Showing posts with label compilation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label compilation. Show all posts

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Instead of revolution: démontage

 

















Mixed Media drawing of Nouriel Roubini by A/Z (Instagram post); 
John Heartfield's Millions Stand Behind Me! (1932), image from Matthew Gale's Dada & Surrealism;
Jean-Michel Basquiat's Five Thousand Dollars (1982), image from Leonhard Emmerling's Basquiat;

***The Super-Rich and Us (Jacques Peretti, BBC);
Joseph Stiglitz CUHK 2016 lecture (Youtube)
Ralph Nader on “The Rebellious CEO” (Democracy Now, 2024); 
Péril Climatique: l'Impunité pour les riches doit cesser (Paloma Moritz/Blast, Sept 2022); 
Piketty: Quality of Life for Billions of People is at Stake (Institute for New Economic Thinking, Ago 2022);
The New Feudalism (Anand Giridharadas, Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2019); 
Conversation entre Vandana Shiva et Gaël Giraud (Centre Sèvres/Facultés Jésuites, 2019);
Rutger Bregman at Davos (2019);
Alex Winter's "The Panama Papers";
Owen Jones interview Margaret Hodge: tax evasion;
Justin Pemberton Discusses Capital in the 21st Century; 
Depeche Mode's Everything Counts; 
[There was another video ici: Jeunes médecins exploités/Étudiants précarisés (Laurent Mathieu/Questions à la une, TV5), it exposed cases of European undergraduate students having to prostitute themselves in order to pay their monthly bills; it is not available anymore by TV5]
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"...il y a des règles qui sont les règles de démontage, où l'on ne sait plus très bien si la soumission ne cache pas la plus grande révolte, et si le combat n'implique pas la pire adhésion..." (Deleuze & Guattari, Pour une littérature mineure).
→ That is, la révolution doit être « permanente » (Deleuze, Logique du sens 64; cf. Derrida, Spectres de Marx 62), elle n’est pas un simple renversement ou remplacement total. Le vrai révolutionnaire n'est pas le radical, le impatient.

***The Ultra-Rich (99,9999%): "The one percent... covered a lot of people. Most were professionals and managers who lacked much power on their own. Bloomberg's new 'billionaires team' would focus only on the top 0.0001 percent, a thin slice ofo humanity whose combined wealth, at four and a half trillion dollars, could pay off the entire public debt of Germany and the UK combined" (Alex Cuadros, Brazillionaires).
- Terrorism and anti-terrorism (state of exception) strengthen the system (Fassbinder, Die Dritte Generation);
- Black bloc tactics risk pretty much to do the same: "This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don’t exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside"—Vija Kinski about protesters in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis;
What about economic policies such as the ones that have been adopted by the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil? People still take for granted that—under all circumstances—it is better to give one's life for a smartphone than to die in poverty. But this is rather a false dilemma, and the right wing is not to be trusted either (Glenn Greenwald and the Intercept have shown how swinish the right wing in Brazil can be).

"... such a competition was only... a concession to that still prevailing national principle according to which mankind is a family of nations vying for excellence, or to the liberal belief that competition will automatically set up its own stabilizing predetermined limits before one competitor has liquidated all the others. This happy balance, however, had hardly been the inevitable outcome of mysterious economic laws, but had relied heavily on political, and even more on police institutions that prevented competitors from using revolvers... competition is no more a principle of politics than expansion, and needs political power just as badly for control and restraint" (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism).
"The Banker should discover the real meaning of his existence, the real motive which led him to choose that profession. He should understand banking as a necessary factor in the economic existence of mankind, instead of as merely a business whose objects are independent of the general welfare. He should learn to distinguish false values from real, and to act not on accidental fluctuations but on considerations of essential importance" (Aleister Crowley, Magic in Theory and Practice).
"The rules of international markets should be radically reformed by establishing a minimal but efficient active regulation of these markets. Such regulation of international markets should be managed in a non-bureaucratic and accountable way and should ensure the active and democratic participation of all countries in the decision-making process and its application. In any case, the process of deregulation should comply with the environmental and social constraints that buttress the sustainability of world development" (Simone Borghesi & Alessandro Vercelli, "Susteinable Globalization").
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Capitalism, Finance & Covid-19: 
"Now, as countries are reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns, they must avoid making the same mistake. In the months after the virus first surfaced, governments stepped in to address the concomitant economic and health crises, rolling out stimulus packages to protect jobs, issuing rules to slow the spread of the disease, and investing in the research and development of treatments and vaccines. These rescue efforts are necessary. But it is not enough for governments to simply intervene as the spender of last resort when markets fail or crises occur. They should actively shape markets so that they deliver the kind of long-term outcomes that benefit everyone."
"Advanced economies had been suffering from major structural flaws well before COVID-19 hit. For one thing, finance is financing itself, thus eroding the foundation of long-term growth. Most of the financial sector’s profits are reinvested back into finance—banks, insurance companies, and real estate—rather than put toward productive uses such as infrastructure or innovation. Only ten percent of all British bank lending, for example, supports nonfinancial firms, with the rest going to real estate and financial assets. In advanced economies, real estate lending constituted about  35 percent of all bank lending in 1970; by 2007, it had risen to about 60 percent. The current structure of finance thus fuels a debt-driven system and speculative bubbles, which, when they burst, bring banks and others begging for government bailouts," "Capitalism After the Pandemic: Getting the Recovery Right" (Mariana Mazzucato/Foreign Affairs);

Patriotic Millionaires (Abigail Disney, Erica Payne, Moby, Ben Cohen, Chuck Collins/heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune, Roberta Kaplan/civil-rights lawyer, Jeffrey Gural/real-estate investor, George Zimmer/founder of Men’s Wearhouse...):
"... the group’s mission was initially a simple idea endorsed by a half-dozen rich people: “Please raise our taxes.” The members now have the broader goal of pressuring their wealthy peers to confront what they believe are the destructive effects of trickle-down economics—the idea, which has driven U.S. policy decisions for several decades and has largely been debunked, that reducing taxes on businesses and the wealthy will benefit low- and middle-income workers."
"When I asked Payne how hard it was to persuade rich people to join, she said, “I think the last time I checked there were about three hundred and seventy-five thousand taxpayers in the country who make a million dollars a year in income”—there are now almost half a million—“and we have a couple hundred members.” She laughed. “If you ever needed a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many of America’s élite are concerned about the basic well-being of their fellow-citizens, that should give you a rough estimate.” Members include Chuck Collins, the heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune; Roberta Kaplan, the civil-rights lawyer; Jeffrey Gural, the real-estate investor; and George Zimmer, the founder of Men’s Wearhouse," "The Ultra-Wealthy Who Argue That They Should Be Paying Higher Taxes" (Sheela Kolhatkar/The New Yorker);

