Would you buy a used Text-Sound Composition from this man?
Well,yes, but you don't have to,because in this new,and very brief caring economy that we find ourselves in due to the virus pandemic, it's free to health workers......in fact everyone,and not just for doing your job either!
Don't wanna piss on anyone's bonfire....well in fact yes I do.....but the sheer hypocrisy and condecending nature of this applauding of the state employees,and other care workers for doing what they are employed to do.Instead of actually paying them what they are worth is,...well... sickening.
Then there's that 99 year old WW2 vet who has raised 20 million quid, so far, for the NHS staff in the UK by walking round his garden 100 times.....shouldn't the Government be doing that? Then we have Kevin Bacon appearing on an advertisment for the mobile phone company for whom he is the 'face of'.....can't think of a prettier face to front your product brand can you?.....playing 'sincere Bacon',as he informs us that this very company that rips us off every week is providing FREE unlimited internet access and calls for Health Workers. Don't it just make your heart swell with pride at how wonderful us humans are when our lives are...allegedly ....in danger.At least the Heaklth Workers have a job....there are millions unemployed who can'y afford to eat!How about raising money for them? Meanwhile Charities are going out of business.
Nothing like this support for the people we rely on to survive happened before the Virus miraculously popped into existence, and it'll be straight back to normal after this nebulous 'vaccine' appears in ten years time or so.
So, health workers, in fact everyone, in this new 'sharing' society that doesn't exist outside a crisis(Thatcher was right again!)...here's my bit....download some Larry Wendt for FREE, and play track 5,"The Secrets of Life and Death", over and over again until the Virus infects itself with our simpering,self-congratulatory fakery and disappears up its own arse.If it has an arse,which is debatable because no-one is really sure if they are classifiable as 'Alive'.
They don't grow, or have cells,and are simply made up of a set of genes bundled within a protective protein shell. They can't reproduce without a host cell,don't respond to stimuli,and can't make its own energy,but can adapt to their environment. The juries out,but the best that science can come up with is that they are 'Not Dead'.
"The secrets of the Dead and the Not-Dead"
Maybe its just that we humans are the real,and most lethal Virus, and as smaller viruses can in fact infect larger Viruses, this is just Mother Nature attempting to redress the balance and remove the part of the ecosystem that is endangering the existence of the whole? What more noble a gesture would it be if we sacrificed ourselves for the planet. I'm gonna start raising funds now by walking up and down my staircase for the noble nature saving cause of mass de-population...I got Bill Gates onside anyway.
But,you can't actually Kill a Virus,as it's barely 'alive'.One can only stop it from replicating....so maybe that's the answer to this human infection.....mass sterilization,or a more deadly Virus...Covid20.We are "Lost Among Dead Viruses"
Start donating now!
I'm not hearing any applause!!!???
Tracklist:
A1 Annabelle's Song
A2 Adaba
A3 How to Cook A Duck
A4 Lost Among Dead Giants
A5 The Secrets of Life and Death
B1 I'm Back
B2 Spiral
B3 In The Beginning Was The Whale
B4 The Spring
B5 There
So, as this came with a pamphlet in the words of Larry himself, you can read about it in the great man's own blurb below. Even though I don't approve of artists explaining themselves, it saves me from straining my brane trying to think of something amusing to say.....suely I'm entitled to a day off....this tape is ridiculously good by the way,lots of spooky whispering,which is always the trade mark of the shy artist working alone in a room with family members near-by or arsehole neighbours ready with threats of phone calls to the authorities...or worse ....take it away Lazza.......
Tracklist:
A1 Annabelle’s Song
A2 Lost Among Dead Giants
A3 Pandora
A4 Berlin Adonis
A5 Sparten From The Start
A6 Log π Sutra
You know what? I could listen to stuff like this all day long.Its got it all, abstract repetitive tape loops, disintegrating ambience, glitching 1970's computers,urban field recordings, lo-fi sound processing, drones, concréte poetry, a bloke with a beard sitting in room fiddling around with cassettes,a good pessimistic title, and tape hiss.Who needs instruments, in fact bin the instruments off,if I hear another guitar line, or 'phat' synth bass notes, I'll go as nuts as Larry Wendt obviously is.
The use of the adjective 'Sound-Poems' for this is rather tenuous, stretching the poetry part to an extreme.It has far more in common with Musique Concréte and old skool Industrial than Hugo Ball or even Jaap Blonk.Its basically the music I grew up with after glam and punk had burnt out and left me with UK DIY.There were legions of kids who would churn out tapes like this every week in 1979/80, mainly the wide ranging influence of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire rather than Larry Wendt, or even Hugo Ball.....although there is certainly a thread of distinct Dada influence by proxy that worked its way down from world war one era Germany into the bedrooms of Britains Youth......not that they were aware of this at all;but there were clearly many references in the works of The Instant Automatons and their various offshoots, like the Alien Brains, 391,and ,of course,Merz,which was a thinly veiled reference to Kurt Schwitters if ever there was one?
I'm figuring that the Dada influence on the North American continent was from a more intellectual angle,rather than fashion driven, as is mostly always the case in the UK,which exists as a mass consciousness as opposed to the individualism that US/Canadian culture is based on....its the vast distances involved in these north American countries that kills universal consciousness dead.
This is no longer the case however, as before the Internet the only way of meeting strangers from the other side of the continent was by snail mail,or telephone calls.Like communicating with an alien race,a conversation was impossible outside of your own town or star system,and that's where it stayed. In the UK anything good or bad, would invariably spread to the whole country within a month,generally stopping at the English Channel,and importing itself into the United States.The classic example being how American kids discovered UK Punk before they had even heard of the New York proto-punk groups from their own country.
Larry Wendt would not have heard of the UK Industrial Bands,but he was doing something very similar in Isolation.Naturally he wouldn't have stood a chance in Britain because he didn't 'look good'.You can't have one without the other 'inna inglan',as our jamaican sub-state would say,just like Americans would have never heard Reggae without it passing by 'Inglan' for the thumbs up first. Weird innit?
Welcome to a world of expanded expectations which expanded so much that it has destroyed entirely the thrill of the new.
Tracklist:
A1 Actaeon
A2 Zoo
A3 Gasoline
B1 Bugs, Crashes, And The Trash-80
B2 My Computer's First Words
B3 Rooster Music
B4 Next Door
Is it Ironic that an album called 'Big Ego' is opened by Patti Smith?....HeHeee,i'm like a dog with a bone here..... Seven minutes and fifty seconds of literary references,beat talk,and unaccompanied caterwauling.Truly horrible;but at least she didn't have that awful adult orientated rock group backing her up. I still haven't recovered from buying and then playing 'Horses',it just sounded so...er...'old'!? In fact most of those new york bohemian bands struck me in the same way...including The Ramones(Ironic bubblegum Rock?). The striking exception were 'Talking Heads',something genuinely new with no obvious roots, and to a certain extent, 'Television';mainly because they both dressed straight. But,Like The Ramones and Smith, punk they were not.
Cleveland seemed to have far more 'punk' cred to these ears.
At least we've got some early Philip Glass (yeah that's him,the funny looking one on the cover!?) to raise the bar,followed by lots of interesting and confrontational poetry of course;all this and a Robert Ashley track to get the weird level up a tad.
A evening of Poetry anyone? Shut up and listen for a couple of hours surrounded by an audience with applause hair-triggers, who laugh at the slightest hint of anything 'Clever';an action inferring that they are 'clever' too.The same problem occurs when a singer pronounces his lyrics clearly so you can hear the words,which naturally suggests that he,forward slash,she, must be saying something sickeningly meaningful.Its pop music, get over it! I'm sure whoever's reading this don't give several shades of shite what I think about anything,as much as I could not care less what a pop vocalists view is on any political situation or dogma.I still have no idea what Joe Strummer was going on about,but from what I understand, it was some pseudo-lefty hypocrisy with rhymes kinda stuff.Trying their level best to put the 'Y' in Nihilism.
No other such event demonstrates the manifestation of the human 'Hive Mind' than a poetry performance. The best way to experience it is buy,or download,the record of the event,hitting the pause button to get another smoothie from the fridge,or most likely go to bed.
No...its good really....its just that the punk priestess as played by hippie Smith just pissed me off a tad.
Tracklist:
A1 –Patti Smith - The Histories Of The Universe 7:46
A2 –Philip Glass - A Secret Solo 2:17
A3 –John Giorno - Grasping At Emptiness 9:45
A4 –Laurie Anderson - Three Expediences 3:00
A5 –Robert Wilson & Christopher Knowles - A Letter To Queen 8:00
B1 –Meredith Monk - Education Of The Girlchild, 1972: Biography 8:00
B2 –Michael Lally - All Of The Above (Excerpt) 6:17
B3 –Robert Lowell - Ulysses & Circe (Excerpt) 9:40
B4 –Larry Wendt - How To Cook A Duck 4:44
B5 –Jackie Curtis - Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas 2:27
C1 –Ed Sanders - The Fugs: A Monologue 2:12
C2 –William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch(Excerpt) 2:14
C3 –Harris Schiff - 15 Years Passes / Dollar Bill 1:45
C4 –Otis Brown - Boneless Chicken 1:43
C5 –Joel Oppenheimer - Cities, This City 2:45
C6 –The Fugs - Saran Wrap 1:15
C7 –Claes Oldenburg - June Was / Panodramdra 1:15
C8 –Denise Levertov - Homage To Pavese: Woman Alone 3:33
C9 –Ted Greenwald - Friends 2:08
C10 –Anthony J. Gnazzo - Hisnia & Hernia 4:44
C11 –Steve Tropp & Gloria Tropp - Snow White 1:03
C12 –Jim Brodey - Homeward Bound 1:52
C13 –Robert Ashley - Interiors With Flash 3:07
D1 –Eileen Myles - Tuesday Brightness 0:50
D2 –Helen Adam - Apartment On Twin Peaks 5:42
D3 –Anne Waldman - Light & Shadow 6:10
D4 –Joe Johnson - Fly Ho 0:37
D5 –Lorenzo Thomas - Wonders 1:50
D6 –Ishmael Reed - Sky Diving 2:19
D7 –Kenward Elmslie - The Woolworth Song 2:30
D8 –Mona DaVinci - The Last Supper Of Mona DaVinci (Excerpt) 2:50
D9 –Bernard Heidsieck - Canal Street No. 19 2:25
D10 –Steve Hamilton - Promise 3:25
D11 –Frank O'Hara - Poem / Poem 1:45
D12 –Ron Padgett No Title 1:28
