Blog : Audiopollen July 26th 2006

Audiopollen July 26th 2006

hello friends and acquaintances,
audiopollen is a weekly radio program exploring experimental, avant-garde, outsider, noise and other forms of music. it broadcasts in brisbane on 4ZZZ 102.1fm and will eventually stream to the world in one way or another...

tonights edition of audiopollen is hosted as per usual by joel stern and lloyd barrett.

We began the show with an incredible new release that has been receiving a lot of critical analysis and review. Many listeners relate the music of Scott Walker to films by Bergman and Tarkovsky rather than other music. Yes, there is something instensly cinematic and literary in his new work.

artist - track - album - label
Scott Walker - Cossacks - The Drift - 4AD

Next we moved on to an incredible piece of 'sound art' by Lebanese artist/musician Mazen Kerbaj.

Mazen is part of the small but impressive Beirut free improvisation scene and has been producing interesting music in this tradition for a number of years now. His work with colleagues in that scene has helped pull Beirut into the global free improv circuit and has led to international tours by both foreign artists visiting Lebanon and Lebanese artists travelling to Europe, Asia, and America. However all this pales in comparison to the attention that Mazen has been getting lately. The current Isreali milatary campaign has resulted in the pulverisation of Lebanese infrastructure, the murder of over 500 civilians, and the displacement of up to a million more. The world's attention is fixed on Lebanon and the events taking place. Mazen's response to these events has been to establish a blog where he publishes his illustrations and impressions, dealing with his personal experience of this crisis. The humour, intelligence, irony, frustration, confusion and compassion is as immediately obvious in his work as it is absent in the reports of 'embedded' journalists and mainstream press.

On the show tonight, we played Mazen's recording entitled:
'Starry Night'.
(available here for dload)
http://www.thewire.co.uk/web/mp3specials.php
http://www.l-m-c.org.uk/audio/mazen.html
http://www.dasmollschegesetz.de/beirut.htm
http://www.muniak.com/mazenkerbaj.html
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/mazen_kerbaj-starry_night.mp3
http://www.nonstuff.com/mazen_kerbaj-starry_night.mp3
A minimalistic improvisation by: mazen kerbaj on trumpet and the israeli air force on bombs.
Recorded by mazen kerbaj on the balcony of his flat in beirut, on the night of 15th to 16th of july 2006.

Mazen's blog can be found at
http://www.mazenkerblog.blogspot.com

I have included one of my favourite images from the blog here. The caption for it reads:

20 july 2006

in the bad times, like in the good times, raed and i are chating in a café

"art / music / war / trumpet / beer / recording / massacre / double-bass / dance / exodus / sound / destruction / laughs / drawing / death / blood / tyr / coffee"

i's weird, there is words we are not used to use.

etc. etc.

We moved on to a mishmashed selection of old and new music for no other reason than our pleasure:

artist - track - album
Smegma - pigface - smell the remains
Tsèhaytu Bèraki - Aminèy - Ethiopiques Vol. 5 Tigrigna Music
Greg Malcolm - hung - hung
Grouper - Hold a Desert - way their crept
mv & ee - meditations on payday - mother of thousands

Added by joel on 1 August 2006