THISISNOTANEXIT - MANIFESTO #1

Beware this forthcoming label-comp! Because it is two CDs of wildness from the TINAE roster, including Naum Gabo, Pink Stallone, The Dark Esquire, Professor Genius, Spectral Empire, Club Silencio, and also Night Plane. It will rain like fire, and burn the bridges where they stand.

new TINAE online shop!

Order a personal copy of Night Plane - Chinese Shadows 12" from the lovely new THISISNOTANEXIT online shop. Buy this twelve inch online, and then it will appear at your house! On this twelve inch, three songs have been etched onto vinyl, which can be heard according to a record player. You can like them!

Psychedelic Australia

buffalo - freedom

some lost heavy-psych wildness from Australia's Buffalo, from their 1973 LP Volcanic Rock. If "Freedom" by Buffalo off of Volcanic Rock isn't the most testosteronic-sounding song listing ever, I don't know what is. Personally my associations with Australia are that it is as if you made Texas an entire continent, which Texas already believes itself to be. Australia is like Texas' fantasy version of itself: an entire continent where you drive around in the wilderness, drink too much, and have psychedelic visions in the outback while jamming songs about "Freedom." You'll note as well that this song is a dead ringer for Soundgarden. When you hear dude sing try and not think about Chris Cornell.

Two years after Volcanic Rock, Peter Weir directed Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is also about psychedelic aussies, except instead of brawny biker types it's about boarding school girls who go into the wilderness and have a group freak-out. Here's the film's central scene.

Australia reminds me also of course of mi madre, born in Taree, New South Wales, north of Sydney. She lived there until she was nine, when her family immigrated to the United States. My mother was personally not very psychedelic, although she did have a pet kookaburra as a child. Having weird pets is kind of psychedelic, especially if it is an unusual species that only exists in one part of the world.

We visited Australia for a month when I was twelve, which was the coolest thing ever. I got to feed kangaroos and hug a koala bear. On my birthday, my father took me up in a private airplane, which he flew, over the Great Barrier Reef.

At one point we stayed at a bed & breakfast that was on a ranch. The family had a daughter about my age who took me around on a four-wheeler. At one point my father and the owner of the ranch were talking about the owner's dogs. "Yeah, they're bitches." He remarked, and because I was twelve I was like whoa can he say that?? Later the daughter explained to me and my brother about weird prepubescent Australian sex rituals, which involved wearing and then breaking a bracelet called a "nigga-band" and then "rooting" each other (not making this up).

The history of Australia's colonization involves the Brits taking all their unwanted denegerate types and then leaving them on a beautifully trippy, completely unique unexplored continent where the indigenous tribes have psychic powers. It's basically an episode of "Lost."

Promo Mixes

(Front Club, Hamburg Germany, 1989)

promomixes.com is a new mix site focusing on historically-influential clubs. Each monthly mix will feature the sounds of a particular club mixed by a DJ who played there, someone who danced there, or someone who simply still jocks the sound.

The first mix is from Berlin's Finn Johannsen and concerns Hamburg's Front Club, one of the first European venues to start playing house music.And apparently a fun place to visit - see the pic of a young couple handcuffed while dancing. Finn has put together "a tape he'd want to slip the owners of Front Club in 1990." Consider it the inaugural offering for a site that promises to offer classic electronic satisfaction together with some important history lessons.

Omni Ciani

Omni magazine was a science/futurism publication founded by Bob Guccione Jr. that ran from the late seventies to the mid-nineties. It ushered in a new era of popular science journalism, being something like the Wired magazine of its time, but with more of a speculative bent. Omni regularly featured pieces from science-fiction luminaries including Arthur C. Clarke and William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace in Omni's pages. The speculative side also meant a predilection for new age-y and UFO-related pseudo-science. In the mid-nineties Omni was the first print publication to go entirely online. You can read an article in Slate magazine here about the history of Omni, and as well visit the online tribute site.

Here is a clip from Omni's short-lived TV incarnation, featuring the analog synth wizardress / nerd pin-up Suzanne Ciani as she composes music for a pinball game. Not only is it remarkably hypnotic to watch her program computers and synthesizers, I also love the smug goofball TV show host at the beginning, lounging by a space lamp and saying "isn't it amazing that electricity of this kind will one day be used to regrow human limbs?" in a ridiculously smug voice, summing up the sort of self-oblivious giddiness of 70s futurism.

Ciani, a student of synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla, has enjoyed a successful career as a musician and commercial composer for several decades, having composed the sound effects for the MECO disco Stars Wars record, releasing her classic Seven Waves album, and scoring numerous commercials. These included a coke commercial in which she used synthesizers to generate the satisfying PSSSHT sound of a soda can being opened.

WAV files of Ciani's designs for the Xenon pinball game shown in the Omni clip are posted on her website.

Here is Suzanne in another clip, this time from the children's tv show 3-2-1 Contact, explaining the properties of electronic sound.

The Green Rush

night plane - blue I feel (when I'm feeling down)

After the Gold Rush, the Green Rush

In honor of Avatar's profound hues of true blue, here's a little night plane jam, its vocals clipped from a certain lost soul gem by the three degrees. You'll find it as well in the midst of my latest mix, "signs in the sky."

