To little(much) information...
Emancipator - Soon It Will Be Cold
Emancipator escaped from the Underground Railroad Chain Gang in the 11th century. He invented the hot air balloon, with which he chartered the Amazon River. He invented wine... or so he claims. In truth, Emancipator is a 19 year old college student, a musician who's first attempt at an
album was worthy enough to grab the attention of a record label. Quite an attempt indeed, his electronica influenced music is by no means complex-- but rather an atmosphere, just ethereal enough to prod the imagination and spur wistful emotion-- trip-hop beats, just sparse and distant enough to create an ebb/flow between thought and a subconscious reality.
Call it experimental? I wouldn't, in fact Emancipator takes his debut album down a road trodden by many before him-- in the same vein as Massive Attack, DJ Shadow, and Portishead in the 90's, followed by countless acts in the past decade. In 2009, pioneering and originality seemingly require a trek into the musical hinterland of the abstruse-- no so with Emancipator. In fact, Soon It Will Be Cold is surprisingly accessible and subtlety eclectic. Gritty, grunge ridden, and smoothly industrial, "The Darkest Evening of The Year", howls notes of winter wind ridden anecdote, turning its musical efficacy to the nightly fall of the sun. Though tracks like "When I Go" and "Soon It Will Be Cold Enough To Build Fires" liberally employ the use of sampled female vocals, recalling a minimalistic and glitchy Zero 7 at work. One of the most prominently thoughtful tracks on the album remains "First Snow", its a vertical progress for the listener, building, slowly accruing, not dissimilar to the first snow of the year. Emancipator weaves a picture, exploiting a certain awe and wonder associated with events like a "First Snow".
In my mind, a very straightforward album. After one listen each song had already seemed to represent something in my mind, though I am almost certain that this is what creates such a captivation with the music. Now, a Lep will always be a ball, a Treston a ladder, and Emancipator will be forever tied to this fall afternoon that I ate and drank of Soon It Will Be Cold. Fortunately this album doesnt take itself to seriously, the music isnt overly involved, and the mood is light.
For a debut album, Emancipator has filled my soul with a brisk wind, the breed of wind that wakes you up and leaves you with a fresh scent. His soaring tones and sampled vocals, absent of any enigma, disembarks your mind with a sort of wonder that is instantly solved by nostalgia. This album will never sell billions of copies, maybe one-hundred and five, few blogs will hype it, few hipsters will drop its title,... though I could be wrong. Soon It Will Be Cold is a thoroughly optimistic album, there's little room for that in the indie world (or is there?).
Tracklist1 Eve
2 Soon It Will Be Cold Enough To Build Fires
4 Wolf Drawn
5 Anthem
6 Smoke Signals
7 When I Go
8 Periscope Up
9 With Rainy Eyes
10 Good Knight
11 Lionheart
12 Maps
13 Father King
14 The Darkest Evening Of The Year
Christian Bök is Canadian, has a Ph. D. in English literature from New York University, is the only human being to write a widely successful five part book of univocal poetry based on the vowels (check: Eunoia), and is now planning his next bold undertaking: the encoding of a poetic piece into the genetic structure of a living organism (check: Xenotext Experiment). It may sound revolutionary, which it likely is, but Bök is by no means the originator of the idea. The project belongs to an experimental artistic movement called transgenic art that was pioneered, at least in the 90's, by Eduardo Kac, who integrated Genesis 1:26 into the genetic sequence of certain bacterium causing mutations that slightly altered the verse. But while Bök cannot be said to own all stock in the idea, his approach to the transgenic enterprise has by comparison more balls. This is because his task, nearly as epic as the possible long term results, is to develop not just a meaningful poem but one that is comprised of a stringently limited selection of words that have the potential of resulting in a meaningful combination of words pieced together from the genetic information of the protein that is synthesized in response to the assimilation of the implanted "poem" sequence. Breathe.
So in essence, Bök will be starting a poetic conversation with the language of life.
But, who will be Bök's microscopic correspondent? None other than nature's epitome of hard ass, Deinococcus radiodurans, the kind of hard knock germ you'd have to launch into the belly of the sun just to put a dent in its membrane. And surely, what better microbial breed to serve as host for your poem-parasite than one that seems to be as evolutionarily robust as an extraterrestrial super virus that grew up crawling between irradiated crags on a sizzling deep space comet?
Here's the mug:
So not only is it built like a ship, but it's so resistant to radiation that it would likely brush off a total nuclear apocalypse, whilst humans, etc. become dust lighting up an atomic sunset. And that explains the selection choice, since an essential part of this experiment is to flirt with the prospect of human culture surviving human civilization. It engages the perfectly familiar immortality impulse, of securing some part of our work on this planet in a genetic time capsule to carry through the next world cataclysm.
So, assuming all alternative ways of preserving a treasury of human achievements from disaster fails, and this meme-gene injection is humanity's only hope of leaving a more permanent mark in the cosmos, will just a poem be enough? This amounts to the paramount question for Bök's whole endeavor, that is whether the poems will "merit preservation in an organism for the next 6 billion years" (Believer interview).
