Bobby Farrell takes the Night Flight

Bobby Farrell of Boney M died yesterday at the age of 61. Born Alfonso Farrell in Aruba, off the north coast of Venezuela, he left home at the age of 15 to become a sailor. He lived in Norway and the Netherlands and then Germany where he worked as a DJ before he was recruited by German singer/songwriter Frank Farian for Boney M. Farian now says that he actually sang on most of Boney M's songs, and that Farrell just mimed to them on stage. But clearly Farrell was the male face of Boney M, and they wouldn't have been Boney M without him.

In 1978, Boney M released a bona fide Disconaut classic, Night Flight to Venus:

Starchild RIP - Teena Marie

US R&B singer Teena Marie died yesterday at the age of 54. Lots of love to her on the internet already, such as this piece at Soulwalking, so I will confine myself to appreciating her fine slice of space funk from 1984:



'Starchild' is in the 'dream lover from outer space' sub-genre of space-themed dance music (see also I lost my heart to a starship trooper and Spacer) with a dash of Earth Wind & Fire-style Egpytology:

Gazing into outer space
My telescope sent me to another planet
Since I was a child I yearned
To wear the rings around Saturn
My fingers burned

But when you hold me baby
That's the only time
I'm content, element, so sublime
Don't it make you wonder that your universal lover
Could be wearing the same smile

Ooo you are my Starchild...
Baby beam me, baby beam me up up
Drink the milky, from the Milky Way cup

Hold me tighter, touch me, then do
All of the sweet things
That star lovers do

Visions of another time
A strong pyramid, where secrets of life hid
Ancient Hieroglyphics told
of one man touching like Midas
He turned my love to gold

And when you hold me baby and I wear your magic ring
I feel you like no one in this world I've seen
Don't it make you wonder that your universal lover
Could be wearing the same smile

Oooo you are my Starchild...
Baby beam me, baby beam me up up
Drink the milky, from the Milky Way cup

Hold me tighter, touch me then do
All of the sweet things
That Star Lovers do

Take me to your heaven
I'll lay your odds to seven
And the Stars up in the sky
I can see them in your eyes
Oooo you are my Starchild...
Starchild...Starchild...

(Teena was often-sampled, most famously by The Fugees)

Skinheads as Independent Travellers in Space

I went to Cafe Oto in Dalston a couple of weeks ago for a reading by two members of Wu Ming, the Italian writing collective responsible for novels including 54, Q (written under the name Luther Blisset) and the newly-translated Manituana.

At least one of the four Wu Mings was associated for a while with the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (1995-2000), the multi-dimensional politico-creative network dedicated to 'independent community-based space travel'. The premise of the AAA was for people to form their own groups (often it must be said, just one or two people) to put their own slant on the mission. Thus my node in the network was Disconaut AAA, dedicated to the use of dance music for space exploration, while electronic/industrial outfit Nocturnal Emissions was associated with AAA Kernow. Messrs Eden and Grievous Angel had their own groups, as did others in France, Italy, Denmark, Holland, New Zealand and elsewhere.

From Bologna, a later Wu-Mingster launched 'Skin Heads as Independent Travellers in Space' (SHITS). This is their launch text, published in 'Moving in Several Directions at Once! The Third Annual Report of the Association of Autonomus Astronauts' (1998). The text celebrates 'proletarian elegance' and looking sharp, a theme that recurs in Wu Ming's novel 54 (discussed here recently).

WORKING CLASS KIDS AGAINST SPACE IMPERIALISM

Only those whose boots stomp the ground will conquer the skies

by Fabrizio P. Belletati

In the name of Luther Blissett “I” announce the foundation of the SHITS (Skin Heads as Independent Travellers in Space).

Proletarians have never benefited by any space exploration programme launched by the great Powers. NASA in particular, that gigantic parasite, dissipated billions of dollars in order to take workers away from their everyday exploitation, inducing them to passively gaze at the deeds of yankee imperialism and the conquest of the “last frontier”. NASA introduced the average chauvinist redneck male as the cultural and aesthetic representative of the whole human species (in the American TV series Northern Exposure. a character named “Maurice Minnefield” effectively parodies pathetic flag-waving ex-astronauts). NASA has always attempted to militarise and commodify outer space (remember the infamous Ronald Reagan’s SDI plan).

