v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Pjusk/Sleep Orchestra

From Textura:

Some projects come about serendipitously, one such being Drowning in the Sky, a collaborative outing between Pjusk (Norwegians Rune Sagevik and Jostein Gjelsvik) and Sleep Orchestra (UK-based electronic music producer Christopher Pegg). In this case, Pegg, prompted by a recommendation from his friend Juan Diego Burillo, listened to Pjusk's Tele for many months and then subsequently caught the group in performance at the Storung Festival in Barcelona. A meeting took place thereafter, which resulted in their collective decision to collaborate on an album, which, of course, became Drowning in the Sky (dedicated, incidentally, to Burillo, who died in 2012).

The material naturally draws upon the styles of the artists involved: Sagevik and Gjelsvik create much of Pjusk's music in an old cabin high in the snow-covered mountains, while Pegg's aligns itself to the kind produced by artists such as Murcof, Saffronkeira, Biosphere, and, yes, Pjusk. So one comes to the project expecting heavily textured and atmospheric dronescapes as opposed to glossy pop songs, and that's pretty much what the album's fifty-seven minutes provide: shape-shifting ambient-drone settings drenched in mist and fog. In these detail-packed productions, nature-based field recordings merge with brooding tones and washes to evoke barren Norwegian plains where townsfolk shield themselves from harsh winds and sub-zero temperatures. The muffled rumble of earth tremors, the murmur of voices, and crackle of electricity also surface within the trio's landscapes, some of them bereft of beats and others subtly animated by plodding beat patterns. Such albums are typically ponderous in tone, and while that's generally the case here, too, light does sometimes peek through the cracks.

The collaborators' material is solid, with a representative piece such as “Vansunbarth” elevated by a disarmingly lovely and Eno-like synth melody that rises above the portentous whooshes and oceanic clicks. Drowning in the Sky also benefits significantly from the contributions of guests on two of the seven tracks: Taylor Deupree and Kåre Nymark Jr. on “Skdiv,” and Tomasz Mrenca on the Pleq remix of “Rionzemef.” Deupree's credited with Kyma on “Skdiv,” but it's the trumpet playing of Nymark Jr. that one will remember most, to some degree for the simple fact that the instrument can't help but stand out when heard within a largely electronic context. That being said, Nymark Jr.'s echo-drenched playing is memorable on its own terms for its declamatory cry, its voice so strong it's able to pierce the thick haze of the backdrop, and Mrenca likewise makes a strong impression when his vibrato-laden violin gently soars across an insistently surging base during “Rionzemef.”

Carmen Souza Interview

 

Interview with Carmen Souza:

Habiendo nacido en Lisboa, ¿cuál es su relación con Cabo Verde?

La relación de Lisboa con sus antiguas colonias ha sido muy fuerte desde hace muchos años, por lo tanto esa unión siempre estuvo muy presente en el crecimiento de los hijos de la diáspora. Personalmente tuve mucho contacto con la música caboverdiana dentro y fuera de casa. También con la música de Brasil, Angola, Mozambique y São Tomé. Eso es algo completamente normal puesto que las relaciones entre Portugal y sus ex colonias son todavía muy estrechas. Yo, siendo hija de padres caboverdianos, tuve la suerte de que ellos siempre escuchasen mucha música de Cabo Verde y de que en todo momento promoviesen la cultura de este país en casa. Viajé de vacaciones por primera vez a Cabo Verde cuando tenía diez años y recuerdo que aquello era fascinante para mí. Era un mundo completamente diferente, en el que no había las mismas condiciones a las que estaba habituada como la luz eléctrica, el agua o la televisión. Y el hecho de tener que adaptarme a este estilo de vida fue muy interesante para mí y lo hice perfectamente, no tuve ningún problema.

¿Suele pasar eso de comenzar una carrera musical por el gospel en Portugal?

Bueno, no es muy normal, a no ser que se tenga cierto lazo con la Iglesia. Desde que yo era pequeña mis padres me acostumbraron a ir a misa todos los domingos. Por lo tanto, desde el principio siempre tuve mucho contacto con la música gospel y me siento muy identificada con el mensaje. Góspel quiere decir evangelio y fue ahí donde comencé y conocí a Theo Pas’cal.  En aquel momento Theo era director musical de varios grupos con bastante experiencia en Portugal. Ahí empecé a dar mis primeros pasos e iniciamos juntos este viaje musical.

