2017: 365 songs by 365 bands/artists. Wouldn’t want to skip a single one of them. Wish I could say the same for all the days in this year.

Kaledo Art
RMH
Sade Olutola

#extradirty
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
$LAYYYTER
cherry valley forever

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Today's Document
KIROKAZE
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Not today Justin
Acquired Stardust
sheepfilms
occasionally subtle

@theartofmadeline
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Show & Tell

Love Begins
Cosmic Funnies
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Netherlands

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Netherlands

seen from United Kingdom

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Germany

seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Sweden

seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from France
seen from Netherlands

seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from South Africa
@anarkiogkos
2017: 365 songs by 365 bands/artists. Wouldn’t want to skip a single one of them. Wish I could say the same for all the days in this year.
My dear friend Zachary V. Sunderman from The New School of Social Research wrote this beautiful essay about our album TROSS ALT (In Spite of Everything). Want a physical copy? It's free, just send yr address to [email protected] IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING On Modern Love’s Tross Alt Zachary V. Sunderman Og ruller steinen opp / igjen og igjen og igjen -“Ekstase” And roll the stone up, again and again and again. Could Kaluza, Modern Love’s vocalist and lyricist, have had Albert Camus in mind when he wrote these lines? It would certainly be appropriate. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus took the fate of the legendary king, condemned to roll a stone fruitlessly up a hill for eternity, to be a metaphor for the human condition. Absurdity. We are faced with a world of no manifest purpose, beset by a host of conditions that we resent. And in this state, this confused, unfulfilled, denied state, we are tasked with living a life, with being a thinking, feeling, acting human being. Where does this lead us? Does this radical openness of the world liberate or condemn us? Does the possibility of true self-realization follow from it, or does a fatalism from which no one can escape? Maybe it’s both. Maybe it depends on us. * * * * * To conspire means to breathe together. -Say Yes! to Scandinavian Vandalism Punk rock is about a lot of things to a lot of people. For some, it was nothing more than the expression of a profound alienation, a rejection of mainstream society so thorough that it ate itself, fed on itself so that it grew and grew and grew into destructiveness and decline. There is something beautiful, something true, in that rage that devours itself alive, for it witnesses, it speaks the howling voice of the left-behind, the fallout of a world that does not care about its people. But it is unsustainable. It is suicide. And as E.M. Cioran observed, there is far too much optimism behind suicide. After all, isn’t optimism our go-to insult for that which can never achieve what it desires? For others, however, it became about something else. It became not just about rejection, and not even just solidarity in that rejection, but about transformation. It became about envisioning better lives, building them in the modeling space of art, and bringing them to life in alternative communities. And it delivered these visions, these possible worlds, to the stage, for all to see, to hear, to share as realities. The thought-provocations of 7 Seconds and Youth of Today. The emotional rawness of Rites of Spring and Embrace. This is the lineage to which Modern Love belongs. If I am to charge nihilism paradoxically with optimism—I think Sartre and Camus would, too—then the inverse must be true: what appears as optimism in this strain of punk rock is actually realism. It does not imagine that there is any easy way out, any magical solution to our problems. It settles into the trenches. It prepares for the long fight. It engages with the world, it bears the weight of that world—the stone—and keeps going, keeps believing, keeps confronting. It asks us to be responsible and be sincere, not only to opt out but to opt in to something else. It asks us to be not blind servants of fate nor enlightened sacrifices to absolute rejection; rather, it challenges us to be agents, movers, people who both reject and create. That was what made me want to call myself a hardcore kid, anyway. This basic aching for something more transformed into the pursuit