The Associations of Autonomous Astronauts fight the present-day state, military and corporate monopoly of space travel, and exhort the oppressed of this world to build their own spaceships and get together into free communities of cosmonauts. The revolutionary proletariat has the power to expose the deceptions of the space travel establishment.

But I think that the AAA project must keep its distance from Hippie/New Age bullshit — we’re talking about class war — neither some kind of utopian-escapist plan (e.g. The Jefferson Starship Blows Against The Empire) nor some Star Trek Kennedyan dream — we’re talking about Jello Biafra’s rant Why I’m Glad That The Shuttle Blew Up.

The subcultural cross-fertilisation which originated the Skinhead style reached its peak in 1969, i.e. whilst NASA was organising and staging the first moon landing hoax. The creative clash between West-Indian music (Ska, Rocksteady and early reggae) and the Hard Mod look defines the so-called “spirit of ‘69”. We’ve got to hang on to this spirit of ‘69, and oppose it to the other, symbolised by the star spangled banner on a TV studio moon ground.

Original skinheads, suedeheads and later street punk skinheads COULDN’T GIVE A TOSS about such nerveless middle-class counterculture à la Jefferson Starship. Skinhead subculture can provide autonomous astronauts with a style and a sartorial rhetoric which break both with liberalism and hippy shit. Moreover, both the Suedehead evolution and the modernist heritage can work as stylistic North Stars and orient our efforts to an essential “proletarian elegance”. It’s a matter of self-respect: we can’t figure what clothes the inhabitants of other planets have on, but certainly we won’t go to the rendez-vous dressed like shaggy buffoons!

Skinhead Moonstomp is the title of a classic Ska anthem. That’s how we’re gonna deal with zero gravity: skipping about on a steady upbeat rhythm. Long live SHITS! Death to NASA!

Unfaltering commerce with the stars

I am still digesting the rich fare served up by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Fred Moten at last week's Black Skin, White Marx? event at Goldsmiths in New Cross, with ingredients including Gramsci, Adorno, Kant, Marx, CLR James, Huey Newton, Orlando Patterson and Frank B. Wilderson. One thing that stuck in my mind was a quote from Du Bois which Spivak mentioned, and which I have subsequently tracked down in full:

'the immediate problem of the Negro was the question of securing existence, of labor and income, of food and home, of spiritual independence and democratic control of the industrial process. It would not do to concenter all effort on economic well-being and forget freedom and manhood and equality. Rather Negroes must live and eat and strive, and still hold unfaltering commerce with the stars' (Dusk of dawn: an essay toward an autobiography of a race concept by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, 1940).

I have no reason to think that Du Bois was really thinking about space travel here, but the linking of a project of emancipation to a sense of the cosmic prefigures the Afro-futurist myths of Sun Ra and George Clinton that I have discussed here previously in the context of the Disconaut Association of Autonomous Astronauts.

A contemporary example of this is the work of Flying Lotus, bringing a post-hip hop sensibility to the cosmology elaborated by his aunt Alice Coltrane among others. From his latest album Cosmogramma, here's Galaxy In Janaki:



The title clearly references Alice Coltrane's track Galaxy in Turiya, from the 1973 album Reflections on Creation and Space (Turiya is a Hindu term for the experience of pure consciousness; Janaki is a name for the Hindu Goddess Sita).

Of the latter's work Kodwo Eshun wrote: 'Jazz becomes an amplified zodiac, an energy generator that lines you up in a stellar trichotomy of human, sound and starsign. Alice Coltrane and [Pharoah] Sanders are playing in the rhythm of the universe according to star constellations transposed into rhythms and intervals... Astro jazz becomes a sunship upon which the composer-starsailor travels' (More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, 1998) .

George Robey: a lost London venue

At 240 Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park in North London there is currently a semi derelict pub. Before it closed it was known as the George Robey (and before that The Clarence Tavern) and was for many years an important music venue, particularly known for punk gigs. You can even download a 1983 set recorded a the pub by anarcho-punk band Omega Tribe at the excellent Kill Your Puppy.

