Annalisa Vanzanten
2023-12-21 18:19:27 UTC
After an irritating introductory segment in which some woman who's probably dead now recites a written letter to a friend (the record is littered with these skit-like clips, and though some are mildly entertaining, they tend to detract from the real deal), the album opens up for real with "Fixed Income," a fine-enough instrumental hip-hop retread that leaves little impression after it's clicked over to "Walkie Talkie," where things lighten up a bit. Built from a harsh drumbeat and a few alternating samples-- a man bellowing "I'm a bad muthafuckin' DJ," a woman proclaiming, "This is why I walk and talk this way," and the now-ubiquitous cry of "SUCKA!"-- the groove on "Walkie Talkie" is seriously tight (even 'dope,' if you so dare), despite its too-quirky, scratched-upon boasting.
A key ingredient that helps to differentiate the tracks here from what had gone before is the reliance - not total, but extensive - on privately pressed records for many of the samples used. Today, with reissue labels excavating every micro-niche in the history of recorded sound, and the phenomenon of digital ubiquity promising instantaneous worldwide access to even the most obscure recordings, such a guiding principle for making sample-based music might seem irrelevant. Indeed, the very idea of a privately pressed record may mean nothing in the smartphone age, where apps and decent microphones come close to putting a reasonably high-spec demo studio in most people's pockets. But in 2002, with the record business in the early throes of digital disruption and always-on full-fat broadband still a pipe dream for many, privately pressed records had an aura and a meaning that felt different and, to an artist like Shadow, would have presented both a source of inspiration and an irresistible challenge. At this point in his career, to focus on them as the primary providers of colour in his sonic palette was a choice that still felt like it mattered. And it is undeniable that it enriched the record Shadow ended up making.
The Private Press Dj Shadow Zip
DOWNLOAD https://t.co/atLBEHm9Hv
"I was trying to take a starting-over approach," he told me of the initial creative impulse. "It was just me making demos again. And it felt good. It just really felt like I had pressed 'reset' and I was starting clean. I was getting a lot of that energy from these [privately pressed] records, and I put them around my workspace, especially if they had pictures. They were just so earnest. They had nothing to lose. Many of them weren't good at all, but some of them were amazing, and what they all are is charming. They're sweet in some way. They're so starry eyed, in a sense: so ambitious but so troubled - because they hadn't a prayer, you know?"
The most obvious - and most extreme - examples of privately pressed pieces that ended up on the record are the Recordio Discs that wound up in the opening and closing 'Letter From Home' tracks. One-off recordings pressed onto cardboard and designed to be sent by their maker to their single recipient by post, these were anomalies even among the obscurity-obsessed crate-digger community Shadow was almost an adjunct professor of at the turn of the century. Not really records, they didn't turn up in second hand record shops, and when people did unearth them, they'd often be hiding alongside personal letters or private mementoes in the kind of places that ended up with the unwanted portions of house-clearance sales. Today we would perhaps interpret them as aural selfies, albeit ones created by a generation that still retained a rote form of formality when sending messages that email and SMS has all but obliterated: Novella Johnson signs her audio postcard, and puts her address at the top, like a letter. (Go online and you discover even the street she was "writing" from no longer exists; the past is forever being rewritten, and not just by DJs making sonic collages.)
But the most extreme use of a private-press record on the album is the two bars from the 1976 B-side 'Plenty Action' by Soft Touch which makes up almost all of the album's astonishing centrepiece, 'Monosyllabik'. For all that he didn't want to make a concept album, Shadow was not averse to allowing a concept to set a challenge that he had to push himself to meet head on. He'd already set a few rules here: while, working on U.N.K.L.E.'s Psyence Fiction, he had allowed himself the leeway of using musicians to play things when sampling wasn't going to work, for The Private Press he refused to use any musical ingredients that didn't come from previously released records. The hugely influential Brainfreeze mix, made with Cut Chemist in 1999, found the pair only allowing themselves to use 7" 45rpm singles. Its all-45 follow-up, Product Placement, incorporated numerous 7"s released to promote some product or other, and recreated a fans' favourite sequence from Brainfreeze using different versions of the same tracks in a kind of "cover version" of part of the earlier mix.
The delight in accomplishing such absurdly, arbitrarily and unnecessarily difficult tasks was clear: so it was little surprise that there would be challenge he would set for himself here, and that it would be of another order of magnitude altogether. With the notable exception of its introductory cry of "What you gon' do now?", which comes from a 1977 United Artists release by The Whitney Family, on 'Monosyllabik' Shadow forced himself to make an entire track using only sounds he could make out of the first two bars of that privately pressed late-period funk 45. He began by cutting the two bars into 32 pieces, then set about attacking them in the studio, using only outboard gear and analogue equipment - no plug-ins or computers. Microphones were set up to record the sound being played in different ways from different speakers, then fed back through the system and spat out in new shapes, each to be reforged, sifted, rearranged and reconstructed in a process he compared to stop-motion animation.
Yet what should surprise us is how an entirely cerebral and intellectual conceit resulted in such an astonishing and potent piece of music. If you didn't know it was all from one place, you'd be hard pressed to tell, as Shadow polishes, twists, distends and distorts his source material to turn it into something that sounds, at different points, subterranean, alien, cyborg, industrial, spacey, explosive, intimate, meticulously detailed and hugely, supersizedly massive. It's a record that on its own justifies the investment you might make in a decent hi-fi: not just a series of amazing sounds, it's structured in three dimensions - bass pulsing like a heartbeat from deep, low and way back within the soundstage as high-end slashes of sound fizz like agitated wasps from left to right and back again. Beyond collage, beyond music production, 'Monosyllabik' is a piece of sound sculpture. Like a sonnet or a haiku its formal restrictions forced its maker to transcend all limitations and succeeds on a level that surely could not have been reached had he given himself fewer or looser rules to adhere to.
National money is a credit instrument issued by the state's bank, the central bank: money has everywhere been nationalised. However, in rich nations, the institutions that actually issue day-to-day credit remain private, for-profit banks. This contingent nesting of private banking within national money creates hybrid and potentially contradictory phenomena as public credit and private interest clash. This hybrid hierarchy is contingent, expressing a local political settlement. A conflict between private profit and public good is baked into such hybrid systems, the political settlement modulating the antagonists.
The political settlement determines whether the central bank sets these mechanisms for elasticity or discipline. We read the development of American shadow banking as an instantiation of neoliberalism, the prevailing political settlement. Shadow banking developed through a contingent conjuncture of long-term marketisation processes, first of liabilities (c. 1960) and then assets (c. 1980). This confluence metastasised private money markets which dangerously amplified the inherent instability of the hybrid system.
In Malaysia, private tutoring is widely perceived as a household necessity. A 2004/05 household expenditure survey recorded that 20.1 per cent of households with at least one child aged seven to 19 indicated expenditures on private tutoring (Kenayathulla 2013, p.634). In a smaller sample of urban students, Tan (2011) surveyed 1,600 Year 7 (lower secondary) students from eight schools in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, and found that 88.0 per cent had received tutoring during their primary schooling
caroline picker is a white anti-racist Jew, acupuncture student, and social justice movement worker living in Phoenix, Arizona. Mostly she writes press releases and grant applications, but you can read her other writing in make/shift magazine or at bodiesofstory.wordpress.com.
(AP) -- Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder conducted a "shadow investigation" that sought to discredit former employees making accusations of workplace sexual harassment, hired private investigators to intimidate witnesses, and used an overseas lawsuit as a pretext to obtain phone records and emails, according to a document released by a House committee on Wednesday.
Snyder's attorneys presented the NFL with a 100-slide PowerPoint presentation including "private text messages, emails, phone logs and call transcripts, and social media posts from nearly 50 individuals who Mr. Snyder apparently believed were involved in a conspiracy to disparage him," the committee said.
Witnesses also told the committee that Snyder sent private investigators to their homes and offered them hush money. The NFL was aware of Snyder's use of private investigators, according to documents obtained by the committee, but the practice continued, witnesses said.