En una ocasión, una amiga portuguesa me comentó que “Portugal necesita menos fado y más samba”. ¿Piensa que los músicos de origen brasileño o africano están enriqueciendo la música portuguesa?

(Risas) De alguna forma se acaba enriqueciendo todo lo que está alrededor, porque las relaciones entre Portugal y el resto de la lusofonía son tan cercanas que todo lo que se hace en Portugal se divulga en los países de expresión portuguesa y al contrario, todo lo que se hace en la lusofonía tiene repercusión en Portugal. En Portugal siempre he sido muy bien acogida por esta mezcla que hago de la música de Cabo Verde con el jazz, y siempre que estoy por allí  se promueve mucho mi trabajo, presento muchos conciertos. Siempre y cuando la música sirva para construir o evolucionar, es algo positivo.

Existe una nueva generación de artistas afro-portugueses con un enorme potencial. ¿En su opinión tienen las mismas oportunidades e igual visibilidad que los portugueses de origen no africano?

Pienso que las oportunidades se las crea uno mismo. Para un músico cuya base está en Cabo Verde es un poco más difícil por toda esta cuestión de la crisis internacional, que ha acabado afectando a la cultura. Para un productor es mucho más difícil ir a buscar a un músico que vive en Cabo Verde, por todas las dificultades logísticas y de visados, que buscar a un músico que está en Londres o en París. Al artista al final no le queda otra que crear sus propias oportunidades y facilitar ciertas condiciones que le permitan una mayor movilidad para cualquier sitio. Se trata de una carrera que requiere de mucha inversión personal. Tengo la costumbre de decir que es necesario creer en aquello que no se ve. Tenemos que poner todos los días un poco de nuestra parte para que las cosas puedan suceder.

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Crisis of Legitimacy

From The Nation:

There are three principal reasons for democracy’s deepening crisis of legitimacy. The first is rooted in what Alasdair Roberts has called “the logic of discipline,” which refers to the strictures that the draftsmen of global capitalism introduced into the blueprints of national governments during the past three decades. Gaining political traction in the late 1970s, a reformist movement that harbored a deep skepticism of the merits of democratic governance of the economy swept through Bonn, Washington, London and finally Paris. In the wake of the oil crises and high inflation, this movement, a coalition of liberals and libertarians, believed it had identified significant weaknesses in democratic governments, whose election cycles encouraged shortsighted, unstable policies that only seemed to benefit powerful lobbies and voting blocs, special interests and the bureaucracy itself. Most distressing of all, national central banks were directed by members of popularly elected governments, who increased inflation to boost employment and tinkered with monetary policy to stimulate short-term economic booms. To remedy such “bad” habits, these self-styled emancipators of the market trumpeted the call to make states more accountable and efficient. This meant, above all, insulating monetary policy from electoral politics, opening up certain sectors of domestic markets to increased international competition, eliminating capital controls and demonizing inflation, which for decades had been one of the primary, if erratic, means by which capitalist democracies redistributed wealth.

What began as an ideological project—as one choice among many that policy-makers might have taken—has since taken on a compelling logic of its own. The economic decisions of the 1970s have done much to shape the form globalization has taken. Now, with world trade more pervasive, and with the domestic economies of even the most affluent nations deeply dependent on foreign investments, the ideological predilections of a few governments have become the preoccupation of all. There is a reason why all mainstream politicians now make decisions based on variables such as the risk of capital flight and the reactions of bond rating agencies, rather than on traditional calculations about the will of their electorates. As the German economist Wolfgang Streeck has argued, this shift in political calculus occurred because the most significant constituency of democracies is no longer voters but the creditors of public debt. Some politicians are, no doubt, very grateful to dress their preferences up in global capital’s language of necessity. But many others submit to the logic of a globalized economy with genuine regret—and for those who are tempted to stray from the program, the recent fates of several countries (from Greece in Europe to Argentina in Latin America and Zimbabwe in Africa) show just how severe the punishment can be.

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Interview with Composer Gabriela Ortiz

Interview at Opera Today:

TM: You were born in Mexico City, and your parents were active as folk musicians.