Club wise it was probably best known for Club Dog, which brought the free festival/squatter spirit indoors from the mid-1980s and became one of the first places where that scene, with its psychedelic and world music vibe, began to cross over with the emerging rave scene. In 1996 the pub briefly became the Powerhaus, part of the Mean Fiddler group, and then closed down.

My main memories of the place are of a club called The Far Side, which I went to a few times in 1994/5. It was one of those places where DJs and sound systems from the squat/free party scene played, like the Liberator DJs . I've just scanned in a couple of spacey flyers which give a feel for it -'Get over to the Far Side - revel without a pause - spinning trippy trancey techno, delightfully deep house and pleasurable progressive for your entertainment'. The flyer for September 1994 (below) also has the topical Fight the Criminal Justice Bill slogan at the bottom.

September 1994 flyer

Frankly my memories of all the places I went to at that time tend to blur a little, but I do recall some great music and searching for a bagel round Finsbury Park before getting the first train back to Brixton the next morning.

January 1995 flyer

See also London RIP (picture of Robey today from Ewan-M at Flickr)

AAA film

I've posted here before on my involvement in the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (1995-2000). Here's some video footage of some of its key moments - the London Space 1999 conference (including the J18 action against the militarisation of space), a balloon launch in New Zealand, the Intergalactic Conference in Bologna, a Paris 'Rave in Space' and the moment an Autonomous Astronaut actually got to experience zero gravity briefly on a cosmonaut-training parabolic flight.



It's ten years in 2010 since the AAA declared mission over - maybe time to celebrate it?

Moonwalking

It's taken my brain a while to make the connection between two of the recent themes at this site - the 1969 Moon landing and the death of Michael Jackson, Moonwalker.

In relation to Jackson, it's his popularisation of the Moonwalk dance that has been the centre of the various flashmobs since his death. For instance at the recent Fusion festival in Germany, there was this mass Moonwalk (well yes I know most people seem to be just shuffling backwards, rather than creating the illusion of stepping forward at the same time, but they are trying):



Contrary to popular mythology, this dance was not invented by Jackson. The backslide (as it was known) has long been in the repertoire of dancers as the following film makes clear with examples from dancers including Fred Astaire, Bill Bailey, Cab Calloway (in white suit at 1:49), Sammy Davis Jr. and many others. The earliest example features Daniel L. Haynes in King Vidor's film Hallelujah in 1929 (at about 2:36 in this video), but doubtless it goes back further than that. It has also featured in the mime routines of the likes of Marcel Marceau and Lindsay Kemp.



It was after Jackson started using these moves in 1983 to accompany his song Billie Jean that the move became known as the Moonwalk. According to Jeffrey Daniel, the dancer/choreographer who taught Jackson the moves, it was Jacko himself who called it the Moonwalk, mistaking the backslide for another dance move with that name (the actual Moonwalk step according to Daniel 'makes it look like you're on the moon and it's less gravity than you would have on earth'). By this act of creative misrecongition, Jackson linked the dance directly with the dreams of his generation - it was after all in the 1969 summer of Apollo 11 that the Jackson 5 recorded their first album and made their first TV appearance.

It is interesting that what caught people's imagination in relation to the actual moon landing was less the scientific achievement of a vehicle taking people from earth to its satellite and back again than the simple human act of walking on the moon. After all the first words spoken by Neil Armstrong in 1969 where precisely 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'. And the Apollo 11 astronauts left behind a plaque with the inscription reading: 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.'

What would it feel like to take that most fundamental of biped actions in space? Jackson's Moonwalking answer is that it is something thrilling, a step beyond normal human motion. Other musicians have also pondered the significance of lunar steps, or used them as a metaphor. In Walking on the Moon by The Police it's the lover's feeling of weightlessness that prompts the comparison: 'Giant steps are what you take, Walking on the moon... Walking back from your house, Walking on the moon, Feet they hardly touch the ground, Walking on the moon' (there's a nice jazz version of this song by Philippe Kahn).

