1-2 | 3-4 10" (Kangaroo, 2001)

Experimental Dub from minimal techno mastermind Ilpo Väisänen. Amazing.

GLUE

Piiri

Piiri - Rajoitusalue EP | Traum V15 (2001)

Experimental side project of Ilpö Väisänen, one half of Finnish minimal techno duo Panasonic

HERE

[anyone who loves music should have a decent set of speakers, listening via laptop only isn't advised really, goes without saying.]

His Omniversity

SPACE IS THE PLACE
featuring Sun Ra and his Arkestra
(1972, released 1974)
Stream VHS 63' version HERE

In 2003, the movie was re-released in its entire 82-minute format on DVD, after a heavily-edited 63-minute version on VHS. The original cuts were requested by Sun Ra, which director John Coney attributed to Sun Ra's prudishness.
The scenes indeed follow a racy "pimps and hos" narrative that is not entirely congruous with the rest of the film, and there was a notable backlash from fans of the original film.
The fact that the director inserted these scenes without the consent of Sun Ra does in fact leave room for scrutiny, considering the absence of Sun Ra in the scenes themselves. [wiki]

El Saturn Research

INTERPLANETARY MELODIES


THE SECOND STOP IS JUPITER


ROCKET SHIP ROCK

Originally released in the 1950s by Alton Abraham's El Saturn Records in Chicago.

Read about El Saturn Research and the Astro-Black Mythology here

The Great Unraveling

s/t (KRS, 1997)

The band's history from '95 to '97. Ex Moss Icon, U.O.A., Born Against

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Chiptune/Rave/...

Bodenstandig 2000 - Maxi German Rave Blast Hits 3 (Rephlex, 1999)

Mysteriös... nicht discript? Read the reviews

HERE