In the year 2214, the Center for Humanistic Study has discovered an unpublished manuscript by Joanna Demers, a musicologist who lived some two centuries before. Her writing interrogates the music of artists ranging from David Bowie and Scott Walker to Kanye West and The KLF. Questioning how people of the early twenty-first century could have believed that music was alive, and that music was simultaneously on the brink of extinction, light is shed on why the United States subsequently chose to eliminate the humanities from universities, and to embrace fascism…

This issue doubles as a catalog-of-sorts to Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, a group exhibition curated by Laura Hoptman at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from May 6 to August 27, 2012. It is a *pseudo*-catalog in the sense that, other than a section of images at the back, it bears no direct relation to the works in the exhibition. Instead, the bulletins extend in different directions from the same title, and could be collectively summarized as preoccupied with the more social aspects of Typography. In this way we hope to throw some *glancing* light on the exhibition. For ...

This Issue was produced under the auspices of the research program Dexter Bang Sinister at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, January 21 – October 28, 2012, curated by Rhea Dall. The program, devised by Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey together with writer-critic-curator Lars Bang Larsen, was based on Lars’s just-completed PhD dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, A History of Irritated Material: Psychedelic Concepts in Neo-Avantgarde Art. In practice, a large part of the so-called research played out in the form of an exhibition set up to explore the notion of *black & white psychedelia*— halfway closing the doors of ...

Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion (1982–84) is a video essay populated by punk and rock performers (Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Black Flag and Glenn Branca) and historical figures (including Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers). This coming together of several narrative voice-overs, of singing and shouting voices, of jarring sounds and text overlaid onto shaky, gritty images, proposes a historical genealogy of rock music and an ambitious thesis on the origins of America. In this illustrated book, Kodwo Eshun examines this landmark work of contemporary moving image in relation to Graham’s wider body of work and to the broader culture of ...

When Spotify was founded in 2006, it aimed to solve the problem of online music distribution, remunerating artists for plays. 13 years on, it is a massive data node that is having a profound effect on how artists and audiences connect. In this cast, New Models speaks with music journalist Liz Pelly, who has written extensively on Spotify, particularly its impact on independent music. She talks to us, here, about Spotify’s structure, how it nudges artists to optimize their acts through metrics, and what it understands “music” (let alone “independent”) culture to be. Liz also gives an update on community ...

Edie Fake, Jamillah James, Alexis Blair Penney Hosted by MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, NY Sunday November 18, 2012 2pm The Center for Experimental Lectures is thrilled to present lectures by Edie Fake, Jamillah James, and Alexis Blair Penney, hosted by MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York as part of the museum’s Sunday Sessions program. Artist Edie Fake’s lecture The Sexual Life of Patterns explores the concept of “the weave” in relation to textiles, gender, and the trans body. Extending the logic of intuitive herbalism, magic, and tarot into textile decoration, ornamentation, and repetitive pattern, Fake’s lecture will explore the physical ...

Hang on wait is this 7 hours of Sister Ray!? This is even more Ray than Steve Irwin done got. Collected, devised and selected by Thomas “Honey” Newth esq. 0.00 (mystery extract) Who knows where this is from? It may even be elsewhere on this mix. Who can say? Bootlegs throw up funny things like this. They are also of, ahem, variable audio quality. 2.13 The Gymnasium, NYC, April 7 or 8, 1967 The song’s about a year old now, having been trotted out in the summer of ’66 according to a setlist, but they say this is the earliest recording. The Gymnasium, incidentally, was ...

“It doesn’t seem to me that anyone has discovered much that’s new since the Illiad or the Odyssey” Raymond Queneau “The audience, which consisted largely of bikers, was unusually hostile, and Iggy, as usual, fed on that hostility, soaked it up and gave it back and absorbed it all over again in an eerie, frightening symbiosis. “All right,” he finally said, stopping a song in the middle, “you assholes wanta hear ‘Louie Louie’ we’ll give you ‘Louie, Louie.’” So the Stooges played a forty-five-minute version of ‘Louie Louie’” Lester Bangs Devised and presented by Dan Fox, words by Raymond Queneau Tracklisting: Louie Louie – Richard Berry ...

Emerging artist and theorist Micah Silver elaborates on the impact of audio on human behavior and social space. Silver’s research ranges from Meillassoux and a triangulation of audio’s trans-substance, to Yves Klein’s Air Architecture, through La Monte Young’s Dream House, and culminates in a discussion of historically significant audio systems and their importance as ephemeral social architectures made of air.

Hear Ye Here ye Here hare here….. Me The Final Run iNs are rip snort rippers ripping Dusters and Twisters. We played 7 shows in 5 states. We made 7 stage sets, 7 posters, 264 unique hand made spray paint stencil t-shirts and one 7 inch record album. We crushed it up front, in the back and all over the place.

As Sci-Fi predictions are realized, and we begin to countenance serving under, living with – and even loving – robots, discussion turns to what constitutes “artificial intelligence” and to what extent we are sentient beings or just programmed automatons ourselves. Though we are now completely reliant on machines and have wrought a world where we are helpless without them, we still feel superior to them in that we have “free will”; Meanwhile, the computers, appliances, and gadgets upon which we depend are programmed by those of our creed (i.e. humans). “Free will” would be defined as the ability to choose; what we think, ...

GERARDO VELÁZQUEZ wrote filth poetry. No taboo was off limits. As a self-described militant homosexual, he skewered societal norms through his transgressive sound art, performances, computer graphics, song lyrics, and poems. Velázquez was born in Mexico in 1958 and later immigrated with his family to Los Angeles. In 1978, he co-founded the infamous synthpunk band Nervous Gender alongside bandmates Michael Ochoa, Edward Stapleton, and Phranc. The band emerged from the early LA punk scene of the late 1970s wielding synthesizers in lieu of guitars. Their sound was raucous and confrontational, fondly described by punk fanzine Slash as “absolutely un-hummable.” They ...