Walk on the Moon by New York indie band Asobi Seksu picks up on that other space meme - not elation but the isolation of the lonely traveller in a monochrome world 'swimming in gray'. Then from the hippy musical Hair (1967), there's the psychedelic dimension of 'Walking in Space' - a trip in every sense - 'My body Is walking in space, My soul is in orbit, With God face to face, Floating, flipping, Flying, tripping...Tripping from Mainline to Moonville... On a rocket to The Fourth Dimension, Total self awareness The intention' etc. etc.

Arthur Russell's This is How We Walk on the Moon, featured in an earlier post, seems to envisage the moon walk as an optimistic struggle, moving forward one step at a time: 'Each step is moving, it's moving me up, moving, it's moving me up, Every step is moving me up... This is how we walk on the moon'. A metaphor for a personal struggle against adversity or perhaps for something wider - moving on up. There are also instrumental pieces like Moon Boots by ORS (1977).

The imagining of walking in space (and dancing in space, sex in space...), beyond the limits of gravicapital, was part of the project of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, of which more to come.

Arthur Russell

Thinking about this month's moon landing anniversary, I realized my post on this should have mentioned the sublime Arthur Russell track 'This is how we walk on the moon': 'Each step is moving, it's moving me up, moving, it's moving me up, Every step is moving me up... This is how we walk on the moon'.



There's a conference on Arthur Russell coming up in New York later this year:

'Kiss Me Again: Mapping the Life and Legacy of Arthur Russell
10 October 2009, NYU, New York

The composer and musician Arthur Russell lived and worked in New York between 1973 and 1992. During his time in the city he performed and recorded compositional music, pop music, disco, new wave, songs for the cello, and hip-hop-inflected electronic pop. As any listener of his music will know, he also liked to blur the boundaries of genre as he went about his work. Russell's open-mindedness and antipathy to being marketed contributed to his lack of recognition, and his music went relatively unheard outside of aficionado dance circles after his passing. But beginning with the simultaneous release of Calling Out of Context and The World of Arthur Russell in 2004, and culminating with the release of the documentary film Wild Combination in 2008, Russell's work has gained a new lease of life.

Acknowledging the newfound interest in Arthur Russell, New York University, the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London and Bloomfield College are organising an Arthur Russell conference that will take place at NYU on 10 October. The all-day event will be organised around four panels, two featuring invited speakers, two featuring speakers who respond to this call for papers. The conference will also feature a screening of Wild Combination, with director Matt Wolf answering questions, and (it is hoped) rare Arthur Russell footage shot by Phill Niblock and Alan Abrams. The evening event will feature musicians who worked with Arthur Russell. Tim Lawrence's biography of Arthur Russell, Hold On to Your Dreams, will be launched during the event. Attendance is free'.

The deadline for ideas for papers is 15 July; if you want to take part contact the organisers Sukhdev Sandhu (NYU), Tim Lawrence (UEL) & Peter Gordon (Bloomfield)- details here.

We were brought up on the Space Race, now they expect us to clean toilets

40 years ago this month since the first human moon landing. The song that most resonates for me relating to this is Monochrome by The Sundays from their 1997 album Static and Silence, if only because it perfectly mirrors my own experience - a small child and his sister woken up to watch the pictures beamed back from the moon:

"it’s 4 in the morning July in ‘69, me and my sister we crept down like shadows, they’re bringing the moon right down to our sitting room, static and silence and a monochrome vision.. it’s history and we stayed awake all night and something is said and the whole room laughs aloud, me and my sister looking on like shadows, the end of an age as we watched them walk in a glow, lost in space, but I don’t know where it is, they’re dancing around, slow puppets silver ground".

There are other pieces of music associated with this episode. The BBC apparently played David Bowie's doomed astronaut anthem Space Oddity during their moon landing coverage (must admit I always assumed that Bowie recorded this after the moon landing, but it seems it prefigured it). Pink Floyd meanwhile jammed live on BBC during the moon landing, according to Dave Gilmour 'They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called Moonhead - it's a nice, atmospheric, spacey, 12-bar blues'.