All other considerations surrounding the Xenotext Experiment aside (i.e. the auspicious marriage of the arts and sciences, the symbolic vigor of putting the evolution of art to the test, or the statement it proclaims about how language infects), my biggest concern is philosophical. Let's assume the gene takes well to the architecture of our stalwart bacterium, which survives the human species by eons of our space/time. Will there be anything like a sense organ and a brain around to appreciate such a feat? This raises the next haunting question: if the success of the project relies on preserving a packet of cultural information (to some level of its original integrity), but no creature that has evolved in a similar enough way to recognize the properties of our language and aesthetics will be around after 6 billion years to brush their chins, to whom will it matter that human beings found a way to scratch their names into the walls of the evolving universe?
Unfortunately, I'm left with a wet blanket taste in my mouth.
But all minor qualms aside, the concept is thrilling and a project like this needs no further justification than what is provided in Bök's applaudable call to arms: "Poets need to be more ambitious."
Autotuned...
According to the subheading, this blog is supposed to include outer spatial themes. True to its word, I present you Carl Sagan (featuring Stephen Hawking) with 'A Glorious Dawn', coupled with a nice beat, a wandering piano, and T-Pain influenced vocals :
According to the subheading, this blog is supposed to include outer spatial themes. True to its word, I present you Carl Sagan (featuring Stephen Hawking) with 'A Glorious Dawn', coupled with a nice beat, a wandering piano, and T-Pain influenced vocals :
Volume II...
1. How does interpretation work at the United Nations? | Interesting read, I had always wondered how the leaders communicate. What prevents the Mongolian translator from misinterpreting and declaring war on Fiji?
2. Funny blog for unfortunate acronyms | Ex: Wisconsin Tourism Federation
3. Is backward time travel sabotaging the Hadron collider? | It keeps breaking, why? From NY Times: Physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.-- AH!
4. Japanese Cafe that serves you what the last guy ordered | And you order for the next patron.-- "Waiter, I'll have your finest cracker"
Find yourself a nice corner and a few hours...
Sarah Palin is writing a memoir. A bit belated of her "one year being anyone somewhat significant" anniversary. A book deal announced in July-- Sarah writes furiously-- book release in November. That sure was fast. She'll likely tell the tale of her wizened political journey, years of hard nosed debating, rhetoric from the stump, and a culmination of eons of well earned influence. All of this compacted into a 400 page volume?! Certainly we can all expect a sequel, maybe even a Winston Churchill-esque attempt will be made (six volumes).
Memoirs are turning into a funny thing. Traditionally they have been reserved for people who have accomplished important things, influenced the tide of world events, played host to a lifetime of achievement, etc.. Now anyone that has been on the news can whip out a sheath of freshly printed hardcover copies and stamp it "memoir"-- no matter that you have had a very uninteresting life.
To compete with Ms. Palin, New York Times writer, Joel Stein takes but a day and writes his memoirs. Because Palin wrote hers with Lynn Vincent, Stein chose Neil Strauss — who co-wrote memoirs with Marilyn Manson, Motley Crue, Dave Navarro and Jenna Jameson — to assist him in writing Rogue Journalist: An Even More American Life. He does a fine job.
Not to give it away, but to quote the entire sixth and final chapter-- which brings the work to a final, solemn conclusion:
That is all, the end.. now go write your own memoir. I am writing mine right now, in cursive, with a quill, by candlelight.. only hoping that the finest British publishing companies will pick up my work!
Sarah Palin is writing a memoir. A bit belated of her "one year being anyone somewhat significant" anniversary. A book deal announced in July-- Sarah writes furiously-- book release in November. That sure was fast. She'll likely tell the tale of her wizened political journey, years of hard nosed debating, rhetoric from the stump, and a culmination of eons of well earned influence. All of this compacted into a 400 page volume?! Certainly we can all expect a sequel, maybe even a Winston Churchill-esque attempt will be made (six volumes).
Memoirs are turning into a funny thing. Traditionally they have been reserved for people who have accomplished important things, influenced the tide of world events, played host to a lifetime of achievement, etc.. Now anyone that has been on the news can whip out a sheath of freshly printed hardcover copies and stamp it "memoir"-- no matter that you have had a very uninteresting life.
To compete with Ms. Palin, New York Times writer, Joel Stein takes but a day and writes his memoirs. Because Palin wrote hers with Lynn Vincent, Stein chose Neil Strauss — who co-wrote memoirs with Marilyn Manson, Motley Crue, Dave Navarro and Jenna Jameson — to assist him in writing Rogue Journalist: An Even More American Life. He does a fine job.
Not to give it away, but to quote the entire sixth and final chapter-- which brings the work to a final, solemn conclusion:
On April 29, 2009, my son Laszlo was born. I thought about Robert Goulet and my grandfather, and how they both would have loved to have seen him. But they were both dead. And one day, I will be too.
That is all, the end.. now go write your own memoir. I am writing mine right now, in cursive, with a quill, by candlelight.. only hoping that the finest British publishing companies will pick up my work!
How to stop highway deaths...
Often times politicians will take the long route in enacting, implementing, and promoting public safety procedures. I, on the other hand, like to tackle issues at the very root of the problem-- really delve deep into the solution, skip any middle man. People shout "to many people die in highway accidents", I would agree, and sympathize...a simple solution exists to those willing to understand reason-- buy more lemons. A very staight forward, highly correlated solution...
What kind of person are you? Go buy lemons! (as I slip away and buy stock in ABC Lemon & Co.)
Impressive!...
A photo shoot with President Obama is one of a kind (quite literally speaking), a nod to Andrew Sullivan for his post.
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