Each month, we invite an artist from the cast of characters that color the RVNG, Beats In Space, and Freedom To Spend universe to compile 15 – 20 tracks that are resonating with them.
From Ka Baird, to you ~
I present you with Activation Exercises, a playlist to rejuvenate and energize. A provocation to action, a provocation to move your body. Some more juicy, some more groovy, some more jilted, some more raw. Featuring the sounds of Uganda’s MC Yallah w Debmaster to Vienna’s Jung An Tagen to Japan’s YPY to Helsinki’s Pekka Airaksinen to Shanghai’s 33EMYBW to Lisbon’s Puto Tito to American experimentalists Max Eilbacher, 75 Dollar Bill and Paul Demarinis (to name a few)!
Feel it, don’t think it! Enjoy! And maybe see you on the dance floor!
xoKa
RIYL-ty Bytes is updated by a different artist each month. If you like something, save it to your library.
Anatolian Weapons returns with an EP of brand new remixes following June 2019’s debut To The Mother of Gods with Seirios Savviadis.
Featuring new takes on key album track “Ofiodaimon” by Tolouse Low Trax, Mr TC and Mekine U Teksi – as well as an instrumental dub take by Anatolian Weapons – the remix collection further opens the third eye that the album’s rapturous Levantine grooves first channeled.
The EP unfolds a with a collaboration between Germany’s seasoned Tolouse Low Trax and Anatolian Weapons, a cyclic, languorous mid-tempo stomp that hones in on microscopic elements of the original, swirling and constant in its drive, falling deep into the Kraut-fantasies that the album version flirts with and beckoned by the vocals of Savvaidis like calls from beyond.
Following a limited vinyl edition in 2018, Oliver Coates’ arrangement of Pulitzer Prize-winning US composer John Luther Adams’ 2007 piece Canticles of the Sky appears for the first time across all formats.
In March 2017, Coates conducted 32 cellists in the UK premiere of the composition, displaying its intimacies after deeply communing with the trajectories of Adams’ fictional suns and moons, the guiding characters and carriers of the piece.
This recorded interpretation, performed by Coates for multi-layered solo cello, takes Canticles of the Sky to wondrous, dizzying new heights, envisaging Adams’ parallel dimension as an idealised construction. Marrying extra-musical studio techniques and meticulous arrangements to Coates’ fascination with early electronic synthesis (especially the work of Laurie Spiegel), the result offers an ultra-sensory take on classical string instrumentation.
Now available for purchase in digital formats here
We’re writing on behalf of a friend: musician and remote healer Pauline Anna Strom (Paula). Paula is visually impaired (blind since birth), elderly (in her 60s), and lives in a rent-controlled apartment in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco with her two reptiles, Little Soulstice and Miss Huff. Since the 70s this apartment has been the center of Paula’s universe, and is the very place where Trans-Millenia Music , a collection of her sound explorations from the 80s that RVNG released in 2017, was conceived and recorded.
Paula recently fractured a part of her hip after falling over some furniture on her apartment balcony. She crawled, with her twenty pound cyclura iguana in her arms, back into the apartment to call for an ambulance. Paula was admitted to a hospital where she had a successful surgery followed by almost a month at Jewish Home & Rehab Center, but was returned to her apartment last week when her appeal for additional rehabilitation time was rejected. She is slowly regaining her physical faculties, though is in an immense amount of pain. This pain was very recently amplified by the sudden / shocking passing of a close friend and caretaker.
Paula is essentially – and fiercely – an independent person. Her insurance covered a part of her rehab, but now she is contending with the cost of additional hospital billing, in home physical therapy visits, and general living expenses. While Paula would much prefer to cover accumulating bills through her healing practice fees, her condition, recovery, and the (necessary) professional assessments / disruptions do not make that an immediately solvent solution.
With Paula’s permission, we’ve set up a GoFundMe page to help offset these bills (her insurance only covered $28 of the ambulance bill, to provide some perspective) and living expenses for the next few months.
Just before her accident, Paula was composing new music for the first time in decades. We are anticipating some of that music to arrive to our Brooklyn headquarters soon, and depending on her comfort level, offering some of it immediately on Bandcamp to help raise some financial support and awareness to Paula’s predicament.
We are also looking for volunteers in the Bay Area who may be able to contribute some time to her mutual care calendar. Almost more pressing than financial aid and in the absence of her trusted friend’s passing, Paula needs help with lifting / carrying dishes and groceries, feeding the reptiles (we’ve met them; they are sweethearts), sorting the mail, reading digital displays on her synthesizers and phone. It would be any day of the week after 2 pm. Paula is a reiki master and is able to offer sessions in exchange for help around her apartment.
Thank you so much for consideration. It means the world to Paula, and to us.
Craig Leon continues his extraterrestrial explorations with “The Gates Made Plain,” the second single from his upcoming album of new music Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 2: The Canon. Following the cosmic lore of Leon’s earlier work, The Canon expands upon the conceptual cycle based on the alien and mathematical relationships that backbone the creation of art, architecture, science, and music.
Director Milton Melvin Croissant III crafts another mythical, mystical video for “The Gates Made Plain” which features a part of the live visual narrative that accompanies Leon’s upcoming shows surrounding The Canon.
Watch the video for “The Gates Made Plain” below:
Following the US debut of their new live show at Durham, North Carolina’s Moogfest in April, Craig and Cassell Webb, Craig’s creative and life partner, will play Ambient Church at The First United Methodist Church in Pasadena, Los Angeles on Friday, May 24.
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