Post-acid house, samples from the Apollo 11 voyage have been widely used as a signifier of spaced out (inter)planetary humanism, for instance on The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (1991). Then, rather incredibly, there's Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin's recent rap track Rocket Experience ('I've been there, now it's your turn'):



Of course, Gil Scott Heron offered a contemporary critique of the prioritisation of Cold War space spectaculars at the expense of wider human needs with his Whitey on the Moon: 'A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon, Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon, I can't pay no doctor bills but Whitey's on the moon, Ten years from now I'll be payin' still while Whitey's on the moon'. While he was right on one level, I still hold on to the optimism of believing that the human adventure hasn't come to an end with MP3s and High-Definition TV.

I don't have much to add to a talk I gave on 23 April 2005 as part of the 'ART IS NOT TERRORISM' event at Confluences, Paris, a 'Benefit event for the defense of Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble at the occasion of 10 years of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts'. The event also included films, music and contributions from Jason Skeet, Kodwo Eshun , Riccardo Balli, James Becht, Ewen Chardronnet, Claire Pentecost, Brian Holmes, Nicola Triscott, Anjali Sagar, Michel Valensi and others.

Nostalgia for the Future: The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars

Once upon a time, people believed in the future. When I was growing up in England in the 1970s, one of the most popular programmes on TV was called 'Tomorrow's World'. Every week scientists would talk about how new and wonderful inventions would make our life better. Sociologists talked of an impending leisure society, where our biggest problem would be what to do with all the spare time created by increasing automation.

Space was central to this sense of future possibility. In eight short years the human species went from Yuri Gagarin's first tentative journey beyond earth's atmosphere to landing on the moon in 1969. However much this achievement might have been framed in the politics of the Cold War it truly was a giant step forward for humankind.

This faith in the future was not confined to apologists for the existing order of things. In 1969 the Situationist International looked forward to the day when 'Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature' (1). Sun Ra proclaimed that 'Space is the Place' for all those who found earth boring and George Clinton invited 'Citizens of the Universe' to join the 'Partying on the Mothership' (2).

I was of the generation of small children woken up in the early hours to watch the first pictures beamed back from the moon. The TV shows and films of the period led us to believe that soon we would all be doing it. By 2001, according to Kubrick's film, humans would be reaching out to the absolute on the far side of the galaxy.

We were lied to. What really happened in 2001? Grey September, planes crashing into buildings followed by weapons targeted from Space on some of the world's poorest people. We are now living in 'a general global state of war that erodes the distinction between war and peace' (3). A new kind of war without temporal or spatial limits - a war waged everywhere and nowhere, anytime, any place.

What better weapon in this new kind of war than space-based systems with the whole world in their sights? In 'The coming of age of the flesh machine', the Critical Arts Ensemble describe the development of the sight machine as an element of the war machine. They write: 'Through the development of satellite-based imaging technologies, in combination with computer networks capable of sorting, storing, and retrieving vast amounts of visual information, a wholistic representation has been constructed of the social, political, economic, and geographical landscape(s) that allows for near-perfect surveillance of all areas, from the micro to the macro. Through such visualization techniques, any situation or population deemed unsuitable for perpetuating the war machine can be targeted for sacrifice or for containment' (4).

The United States Air Force has an Air Force Space Command with its own Strategic Master Plan setting out a 25 year plan to maintain US space superiority. It boasts that 'Recent conflicts in Afghanisatan and Iraq have clearly demonstrated the asymmetric advantage space brings to any fight, whether that fight is in the middle of the desert, isolated mountainous terrain, or a large metropolitan area' A frightening new military newspeak has developed - 'Space Force Application' (weapons in space deployed against terrestrial targets), 'Counterspace' (preventing enemies using space), 'Space Force Enhancement' (using space to support air, ground, and sea forces) and 'Full Spectrum Space Combat Command'.

The Plan proposes developing the 'capability to deliver attacks from space… Space force application systems would have the advantages of rapid global access and the ability to effectively bypass adversary systems' (5). The vision then is of an orbital killing platform, out of this world but able to strike at targets on its surface. Weapons that can be deployed at the push of a button without the pesky inteference of mutineers, strikers, war resisters and saboteurs.

