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basso magazin
basso magazin is edited by Yusuf Etiman. Yusuf was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1969 and lives and works......read more

snax
From forming an imaginary band called J.P & The Writers at the tender age of 5 with his brother, multi-instrumentalist,......read more

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[random inspiration]

the white noise - "an electric storm"
One of the only advantages of obscurity granted by the world to any experimental artist, for a lover of music or literature or any art form, is to know that this very same world still hides amazing records and books and photographs, and that one day, all of a sudden, one comes across such hidden treasures, and may reshuffle the shelves in one's mind and rearrange historical lineage. For example, in poetry, Mina Loy was such a discovery to me, and I had not imagined the modernist lyric in English had produced such an exuberant body of work. And it was not long ago that I found information on a band called The White Noise, whose debut album had been released in 1969 by Island Records. The album is called "An Electric Storm", and last night I finally got a hold of the album itself in an old record store. Formed in London, The White Noise were David Vorhaus, Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. All three had unlikely backgrounds, Vorhaus studied classical music and electronics and Derbyshire had studied mathmatics and music, and had gone on to work for the UN and later become a trainee studio manager for the BBC, after trying to get a position at Decca and hearing from them that "they did not employ women in their recording studios." At the BBC, she began to work in the radiophonic workshop where she met Brian Hodgson, and they worked together as a group called Unit Delta Plus, with the objective of creating and promoting the use of electronic music in film, TV and advertising. With no computers at hand (this is 1966), the group (also joined by Peter Zinovieff), worked with tape, homemade instruments, and the manipulation, splicing, looping of sound. David Vorhaus attended a lecture given by Unit Delta Plus, and approached Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson with the desire to work with them. This was the beginning of The White Noise. Working with collage, the first prototypes of synthesizers, and experimentations with the vocals (singers invited were John Whitman, Annie Bird and Val Shaw), The White Noise produced, realised and released "An Electric Storm", a groundbreaking record which would remain a secret tip among the lucky ones to find it (the album made no money for Island and it is hard to get a hold of the rare record), coming to hit waves of influence up to our days, in groups such as Broadcast or Stereolab. Experimental and disturbing work which manages to remain pop and beautiful, this dreamlike artifact of electronic music has some of the loveliest tracks in the history of electronic music, with beautiful short pop-pearls of 3 minutes, like "Love Without Sound" or "My Game of Loving" (with its sound outtakes from an electronic and flesh orgy) or "Here Come The Fleas", and yet, on its B side, carry such dark poems as "The Visitation", with its 11 minutes of emotional landscaping, substituting the gasping for breath and sexual moaning on the A side for crying; and the 7 minutes of "Black Mass: Electric Storm in Hell (The White Noise)", a rather scary song. The White Noise would break up after this first record, and the work would be carried on by David Vorhaus alone, releasing albums called simply "White Noise" and numbered I, II, III, IV and V. Derbyshire and Hodgson would return to their work in electronics and music. Listening to an album like "An Electric Storm" can show us how far some artists are able to take their experimentations without breaking the communication with the viewer/reader/listener. With the Moog becoming more widely available, the work with synthesizers became more common and the radiophonic workshop experiments of The White Noise turned obsolete very fast, but "An Electric Storm" remains as a groundbreaking dark pop artifact. Get a hold of it. And lose some sleep. - Ricardo Domeneck

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NEWS

07-25-07 nyc will rate school principals on atrs programms Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that the city's Department of Education will require all schools to maintain arts programs, and that principals will be rated in their annual reviews on how well they run those programs. The announcement came just months after the department infuriated arts groups by eliminating a multimillion-dollar program to finance arts education. The rest of this article can be found on The New York Times.
07-25-07 bedtime stories too complicated for parents One in 10 parents struggle to understand the bedtime stories they read to their children, a survey by adult learning organisation Learndirect has found. Almost a quarter (23%) skip passages they cannot read or invent words to get to the end of a sentence, the poll found. A third of parents also admit to difficulties in helping their children with their maths homework. Find the whole article on The Guardian.
