In love with trash trucks and bar signs Dirty sidewalks and chaotic lines Stepped on dead rats riding the rail Soothing sirens announce a bloodied trail
A desperate reach to grab the air The rambling mind, a heart laid bare Spilt milk and the ding, ding, ding! A date with disaster or a song to sing?
In love with bar signs and trash trucks The struggle to enjoy a couple more bucks A bustled hustle each patron employs The sound of a memory, a beautiful noise
Shouts from the wet streets are rising Up the five floors exercising A cozy space amongst the debris Dreamt by dreams, it’s no life ordinary
The cacophony of modern life also stops us from listening. The acoustics in restaurants can make it difficult, if not impossible, for diners to clearly hear one another. Offices with an open design ensure every keyboard click, telephone call and after-lunch belch make for constant racket. Traffic noise on city streets, music playing in shops and the bean grinder at your favourite coffeehouse exceed the volume of normal conversation by as much as 30 decibels, and can even cause hearing loss.
Kate Murphy (New York Times, Talk Less, Listen More)
First, please quiet the noise in my head.
The events of this past week have put me in a spin. Even as the sadness recedes somewhat, images pop up randomly, memories flicker; a pre-tear feeling appears in my chest and throat but is soon countered by my rationality and tucked back away.
While my mind wanders less there is a lack of clarity around my thoughts. A directionless, purposeless meandering. This is a different feeling to the one I was experiencing previously. Where I could sit in my class and concentrate with students running, shouting and screaming. Now it drives me crazy.
All this adds up to limit my engagement, to cloud my listening ability. I can hear but I’m not listening.
Listening is a difficult skill to master. Made even more complicated by the sound-byte outrages of social media culture. I don’t feel that I have ever been able to listen properly. I want to practice the quietening of my own thoughts and be more fully engaged, whether in conversation, in watching videos and movies and to attempt that euphoric emotion when really listening to music.
I keep reminding myself to talk less, to shut up a little. Not to jump into what I want to say, to make my point or to win the argument. Just listen. And think.
Damn, this was hard to write today. It’s probably reflected in the scattered approach and execution. But every day I accept the challenge. Put words down on paper. Get thoughts out. Think, until clarity.
Hello and welcome to inconclusive arguments in today’s conference we have a psychologist, a guru, an athlete, a freak, a scientist, a dictator, an anarchist, a mass murderer, a composer, a human vegetable, and a complete outsider. let’s open the discussion with you, er huh what gives? that look of revelation on the athlete’s face – the complete outsider is the centre of attention – just what is the human vegetable doing to the psychologist, the freak is eating the mass murderer, o my god terrifying vistas of reality and our position therein are being opened up to us all, this is the worst thing that’s happened to mankind and in the studio they’ve opted for a new dark age but your commentator has gone stark staring mad.
New Dark Age by Rudimentary Peni
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful to have put myself on a better path. It’s a struggle but it will be worth it.
To-do list
Speak less – listen more – do not complain ½
Write a blog post ✅
Check George’s lesson plan again ✅
Do body scan and breathing concentration ½
WOOP ✅
A slightly disrupted day lessons-wise but at least it meant I only really taught one lesson so it was very easy.
I took some time to read before we went out for dinner and then later meeting Bee and George. Had a few drinks together but got the feeling that everyone was a little too tired to really relax and fully enjoy the night. I, myself, really struggled to get some thoughts out on the blog and I was writing about how confusing and unclear my thinking has been since Kimi passed.
I also started reading more about the Stoic contemplation of death which is something more on my mind now.
And now, slightly hungover, it’s a little difficult to find words.
Today I will attempt to remind myself that I may die tonight in an effort to push myself back into the moment.
Harsh Noise from Bangkok, Thailand, Main project of “Arkat Vinyapiroath” The sounds of liberation which may lead to free the others from their inner confinement, Bangkok Noise outfit who represents the stories through recordings from time to time in both acoustic and electric sound synthesis.