GO: My father is an architect, and my mother, who has passed away, was a psychoanalyst, but they also played in a folk music group called Los Folkloristas, which was very well-known in the sixties and the seventies.

TM: How did they start to do that?

GO: On my father’s side, my grandfather is from the city of Guadalajara, in Jalisco. He was a doctor, and had a very interesting life. He studied at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and when he came back to Mexico, the Mexican Revolution had just started in 1910, and he went to fight with Pancho Villa. When he came back, because he came from a very wealthy family, the family moved to the United States, but he decided to stay in Mexico City, and he met my grandmother in Chihuahua, in the north of Mexico, and they got married. My grandfather loved classical, and saw Mahler conducting in New York while he was studying in Washington, so the musical interests of my father come from that part of the family. Because my grandfather was from Guadalajara, my father loved mariachi and son jalisciense and all this folk music from Jalisco. He started playing guitar and folk music when he was very young. He had these two sides — classical music and folk music. My mother studied piano for fifteen years. I was around music throughout my childhood.

TM: What were your first musical activities?

GO: I started by playing guitar and folk music, and joined my parents. When I was nine, my mother suggested that I start playing piano and reading music, so that I would have a more formal musical education. So I started playing piano when I was nine or ten years old. By fifteen I realized that I could compose melodies, so I knew very early that I wanted to be a composer.

TM: In addition to the folk music, were there kinds of international pop music that were part of your life when you were an adolescent?

GO: I loved all kinds of music — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. My uncle was a mathematician, and he would play the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin — I loved those bands too. I love salsa, mambo, jazz — but jazz was something that came later, not at that time.

TM: What did adolescents listen to?

GO: There were three different kinds of people. There were people who loved to dance disco — I remember people dancing to the Beegees, and Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta. And then there were people who were nostalgic for older bands, like the Who, the Doors, Janis Joplin, and all of that kind of stuff. And there were people who listened to folk music from all over Latin America.

TM: Much of the Mexican music that we hear in the United States must be from northern Mexico — corridos and so forth. Perhaps that is different from what is listened to in Mexico City.

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Lynn Geesaman

 

 

Our Lost Predictive Powers

From NYTimes,  Evgeny Morozov writes:

In “On What We Can Not Do,” a short and pungent essay published a few years ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben outlined two ways in which power operates today. There’s the conventional type that seeks to limit our potential for self-­development by restricting material resources and banning certain behaviors. But there’s also a subtler, more insidious type, which limits not what we can do but what we can not do. What’s at stake here is not so much our ability to do things but our capacity not to make use of that very ability.

While each of us can still choose not to be on Facebook, have a credit history or build a presence online, can we really afford not to do any of those things today? It was acceptable not to have a cellphone when most people didn’t have them; today, when almost everybody does and when our phone habits can even be used to assess whether we qualify for a loan, such acts of refusal border on the impossible.

For Agamben, it’s this double power “to be and to not be, to do and to not do” that makes us human. This active necessity to choose (and err) contributes to the development of individual faculties that shape our subjectivity. The tragedy of modern man, then, is that “he has become blind not to his capacities but to his incapacities, not to what he can do but to what he cannot, or can not, do.”

This blindness to the question of incapacities mars most popular books on recent advances in our ability to store, analyze and profit from vast amounts of data generated by our gadgets. (Our wherewithal not to call this phenomenon by the ugly, jargony name of Big Data seems itself to be under threat.) The two books under review, alas, are no exception.

In “The Naked Future,” Patrick Tucker, an editor at large for The Futurist magazine, surveys how this influx of readily available data will transform every domain of our existence, from improving our ability to predict earthquakes (thanks to the proliferation of sensors) to producing highly customized education courses that would tailor their content and teaching style, in real time, to the needs of individual students. His verdict: It’s all for the better.

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Master of Perception

From The LA Review:

DONALD RUMSFELD believes he is a master of perception.

This we witnessed daily during his nearly six years as George Bush’s defense chief. With his dagger tongue and square-jawed old man-bro charm, he never doubted his control of the narrative of the Iraq War, even as its lies and catastrophic abuses of justice bubbled violently to the surface.