07-25-07 an urgent need for editors The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It's also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Read the entire story on Salon.
07-24-07 painting damaged by kissing A woman kissed a white painting by Cy Twombly in a French museum and damaged it. The immaculate white canvas so attracted Sam Rindy she smudged it with her lipstick, saying later she had wanted to make it even more beautiful. The 3x2m (9x6-foot) painting by US artist Cy Twombly is valued at more than $2m. Read the entire article on BBC.
07-24-07 is radio a danger for record sales? A recent study compared record sales and music radio listening in some 100 American cities from 1998 to 2003. It found that, very roughly, an hour's worth of radio listening per person per day, over the course of a year, corresponded with a 0.75 drop in the number of albums purchased per capita in a given city. More on The New York Times.
07-24-07 looking for a post celluloid world Doomsayers have been bellowing through the Hollywood hills for years. Clearly, there's something about this industry, which has held the planet in its twinkly thrall for almost a century, and which has transformed so much, that summons wishful thinking of the deathly variety. Artists would like to see it suffer and die for its philistinism. Small businesses want it dead for its muscular monopolism. Non-American film makers would kill it for killing non-American film industries. Minorities loathe its stereotypes. But with the advent of digital distribution, the film industry will fragment, diversify and take root again in national cultures. Logic is not on Hollywood's side. Find the whole story on Literary Review of Canada.
07-23-07 berlin festival 2007 The two-day Berlin Festival kicks off right in the centre of the city, this Friday, 27 July, with an all-star musical cast, ranging from legendary German indie-rockers Tocotronic to evangelical cut-up collective The Go! Team, camp sophists Datarock and a whole array of artists across the electro-indie-rock spectrum. This year represents the third instalment of the indie institution, and the first time, after two difficult attempts to lure Berlin�s idle aesthetes out to the country side, that the Berlin Festival takes place in the city itself, at the renovated Poststadion, just a stone�s throw from Berlin�s main train station (Hauptbahnhof). The operation seems to have �grown up� a bit in other ways too, with an expanded roster of sponsors including corporate heavy-hitters myspace and lifestyle hotel-chain Arcotel. Punters might also note a second stage sponsored by Vice magazine this year, offering a slightly more experimental, harder-edged complement to the main stage, with artists such as Shitdisco, Uffie, and the Presets. The Festival promises two days of aural delights and a chance to ogle cute hipster boys and girls, with festivities kicking off at 3pm on Friday and Saturday afternoons and continuing until around 10pm both nights, with a nightly after-party at the Tape Club. www.berlinfestival.de
07-23-07 you are good but too young for top 40 Some of the biggest-selling music stars are being locked out of Top 40 radio. They're current or former stars of the Disney Channel, and are routinely mining gold, platinum and multi-platinum CD sales while being virtually locked out at Top 40. Why? That's because mainstream radio, which targets a coveted 18-to-34 year-old demo, doesn't want to risk alienating its older listeners. Find out more about this on Backstage.
07-23-07 is the web run by amateurs? The Cult of the Amateur is a broadside attack on Web 2.0, a term we may hastily define here as that growing sector of the internet which serves mainly as a platform for user-generated content, including sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Typepad, Blogger and YouTube. The main thrust of his argument is that all this home-made content - blogs, podcasts, amateur videos and music - is an inadequate replacement for mainstream media. It may be a harmless, even occasionally enriching addition, but we can't have both, because the former is swiftly killing off the latter. Read the entire story on The Guardian.
07-20-07 italy wont give back llibyan art Libya wants a second-century statue of Venus currently on display in the Palazzo Massimo museum in Rome returned to it. But the Italian conservation group Italia Nostra is resisting...to read more click on The Art Newspaper.
07-20-07 pinewood age 70 Britain's historic Pinewood Movie Studios turned 70 this summer. This wasn't to be one of those tiny London-based studios where space was so tight that a cameraman could hardly swing the proverbial cat. The idea was to apply modern business ideas to the often shambolic practice of British film-making. Read more about this on The Independent.
07-20-07 can algorhythms take decisions? Predictive algorhythms are getting more and more accurate. No-one can argue with statistically based procedures for making complex decisions under conditions of uncertainty, so long as successes and failures are aggregated across cases and the cost of errors is low. But if one is interested in individual cases or if the cost of decision errors is high, then these techniques are problematic. Find the whole story on The Guardian.
07-19-07 dutch tv hoax boosts number of kidney donors Last month a Dutch TV show was said to be offering a kidney as a prize. "The Big Donor Show was revealed to be a hoax as the fake donor was apparently about to reveal her choice of patient. But Dutch media say the number of people registering as organ donors has jumped since the hoax. The usual monthly figure is just 3-4,000." In the past month that has jumped to 12,000. Find out the rest about this on BBC.
07-19-07 a tower for $2 billion JPMorgan will build a $2 billion tower at the World Trade Center site. But it is utterly mystifying that a sophisticated bank with $1.35 trillion in assets would house its valuable traders in the kind of spec box that companies dump call centers into. WTC 5 could have expressed the entrepreneurial energy of the bank by making an evocative statement of those trading floors or by highlighting the gutsy engineering that will be needed to hang them in the air. The bank could have thrillingly engaged the cityscape that has nurtured its success. Read more on Bloomberg.
07-19-07 youtube predominance might not serve viewers well Does YouTube, that much-ballyhooed showcase for amateur video, actually stifle creativity? "Web video isn't an oligarchy, it's a dictatorship. You're either on YouTube or nobody's watching. This dominance has a downside: The popular misapprehension that YouTube and Web video are synonymous has limited our sense of what online video can be. Read the whole story on Slate.
07-18-07 new mascot on hamas kids' tv Hamas television, which was criticized for a Mickey Mouse-like character named Farfur who spouted anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish nostrums at children, has replaced the mouse with a bee named Nahoul, who says he is Farfur's cousin. Farfur was beaten to death by an Israeli who wanted his land on the previous episode of the children's show 'Tomorrow's Pioneers. Get more information about Farfur and Nahoul on The New York Times.
07-18-07 us sanctions prevent financial aid for hemingway's cuba house Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, 10 miles east of Havana, is the place Ernest Hemingway called home from 1939 to 1960, and it is there that the author's abundant tastes, in literature and in life, are on display."But the house is in decay, and getting help from American rescuers is being hampered by US government sanctions against Cuba. Read more about Lookout Farm on The Guardian.
07-18-07 saving iraq's professors In an urgent effort to save a critical mass of scholars unlike any initiative undertaken since World War II, the Institute of International Education's Scholar Rescue Fund is finalizing plans to rescue hundreds of Iraqi professors beginning in the coming months. 'We consider it to be the first large-scale effort of its kind since the 1930s, when IIE's Emergency Rescue Committee rescued over 300 senior European scholars and brought them to safety in the United States'. More about this on InsideHigherEd.
07-17-07 ms shin, korean art star is a fraud Until this week, Shin Jeong-ah, 35, was at the top of her profession. Claiming to have a doctorate from Yale and a master's degree from Kansas University, she was the youngest professor at Seoul's prestigious Dongguk University and the head curator of the Sungkok Art Museum, home to some of Korea's most prestigious exhibitions and the recipient of millions of pounds in corporate sponsorship from the country's biggest conglomerates. Find the whole story on The Independent.
07-17-07 vinyl wave In a rare case of cheerful news for the record labels, the latest phenomenon in a notoriously fickle industry is one nobody dared predict: a vinyl revival. Latest figures show a big jump in vinyl sales in the first half of this year, confirming the anecdotal evidence from specialist shops throughout the UK. Read more about the comeback of vinyl on The Guardian .
07-17-07 is the west loosing its culture? Our prolonged crises over multi-culturalism, inspired by the rise of Islamism - threatens us with the loss of our culture. The western world could become a civilisation devoid of culture: exactly what, in 1922, Oswald Spengler forecast in his book The Decline of the West. For Spengler, we were about to find ourselves in the depraved, cultureless condition of the late Roman empire. Read the entire article on The Times.
07-16-07 italy finally getting modern? For all its rich artistic tradition, Italy is lacking a single major museum devoted to contemporary art. The absence of a high-profile contemporary art museum has been keenly felt, not least of all by Italian artists. [But] now, the wait might be over. In the spring, the city of Venice entered into a renewable 30-year agreement with Francois Pinault, 70, one of Europe's most active art collectors. Pinault is to develop a modern art museum at Dogana di Mare, an extraordinary Renaissance-era customs warehouse. Read the whole story on Los Angeles Times.
07-16-07 small net radios get reprieve on royalty fees Under the new proposal, which must be implemented by the CRB, SoundExchange would cap the $500 monthly per-channel minimum fee at $50,000 per year for webcasters. In exchange, webcasters would be required to provide more detailed data on the music that they play and make an effort to stop unauthorized copying from streamrippers -- software that can turn ephemeral net radio streams into permanent recordings. More about the future of net radios on Wired.
07-16-07 are the richest good for the culture? As the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else continues to grow, some have speculated that we could be entering a new Gilded Age, and the billionaires making it happen think it could be a very good thing. Of course, they would think that. "The new titans often see themselves as pillars of a similarly prosperous and expansive age, one in which their successes and their philanthropy have made government less important than it once was. Read more about this on The New York Times.
07-15-07 ballet tribute for gianni versace A specially-written ballet is due to be performed in Milan to mark the 10th anniversary of fashion designer Gianni Versace's death. Thanks Gianni, With Love has been put together by French choreographer Maurice Bejart, for whom Versace designed many stage costumes. About 1,500 guests, including Versace's favourite models, are due to attend the show at the La Scala opera house. The designer was murdered outside his Miami mansion on 15 July, 1997. More from BBC News.
07-13-07 tintin the racist? A British commission on racial equality is calling for a Tintin comic book to be banned from UK bookstores over complaints that it is transparently racist. The graphic novel, entitled "Tintin in the Congo," includes stereotypical caricatures of Africans, who frequently speak in embarrassingly imbecilic style. Tintin's author, Herge, "continued to revise his books after their publication, and admitted embarrassment over some of the views they expressed." Find out more about this on BBC.
07-13-07 copyright board declines to delay webcast royalty hike The Copyright Royalty Board, an obscure group of federal judges, set the new rates in March, eliminating a provision that allowed small webcasters to pay 10% to 12% of their revenues instead of a set per-song fee for every listener. The current rate of .0762 of a cent each time a song is played will more than double by 2010, and many Internet radio stations will face royalty payments greater than their revenues. Many individuals make little or no money through their online stations, so the decision made webcasting prohibitively expensive. Read more about the future of internet radio on Los Angeles Times.
07-13-07 traditional recording companies blast prince Big recording companies are furious at Prince for giving his new music away free in copies of an English newspaper. The giveaway has been roundly criticized as a major blow for an industry already facing rapidly declining CD sales. It has led Sony BMG U.K., Prince's local label, to pull the plug on its own sales release of the CD in Britain. Read the entire article on Yahoo!.
07-12-07 bringing the real africa to light A landmark exhibit of the work of artist Simon Njami is aiming to change global perceptions of African life and culture, a mission the artist has embraced throughout his career. Born in Europe, Njami sees the world's affection for traditional African art as an incomplete interest in the subject. Art and artists can tell their own stories - and in those stories is truth about what it is to be African. Part of the truth, at least. More about african art on The Christian Science Monitor.
07-12-07 a bright future for radio? Why are these canny investors putting their millions into radio? Because they believe in the digital future, where, within the next five years, it is confidently predicted every television will be digital, every home have broadband. Radio will be something you download, time-shift, available through many devices other than that crackly old set that sits in your kitchen with flour on its face. They can also see that UK commercial radio is a business in decline. Some experts believe this is because there are too many stations, too much regulation, unfair competition from a BBC with its secure funding and freedom to change. Find out more about the future of radio on The Telegraph.
07-12-07 terrorist reprisal for rushdie honor? Al Qaida threatens reprisals against the UK for awarding a knighthood to Salman Rushdie. Ayman al-Zawahiri, deliverer of most recent al-Qaida messages, accused Britain of defying the Muslim world by honouring the author of The Satanic Verses, who was deemed to have insulted Islam. Read more about this on The Guardian.
07-11-07 the world's top 10 new building projects Countries from the US to Kazakhstan are in a building frenzy. They are all eclipsed, however, by the greatest building site of all: China, whose appetite is so insatiable that it is gobbling up half the world's concrete and still has room for a third of its steel for pudding. This is a boom time for architecture. Dubai, Beijing, Shanghai and Moscow are staking their claim to a place on the architectural stage, with no absurdity too extreme. More information about the 10 greatest projects on The Times.
07-11-07 the face of modern movie-going Los Angeles has two movie complexes that illustrate the modern movie theatre business: the sleek new 12-screen Landmark complex alongside the Westside Pavilion and the handsome old Westwood Crest Theater, a 1940-era movie house on Westwood Boulevard. As different as they may appear on the surface, they are fascinating examples of the brave new world of high-quality movie exhibition, a world full of movies aimed at -- gasp -- people who aren't dying to see Transformers. Find out more about modern movie theaters on Los Angeles Times.
07-11-07 what if you could record every second of your life? We're only a few years away from the cost of data storage dropping so far that we can record "everything" that happens to us: our location at any given time, what we are hearing, what we are seeing, and what we are saying or doing. With your phone converting all the speech it hears to text (and storing that, too, and indexing it by time and location it becomes possible to search it all - like having Google for your memory. You don't ever need to forget a conversation again, even if all you can recall about it is that it was with a stranger you met in a given pub about two months ago and someone mentioned the word 'fishhooks'. Find read more about this on BBC.
07-10-07 can crowds create fiction, architecture, movies? Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression? Find out omre about this on The Guardian.
07-10-07 architects take to second life Second Life is loosely and shambolically generating a new type of architecture. Who knows what that might mean for SL's current jump-cut geography? In the future, perhaps SL's overlords will start to clean up its shantytown chaos, repossessing homes and driving giant boulevards through it, as Haussmann did with Paris. Perhaps it will end up looking nothing like our own world; perhaps they'll converge in ways we can't yet imagine. It is a world in its infancy, unavoidably complex, useful, unpredictable and legitimate, with countless advantages over the real one. Read more about architecture in second life on The Guardian.
07-10-07 netherlands puts national art for sale on ebay Thousands of artworks from the Dutch national collection are being sold on eBay. These are works that have not been on display in 100 years or works that do not fit in with the kind of exhibitions in museums. Most of the works were made through a government program in the 1980s, which paid artists for a certain number of works to be produced. Find out more about this big online art sale on CBC.
07-09-07 the world's last handwritten newspaper Here in the shadow of the Wallajah Mosque, a team of six puts out this hand-penned paper. Four of them are katibs -- writers dedicated to the ancient art of Urdu calligraphy. It takes three hours using a pen, ink and ruler to transform a sheet of paper into news and art. Read more about this interesting publication on Wired.
07-09-07 taking a match to the mad artist At the start of the 20th century, there were a mere dozen or so classifications of mental disorder. By the end of the century, the official Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders had defined around 380. One objection to the idea of the insane artist is its glamorisation of what, for most psychiatric patients, is simply excruciating illness. Another is that no single entity called 'madness' exists at all. Read all about this on The Guardian.
07-09-07 sex by the word count (not statistically significant) The idea that women use nearly three times as many words a day as men has taken on the status of an urban legend. An urban legend that isn't true, say researchers. The researchers placed microphones on 396 college students for periods ranging from two to 10 days, sampled their conversations and calculated how many words they used in the course of a day. The score: Women, 16,215. Men, 15,669. The difference: 546 words: Not statistically significant. Read more about this study on Yahoo!.
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