The Plan also describes something called the 'Commanding the Future' initiative, established to implement all this. This is the official vision of the future in 2005. No more fairy stories of better days to come. Instead the future as an idea has been colonised by fear and pessimism. We are told that the future will be a more dangerous place, in which only the State can save us. Every repressive law is now justified in the name of protecting us from some terrible future eventuality. So we have the Patriot Act which has ensnared Steve Kurtz and many other innocents.

Opposition movements have also turned their face to the past. Previous radical movements populated the future with utopian visions of different possible worlds. Marx wrote of the 1848 events in France that 'The social revolution… cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future' (6). Since the heyday of the space race and the defeat of the radical movements of the 60s and 70s there has been a lowering of horizons away from changing the world towards just stopping things getting worse - the buzz words always seem to be 'stop' and 'resist'. Elsewhere, social conservatism is on the march from religious fundamentalisms to endless retro fashions in music and clothes.

The Association of Autonomous Astronauts was partly an attempt to make good some of the unkept promises of our childhoods. Like the band Pulp we asked 'we were brought up on the Space Race, now they expect us to clean toilets. When you have seen how big the world is, how can you make do with this?' (7). We wanted to rediscover space as the site of new ways of living and being, relishing the eruption of the marvellous rather than smothering it in the commercial, state and military baggage dragged into space by the mainstream space programmes. To do so we created a speculative playground in which all manner of new possibilities could be explored - dancing, music, sex - in the context of the entirely feasible proposition of community based spaced exploration.

The questions posed by the AAA remain unanswered: 'What would it be like to step into space? Beyond earth's gravity, its economy, its laws, what wonders would we discover? What unknown pleasures would we stumble across on our trip to the stars?' (8).

For most of us, the AAA is now in the past, but it is also in the future. One of the ideas we toyed with was that the AAA was a revolutionary movement of the future operating in the present, maybe, like in the film Terminator, sent back into the past by future autonomous communities in space, to guarantee their eventual success.

The task remains of reclaiming the future as a place of expanded human subjectivity and social wealth, rather than as a repository for present day anxieties. If sometimes it feels that we are in dark times, we must remember that the darker the night, the brighter the stars.

Neil Starman


The Once and Future Disconaut Association of Autonomous Astronauts
Paris, April 2005

References:

1. Eduardo Rothe, The Conquest of Space in the Time of Power, Internationale Situationniste, no,12, (1969).
2. The reference here is to the Sun Ra tracks 'Space is the Place' and 'Outer Spaceways Incorporated' and to Parliament's 'Mothership Connection'.
3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
4. Critical Arts Ensemble, Flesh Machine: cyborgs, designer babies and the new eugenic consciousness (New York: Autonomedia, 1998)
5. Air Force Space Command, Strategic Master Plan FY06 and beyond (2003)
6. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napolean Bonaparte (1852)
7. Pulp, Glory Days, from the LP 'This is Hardcore', 1998.
8. Neil Disconaut, Mission Accomplished but the Beat Goes On: the Fantastic Voyage of the AAA, in See you in Space: the Fifth Annual Report of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (London, 2000)




See also: This is how we walk on the moon

J18 1999

Ten years ago today, the G8 Summit in Cologne was the occasion for the global J18 'Carnival Against Capital' with demonstrations, street parties, riots and every conceivable kind of protest in places across the world.

In London I took part in the huge carnivalesque protest initiated by Reclaim the Streets, which saw 10,000 people converge on the financial centre of the City of London. The day started for me with a protest by the Association of Autonomous Astronauts against the militarisation of space at the London HQ of the Lockheed Martin Corporation in Berkeley Square. Police prevented several people in spacesuits from entering the building (an incident broadcast live via mobile phone on BBC Radio Scotland), but a line of people stood outside with placards saying "Stop Star Wars - Military Out of Space" and handed out leaflets, the text of which is reproduced below. As well as a contribution to the J18 it marked the start of the AAA's 'Space 1999 - Ten Days that Shook the Universe' festival in London.

The we headed into the City where the main event was in full swing - in fact we'd already missed the famous storming of the London International Financial Futures and & