Interesting www/blogs still visiting?

Started by FreakAnimalFinland, October 09, 2021, 09:24:37 AM

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Tribe Tapes

One site I would recommend in today's dystopian web is Electronic Cottage. Hal McGee has been trying to get people to write for this forever now, and there seems to be a good amount of contributors. Not very focused on "noise" as much as general experimental music and mail art, but I'm glad to see people writing out of utter enthusiasm — rather than belligerent self-promotion.

The main reason I like Electronic Cottage is its focus on the collaborative / communal elements of underground music. That's something that has sorely been lacking in today's age of Bandcamp and pseudo-professionalism.

https://www.electroniccottage.org/

Soloman Tump

Quote from: Tribe Tapes on December 05, 2021, 01:58:20 AM
The main reason I like Electronic Cottage is its focus on the collaborative / communal elements of underground music. That's something that has sorely been lacking in today's age of Bandcamp and pseudo-professionalism.

https://www.electroniccottage.org/

Great recommendation, I completely forgot about this site.  I registered at the start of lockdown and used for a while, then forgot.... there doesn't seem to be a way to log in now though? And slow number of new content... maybe its closed?

Tribe Tapes

Quote from: Soloman Tump on December 05, 2021, 11:39:27 AM
Great recommendation, I completely forgot about this site.  I registered at the start of lockdown and used for a while, then forgot.... there doesn't seem to be a way to log in now though? And slow number of new content... maybe its closed?

Hmm. I doubt it's closed, Daevid Brock seems to have been posting articles quite regularly. Admittedly, it's been a while since I contributed to the site, but it looks like the main way to contribute is by proxy through Hal. Essentially, you send him an article, and then he posts it with accreditation.

https://www.electroniccottage.org/participate.html

Cementimental

#18
I'm now a moderator of the small but excellent Noise Art & Ephemera Archive group on facebook, will be ruthlessly deleting bandcamp-release-spam so hopefully the signal to noise (ha) ratio will improve, some really cool stuff on there: https://www.facebook.com/groups/351690259161580

Balor/SS1535

Quote from: Cementimental on December 09, 2021, 12:13:56 PM
I'm now a moderator of the small but excellent Noise Art & Ephemera Archive group on facebook, will be ruthlessly deleting bandcamp-release-spam so hopefully the signal to noise (ha) ratio will improve, some really cool stuff on there: https://www.facebook.com/groups/351690259161580

I just joined.  It looks like there is lots of interesting stuff being posted there.  Thanks!

Cementimental

Quote from: Lysergikon137 on October 27, 2021, 06:17:04 PM
Everything I've read from Adam Lehrer makes me feel like I'm gonna get cancer.

Wouldn't go that far but I subscribed out of interest after his intriguing review of my dungeon synth album, gave the newsletter a chance but got a bit bored of unexamined right-wing talking points and easily debunked antivax gibberish shoehorned into completely unrelated art/music reviews, plus /r/thathappened style accounts of pwning the libs at gallery openings :D

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on December 09, 2021, 06:20:42 PM
I just joined.  It looks like there is lots of interesting stuff being posted there.  Thanks!
No probs! Hopefully it will grow now we can prune the off topic.

FreakAnimalFinland

Oh yes, it is such a turn off on that noise art / ephemera archive has all those bozos just spamming it with latest bandcamp links. Some such a rare treats have been posted there and then at times you get just most uninspiring shit links.

Quote from: Cementimental on December 09, 2021, 10:02:57 PM
Quote from: Lysergikon137 on October 27, 2021, 06:17:04 PM
Everything I've read from Adam Lehrer makes me feel like I'm gonna get cancer.

Wouldn't go that far but I subscribed out of interest after his intriguing review of my dungeon synth album, gave the newsletter a chance but got a bit bored of unexamined right-wing talking points and easily debunked antivax gibberish shoehorned into completely unrelated art/music reviews, plus /r/thathappened style accounts of pwning the libs at gallery openings :D

Isn't that like one post among several art related ones he made after this was being discussed here? hehe.. I guess one needs a bit resilience to read anything these days? Not wanting to be served 100% what you prefer and agree. If you realize what the "gringe propaganda" section is about, and don't like to spend time on such thing, then you know you can also skip it.

I recall moment of reading noise interview where some of the main points were what president was doing and insightfulness of handmaids tale on Netflix. I wondered for few seconds, why am I reading this from industrial/noise fanzine? But could read entire magazine. Even listen and appreciate the artist in question. I can read Lehrer ranting about ethnic bias on top of the year lists of mainstream media or latest developments in PC language , although I doubt I need to. It's nothing that bad if there is possibility some decent art/noise/industrial culture reporting is found besides it.
E-mail: fanimal +a+ cfprod,com
MAGAZINE: http://www.special-interests.net
LABEL / DISTRIBUTION: FREAK ANIMAL http://www.nhfastore.net

chryptusrecords

Quote from: FreakAnimalFinland on November 11, 2021, 12:25:51 PM
I don't have distaste of phobia about politics themselves. I assume above mentioned Leary type slogan would suggest embrace the cultural changes by detaching from the existing conventions? I often see that people lump together any "idea" any idealism, any discussion of real world as "politics", without distinction what someone is doing or saying. It often makes me wonder so what it really is that appeals in noise/industrial/books/movies etc? It often turns out that it is preferably escapism. That it would be meaningless. That is something I do not have time nor interests for.

Mikko, I saw a documentary about Finnish black metal once where you were interviewed and said something like "it is just the word 'politics' which irritates people, the content of black metal is political whether we like it or not,' and I think this applies to 'noise scene' as well

FreakAnimalFinland

Yeah, term is obsolete unless you define what you mean with it.
Either you can go to the old "feminist" route (like myself, haha) that everything is political. (There is of course other side of this coin that nothing really is.)

Or you can really define politics meaning something very specific. If you go this route, it is very very hard to find real politics in music. Anyone whining about politics in music, usually mean that they found some opinion or expression they don't personally stand for, and can't cope with it.

In case of Black Metal, there are plenty of people who have some sort of worldview, some sort of opinion of something. Most often, very little to do with actual "politics". It seems oddly self-absorbed nonsense that one would be irritated or unable to handle artist or author with other kind of worldview, and seeking to purify genre such as black metal (for example), so be void of meaning. It is occasionally amusing to see the neverending cycle of people being horrified and hurt by discovering their favorite bands in Black Metal turned out to be... thinking unlike themselves?!

E-mail: fanimal +a+ cfprod,com
MAGAZINE: http://www.special-interests.net
LABEL / DISTRIBUTION: FREAK ANIMAL http://www.nhfastore.net

chryptusrecords

To tie this back into original topic, in my opinion this is a sort of "algorithmic thinking" which infects people, even in noise and black metal and so on. Everyone complains about how social media is shit, but there is still good stuff to be found, if you are willing to look for it. I have discovered a handful of very good artists through surface-level platforms like instagram (Erica Frevel, Georg Jutvall, Conall Kearney to name just a few), but you have to specifically seek out these things, it's not enough to just be delivered content by the algorithms.

With websites, there's still so much mind-bending fucked up stuff on the internet, it is just that centralization and censorship on platforms like instagram is... not 'effective,' but pervasive? You can't type the word "fuck" or "taliban" or "anorexia." But if you are willing to go outside the big platforms, to put in just a BIT of effort, you can still find great stuff out there.

For instance, back in 2019, there was a news story making rounds for a day about a girl who was obsessed with the columbine school shooting and was wanted by police, traveling to colorado and causing hundreds of schools to shut down. they found her dead in the woods of suicide later that day. don't remember all the details. but with minimal effort at the time it was easy to find her personal website, which is still up: https://dissolvedgirl.neocities.org/welcomepage.html. now thoroughly linked thru to reddit and so on....

Point is, internet is getting worse, but also people are lazy, and if our small scenes are good for anything you would hope it would be instilling in people the desire for unknown, for the search, for flipping through stacks literally or not. It's political because we are creating a separate set of cultural artifacts, we don't want (or at least I certainly don't) to be associated with the dominant culture in any way.

edit: I'll give you another good website: https://cryptome.org/

Cementimental

I get a lot of enjoyment out of extremely-specific-topic web 1.0 style sites where there's a fine line between ill-advised SEO and rampant paranoid-schizophrenic word salad:

https://www.consumertronics.net/

https://www.hillforts.co.uk/

FreakAnimalFinland

Very often, when I try to access some visual artists www site, it it dead link.
while ago I was browing through art book of this one artists, that is 20 years old, and wondered... could there be something still online, and positively surprised:

http://www.reinhardscheibner.com/

News are even from 2021. Perhaps not utterly active in later days, but you got stuff there.
E-mail: fanimal +a+ cfprod,com
MAGAZINE: http://www.special-interests.net
LABEL / DISTRIBUTION: FREAK ANIMAL http://www.nhfastore.net

FreakAnimalFinland

E-mail: fanimal +a+ cfprod,com
MAGAZINE: http://www.special-interests.net
LABEL / DISTRIBUTION: FREAK ANIMAL http://www.nhfastore.net

theotherjohn

I'm somewhat hesitant to share this website (and I figure you're already aware of it anyway Mikko due to their sporadic news updates on Graham Ovenden), but it certainly qualifies as an interesting blog at the very least: Pigtails in Paint has numerous well-written blog posts about the authors' "niche" interest in art history. Nothing illegal material-wise to be found there (although I suspect there is an agenda by some of their authors to bring wider acceptance to the concept of GL), just well done research, commentary and exhaustive documentation on a long established (but now taboo) artistic tradition. You might even be pleased to know that the cover art for Grunt's Myth of Blood even got shared and discussed there once, heh!

FreakAnimalFinland

Grunt cover is famous art photo made by Finnish photographer back in the 30's/40's. Germans sent out group of people visit Finland in friendly association, and in one of the days of visit, (german) children were assembled in ring, in "modern pagan" ritual for the glory of the sun. It is old enough, and slightly controversial for many reasons, so more details information might be hard to find (especially in english).
E-mail: fanimal +a+ cfprod,com
MAGAZINE: http://www.special-interests.net
LABEL / DISTRIBUTION: FREAK ANIMAL http://www.nhfastore.net