But although Cameron's epic may be steeped in blue, were you to puncture its gargantuan heart, green would be the color on your hands. Green, the color of cash in North America, and the color used as cultural short-hand for anything deemed remotely environmentally-conscious, is a fitting color to apply to Avatar, which will certainly see plenty of dollars as it disseminates its utopian eco-fairy tale.

While the value of Avatar may seem to lie largely in its contribution to digital cinema production, and not in its relatively heavy-handed narrative, there is actually a subtle plot point in the depiction of the indigenous Na'vi tribe. It's not a movie about technology versus nature, it's a movie about low-tech vs. high tech. And guess what? It's actually the stone-arrow firing Na'vi who are the high-tech team, not the missile-launching humans. Dr. Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver, points out that the planet Pandora functions on a biological level like a huge labyrinthine network, everything is connected to everything else. It's like if the internet were a whole biosphere. The name Pandora also refers not only to the Greek myth but to pandora.com, the online music portal which generates music stations based on your preferences.

The green valley of Pandora is also silicon valley. Advances in digital and nano technology will, in the near future, more and more resemble the kind of lessons taught by Gaia spirit-mother myths: everything is connected. Human technology will continue to infiltrate the biosphere on a cellular level. Very very high-tech will more and more resemble no-tech, that is, it will trend towards resembling nature.

- - - - -

Included here is a live performance by Thom Yorke of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" at Electric Lady Studios in 2003. The lyrics of the final verse reflect a sci-fi eco-utopianism not dissimilar from Avatar's:

"Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying

In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun"

Fans of Neil will remember of course that the first verse contains the line "Look at mother nature on the run, in the nineteen seventies."

After the gold rush, the green rush. After the rush to tear precious elements out of the earth, the rush that possesses the villains of Avatar, the rush to immerse again in nature, like Avatar's protagonist.

The green rush is on for 2010: this means broader dissemination of environmental concerns and awarenesses. It's green for a second reason though, because of how capitalism works. The more that consumers and clients display concern for the environment, the more that businesses will mirror this concern for the sake of profit. The green rush is also a gold rush.

The green rush also means: the chance to profit off the increased de-criminalization of marijuana. This is the double green: the green dollar bill, and the green pot leaf. They will continue to befriend and get each other high. It is only a matter of time before you will have psychedelic suburbia: living rooms with gadgets and accessories more befitting the medicinal and recreational consumption of THC. Imagine the Skymall (tm) catalog of the near future, replete with unnecessarily inventive pot gadgets. Of all narcotics, pot is the easiest for capitalism to embrace, because not only is it comparatively harmless and friendly, but pot culture involves tons of cannabis device-making: everyone knows your stoner friend is by default also a great DIY carpenter.

Finally, green is also the color of the growing resistance movement in Iran. In 2010, green thus is the color for emergent democratic trends in the Muslim world and the Middle East, the color for eco-conscious capitalism, and for commercial developments in de-criminalized substances.

Night Plane - Signs in the Sky mix

Night Plane - Signs in the Sky

Intro: Let the Haters Hate

1. Norway Light Spiral

2. Kremlin Pyramid

3. Cava Scura

4. Blue I Feel (When I'm Feeling Down)

5. Don't Come Running

6. Here On Earth

Night Plane brings you "Signs in the Sky," a 23-minute mix of new and unreleased original material - afro/beardo/deepo styles - in honor of two recent aerial mysteries. Within twenty-four hours of one another, two strange phenomena recently occurred in the night skies of the Northern Hemisphere. The first, a swirling abyss of blue light, shone above Oslo. The second, a hovering pyramid, thought to be much as one mile long, menaced the airspace over Moscow's Red Square. Numerous eyewitness and video testimonies for both events exist. The light spiral is confirmed to have occurred on Dec 9th, and some accounts place the Kremlin pyramid around the same time. Russia's Pravda news agency, however, did not report the pyramid until Dec 18th - possibly since the spiral was announced as the result of a failed Russian missile launch, the Russian authorities did not want the event of the still-unexplained pyramid to be associated with the Norwegian light display. Some conspiracy theorists read both spiral and pyramid as related in some way to Obama's Nobel Peace prize speech given on Dec 10th. Are the spiral and pyramid related? Is one or both of extraterrestrial origin? I mean, holy shit, that's a goddamn pyramid floating over the Kremlin. Enjoy.

Flights of the Night Plane

Refinery29 hosts their best-of 2009 playlist, mixed by Night Plane

In the UK, Converse Music has the Night Plane remix of The Detachments "Circles" for free download

Night Plane remix of "Situation" by The Dark Esquire now up on Myspace, digital release on January 25th

The Dark Esquire - Situation 12"

The spectacle is real.

The situation is real.

Available January 25th, The Dark Esquire's much-anticipated debut 12" for THISISNOTANEXIT, hand-printed silkscreen cover, 300 copies. Night Plane remix on the digital release.

Here's the vid:

occult gathering II: winter solstice

Ok, this is a little weird, but it looks like whoever organized the Brooklyn Heights occult gathering reads AC, or else is good with Google, as they found my site and sent this in, announcing a follow-up event. someone please go and tell me what happened, I just got home to texas.