"A core responsibility of this committee is to conduct oversight of the executive branch, but this entire Congress, Democrats have turned a blind eye to the Biden administration," said Kentucky GOP Rep. James Comer, the committee's ranking member. "Instead, the Oversight committee is investigating a single private organization for workplace misconduct that occurred years ago."
0aad45d008
A key ingredient that helps to differentiate the tracks here from what had gone before is the reliance - not total, but extensive - on privately pressed records for many of the samples used. Today, with reissue labels excavating every micro-niche in the history of recorded sound, and the phenomenon of digital ubiquity promising instantaneous worldwide access to even the most obscure recordings, such a guiding principle for making sample-based music might seem irrelevant. Indeed, the very idea of a privately pressed record may mean nothing in the smartphone age, where apps and decent microphones come close to putting a reasonably high-spec demo studio in most people's pockets. But in 2002, with the record business in the early throes of digital disruption and always-on full-fat broadband still a pipe dream for many, privately pressed records had an aura and a meaning that felt different and, to an artist like Shadow, would have presented both a source of inspiration and an irresistible challenge. At this point in his career, to focus on them as the primary providers of colour in his sonic palette was a choice that still felt like it mattered. And it is undeniable that it enriched the record Shadow ended up making.
The Private Press Dj Shadow Zip
DOWNLOAD https://t.co/atLBEHm9Hv
"I was trying to take a starting-over approach," he told me of the initial creative impulse. "It was just me making demos again. And it felt good. It just really felt like I had pressed 'reset' and I was starting clean. I was getting a lot of that energy from these [privately pressed] records, and I put them around my workspace, especially if they had pictures. They were just so earnest. They had nothing to lose. Many of them weren't good at all, but some of them were amazing, and what they all are is charming. They're sweet in some way. They're so starry eyed, in a sense: so ambitious but so troubled - because they hadn't a prayer, you know?"
The most obvious - and most extreme - examples of privately pressed pieces that ended up on the record are the Recordio Discs that wound up in the opening and closing 'Letter From Home' tracks. One-off recordings pressed onto cardboard and designed to be sent by their maker to their single recipient by post, these were anomalies even among the obscurity-obsessed crate-digger community Shadow was almost an adjunct professor of at the turn of the century. Not really records, they didn't turn up in second hand record shops, and when people did unearth them, they'd often be hiding alongside personal letters or private mementoes in the kind of places that ended up with the unwanted portions of house-clearance sales. Today we would perhaps interpret them as aural selfies, albeit ones created by a generation that still retained a rote form of formality when sending messages that email and SMS has all but obliterated: Novella Johnson signs her audio postcard, and puts her address at the top, like a letter. (Go online and you discover even the street she was "writing" from no longer exists; the past is forever being rewritten, and not just by DJs making sonic collages.)
But the most extreme use of a private-press record on the album is the two bars from the 1976 B-side 'Plenty Action' by Soft Touch which makes up almost all of the album's astonishing centrepiece, 'Monosyllabik'. For all that he didn't want to make a concept album, Shadow was not averse to allowing a concept to set a challenge that he had to push himself to meet head on. He'd already set a few rules here: while, working on U.N.K.L.E.'s Psyence Fiction, he had allowed himself the leeway of using musicians to play things when sampling wasn't going to work, for The Private Press he refused to use any musical ingredients that didn't come from previously released records. The hugely influential Brainfreeze mix, made with Cut Chemist in 1999, found the pair only allowing themselves to use 7" 45rpm singles. Its all-45 follow-up, Product Placement, incorporated numerous 7"s released to promote some product or other, and recreated a fans' favourite sequence from Brainfreeze using different versions of the same tracks in a kind of "cover version" of part of the earlier mix.
