Nice pumps.

Via ectoplasmosis

Turns out that spaceships stand in for slave ships:

Echoes of Sun Ra and NOI [Nation of Islam] are audible in the music of George Clinton, who must have had both in mind when he transformed Parliament from a doo-wop group into a mother-ship-worshipping acid-funk congregation in the 1970s. Clinton’s mother ship, of course, was likelier to drop megatons of booty and cocaine than warheads, but hedonism wasn’t the only goal. In the opening bars of “Mother Ship Connection,” Clinton announces, “We have returned to claim the pyramids”—a nod to paleocontact theories, which hypothesize that ancient astronauts shared technological secrets with North Africans. Perceptible in this ripple of the Afronaut impulse is the yearning for and fantastical reclamation of an ennobling African history: A trip to space doubles as a return to roots.

The Afronaut universe, of course, comprises more performers than those mentioned here and extends beyond music, from the hero of Brother From Another Planet to Astronaut Jones, Tracy Morgan’s ridiculous SNL creation. Where hip-hop is concerned, though, the first Afronaut to speak of is Afrika Bambaataa. A gang leader turned community activist and DJ, Bambaataa spun Parliament-Funkadelic records alongside reggae, techno, and rock vinyl and wore elaborate African-Samurai-Cherokee-cyborg costumes doubtless inspired by the Arkestra. In the burnt-out South Bronx of the early ’80s, Bambaataa’s Afronaut mythology—championing Zulu valor and an interstellar utopianism—offered both racial pride and an escapist-hatch out of the bleak, inner-city quotidian.

The article failed to mention my personal favorite megaton of booty: Galaxy.

David Byrne is still cool.

Playing the building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

More pics / Video

Via DGSF Stefan Gruber

Killer vid for Stereolab’s new single.

It’s getting hot out there. You know what that means.

So in this series of nicely shot videos, Vice goes looking for the lead singer of a Norwegian Black Metal band, a guy named Gaahl who supposedly tortured someone 15 years ago. The Vice guys proceed to scare the daylights out of themselves, like a bunch of school girls at a slumber party, cuddling underneath a sheet. But watch, and by the fourth and fifth episodes, the Big Bad Boogie Man seems like a libertarian without any friends—which is really what Satanism boils down to, once you strip away all the makeup and angst. (By in large, the commenters buy the ruse.) BTW, Black Metal is what inspired Banks Violette’s church made of salt—the New York Times piece about it, and Black Metal, is excellent.

The month of May is devoted to the ecstatic moment. Sample some on Sunday at the Can Factory.

via Channel 53

A classic, via The Moment, which attempted a kind of high-brow survey, asking people to send in their fave videos about “dancing about architecture. This was Andreas Angelidakis’s submission. (He’s the guy that did these interesting buildings in second life.) After the jump, a nice but somewhat static video Angelidakis made, inspired by Nomi:

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Assume Vivid Astro Focus, eat your heart out. The vid is from the documentary directed by Pat Mire, Dance For a Chicken: The Cajun Mardi Gras—the whole film is online, thanks to the amazing Folkstreams; the website has interesting stuff for years. (I got this from somewhere and I can’t remember! Holler if it was your blog.) From an interesting essay on the tradition:

Led by a flag-bearing capitaine, this colorful and noisy procession of masked and costumed men on horses and wagons go from house to house in the countryside asking for charity in return for a performance of dancing and buffoonery. The participants are earnestly employed chasing chickens, the most valued offering, and they pride themselves on their ability to collect enough “live chickens” to feed the entire community “free of charge.”

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