Grave Blankets:
Recorded with signals sent from land to space to land again and again and again. Thanks to resistors and capacitors.
Gamnad737:
Gamnad737’s track recorded, mixed, mastered by Arkat Vinyapiroath at Moontone Records in 2019
Astolfo Sulla Luna is an Italian trio with a natural inclination to researching combinations between literature and mathematics. The approach to composition is similar to classical music, but taking sounds and attitude from the underground scene, from noise to post hardcore, from math rock to jazz core.
After two EPs, Moti Browniani (2011) and Cancroregina (2012), they released their first LP on November 2015, Ψ², a work filled with noises, sounds of the sea and clock’s tickings, chess games and battles against one’s self.
Roland Barthes once said: “The ‘grain’ of the voice is not – or is not merely – its timbre; the signifiance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else,” but who gives a shit? Torturing Nurse would sooner cough on you than speak to you, and they are most definitely not concerned with “music”, just the “some- thing else”. The “grain” here is the granular phlegm at the bottom of “vocalist” Junky’s throat, a choking, faltering reference to the body before the machine takes full control. For this music, you don’t need ears. You don’t even need a body, really. What would Barthes say about the grating grain of all voices at once? Music that’s been fed through the effect-chain meat grinder so many times it ceases to be readable as “music” and actually starts to sound like meat? Just GRIND, fine-ground, the last tiny pieces of humanity ebbing through the proverbial hourglass, grain by grain by grain. There’s no one left: just “Midnight, The Stars & You,” and the horrible, howling wind whipping rust particles through your pores until you’re more corroded metal than man.
Roland Barthes also said: “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which… more
PRIMITIVE CALCULATORS are Frank Lovece – Vocals Stuart Grant – Guitar / Vocals Denise Hilton – Keyboards / Vocals David Light – Bass Andrea Blake – Rhythms / Vocals additional vocals by Pocket Calculators featuring Grace, Velvet Sand (Siege-a & O-g-o), Fu and Stella Electrika
In 2004, Sub Jam established it’s sub-label Kwanyin Records. In 2010 Kwanyin starts the “Mini Kwanyin” series. CDR, limited copies, unified packages, hand produced. The value of CD (or CDR, vinyl etc) is not just as the medium of music but how it builds a relationship with people. This is a series of guerrilla publishing – it’s awaking more sounds.
Compiled by Yan Jun and co-released with Mini Kwanyin (China) and tenzenmen (Australia)
The contest to kill 100 people using a sword (百人斬り競争 hyakunin-giri kyōsō) is a wartime account of a “contest” between two Japanese Army officers during the Japanese invasion of China over which of them could first kill 100 people with his sword. The two officers were later executed on war crimes charges for their involvement. Since that time, the historicity of the event has been hotly contested, often by Japanese nationalists or revisionist historians seeking to invalidate the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre.
The issue first emerged from a series of wartime Japanese-language newspaper articles, which celebrated the “heroic” killing of Chinese by two Japanese officers, who were engaged in a competition to see who could kill the most first.The issue was revived in the 1970s and sparked a larger controversy over Japanese war crimes in China, and in particular the Nanking Massacre.
The original newspaper accounts described the killings as hand-to-hand combat; historians have suggested that they were more likely just another part of the widespread mass killings of defenseless prisoners.
At the end of 2011 contact was made with specialist lathe press label Bubutz Records in Italy to issue a Torturing Nurse recording on one-sided clear vinyl with a light wooden back. The process was derailed slightly as the very hard highband frequencies supplied by Torturing Nurse were damaging the cutting system! The initial run of 30 was reduced to just the 9 requested by Torturing Nurse and tenzenmen as Bubutz didn’t want to risk any further damage to their equipment!
Update 23/9/2012: New versions now available but very limited due to the high cost involved in manufacture. These items made in the USA and only 2 copies of each were ever produced.
Photography: Contiero & Diacci Design: Antonio Contiero
1994ever 