Çarşamba 2 Haz 2010, 8:03
Catastrophe, apocalypse, doom.
These are the obvious and often related categories referring to what is the frame for the following playlist: the giant and disastrous oil spill in the gulf of Mexico. As I've been watching the BP-streamed covering of the underwater scenes from the oil spill in the gulf of Mexico the last few days for quite some time, this playlist can serve as a kind of a soundtrack to. So you may be adviced to take a look while listening:
As well as the origin of the pictures you see on this web page – they are filmed by so called 'remotely operated vehicles', i.e. by inhuman machines linked to someone sitting at a joystick by a cable – as well as the nature of these pictures is a mechanic, decided unnatural one, some of the tunes bring to mind the idea of a mechanized world wherein most of people's daily activities is dominated by computers and their rational organizing of processes.
Another aspect within this list are the emotions and feelings evoked by watching the pictures and that spring to mind when thinking about the consequences of what we are watching: frustration, anger, melancholy, resistance. On the other side, there might also be the feeling of an intellectual inaptness when trying to go beyond these seemingly far away, somehow abstract pictures and relate them with what is happening to the nature, the animals and people confronted with the oil. Pain and harm are sometimes impossible to communicate, to translate from one to another.
Then, there is also the setting these pictures are taken in, the underwater world that for itself evokes enough associations to make a whole bunch of tapes: isolation, darkness, coldness, and, at last, a big nothing.
1. Sleigh Bells - A/B Machines
2. Invincible - Locusts (feat. Finale, wsg Gwen Mingo & Ron Scott)
3. Box Mouse - 5:37am Outside the Station
4. Chicago Underground Duo - Confliction
5. Graham Lambkin - Baby & Fox
6. Peter Evans - Nature/Culture d
7. Flying Lotus - Computer Face // Pure Being
8. Atlas Sound - Shelia
9. Metamorfrozen - Dark Days Under Mount Terror
10. Tujiko Noriko + Lawrence English + John Chantler - I Can Hear the Heart
11. The McIntosh County Shouters - Move, Daniel
12. Autechre - PlyPhon
13. Daniel Menche - Kataract
The last track by Daniel Menche is actually a whole album so this serves as an optional additon. Songs by Metamorfrozen and Box Mouse (on Echodub Loves Vol. 2 sampler) can be downloaded for free. The McIntosh County Shouters can be found and listened to at Smithsonian Folkways. For an extended video edition of Invincible's Locusts have a look at Youtube.