repurposed Thomas Köner album cover photography with GIFs found on dump.fm (top and bottom ones from unicorngirl)
August 2010
Gysin Book Review Plus YouTube
Dick Headley on Brion Gysin, with a YouTube showing Gysin at work in his painting studio.
On Gysin's book The Process:
Gysin is no Burroughs, Bowles or Castaneda. He’s good at creating allusion, he uses lots of tricks but The Process rambles and goes nowhere. None of this makes the book unreadable. The attempts at humour don’t come across well, Gysin doesn’t seem to have had much time for self-deprecation, but there are some interesting details about traveling in the Sahara once you get used to the tone. There’s also something fascinating about watching a self-absorbed individual trying to get away from his own self. And it is a very unusual book…there are points where it seems to read the reader.
(hat tip mark)
Gysin GIF Art
Interpretations of Brion Gysin's internet-available artwork. Dedicated to Ben Davis, critic of Artnet, who believes Gysin's works "are relics of a world that no longer exists, for bad and for good."
left: stage; right: hypothete
tiled (composite) Gysin-derived animation by stage - really well-done, please take a look
Gysin filmstrip animation by hypothete - previously posted; also excellent
Breaking the Pack Ice
At disquiet.com we are discussing a "dark ambient" work that eludes description more than most (it's possibly not "darK" at all). Thomas Köner, half of the seminal techno-noise outfit Porter Ricks, released Permafrost 17 years ago. The Type recording label re-release can be streamed on page where we are talking about it. So far commenters seem uncomfortable with the ice- and polar-related similes used to describe the work in the accompanying release notes. Above is the original cover, which beats the re-release's. As I noted on disquiet.com, "you have the word 'permafrost' but surrounded by all this ambiguous granular material. The mind has nowhere to go and doubles back into the music, instead of trying to think of additional nature metaphors" (such as "distant icy tonal blasts and croaking occidental winds").
The initial pronouncements have been made and now we need some serious disagreement. Please come join us and attempt to refudiate (thank you, Sarah Palin!) the authoritarian third person ukases on this music.
