last thing i remember from a dream: saying "can somebody please google 'zombie incubation time'"

generative art: the first native art form in the 21st century?

Short introduction video to UNIX by the inventors, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

check out mikesten's new project: http://tallyho.heroku.com

Immigration and "Ausländer" in Germany illustrated with vintage infographics.

 

a lot of noise, mostly themes, wallpapers, sexy girls, lite/free stuff etc.

Are you a digital hoarder? (broadcast from 2007)

a day at the soundclound office in london

follow zhao on soundcloud:
djzhao

reboot.fm post:
http://reboot.fm/2010/07/17/night-flights-zhao/

Zhaoist Manifesto

1. FUSION

"The boundaries of objects are vague - and that goes for us too... Describing the world in terms of discrete objects is a useful fiction." - Kees van Deemter

Well worn cliche or not, everything in the world is connected. Borders and separation, in the spheres of physics, of politics, of "race", as it is of culture, are illusions fostered by narrow and fearful minds, often purposefully fabricated by those who seek control and to benefit from alienation, antagonism, and the suffering of millions.

Today our conceptions of the cultures of the world, of their history and relationships to each other, is sadly still under heavy influence of 18th and 19th century revisionist versions of history. During those colonialist times in the United States, education reform initiated by the wealthy elite of powerful industrialists applied sweeping changes across university campuses, teaching a fundamental and intrinsic divide between "East" and "West", painting the former as largely superstitious, backwards, repressive, and the later progressive, modern, liberal. While in Europe racist German and English scholars began erasing the African and Asian foundational influence of classical Greece out of history, replaced by an absurd Euro-centric story of the "Cradle of Western Civilization" developing more or less autonomously, with the only outside influence from "Northern Tribes", separate from much older and more advanced civilizations in close physical proximity. The dissemination of this fictional dichotomy between the "occident" and "orient" has always been politically motivated: it furthers the aims of the ruling class, provides a necessary ideological backdrop for colonial and neo-colonial agendas, and is still instrumental in world affairs today (the structural basis for "the war on terror" as related to the demonization of Islam).

But there is no essential divide between "East" and "West", their relationship being more like parent and child. And when it comes to music, the inter-relatedness of all cultures and the character of their specific relationships can be perhaps even more easily understood. For instance if one looks at the history of the guitar, one finds that it was descendent of the Oud, the first record of which appears in ancient Mesopotamia during the Acadian period (2359-2159 BC). The Romans around 40 AD made a version of it called the Cithara, which spread to the Vikings in Europe; and later Gypsies living in Islamic Spain created the modern guitar based on that. And if one traces the history of 20th Century North American pop and dance music, a crude and very abbreviated but basically sound genealogy describes a line going back to Disco, to Soul, to Funk, to Motown, to Gospel, to Blues, to Jazz, to work songs of the slaves, and indeed, to Africa.

Continuities are everywhere one chooses to look: the Balkans are connected to Israel to Iraq to Spain to Egypt to Morrocco to Mali to the Congo to Haiti to Cuba to Colombia to NYC. Yet there is still this prevalent vantage point that "World Music" is indeed somehow fundamentally different from "Western Music", and it is still shocking to some that non-Western sounds are making such a ripple in 2010 (the success of artists such as Omar Suleyman, and a new wave of indie musicians citing non-western influence). As if Rock and Roll itself wasn't African American, and less directly, African in origin. As if Led Zeppelin wasn't heavily influenced by Turkish music, or the Rolling Stones by Morroccan traditions, the Beatles by Indian Classical, Can and (early) Kraftwerk by East Asian sensibilities and African percussion, Debussey and John Cage by Indonesian Gamelan, Steve Reich and Georgy Ligetti by African polyrhythms, etc, etc, etc. Forward thinking and ground breaking modern music in the "west" has always taken cues from much older non-western sources (similar to the way modern visual art owes much to pre-modern, so called "primitive" forms).

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