Les “gilets jaunes”, c'est nous»:
"Juliette Binoche, Emmanuelle Béart, Edouard Louis, Alain Damasio... Autant de personnalités qui apportent leur soutien à un mouvement «sans précédent dans l’histoire». Un mouvement qui représente tous les métiers de la culture. Un mouvement que le pouvoir cherche à discréditer et réprime sévèrement alors que la violence la plus menaçante est économique et sociale... Un mouvement qui réclame des choses essentielles : une démocratie plus directe, une plus grande justice sociale et fiscale, des mesures radicales face à l’état d’urgence écologique... Le bilan de la répression s’aggrave chaque semaine. Au 19 avril, on recensait 1 décès, 248 blessé·e·s à la tête, 23 éborgné·e·s, 5 mains arrachées chez les manifestant·e·s. C’est indigne de notre République. Et nous ne sommes pas les premier·e·s à le dénoncer : Amnesty International, la Ligue des droits de l’homme, l’ONU, l’Union européenne, le Défenseur des droits, tou·te·s condamnent les violences poli­cières sur les gilets jaunes en France," "Gilets jaunes : nous ne sommes pas dupes!"(Liberation 04/05/2019);
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James Joyce, Ulysses:
" — But what Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.
— Iago, Stephen murmured."
"I want to see, concluded Bloom, all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable tidysized income... That's the vital issue at stake and it's feasible..."

 Ezra Pound (from Canto XLV):
"Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man's courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura."

e. e. cummings:
" ...(and if
he she it or everybody gets a
bellyful without
lifting my finger i say to hell
with that i
say that doesn't matter) but
if somebody
or you are beautiful or
deep or generous what
i say is
whistle that
sing that yell that spell
that out big (bigger than cosmic 
rays war earthquakes famine..."

"Mais que seraient les Lumières sans le marché?"
Jacques Derrida
"... to use a term introduced by Braudel, capitalism has always been an 'antimarket'"
Manuel De Landa (paper)
"Modern society... sacrificed private property whenever it came into conflict with the accumulation of wealth... Proudhon presents property in its 'egoist, satanic nature' as the 'most efficient means to resist despotism...'"
Hannah Arendt
"... making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."
"What's great about this country is that... President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke... A Coke is a Coke and no money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking... when Queen Elizabeth came here and President Eisenhower bought her a hot dog I'm sure he felt confident that she couldn't have had delivered to Buckingham Palace a better hot dog than that one he bought her for maybe twenty cents at the ballpark... Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up-there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs and wear the same ILGWU clothes and see the same TV shows... All this is really American. The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is... a lot of places give you special treatment when you're famous, but that's not really American. Wherever it's possible, you should try to pay people in measurements that are the most suitable for their talent or job."
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
"So my relation to the Sex Pistols was a direct link to that existential angst-ridden early motive... By the dawn of the seventies, the philosophy was that you couldn't do anything without a lot of money. So my philosophy was back to, 'Fuck you, we don't care if we can't play and don't have very good instruments, we're still doing it because we think you're all a bunch of cunts. I think that's what really created the anger—the anger was simply about money, that the culture had become corporate, that we no longer owned it and everybody was desperate to fucking get it back."
Malcolm McLaren (Please Kill Me)

"...pues cree que esa liquidación será una mera sustitución..."
Morelli/Julio Cortázar
"Qu'est-ce qu'un art révolutionnaire? à quelle époque cesse sa révolution?"
Gauguin
"Le surréalisme doit être conçu comme une dynamique dont aujourd'hui le vecteur n'est pas à chercher dans la Révolution surréaliste, mais dans la Brèche..." 
Breton ("Perspective Cavalier," 1963).
"... proliferation not only immediately precedes revolutions, but it is there all the time..."
Paul Feyerabend, Consolations for the Specialist
"... on ne saurait sortir de cette conception négative de l'efficacité sans remettre en question ce qui risque de toucher à son principe même: non seulement le rapport moyens-fin, son aspect à la fois instrumental et ponctuel (celui des mesures individuelles), mais aussi son caractère aléatoire (réussir ou non: moment crucial et tragique) et son implication d'effort (en fonction de tâches qu'on s'est fixées comme moyen pour réussir)."
François Jullien (Traité de l'efficacité)

"sang frais et français"
Marcel Duchamp
"... on en voulut moins au bloc national quand on vit tout d'un coup les victimes du bolchevisme, des grandes-duchesses en haillons, dont on avait assassiné les maris dans une brouette, les fils en jetant des pierres dessus après les avoir laissé sans manger..."
Marcel Proust (le narrateur)
"Résultat en Russie: On rit du fanatisme religieux, mais on se met à genoux devant Sainte-Dynamo, j'exagère à peine. Vraiment c'est moins con de faire de Jeanne d'Arc une bienheureuse, de croire à la patrie, d'adorer Wottan ou d'aimer sa femme et ses enfants."
André Masson (Lettre a Georges Bataille, 6 octobre 1935)
"When you set up a revolution... the neuro chemistry runs the show and eventually, you end with the Mafia."
David Bohm (interview)
"When the revolutionary exploits men's urge to downward self-transcendence, he exploits it to the frantic and demoniac limit."
A. Huxley
"Some maudlin citizens will think they can send something edifying, not realizing that sending is evil... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus."
William S. Burroughs
"... a new era may perfectly naturally arrive in which the St. Vitus' dance of money-making and ambition will cease to be the chief end of existence..."
Edward Carpenter
"... it is not necessary or even desirable to seek to "overthrow capitalism," as protestors often suggest..."
Colin Tudge (the World Food Club)
"Violence plays into the hands of the status quo elites. They will use even a hint of violence as an excuse to unleash greater oppression of the people."
Rex Weyler/Greenpeace (Why Civil Disobedience Works)
"... a analogia entre as razões que os comunistas dão para justificarem seu desejo de destruir sem remorso a ordem capitalista, e os argumentos que aquele estudante de Crime e Castigo invocou na taverna para confessar o assassínio da velha dona da casa de penhores."
Érico Veríssimo/Tio Bicho
"Les crimes et autres passages à l'acte plus ou moins agressifs ne sont que des ratages du symbole, ils signent un échec du matricide imaginaire qui, seul, ouvre la voie à la pensée."
J. Kristeva
"On ne saurait trop insister sur le point suivant: combien les notions de lutte, de guerre, de rivalité ou même de comparaison sont étrangères à Nietzsche et à sa conception de la volonté de puissance."
G. Deleuze
"... la monstruosité intégrale ne peut justement se réaliser ailleurs qu'à l'intérieur des conditions qui rendent le sadisme possible, à l'intérieur d'un espace que composent des obstacles, soit dans le langage logiquement structuré des normes et des institutions. L'absence de structure logique ne se peut vérifier que par la logique donnée, quand même celle-ci serait fausse, laquelle, en refusant la monstruosité, la provoque."
Pierre Klossowski
"Hier redet kein 'Prophet', keiner jener schauerlichen Zwitter von Krankheit und Willen zur Macht, die man Religionsstifter nennt."
"Vorsicht selbst vor jedem großen Worte, jeder großen Attitüde! Lauter Gefahren, daß der Instinkt zu früh 'sie versteht'. — Inzwischen wächst und wächst die organisirende, die zur Herrschaft berufene 'Idee' in der Tiefe, — sie beginnt zu befehlen, sie leitet langsam aus Nebenwegen und Abwegen zurück, sie bereitet einzelne Qualitäten und Tüchtigkeiten vor, die einmal als Mittel zum Ganzen sich unentbehrlich erweisen werden, — sie bildet der Reihe nach alle dienenden Vermögen aus, bevor sie irgend Etwas von der dominirenden Aufgabe, von 'Ziel', 'Zweck', 'Sinn' verlauten läßt."
"Die Krankheit löste mich langsam heraus: sie ersparte mir jeden Bruch, jeden gewaltthätigen und anstössigen Schritt. Ich habe kein Wohlwollen damals eingebüßt und viel noch hinzugewonnen. Die Krankheit... erlaubte, sie gebot mir Vergessen; sie beschenkte mich mit der Nöthigung zum Stillliegen, zum Müßiggang, zum Warten und Geduldigsein... Aber das heißt ja denken!"
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

"... d'une économie politique tyrannique... la administration de la peur publique se déplaçant du champ de bataille du passé en direction du marché, autrement dit d'une vie quotidienne bientôt rendue impossible..."
Paul Virilio
"The present way of running the economy on neo-liberal principles is a sure recipe for disaster."
Edy Korthals Altes (The Present Economic Order)
"Felicità Eterna is a resplendently beautiful, blonde young woman whose nudity denotes her contempt for perishable earthly things... Felicità Breve is a lady whose dress yellow and white signifies satisfaction. She is adorned with precious stones and holding a vessel full of gold and gems."
Panofsky
"... all the one-dimensional people with their one-dimensional possessions were lined up along this single dimension like long, thin beads strung out along a thread..."
Lisa Randall
"Cash makes the world go round
Cash makes your girl get down"
Tommy Cash


Panama Papers:
- "The System is Rigged," Salon; 
- article par Eva Joly dans Le Monde Diplomatique; 

 Clipping:
- '“Capital in the 21st Century” is based on the bestselling 2013 book by Thomas Piketty, a French economist. The film, directed by Justin Pemberton, undermines that core power of the world’s elites — shaping how we think — in a particularly wise, sneaky way... “Nationalism is often used by elites to make people forget class conflict and instead focus on national identity” [says Piketty]. It can be debated the degree to which berserk nationalism was consciously stoked by Europe’s rulers to distract from their failures,' "Capital in the 21st Century: Finally, a movie that tells the history of how we got into this mess" (Jon Schwarz/The Intercept);
- '“The fact that houses are too expensive is not only to do with too few being built. There is a lot of capital flowing around the world trying to find an investment, and right now real estate is seen as the best way to invest, so that drives up prices”' [Amsterdam's Deputy Major/Marieke van Doorninck]  Amsterdam to embrace 'doughnut' model to mend post-coronavirus economy (The Guardian);
- '... the urgent task that democrats and liberals must embrace is this: bursting the bubbles we live in... Data collected in France and Germany reveals that the reason why citizens who are drawn to populist parties hold grudges against the “media and politics”, is because they adopt an “agenda” that doesn’t at all fit their concerns. Those main concerns are “precarious working conditions, worries about money and declining social infrastructure,”' Can Emmanuel Macron’s ‘great national debate’ save his presidency? (The Guardian);
- What Does Greta Thunberg's Call for Equity Means? (Climate Home News); 
- 1000 milliards d'euros : le coût de l'évasion fiscale (La Tribune);
- Raghuram Rajan says capitalism is únder serious threat' (BBC News); 
- 'This is about saving capitalism': the Dutch historian who savaged Davos elite (The Guardian);
- David Attenborough tells Davos: ‘The Garden of Eden is no more’ (The Guardian);
- Gilets jaunes: are nationalists infiltrating the yellow vests? (BBC);
- A Giant Pile of Money (The Intercept);
- Elizabeth Warren. v. the District of Corruption (The Intercept); 
- Myths of the 1 Percent (The New York Times);
- What are the Paradise Papers and what do they tell us? (The Guardian); 
- Why we are shining a light on the world of tax heavens again (The Guardian); 
- IMF: higher taxes for rich will cut inequality without hitting growth (The Guardian); 
- Power, Ilness, Homelessness: McDonald's UK Workers are going to strike (The Guardian);  
- America's geography of wealth: the shrinking urban middle class visualised (The Guardian);  
- America has become so anti-innovation, it is economic suicide (The Guardian); 
- World's eight richest people have same wealth as poorest 50% (The Guardian); 
- Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries (The Guardian); 
- The art and science of economics at Cambridge (The Economist);
- Roberto Saviano: London is heart of global financial corruption (The Guardian);
- It is time to junk the flawed economic models (The Guardian);
- Neoliberalism: the ideology at the root of all our problems (The Guardian);
- Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? (The Guardian);
- Dívida Pública: o veículo para roubo de recursos públicos;
- Sobre a ideia brilhante de suspensão da dívida como política anticíclica (José Luis Oreiro);
- The death of neoliberalism (The Guardian);
- The great Greek bank robery (Yanis Varoufakis);
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Ralph Nader on the Democratic Party (2020's Election):
"They have to stop Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren because their hegemony is over if one of those people gets elected, and they want to continue dialing for corporate dollars. They want to continue Obama’s record setting fundraising from Wall Street which exceeded his Republican opponents. Imagine, he got more money from Wall Street than John McCain in 2008. That’s the internal struggle. This business about socialism, that’s just a cover but they’re willing to emulate themselves this year, and let Trump win by basically stereotyping any kind of progressive legislation as socialism."
"They like people like Joe Biden, you know, he comes out of the corporate stake, out of the Obama world, out of the Clarence Thomas, enabler chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and mistreating Anita Hill and, and he comes out of that. They like him and if he falters, they’ll go for Bloomberg, because they know he’s got a lot of money to go up against the Republicans. It’s just redux. Its corporate state Democrat redux. That is they’re almost identical in military and foreign policy with the Republicans. They’re almost identical and booming, bigger military budgets and lathering the military industrial complex with whatever they want. They’re almost identical with avoiding applying law enforcement to Wall Street. All that is deliberate. All that is part of the Rep/Dem consensus, the two party duopoly that stereotypes third parties, and when they start seeing an insurgence in their own party, they go to work on it behind the scenes, tipping close primary elections."
"How can anybody running for president against this relentless savage sexual predator, this constant liar on matters of serious import to the American people — separating millions of people from reality into his commercialized fantasy, this person who’s a bigot and a racist and he follows up with actions reflecting that — how can the Democrats even raise the issue of trying to find a candidate who’s electable against this person? That’s just a technique to marginalize progressive candidates — and they use the words moderate and centrist and leftist and extremist to pursue the same strategy — to mainstream their corporate Democratic primary candidates."
"For example, Joe Biden is called a moderate. Joe Biden, for example, has supported wars abroad that are unconstitutional. Why is that a moderate? Joe Biden has been to toady the big banks. Why is that a moderate? Why is it considered leftist to support universal health insurance and a living wage and cracking down on corporate crime? Those received enormous results in the polls. Left, right support, 65, 70, 75, 80, 90 percent."
"So this is really Armageddon time for the Democratic Party. They’ve been losing and losing to the worst Republican Party in history, the stupidity, the ignorance, the bigotry, the corporatism, the self-serving enrichments, etc. They’re a mirror of Trump. If the Democrats lose this one, there’s going to be a lot of fissure and a lot of splits," "It is Armageddon time for the Democratic Party" (Jeremy Scahill/The Intercept);

Paul Krugman: 
"That was mostly — so, my book is Arguing with Zombies. And one of the zombies is this obsession with public debt and the belief that we should be terribly scared of government debt, and we can’t do anything because of deficits. Eek! And that’s the way Buttigieg talks now, at that very moment when mainstream economics, if you like, centrist economics, has concluded, “Hey, these debt worries were way overblown.” You know, the president of the American Economic Association gave this presidential address saying debt is just not nearly the problem people think it is, and it’s not a constraint. And, of course, Republicans have pulled one of the greatest acts of policy hypocrisy in history. You know, deficits were an existential threat as long as Obama was in office; they don’t matter as soon as Trump is in office. So, I really don’t want to see — I mean, if we did get a Democratic centrist who bought into this deficit scaremongering, that would be a really bad thing. That would block any kind of initiative," "Sanders & Socialism: Debate Between Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman & Socialist Economist Richard Wolff" (Democracy Now); 
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On Mass Surveillance: 
"The NSA and GCHQ, whose collaboration is at the heart of the US and British "special relationship", have been central to that for decades. Their global eavesdropping role is the cornerstone of the 'five eyes' alliance of anglophone states (including Australia, Canada and New Zealand) which underpins US-dominated western global power. Both agencies were founded to spy on the rest of the world, but ended up also targeting their own people."
"Corporations have long been hand in glove with the secret state, working with the security services to this day to blacklist trade unionists and funding covert labour movement organisations during the cold war. What's changed is that communication is in the hands of the corporations. And the companies whose servers are vacuumed up by Prism are a roll call of US internet giants, from Google to YouTube."
"The leaked NSA documents say the companies collaborate, which they deny. But any idea that these tax-dodging behemoths represent a new form of libertarian democratic cool has now been comprehensively exposed as yesterday's marketing guff."
"... the NSA and GCHQ, along with their sister spying outfits, are fuelling as much as fighting terrorism. It is they who provide the intelligence for drone attacks that have killed thousands of civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. A Pakistani man is currently taking a case to the court of appeal against GCHQ for allegedly providing the "intelligence" for a CIA drone strike that killed his father."
"And it's the same US and British intelligence services that have been involved in widespread torture, kidnapping and other crimes in the past decade – as well as scandalous intelligence manipulation over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – who now claim to be protecting us from some of the consequences."
"At home, GCHQ and the NSA were mobilised to conduct spying and dirty tricks operations against the 1980s British miners'strike, while in the 1970s the US Senate Church committee exposed systematic abuse of US eavesdropping powers against civil rights and anti-war activists (along with assassination abroad)," "NSA and GCHQ: mass surveillance is about power as much as privacy" (Seumas Milne, The Guardian, 06/11/2013);

Ultimate piece on Snowden and his ring (written by a woman):
"[In five years since Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance], we’ve learned much more about how Big Tech was not only sharing data with the NSA but collecting vast troves of information about us for its own purposes. And we’ve started to see the strategic ends to which Big Data can be put. In that sense, we’re only beginning to comprehend the full significance of Snowden’s disclosures... This is not to say that we know more today about Snowden’s motivations or aims than we did in 2013. The question of whether or not Snowden was a Russian asset all along has been raised and debated..."
"[NSA's PRISM, whose documents were leaked by Snowden and disclosed by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman] secured cooperation between the Internet companies and the NSA at the point when an individual suspected of involvement in terrorism had been targeted and the NSA wished to retrieve that suspect’s messages from the companies’ servers. Many Americans will still feel that this program constituted an unwarranted breach of privacy, but what PRISM does not do is vindicate the idea of a “deep state” operating entirely independently of the rule of law. Although this might seem like a fine distinction to some, it is an extremely significant one. But the narrative of deep-state lawlessness was too appealing..."
"Assange’s allies, Milne included, have made clear that their allegiance doesn’t lie with liberal democracies and their values. They have taken sides with authoritarianism in their fight against the hypocrisy of liberal democracies... Assange, a former libertarian, has called Russia under Putin “a bulwark against Western imperialism”... For his part, Greenwald has repeatedly, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, decried as Russophobia the findings that Putin ordered interference in the 2016 US presidential election—even appearing on Fox News to do so. The very term “Russophobia” obfuscates the distinction between Vladimir Putin’s regime and Russia; the two clearly can’t be identified with one another... The distinction between left and right, he argues, will increasingly be replaced by the opposition between people who are pro-establishment and anti-establishment. But being anti-establishment is not a politics. It defends no clear set of values or principles. And it permits prevarication about the essential choice between criticizing and helping to reform liberal democracy from within or assisting in its demise. It encourages its partisans to take sides with a smaller, authoritarian state in order to check the power of the one whose establishment it opposes..."
"In their book Red Web: The Kremlin’s War on the Internet, the Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan recounted the experiences of human rights activists who were summoned via an email purportedly from Snowden himself, to a meeting with him at Moscow airport when he surfaced there with Sarah Harrison, to find they were joining the heads of various pro-Kremlin “human rights” groups, Vladimir Lukin, the Putin-appointed Human Rights Commissioner of Russia, and the lawyers Anatoly Kucherena and Henri Reznik. It was clear to the independent activists that Kucherena had organized the meeting..."
"So whether we trust [Snowden] matters. It matters whether we view him as a bad actor, or as a well-intentioned whistleblower who has shown bad judgment, or as someone who has allowed himself to become an unwitting pawn of the Russians... In a 2016 lecture by video-link at Fusion’s Real Future Fair, Snowden discouraged his audience from pursuing the legal and political remedies that liberal democracies offer..."
"If there’s one thing Greenwald, Assange, and their followers got right, it’s that the United States became a tremendous economic and military power over the last seven decades. When it blunders in its foreign or domestic policy, the US has the capacity to do swift and unparalleled damage. The question then is whether this awesome power is better wielded by a liberal-democratic state in an arguably hypocritical way but with some restraint, or by an authoritarian one in a nakedly avowed way and with no restraint. In the five years since Snowden’s revelations, we have seen changes, particularly the election of Donald Trump with his undisguised admiration for strongmen, that compel us to imagine a possible authoritarian future for the United States," "Edward Snowden Reconsidered" (Tamsin Shaw, The New York Review of Books, 09/13/2018);

What should have been the ultimate piece on Glenn Greenwald (& still much more on Assange): 
"What’s astonishing about their ascent to heroism is the breadth of their support. The embrace of the antiwar left and the libertarian right was to be expected. But effusions of praise for the leakers can also be found throughout the liberal establishment..."
"Contrary to [Snowden's] claims, he seems to have become an anti-secrecy activist only after the White House was won by a liberal Democrat who, in most ways, represented everything that a right-wing Ron Paul admirer would have detested..."
"In several cases over a five-year span, Greenwald represented Matthew Hale, the head of the Illinois-based white-supremacist World Church of the Creator, which attracted a small core of violently inclined adherents... Greenwald’s other clients included the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who were implicated in an especially horrible crime. Two white supremacists on Long Island had picked up a pair of unsuspecting Mexican day laborers, lured them into an abandoned warehouse, and then clubbed them with a crowbar and stabbed them repeatedly. The day laborers managed to escape, and when they recovered from their injuries, they sued the National Alliance and other hate groups, alleging that they had inspired the attackers. Greenwald described the suit as a dangerous attempt to suppress free speech by making holders of “unconventional” views liable for the actions of others... most of [Greenwald's] writings, his critique of America abroad was congenial both to the isolationist paleo-Right and to post–New Left anti-imperialists... Along those lines, Greenwald found common ground with the upper echelons of right-wing free-market libertarianism... When bloggers confronted Greenwald about his associations with libertarians, the darling of the netroots and MSNBC left angrily batted the claims away as distortions. He need not have reacted so forcefully. Accused of working for Cato, for example, he might simply have said that he believed in addressing any organization that wanted to hear from him and left it at that. Instead, Greenwald attacked his critics as “McCarthyite” purveyors of “falsehoods, fabrications, and lies”..."
"In 2010, Greenwald began attacking the Obama administration from the left on a variety of domestic issues, attacking Wall Street corruption, opposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and decrying inequality. Yet even as he insisted on his left liberalism, he remained a steadfast promoter of Ron Paul—“far and away the most anti-war, anti-Surveillance-State, anti-crony-capitalism, and anti-drug-war presidential candidate in either party.” (After Paul’s son, then senatorial candidate Rand Paul, questioned the Civil Rights Act, Greenwald agreed with criticism that the remark was “wacky,” but insisted that the real “crazies” in American politics were mainstream Democrats and Republicans.)... During his political pilgrimage, Greenwald became consumed: For him, the national security apparatus is not just an important issue; it is the great burning issue of our time..."
"In the wake of the WikiLeaks frenzy, Assange often tried to clarify where he stood politically. His simultaneous embrace of leftist icons such as Noam Chomsky and right-wing libertarians seemed to indicate that he was open to ideas from either end of the political spectrum, so long as they were directed against authoritarianism. Finally, in 2013, Assange proclaimed, “The only hope as far as electoral politics presently... is the libertarian section of the Republican Party”... Yet even that declaration was misleading. In practice, Assange has a history of working closely with forces far more radical than the Republican Liberty Caucus. Late in 2012, Assange announced the formation of the WikiLeaks Party in Australia. It had been expected that WikiLeaks would ultimately throw its support to the Green Party—especially after the party’s National Council voted in favor of such a move. Instead, WikiLeaks aligned with a collection of far-right parties. One was the nativist Australia First, whose most prominent figure was a former neo-Nazi previously convicted of coordinating a shotgun attack on the home of an Australian representative of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Members of the WikiLeaks Party blamed the flap on an “administrative error”; mass resignations from the party’s leadership followed. Those who quit cited a lack of transparency in the party’s operations, and some pointed to remarks Assange had made blasting a Green Party proposal to reform Australia’s harsh treatment of asylum seekers..."
"Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange have largely set the terms in the debate over transparency and privacy in America. But the value of some of their revelations does not mean that they deserve the prestige and influence that has been accorded to them," "Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought" (Sean Wilentz, The New Republic, 19/01/2014);

Misinformation Wars: "The Seven Commandments of Fake News" (Adam B. Ellick, Adam Westbrook and Jonah M. Kessel, The New York Times):

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Sunday, February 07, 2016

(Electronic & Others) High or Middle Culture?


Art Prints







































A/Z's post on Instagram: sound & video in the background: The Knife's Silent Shout (from Disk III of Silent Shout's Deluxe Edition);
A Rough Sketch of Tommy Cash, drawing by A/Z available with other drawings and photographs at Fine Art America; 
The Knife (Networking);
The Knife (Tomorrow in a Year); 
Björk (Mouth's Cradle);
Björk (Pluto);
Madonna (Material Girl);
Bauhaus (Bela Lugosi's Dead);
DAF (Der Räuber un der Prinz);
DAF (El Que);
Japan (Ghosts);
Orange Juice (Rip It Up);
Public Image Limited (Albatross);
Chrome (All Data Lost);
Factrix (Phantom Play);
The Residents (Swastikas on Parade);
This Heat (A New Kind of Water);
The Flying Lizards (Money);
Wire (I'm the Fly);
Talking Heads (Psycho Killer);
DNA (Detached);
Mars (Helen Forsdale);
Teenage Jesus (Orphans);
Contortions (I Can't Stand Myself);
Throbbing Gristle (Greasy Spoon);
Cabaret Voltaire (Silent Command, Kino);
The Future (Future Religion);
The Pop Group (We Are Time);
Devo (The Truth About De-Evolution) [this video is not available anymore at Youtube];
Donna Summer (I Feel Love); 
Blue Jay Way (Beatles); 
Cambridge 1969 (John Lennon & Yoko Ono); 
The Crucifixion (Phil Ochs); 
Ornette Coleman's Sound Museum (montage A/Z);
Bat Macumba (Mutantes);
Saúde (Rita Lee) [this video is not available anymore at Youtube];
On the Rocks (Rita Lee);
Morton Subotnick (Silver apples of the Moon); 
Alack Karis & Kian Freitas/ Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra; 
Milda Vitartaite plays Mario Davidovsky Synchronisms N 6 (for piano and electronic sound, Youtube);
Code Morel & One Hundred Forty Nine Inches (montage A/Z) [I took this video out of Youtube, because I wanted to change it];

"In one of its innumerable forms music is a powerful drug, partly stimulant and partly narcotic, but wholly alterative."
A. Huxley, The Devils of Loudun
"After we'd sniff glue we used to call up number on the phone. We knew these numbers to dial where you could get these weird sounds. We'd call the numbers and it would go Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep."
Dee Dee Ramone (Please Kill Me)
"... remettre en usage des instruments anciens et oubliés, créer des instruments nouveaux... rechercher,  en dehors de la musique, des instruments et des appareils qui, basés sur des fusions spéciales ou des alliages renouvelés de métaux, puissent atteindre un diapason nouveau de l'octave, produire des sons ou des bruits insupportables, lancinants."
A. Artaud (Le théâtre de la cruauté)

"Zuletzt fehlt mir jeder Grund, die Hoffnung auf eine dionysische Zukunftder Musik zurückzunehmen."
"... wie der das Schwerste von Schicksal, ein Verhängniss von Aufgabe tragende Geist trotzdem der leichteste und jenseitigste sein kann — Zarathustra ist ein Tänzer —;" 
Nietzsche (Ecce Homo)
"... long live dancing in the eddy of the infinite!" 
The young person in Repetition (translation by M. G. Piety)
"... une des divinités caractéristiques du Panthéon brahmanique est le Danseur Suprême. Etre universel, il détient le fil du labyrinthe cosmique. Seigneur jouant au degré le plus élevé: son passe-temps est, inextricablement, de créer et d'anéantir."
André Masson (La tentation de l'Orient/Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)
"Você acredita que eu ia pro Dancing Days dançar a noite inteira, sozinho?"
Ney Matogrosso

"When the mood came over him, he might suddenly interrupt a Saturday afternoon walk in the fashionable Bahnhofstrasse by flinging his loose limbs about in a kind of spider dance, the effect accentuated by his tight trouser-legs and wide cloak, diminutive hat, and thin cane."
Richard Ellmann
"Voisin d'un dancing for populaire connu plus tard sous le nom de Bal nègre, un vieille maison marquée pour la pioche... De l'autre côté: deux ateliers d'artistes... Cette campagnonnage n'avait rien de typiquement 'intellectuel'; parler et sentir ensemble, prendre ses repas en commun, travailler d'une même élan, et danser."
André Masson (45, rue Blomet/Écris, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)

"Na gravação de Adeus Maria Fulô, usei um instrumentinho que os palhaços Torresmo e Fuzarca faziam com tampinhas de garrafa afinadas que, ao soltá-las no chão, tilintavam a nota certa... regravamos Bat Macumba e Baby..."
"Éramos apreciados por nossa esquisitice visual e sonora."
"Quando lançamos Saúde, a crítica me crucificou porque pela primeira vez no país usei em algumas faixas a bateria eletrônica Korg. Diziam que eu havia tirado o trabalho de bateristas humanos. Enquanto a crítica vinha com a farinha, minha antena futurista já comia o bolo. Ser pioneira tem seu preço."
"Minha preferida dessa safra é On the rocks, trenzão, pesadão e chique, letra bem colocada, instrumentália precisa, mixagem perfeita, uma de que muito me orgulho."
Rita Lee
"Com sua trupe panfamiliar, suas mulheres e filhos músicos (virtuoses de vanguarda e jazzistas-roqueiros), Stockhausen é o elo perdido entre a grande música e uma outra música que poderá surgir."
José Miguel Wisnik

"Je me souviens avoir discuté avec Stockhausen... l'idée selon laquelle 'notre musique' (cette notion commune existait encore un peu)... aurait pour mission... d'édifier un 'space' suffisamment étendu et complexe pour que puissent s'y rencontrer... soit l'ancien et le nouveau, soit le 'savant' et le 'populaire'..."
"... des échanges, parfois secrets, s'établissant entre les 'genres', et même certaines des acquisitions les plus aventureuses des musiques expérimentales s'acclimatant dans des régios moins 'distinguées' ou même plus commericales (qu'on pense à la subversion du langage qu'a représente le 'free jazz' ou l'assimilation de l'électronique par le pop, le rock et, surtout les musiques illustratives et 'fonctionelles')..."
Henri Pousseur, Musiques Croisées

"La pauvreté reprochée à beaucoup de sons synthétiques, et pas seulement sur les appareils 'bas gamme', provient souvent du fait que peu de paramètres varient, par exemple que seule la hauteur change, alors qu'entre une note d'un instrument acoustique et la note immédiatement plus grave ou plus aiguë, une foule de variables bougent (pente de décroissance d'intensité, timbre harmonique, vibrato...) simultanément avec la hauteur, même si c'est plus discrètement qu'elle. En même temps, c'est cette pauvreté qui fait le charme propre des sons synthétiques, et des groupes et auteurs 'pop' comme Kraftwerk ou Brian Eno."
"Alan Williams défend l'idée — que nous partageons — que 'ce n'est jamais le sont littéral, 'original' qui est reproduit dans l'enregistrement, mais une perspective sur lui."
"... le son pourrait avoir d'être 'inréifiable' tout en étant accessible à une description et une appréhension plus précises."
Michel de Chion, Le Son

"[Nos áureos tempos na Rádio Nacional] a sonoplastia era coisa de 'alto nível'... Apenas composições dos grandes mestres da música clássica é que integravam as trilhas sonoras daquele período. Mais que isso, os sonoplastas davam preferência ao repertório de vanguarda da música do século XX. Enquanto o público 'consumidor de cultura' torcia o nariz no Municipal ao ouvir as execuções dos mais avançados autores de nossa época, as donas de casa, ao fritar suas abobrinhas, estavam ouvindo no rádio, através da sonoplastia, nada menos que Stravinsky, Schöenberg, Webern, Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Dukas e outros."
"No fim dos anos 60... Numa era das mais criativas da história, a molecada agarrou a tal caixinha, o sintetizador, e saiu pelo mundo ejaculando frequência por todos os poros... O Japão, o país do futuro, ativava ainda mais sua indústria eletroeletrônica produzindo centenas de maquininhas infernais, práticas e portáveis, que faziam da manipulação do som eletrônico um brinquedo infantil."
Julio Medaglia (Música Impopular)