The delight in accomplishing such absurdly, arbitrarily and unnecessarily difficult tasks was clear: so it was little surprise that there would be challenge he would set for himself here, and that it would be of another order of magnitude altogether. With the notable exception of its introductory cry of "What you gon' do now?", which comes from a 1977 United Artists release by The Whitney Family, on 'Monosyllabik' Shadow forced himself to make an entire track using only sounds he could make out of the first two bars of that privately pressed late-period funk 45. He began by cutting the two bars into 32 pieces, then set about attacking them in the studio, using only outboard gear and analogue equipment - no plug-ins or computers. Microphones were set up to record the sound being played in different ways from different speakers, then fed back through the system and spat out in new shapes, each to be reforged, sifted, rearranged and reconstructed in a process he compared to stop-motion animation.
Yet what should surprise us is how an entirely cerebral and intellectual conceit resulted in such an astonishing and potent piece of music. If you didn't know it was all from one place, you'd be hard pressed to tell, as Shadow polishes, twists, distends and distorts his source material to turn it into something that sounds, at different points, subterranean, alien, cyborg, industrial, spacey, explosive, intimate, meticulously detailed and hugely, supersizedly massive. It's a record that on its own justifies the investment you might make in a decent hi-fi: not just a series of amazing sounds, it's structured in three dimensions - bass pulsing like a heartbeat from deep, low and way back within the soundstage as high-end slashes of sound fizz like agitated wasps from left to right and back again. Beyond collage, beyond music production, 'Monosyllabik' is a piece of sound sculpture. Like a sonnet or a haiku its formal restrictions forced its maker to transcend all limitations and succeeds on a level that surely could not have been reached had he given himself fewer or looser rules to adhere to.
National money is a credit instrument issued by the state's bank, the central bank: money has everywhere been nationalised. However, in rich nations, the institutions that actually issue day-to-day credit remain private, for-profit banks. This contingent nesting of private banking within national money creates hybrid and potentially contradictory phenomena as public credit and private interest clash. This hybrid hierarchy is contingent, expressing a local political settlement. A conflict between private profit and public good is baked into such hybrid systems, the political settlement modulating the antagonists.
The political settlement determines whether the central bank sets these mechanisms for elasticity or discipline. We read the development of American shadow banking as an instantiation of neoliberalism, the prevailing political settlement. Shadow banking developed through a contingent conjuncture of long-term marketisation processes, first of liabilities (c. 1960) and then assets (c. 1980). This confluence metastasised private money markets which dangerously amplified the inherent instability of the hybrid system.
In Malaysia, private tutoring is widely perceived as a household necessity. A 2004/05 household expenditure survey recorded that 20.1 per cent of households with at least one child aged seven to 19 indicated expenditures on private tutoring (Kenayathulla 2013, p.634). In a smaller sample of urban students, Tan (2011) surveyed 1,600 Year 7 (lower secondary) students from eight schools in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, and found that 88.0 per cent had received tutoring during their primary schooling
caroline picker is a white anti-racist Jew, acupuncture student, and social justice movement worker living in Phoenix, Arizona. Mostly she writes press releases and grant applications, but you can read her other writing in make/shift magazine or at bodiesofstory.wordpress.com.
(AP) -- Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder conducted a "shadow investigation" that sought to discredit former employees making accusations of workplace sexual harassment, hired private investigators to intimidate witnesses, and used an overseas lawsuit as a pretext to obtain phone records and emails, according to a document released by a House committee on Wednesday.
Snyder's attorneys presented the NFL with a 100-slide PowerPoint presentation including "private text messages, emails, phone logs and call transcripts, and social media posts from nearly 50 individuals who Mr. Snyder apparently believed were involved in a conspiracy to disparage him," the committee said.
Witnesses also told the committee that Snyder sent private investigators to their homes and offered them hush money. The NFL was aware of Snyder's use of private investigators, according to documents obtained by the committee, but the practice continued, witnesses said.
"A core responsibility of this committee is to conduct oversight of the executive branch, but this entire Congress, Democrats have turned a blind eye to the Biden administration," said Kentucky GOP Rep. James Comer, the committee's ranking member. "Instead, the Oversight committee is investigating a single private organization for workplace misconduct that occurred years ago."
0aad45d008