I've had a very bicycle oriented past few days. I was gifted a bike (Thanks Matteo!) - totally trashed and rusted, but it works. I took advantage of the fact that the beach side of the road from Leme to Leblon was open today (Sunday) and crossed Copacabana and Ipanema.

Kraftwerk ride bicycles too. Tour de France (1983 Original)

I've always loved bikes - from racing BMX when I was teenager to working as a bike messenger in Seattle in my early 20s. Then, I moved out of the country and put my bike in storage and (strangely) kind of forgot about how much I love bicycles.



When I got back home after this last tour in europe, there was an abandoned copy of Pedal (thanks Diplo) in my apartment - a documentary on bike messengers in New York City by Peter Sutherland. Very cool film. The best parts are the shots filmed right in traffic - following a messenger passing between cars and buses, running red lights. There are some interesting characters and it gives a taste of the subculture of messengers.

The only thing I really didn't like was the sound track that at times really detracted from the film. At one point early on, I actually stopped the film and checked everything to make sure that I hadn't inadvertently left some other audio running - like the sound track was totally detached from the film. But, then again, when you don't have anything good to say (they say), don't say anything at all.....anyway, well worth seeing.

Jean Jenkins was an old school expatriate american ethnomusicologist who based herself in London and cruised all over the world recording sound and music in Africa, Asia and Europe until she died in 1990. Damn, she was older than my grandma!

This is a recording of hers - the "Cow Milking Song" (I gave it that name, actually it is "track 31".....cow milking is no job for a slouch.
Music from Ethiopia; Recordings by Jean Jenkins, [Topic 2001]

Jean Jenkins on Wikipedia

To start things off...

Kolleidosonic is now my virtual bulletinboard for random things of interest. Mostly musical, a sonic kaleidoscopic collision.

Yes. May we begin.....



The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

The babylonians conquered the surrounding lands and built and built and built to reach the heavens and then God smited (sp?) them down and cast them to the 4 corners of the earth and gave them all different tongues. Now multi national corporations across the land are joining the fight. Globalization will reach the heavens and unite the tongues once again.



Einstuerzende Neubauten, "Tanz Debil" from Kollaps (Zickzack 1981)

I saw Einstuerzende Neubauten play a free show on the waterfront in Seattle in 1985. One of my friends who had a car (and was old enough to have a license) drove me there. I remember seeing a strangely clothed old man improvising a sculpture from garbage wash onto the the rocks, a mohawked crusty attempting to stick his head into the bass bin and Blixa Bargeld strutting around in a leather vest that was held together by staples while they doused chunks of styrofoam and carboard boxes with gasoline in a metal trough at the foot of the stage and set it on fire. Total assault on the senses. I'd never seen anything like it and it changed my life for ever. Yes. I liked it. Re-listening after many years, I still like it.

They seem to go well together......a soundtrack made MANY years later. Der stern ist tot. The star is dead. Appropriately (or at least as my pretend soundtrack to brueghel's painting), Einstueurzende Neubauten means Collapsing New Buildings. This track originally appeared on Kollaps (Collapse) and then again in 1983 on Strategien Gegen Arkitectur (Strategies Against Architecture). The Tower of Babel was a apparently a very large new building that collapsed. Kind of like the WTC, but that'd be a different story.......