"The 1980s were a great time for innovation with regard to electronic music. Pop music was starting to incorporate new types of keyboards and drum machines, with new ones coming out every month that helped refine and define the sound of that era."
"You would be surprised how many happy accidents make it onto the records. Robert used to call me 'the X factor,' as he was never quite sure what I might come up with."
"We also liked the way he played his leather trousers with his hands. Yes, that's what you hear on 'The Carterpillar' that sounds like butterfly wings beating: Mr. A.'s leather trousers."
"I have always had a great love for all kinds of experimental music, especially the early synthesizer pioneers like Morton Subotnick, and I loved Don Buchla's electronic machines."
Lol Tolhurst
**************************************************************

"Recorded in West Berlin, Bowie's Low and Heroes, Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life (both of which Bowie produced), hugely impacted listeners [and] signaled a shift away from America and rock'n'roll toward Europe and a cool, controlled sound in which synthesizers played as much of a role as guitars..." 
"...  1977's most significant singles [were] 'Trans-Europe Express,' a metronomic, metal-on-metal threnody for the industrial era by the German band Kraftwerk, and Donna Summer's Eurodisco smash 'I Feel Love,' made almost entirely from synthetic sounds by producer Giorgio Moroder, and Italian based in in Munich."
"Rather than a keyboard, Devo treated the synth as a noise generator. 'The more technology you have, the more primitive you can be,' Mothersbaugh told one interviewer. 'You can express guttural sounds, bird noises, brains waves, blood flow.'"
"Devo found Alan Myers, 'this incredible metronomic drummer,' and the group started to explore disconcertingly disjointed time signatures like 7/8 and 11/8. 'Those kind of timings make you feel rigid right away,' says Casale."
"... all rattling synthetic percussion and soiled sheet of sound recall avant-classical electronic composers such as Morton Subotnick. For a while Cabaret Voltaire didn't even have a proper synth, instead using tape loops and a primitive oscillator built by Watson. Kirk's primary instrument was the clarinet, fed through effects to sound harshly processed and eerie, as on the spychotic-bucolic Fuse Mountain."
"Initially, the Future came up with 'the rather radical idea that we'd have shared vocals,' says Ian Craig Marsh. 'We dispensed with our names and called ourselves A, B, and C. I was all very computer oriented...' A cybernetic version of Burroughs's and Gysin's cut-ups and surrealist automatic writing..."
"Another Cabaret Voltaire hallmark was the dehumanization of Mallinder's voice via creepy treatments that made him sound reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being."
"COUM started as a rock band of sorts, making up music on the spot, undeterred by lack of grounding in improvisational technique, using broken violins and prepared piano as well as conventional rock instruments like drums and electric bass. Inspired by John Cage's writing and by primitivists like the Fugs and the Velvet Underground, P-Orridge believed that 'the future of music lies in nonmusicians.'"
"Ironically, a traditional blues and country technique, slide guitar, provided No Wave with some of its most disconcertingly novel noises."
"Byrne was reading books by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists... Eno and Byrne became fascinated with American radio's menagerie of evangelist preachers, right-wing pundits, and callers phoning in to live talk radio shows. Radio was America's seething id."
"Unwilling to spend what it would take to make Wire happen as a pop group, EMI was equally disinclined to fund their more esoteric side."
"Factrix quickly  realized that 'you could put the acetates in upside down and backward, play them the wrong way. That was what was really inspiring to us at the time, 'let's see what happens if we do this wrong.'"
"'The mystical for Factrix was teh  same as Coltrane or any musician who's trying to get to the place where the music is free. The sounds, they really  did have a life of their own. We were really just following the sounds. We were disciples of feedback' [Bond Bergland]."
"'Most  bands get a synthesizer and their first idea is to tune it! They want a clean normal sound. They don't work with the power you get from a synthesizer. We want to bring together this high technique with body  power' [Robert Görl/DAF]."
"DAF and their offshoot group Liaisons Dangereuses influenced the embryonic black electronic sounds of Chicago house and Detroit techno, while Kraftwerk almost single-handedly inspired New York electro."
"'You could do a vaguely experimental film thing as cheaply as you possibly could, and if it was connected to a song, MTV would play it because they needed stuff desperately in those days' [David Byrne]."
"Rave music teemed with futuristic textures and strange noises that came straight out of DAF and Cabaret Voltaire... Acid house essentially fused postpunk futurism with sixties Dionysian frenzy."
Simon Reynolds

"As Stockhausen showed in the 1950s, electronic instruments unify the time field between the audio or intoned frequencies above about 20 Hz and the infrasonic or rhythmic frequencies below this threshold. This means that we can compose throughout this zone, where rhythms morph into tones and vice versa."
"A sine [in a simple sinusoidal wave] repeats at exactly constant intervals of time. Repeating waveforms are called periodic. If there is no discernible repetition pattern, it is called aperiodic or noise. In between the extremes of periodic and aperiodic is a vast domain of quasi-periodic tones. The rate of repetition of a periodic sound is called its fundamental frequency, measured in cycles per second."
"Many frequencies can superimpose in a waveform. A frequency-domain or spectrum representation shows the distribution of frequency energy in a sound... A working definition of spectrum is: a measure of the distribution of signal energy as a function of frequency. Such a definition may seem straightforward, but in practice, different analysis techniques measure properties that they each call 'spectrum' with diverging results. Except for isolated test cases, the practice of spectrum analysis is not an exact science."
"Myriad alternatives to Fourier-based spectrum estimation exist (Roads 1996). Among them, one family is of particular interest, as they decompose a sound into a collection of sound atoms (analogous to grains)."
"... the ear is especially sensitive to frequencies between 1000 Hz and 4000 Hz. Tones in this region sound louder than tones of equal intensity in other frequencies. Thus the measurement of loudness falls under the realm of psychoacoustics."
"The subject of masking inevitably arises in discussions of loudness perception. In its most basic form, masking describes a phenomenon wherein a low-level sound is obscured by a higher-level sound. For example, standing in a shower masks many sounds, such as someone speaking nearby."
"... other types of masking effects are time-based: forward and backward masking. Consider a short sound that ends abruptly. The human auditory system continues to react for a short time (about a half second) after the sound ends. This 'resonance' can blur our perception of the onset of a second sound. Indeed, when the time interval between impulses is less than about 50 ms, the ear no longer perceives them as separate impulses... Backward masking is a curious phenomenon. Basically, a loud click or noise coming less than 100 ms after another sound can obscure our perception of the earlier sound. The masking sound can disrupt the brain’s ability to hear a preceding sound, hence the term backward). It is interesting that both forward masking and backward masking occur in the visual domain as well."
"Low-frequency impulsive events are perceived as rhythms. These are the infrasonic frequencies in the range below about 20 Hz. The infectious beating rhythms of percussion instruments fall within this range."
"Structure-borne sound is vibration that one can feel, like the vibration caused by a train rumbling down nearby tracks. These are typically low-frequency vibrations that one’s ear may be able to hear, but they are also felt through the body. Of course, we can also feel high frequencies, such as the buzzing of an electric razor, which is felt by the hand, as well as heard by the ear."
"Ultrasound comprises the domain of high frequencies beyond the range of human audibility."
"Sound propagates at different rates, depending on the medium of propagation... Sounds at extreme sonic velocities are destructive. Explosives can generate powerful transonic shock wave air currents traveling at up to 8000 meters per second, corresponding to Mach 24. These destroy everything in their path."
"Sounds have a specific physical size as well as shape. A quiet sound is physically petite. One has to put one’s ear close to it because the body of air it perturbs is tiny. Other sound waves are gigantic, such as the Krakatoa explosion of August 1883. It was heard 4800 kilometers away, and the pressure wave traveled around the earth for 127 hours."
"When rhythms are sped up, they morph into tones. When modulations like tremolo and vibrato are sped up, they morph into complex spectra. Streaming around the thresholds of this zone of morphosis—where discrete events turn into continuous tones—is intrinsically fascinating."
"... as [Paul] Griffiths observed, electronic music can resolve an antagonism between music and text since words themselves can be transformed. Extreme distortions obscure the meanings of the words, so that the sonic contours of the vocalisms are more important than their literal sense. Moreover, the freedom of the electronic medium encourages composers to make smooth connections between vocal and non-vocal material."
"In the ideal, a source of noise should generate random values. To define an algorithm for generating truly random numbers is, however, impossible mathematically (Chaitin). Any software method for random number generation ultimately rests on a finite, deterministic procedure. Hence, an algorithm for generating 'random' numbers is actually a pseudorandom number generator... Stephen Wolfram famously developed a new type of pseudorandom number generator that he called rule 30 based on a cellular automata algorithm that is much more random than previous algorithms. A main challenge for digital synthesis is creating more sophisticated algorithmic models for noise... Natural wind, sea spray, waterfalls, and thunder are excellent sources of wideband noise. Speech and animal sounds contain many evocative noises, especially the fricatives and plosives of speech [s], [z], [sh], [f], [k], [t], [p], [g], and so on. I have already mentioned the rich noises of the unpitched percussion instruments. Collections of samples recorded at industrial sites are available. These feature the sounds of crushing, creaking, scraping, squealing, squeaking, and grinding... Analog devices produce some of the most complex and unstable noises. For example, the noise from a diode section of a transistor is widely considered to be one of the most random phenomena in nature... The ear is attracted to changes in noise, to trends... As early drum machines taught us, white noise is a poor substitute for a cymbal crash."
"The early electronic music of Stockhausen is a classic example of the integration of pitched and non-pitched elements. Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) juxtaposed sung serial melodies and chords against such elements as 'sine complex showers,' 'impulse complex showers,' filtered and broadband noise, and 'chords' of narrow noise bands. His Kontakte (1960) takes the contrasts even further. At any given instant, Stockhausen pits noise against pitch, fixed against moving, close against far, short against long, high against low register, soft against loud—always in sharp relief. This unrelenting counterpoint of contrasts marks Kontakte as an especially inventive composition, as Stockhausen discovered oppositions that were never before articulated."
"The lush spatial effect of artificial reverberation is characteristic of the electronic medium. Early recordings used a real physical space—an echo chamber—to produce reverberation."
"Spring reverberators in electric organs date to the 1940s and were later common in guitar amplifiers. In the 1950s, Elektro-Mess-Technik (EMT) introduced the massive (2.4 meters long, 200 kg) model 140 plate reverberator, a higher-quality reverberator renowned for its concert hall-like sound. Plate reverberators consist of a large, thin piece of sheet metal suspended from a steel frame by springs... Equipped with vacuum tube electronics, these units were installed in early electronic music studios like the historic WDR studio in Cologne, where Stockhausen realized many of his electronic pieces, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio... The classic EMT 140 impulse response is accurately modeled by contemporary software reverberators and still marries well with electronic sonorities."
"Portable field recorders enable composers to integrate natural spatial environments (both interior and exterior) into their work. Interior recordings bring us into living spaces, while recording the open space of the outdoors environment allows us to enter the realm of free field acoustics, characterized by a total lack of reflections. Of course, there can also be reflections outside, but the distance cue becomes especially important as we hear the natural foreground/background of the soundstage... Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1930) pioneered this genre, depicting the urban soundscape of Berlin. Two decades later, musique concrète used natural sounds, but typically in short clips spliced together rapidly. In contrast, Luc Ferrari’s breakthrough composition Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1967–1970) began as a long, continuous recording of environmental sounds at a Yugoslavian beach."
"Sound spatialization presents two facets: the virtual and the physical. In the studio, composers spatialize sounds by means of tape echo feedback, delays, spectral filtration, phase shift (for image displacement, widening, and narrowing), convolution, granulation, panning, Doppler shift (for simulation of moving sounds), and reverberation. These transformations give the illusion of sounds inhabiting and moving in imaginary virtual environments."
"Tape echo feedback (TEF) is a classic tape-studio approach to sound transformation that creates a ping-pong panning echo effect, but it can also lead to a transmutation as the original input sound is submerged in distant feedback. There are many variations on TEF, but the classic version requires an analog tape recorder with a continuously variable speed control."
"Another class of reverberators based on convolution is especially interesting... we can take the acoustic signature of an existing space such as a concert hall, and through convolution, impose its spatial characteristics on any sound, creating the illusion of sounds playing in the portrayed space... In the theory of convolution, the acoustic signature of a physical space is sampled by recording the response of a room to a sharp impulse. This is its impulse response."
"Since convolution itself is straightforward, the added value of convolving reverberator applications comes in the form of extensive libraries of proprietary IRs of exotic spaces, including concert halls, cathedrals, stadiums, theaters, churches, recording studios, rooms, scoring stages, clubs, tombs, car interiors, closets, and even acoustic instruments... it is also possible to create synthetic IRs that model strange imaginary rooms with otherworldly echo patterns."
"Starting from the edge of the conventional loudspeaker, we can treat dif- ferent sounds so that they appear to emanate from specific depths behind the loudspeaker. This leads to one of the more interesting possibilities in electronic music: the possibility of a counterpoint between foreground and background elements, where the perceived depth of each element is a function of its virtual acoustic properties. A low-pass filtered sound—bathed in reverberation and diminished in amplitude—recedes into the background, while a bright, present, loud sound jumps to the foreground."
Curtis Roads, Composing Electronic Music

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