Since he stepped down in 2006, he has seemed to lack the propulsive venom of a Cheney, the relative quiet of a Bush, the polished humbleness of a Powell. There is still the bullshit, however. “The President did not lie. The Vice President did not lie. Tenet did not lie. Rice did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong,” Rumsfeld writes in his 2011memoir, Known and Unknown.

In The Unknown Known, Errol Morris’s recent documentary about Rumsfeld, there is no depth to the man, no undercurrent of self-examination or indication of sleep lost over poor judgment. Rumsfeld would like to appear as a wizened septuagenarian, one who took his shots, made a few, saw some shit — of Vietnam, he tells Morris, “Some things work out, some things don’t” — and was gone. Rumsfeld “plays dumb,” my old boss David Corn wrote. “And, thus, nothing else he says in the documentary can be taken at face value. This is a fellow who either is not as smart as he thinks or not perceptive enough to handle the hard truths.”

Morris obsesses over the millions of “snowflakes” the secretary sprinkled across Washington over nearly five decades: memos both trivial and grave, ponderous and historic. In public, Rumsfeld would write and say that the evidence of WMDs in Iraq was strong, but then write in memos that the intelligence was suspect, “as if to demonstrate his prescience and open-mindedness,” as David and I wrote in 2011. “I don’t know where all these words came from,” he faux-bewilderingly confesses to Morris.

Rumsfeld seems to me like a man fully aware of the public’s short memory, affinity for second chances, and tender spot for the elderly. He plays up the things that make him seem old, puffing out the space above his upper lip and frequently contradicting Morris’s narration of recent history as if to say, No, no, that’s not quite right sonny.

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Execution Metadata

From NYRB, David Cole writes:

Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress’s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development.

For some, no doubt, the very fact that this bill has attracted such broad bipartisan approval will be grounds for suspicion. After all, this is the same Congress that repeatedly reauthorized the 2001 USA Patriot Act, a law that was also proposed by Sensenbrenner and on which the bulk collection of metadata was said to rest—even if many members of Congress were not aware of how the NSA was using (or abusing) it. And this is the same administration that retained the NSA’s data collection program, inherited from its predecessor, as long as it was a secret, and only called for reform when the American people learned from the disclosures of NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government was routinely collecting phone and Internet records on all of us. So, one might well ask, if Congress and the White House, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, all now agree on reform, how meaningful can the reform be?

This is a reasonable question. This compromise bill addresses only one part of the NSA’s surveillance activities, and does not do nearly enough to address the many other privacy-invasive practices that we now know the NSA has undertaken. But it’s nonetheless an important first step, and would introduce several crucial reforms affecting all Americans.

First, and most importantly, it would significantly limit the collection of phone metadata and other “business records.” Until now, the NSA and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have aggressively interpreted a USA Patriot Act provision that authorized collection of business records “relevant” to a counterterrorism investigation. The NSA convinced the court that because it might be useful in the future to search through anyone’s calling history to see if that person had been in contact with a suspected terrorist, the agency should be able to collect everyone’s records and store them for five years.

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Related articles

Former NSA Director: 'We Kill People Based on Metadata.'

House passes watered down NSA reform bill

Surveillance state quote of the day

Paolo Rocco

From New Inquiry-Hackdom

From Renata Adler’s review of Pauline Kael’s When the Lights Go Down, in the August 14, 1980, issue of the New York Review of Books

The consumer service remains the professional basis for the staff reviewer’s job; fidelity, evidence, and so forth are still the measures of his value, but the high critical edge becomes misplaced, disproportionate when applied to most ordinary work. The staff critic is nonetheless obliged, and paid, to do more than simply mark time between rich periods and occasional masterpieces. The simple truth—this is okay, this is not okay, this is vile, this resembles that, this is good indeed, this is unspeakable—is not a day’s work for a thinking adult. Some critics go shrill. Others go stale. A lot go simultaneously shrill and stale…. Some staff critics quit and choose to work flat out again, on other interests and in intermittent pieces. By far the most common tendency, however, is to stay put and simply to inflate, to pretend that each day’s text is after all a crisis—the most, first, best, worst, finest, meanest, deepest, etc.—to take on, since we are dealing in superlatives, one of the first, most unmistakable marks of the hack.

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