of its realization. And I’ve kept that spirit with me ever since. Today I have a record in my ears that I can tell shares that spirit, more desperately than ever. * * * * * Så bli med meg / la oss dele våre oksygentanker (So come with me / let’s share our oxygen tanks) Vise vei / til hverandres (Show the way / to each other) -“Nødinngang” Camus wanted to know one thing: whether humankind can live without illusions. Is there such thing as worthwhile experience under such conditions—of not only having nothing to fall back on, but knowing that we don’t have it? There is one illusion that magically believes in the achievement of a better world simply by the destruction of the current one. Over-enamored with the ooze of blood and the crackling of flames, it makes an impossible leap, where creation results from pure negation. There is another illusion that lets people imagine wistfully, dream away their free moments, while in their practices they, as Bourdieu would say, reproduce the existing world over and over. Again and again. Another rock, another fate. But what if there is a space between? A space where, in spite of the condition in which we find ourselves, in spite of the miseries we must undergo to sustain our lives, in spite of the seemingly insurmountable oppressions of power and responsibility, in spite of everything, we can do more than imagine another world, but in fact create it? A space where, in the way we live our lives, in the way we interact with each other, in the way we organize our relationships and our actions and our ethics, we begin to see beyond the stone, beyond the hill, beyond the endless slog, to new lands, new opportunities lying in wait for our arrival? A truly existential space marked by the radical embrace of our chance to live on terms of our own making, without retreating to the hindering power of the comfortably conservative? Tross alt: it suggests not only the will to persevere, some heroic, masculine endurance in the face of pain; it suggests defiance, an unwillingness for the “everything” to remain what it is: all-encompassing, non-negotiable. For we are not, in the end, truly like Sisyphus, that is: condemned. To mistake what is for what has always been and what must always be is, simply, an error in reasoning. A mystification. A mythification—as Roland Barthes would have it. History has never been static, nor predestined. History is endlessly restless; the catch is that we decide where it moves. The thing is, we’ve actually been doing it all along. The trick is to get on top of it. To move, with Arendt, outside our pinched position “between past and future.” To become, with de Beauvoir, creatures of our own creation, who do not mistake what we find around us for eternal, objective facts. To accept, with Kierkegaard, the responsibility of possibility, the possibility that leads either to the Fall or to our redemption. That is: to reject inevitability. To exchange “it is what it is” for “it is what we want it to be.” To find the way forward, a way that is not darkened by sameness or failure, a way that is lit with the genuine difference we make together, moment to moment, on the ground, in real time. To charge forward, as Laclau and Mouffe argued, not with the mistaken and monstrous guides of ideology and dogma, but rather the decisions we make together in our differences, the alliances we form as a people with each other’s interests in mind. To reject nihilism, to turn its discontent inside out; as Kaluza told Just Say YO! Fanzine in issue no. 3 (July, 2016): to nurture “hatred for this world in love of what it might become.” To embrace, with Modern Love, “the radical pleasures of (im)possibility.” And, in the meantime, to comfort each other, to experience with each other, to indulge the world-modeling, world-creating possibilities of art as we sing together, dance together, feel together, hurt together. To form the bonds of friendship, the bonds of solidarity, the bonds of true humanity—ah, at long last!—through the unparalleled ritual of passionate music. After all, the creation of a new world should be a celebration. There should be music. “Another world is possible,” they say. If it is, let Modern Love be its soundtrack. For I hear all of this philosophy coming to life in their songs. New York City, 2017
2017: Stonehenge Family: Woodwork - Chaviré - Modern Love
Oksygentanker #7 + #8 lanseres på Tversover Oslo i dag. Her er playlista for #7.
10 track album
Artefact <3
Reminisce 2016 No offense to Bowie, Cohen, Prince or George Michael, but this is a playlist dedicated to the memory of some other people who passed away in 2016 and made music that meant more to me. 💔
