here are some photos from the recent summer residency at hangar in barcelona, from the radically transforming neighborhood of poble nou. If you believe the hype, then the unabashed destruction of all local environments is making way for a new kind of architectural “progress.” The main square next to hangar is being called, in english, “Central Park”. Hmm…

The main act of industrial preservation are the lonely chimneys left at each site…a reminder of industry and the working class who are being driven out.

little slideshow from flickr

Summer’s winding down. Been one of the best I’ve had in years, have to say. I am still in barcelona, on my way back soon to the monstrosity of smallness that is new york. Along those lines, I thought I might make a point of doing a little self promotion in anticipation of the pressure cooker.

my alter ego (can one person have that much ego such that one body is not enough?!) NRON has a mix online. The catch: it is a small part of the larger picture of PURE FIRE 2006 megamix with djs Reaganomics, Peter Gunn and Criterion, out on Apple Core from Broklyn Beats records. But I am easy like that, so you can listen to and download NRON’s part below. Get it while its hot for your lower res listening pleasure.

So what else? I can say barcelona has been great for working on music and on my current mapping strategy research, which vaguely falls under the category of locative sound practice. Sad to see it all change, but time to school and get schooled in the ny race to oblivion…so as jc says, see you on the other side!

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When 911 happened, i was at the dentist in Rio de Janeiro. I ran home, leaving the chair, with holes drilled in my teeth, to watch the towers fall.
What kept running through my mind was “Here we go. There will be such a backlash against whover did this, that it is going to finally give the U.S. the excuse to attack whomever they wish for whatever reason.”

But the backlash was insidious. I thought it would begin locally, with each neighborhood burning anything they deemed muslim or Other. But it didn’t. Instead, it has creeped in, through the Patriot Act, through Homeland security, and through Fox news.

And now it has come out, because it can, the country is prepared. The new isolationism has been primed through a campaign of fear.

Today, fox news had a guest who called for a “muslim only line at the airport.”

Now this isn’t any different than any other sensationalist drivel they report. But the significance is much larger now, because it doesn’t really faze me as an American. I say to myself, “Well of course they would say that to get ratings.” But the fact remains, millions of people watch these shows, and millions of people determine their politics now on their relationship to fear of terror.

The fear generation machine launched into hyperdrive after 911 in the US is a creeper, a sleeper cell. We are now numbed to its call for global free market capitalism masked as democracy, we are numbed to the claim that freedom is equal to control of oil reserves, numbed into believing that WMD was not the excuse we used to attack Iraq, numbed to the invented Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden connections, numbed to Guantanamo and the illegal prisons around the world that are completely against anything we deem or have deemed democratic even by our own constitution. We are numbed because the terrorist sleeper cell has lulled us to sleep with it.

today I visited the MACBA here in barcelona (redundant?). Excellent shows of both George Brecht and on artists who have used vinyl records as their medium. I could report for hours on each, but suffice to say, each engaged with areas that I find both critical and fascinating: chance and sound. So I was enthralled, and spent the better part of a (rainy!!) day here in barcelona looking, listening and laughing.

I will post more specifics soon as I am a little drained. As u can see, there’s a little upgrade to the dpblog, which has taken too much time and energy and now i must rest. Still, hope it makes reading easier and more pleasurable…ok, more in a sec.

One thing I like to do to people is make them close their ears.

Use your hands, cover your ears, and for 1 minute, close your eyes. When you wake up, the first thing you must do is write down what you heard.

It is a simple exercise. But it reminds me that I can never close my ears, only focus to listen.

John Cage pronounced the mapping of sound to the body and the inexctricable noise (perhaps music) we produce with our own bloodstream and body, and we began to know that silence is impossible during life. But as I pass from Germany back to Spain, I have to ask, is there prehearing? I ask, because the ocean seems to lull me to sleep…was this the sound of the amniotic fluid that surrounded me? Or was it the darwinian origins of human development? Or is it that finally, we hear the 75% of ourselves that remains in the form of water?

I know that these questions are not to be answered by science (are any?). But it has been again to go deeper into sound, as waves, that I seem to find some clues. As Kittler reminds us, the only way of storing sound or image is still through waves. Here is just plain cool math to say we are made of waves.

If Frequency Modulation is our means of broadcasting mapped noise (sound), then Language, a way of mapping sound to referent, is a great site for examining our little gestures of mapping. I like the lies and mistakes… like M. Hulot’s Holiday or Coyle & Sharpe’s Bulg- The Hill

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