2016 is over if you want it Already in 2015 I knew that the record of 2016 would be “Politika” by BERNAYS PROPAGANDA. But some other nice music has come out of this year. And this is a nice excuse to put “my” band in great company. ;-)
Glød i asken - tross alt
“The man became a sieve, the woman, the sow, had to swim, for herself, for noone, for everyone
The Landwehr Canal will not make a murmur Nothing stops.” - Fra Paul Celans dikt “You Lie” (Du liegst)
15.januar 1919 ble Rosa Luxemburg og Karl Liebknecht myrdet. Skutt og dumpet i Landwehr Canal. Kanalen laget ikke en lyd. Alt fortsatte. Ingenting stoppet opp. Livet gikk videre, selv om deres liv endte. Business as usual. Nok en dag. Og i denne stillheten, en stillhet som adresserer seg selv, en stillhet bare stillheten kjenner, et mangfold av (druknede) stemmer. Som hver eneste jævla dag: Nok en dag. Uten at ofrene blir hørt.
Samme dag som Freikorps-soldatene myrdet de to, ble Liebknechts tekst “Tross alt!” publisert i Rote Fahne: “... Spartakus - det betyr: flamme og ånd, det betyr sjel og hjerte, det betyr det revolusjonære proletariatets vilje og dåd. Og Spartakus - det betyr det klassebevisste proletariatets alle lengsler, all besluttsom kamp. Spartakus betyr sosialisme og verdensrevolusjon… Og enten vi lever eller ikke når målet er nådd - så vil programmet vårt leve; det vil beherske den forløste menneskeheten og deres verden. Tross alt!”
Tross alt. Et paradoks. Et likevel. Et sted mellom væren og ikke-væren. Og istedet, i dette ikke-stedet, et potensielt gjøren. Et imperativ. La oss trosse alt. For enten det er “resistance is futile” eller “resistance if fertile”-skiltet som lyser mot deg i neonbokstaver, hva er alternativet? At ingenting stopper? At alt som ikke kan fortsette lenger, bare fortsetter? At livet går videre, det livet som ikke lever, og vi gjør ingenting for å redde menneskene og verden fordi alt uansett er fortapt? At bare fordi noe er utenkelig, lar vi være å tenke det? Som Blindt Hat sang og ekkoet av dem i Kafka Prosess, og ekkoet igjen mange år etter i Bone Idles: “Det må være andre veier ut av det”. Det må. Tross alt.
Alle setter vi livet på spill, enten vi vil eller ei. Spørsmålet er: For hva? «Et gjenferd går omkring i Europa – kommunismens gjenferd.» Slik åpner Dag Østerbergs nye oversettelse av Karl Marx Kapitalen. Spøkelsene fra 1971-oversettelsen er byttet ut med gjenferd. Kommunismen er ikke det eneste spøkelset som hjemsøker Europa. Avisoverskrifter kan fortelle at vi opplever 30-tallet i reprise. Økonomisk krise. Mennesker på flukt. Totalitærpopulistiske politiske ledere på fremmarsj.
I 2011 ba Høyre-leder Erna Solberg nordmenn om å ta et oppgjør med hverdagsrasismen, og sammenlignet dagens muslimhets med 30-tallets antisemittisme. Fem år etter rasler “integreringsministeren” i Solbergs regjering med fotlenker og sier: - Her i Norge spiser vi svin, drikker alkohol og viser ansiktet. Gysne gufs fra fortiden. Fremtiden hører fortiden til, og den har forlengst feilet fullstendig. Med tiden så til de grader ute av ledd, er det da mulig å gå ut av tiden? Holder den oss alle fanget i en retromanisk runddans, døde såvel som levende? Eller er - tross alt - tiden inne? “Communism must have the courage to be a ´ghost´- if it wishes to recuperate an authentic reality” - Gianni Vattimo.
I filmen Ghost Dance av Ken McMullen, sier en av fortellerstemmene: - At first it was thought that ghosts would be forgotten in this new electronic age. But as things turned out, they began to use electronic gadgets for their own purpose. Now they often jump on radio waves. Det var i 1983. Elektronisk åndtologi har ikke blitt mindre aktuelt siden da. Bare se på de digitale rommene vi til daglig beveger oss i, skjermene vi klistrer blikk og tomler til, signaler til og fra usynlige tomrom rett under fingertuppene våre, den bunnløse intetheten, facebook- og insta-profiler der våre døde lever videre, blir tagget, og sendt hilsninger til, som emojis av foldede hender, blå og brustne hjerter.
“All stories are, more or less, ghost stories”. En stemme som forlater en kropp, slik pusten, ånden forlater en kropp, er allerede adskilt fra kroppen den forlater. Selv før den er blitt innspilt (re-corded) og avspilt (re-played). Alt solid smelter som kjent til luften vi puster inn. Og ut igjen. Jeg'et jeg etterlater, er nok et jeg jeg kan lengte etter, men jeg kan ikke lenger etterape det. Fortiden vi bærer med oss, er aldri hva den en gang var.
“Reviving what was never there. Surviving death - and what it meant” - Onward
Mens jeg har jobbet med denne teksten, eller skal jeg si, denne teksten har jobbet med meg, har jeg blitt hjemsøkt. Av en SMS fra en død venn. Om Jon Bunch. Vokalisten i Reason To Believe, Sense Field, Further Seems Forever og War Generation tok sitt liv 31.januar 2016. Jeg hadde bare møtt ham én gang, men: Det gjorde inntrykk. På oss og (relativt) mange med oss. Vi så bilder og videoer fra gripende minnekonserter med #jonbunchforever-hashtags. Jeg måtte tilkjennegi en viss skepsis til dødskulting generelt (og Bowie spesielt, det var omtrent på den tiden), så jeg la inn et godt ord for livskulting. Svaret fra min venn - fem måneder før han selv gikk bort: “…romantisk innstilt til dødskult sikkert pga Derrida – som på en måte hele livsverk er en dødskult — “the work of mourning” “surviving death - living on”. Hvordan argumentere mot et forsvar for dødskulting når det kommer i form av en tekstmelding fra et spøkelse?
Allikevel: Selv nå kjenner jeg en reservasjon mot å dødskulte ham, ja selv for å skrive hans navn. Som om ikke minst syv av dere åtte som kanskje leser dette, skjønner med en gang hvem jeg snakker om. Selv om det i dag er hans 45-årsdag, jeg har på meg FPS-longsleeve (det vet jeg han ville ha likt), og jeg har vært og sett på det hullet i bakken, hvor urnen med asken, støvet, som er igjen av ham i dag skal nedsenkes. For det hullet i bakken, jeg så ikke bunnen, og den jordhaugen som skal spas over det som ikke lenger er igjen av det mennesket jeg kjente, leste jeg Hölderlin (“Du skjønne sol, gå ned!) og spilte Wide Awake ("Friendship!”). Spøkelset etter ham, kom før urnen til denne plassen, fortidens spøkelse ble et fremtidens spøkelse.
Kirkegård. Et hull i bakken. Som en fysisk manifestert Faith/Void-splitt. Slik vi alle er splittet, mellom tro og tomhet. Av meningsløse lengsler etter mening. Har jeg ennå ikke sagt navnet til han som delte navn med disippelen som fornektet Kristus tre ganger før solen gikk ned? Den skjønne solen, som “uten lyd og uten møye stiger opp over dem som sliter”? Jeg fornekter gjerne troen, og omfavner tomheten, men nei, jeg fornekter ikke deg, Peter Joachim Sævik Amdam, selv om du sikkert har følt det før. Da du var i live, var det tider jeg kjente et behov for å komme ut av skyggen din, før den kvelte meg. Nå som du er død, kjenner jeg behovet for å være i den skyggen og utforske den, og puste i den. Nå som du er borte, er jeg redd skyggen en gang også skal forsvinne. Sa jeg “du” til en som er død? Herregud. Sa jeg herregud?
- Ghosts don’t just appear. They come back, sier Derrida i Ghost Dance, og snakker om en “mourning that goes wrong”, og en “incorporation”, der de døde blir tatt inn i oss, uten å bli internalisert, som en del av oss. De okkuperer et sted i kroppen vår, og kan snakke for seg selv. Vi levende blir en gravplass for de døde. Spøkelsene tar over talen vår, som buktalere tar over en dukke. - It can be terrifying. But that’s when things start to happen.
Jeg er også blitt hjemsøkt av en tekstlinje som har kvernet i hodet mitt, slik gitarintroen på For Pete’s Sakes “To Die” kvernet de første ukene etter Peters død. “This depression is haunting me” - Burn. Et band som så mange andre har gjenoppstått. Det som var en glød i asken, har flammet opp igjen. Flame Still Burns…
Vi ser ting de aldri vil se. Usynlige koder. Ånder, stemmer, sukk, pust. Tiden er inne. Gå gjennom vegger. Omfavn hverandre. Pust sammen. Konspirer.
Tross alt.
- Kaluza.
Oslo, 28.oktober 2016.
Sees på Internasjonalen lørdag 5.november.
my friends in priests did a thing!
Terrorstat - Fuckin´ CLASSIC Oslo Hardcore! <3
If you get tired of me calling BERNAYS PROPAGANDA the best band in the world, please unfollow.
”The Gang Work Out How To Run A Distro”
leaving britain in this man’s good humberside hands
my friend, BP
"I mostly enjoy it when I've put something together and then sending a tape full of great stuff on it to someone in Norway. That's a nice novelty..."
@jorgenstokk 🙌
Waving your flag
A blind patriot
“Love it or leave it”
Your eyes are shut
Frau
London 2013-2015
DAMN. Just dug up an edited excerpt from the MRR column I wrote at the time to accompany the second photo from Static Shock Fest 2013 because I can’t stop looking at it:
_____
“I have been inside the venue for fifteen minutes setting up merch and catching up with out of towners when a voice I don’t recognise says, with a suggestive overtone ‘I like your tattoos.’ This is not uncommon patter but marginally less likely to happen at a gig where a lot of women have tattoos. I ignore it just as I would do on the street, but then the voice is closer, in my ear, nearly, then he’s moved nearer to say ‘Yeah, that was me, I like your tattoos.’ I stare straight ahead and say ‘Thank. You.’ In an expressionless manner. I forget about this encounter completely over the course of the next hour, Good Throb plays our set and it goes pretty well.
I get a water and the same bartender says to me ‘I just wanna say sorry. I never would have tried that cheap chat-up line on you if I’d know you were all cool and in a band.’ I’m caught off guard by this line to the degree that I straight up laugh in the guy’s face without really taking him to task on it. The multiple levels of fucking stupid and annoying that this remark contains only hit me after I’ve laughed in the guys face and got him to break a twenty’s change for merch float. I tell a few mates about this and we laugh about how stupid it is, and how we didn’t know there was an arbitrary line between the type of tack used on you know, ‘regular’ girls (??) and women in bands. Over the course of that evening, if I look across the room at any point, this guy will usually be looking back at me (there are more than 200 people in attendance) and I notice him collecting glasses in just the spots where he apparently needs to touch me to get past more than once.
The gig is a riot, S.H.I.T play a blinding set and get the kind of reaction I haven’t seen in London in a long, long time. The following night, there’s been a matinee, where RAKTA smash it for the second time of the fest, and the main gig starts early. I’m setting up merch and immediately accosted by the same creepy bar man. Once again I manage to shake him off by averting eye contact. I always hold out for a long time before pulling the ‘ihaveaboyfriend’ card because that shouldn’t be the only red signal these type of men will respond to. I wish I had, because within a few hours I’m crumpled in a heap sobbing in a dark corner, totally defeated by this boring predictable bullshit, wanting to disappear. This is how it goes down:
Just before Frau’s set, the creepy bar man gets a ‘venue volunteer’ (read: scary drunk old guy hanger on in a hi vis jacket) at this venue to go up to several members of Frau while they’re setting up and says to them ‘that guy at the bar says have a great set, he thinks you’re really pretty,’ Frau, being made of stronger women than I, duly tell this cretin to get fucked right off the batt, several people get called cunts and it’s an ugly scene all round, complete with entitled outrage and a constant barrage of assertions that ‘If I give you a compliment, if I say you’re beautiful, you need to learn to take it.’ I have been taking it all night between running around looking for speaker leads, helping out on the door and selling shirts and this fucking bullshit is one extra thing I do not need, especially as the guys’ behaviour becomes more and more predatory.
The tension is high and Frau play an unbelievable set that gets me right between the ribs. Earlier that evening Paula from Frau was told by the venue ‘security’ that she might get raped in the womens’ toilets, as an hilarious ‘joke.’ Ash references this and the rest of pre-set drama on stage with the words ‘I was sexually assaulted when I was ten and I’m not fucking laughing about it.’ It’s a moment of release recognition and righteous anger and I am so full of rage on my own and everyone else’s behalf that I can’t work out if I want to stagedive, cry or eat my own hands. It felt good, at least, to know it wasn’t just me being targeted.
That is, until the final blow, where the creepy bar guy gets right up in my face as I’m trying to help clear up, and says ‘Sorry about that stuff with the last band, I only got that guy to go and talk to them because I thought she was you, and I just think you’re so pretty.’ At this point, mind blown by the fact that he can’t tell two women apart and generally nauseous with rage, I finally stop acquiescing and tell him quietly that I’m really sick of hearing these weird apologies and for him to please fuck off.
Relatedly, I later vent about all this on the internet and a barrage of women tell me this guy was telling them to smile every time they bought a drink, and someone else comments under it saying that a member of one of the bands who played (DiE) groped them in a taxi after the show. No, there is no rest or reprieve for us because if we go ‘public’ we are gossips or witch hunting harpies, and if we stay quiet then ‘how can anyone help if you won’t name and shame.’ I know that we are sad and tired and I know that often the pressure to respond correctly from people who think they know best is a burden as heavy as the one that has to deal with this shit in the first place. Two sides of the same coin. ’
___
That was three years ago, so much shit has changed for the better, we are stronger than ever, but still, fuck T Chances. Punk women forever.
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-hIIe3qutA)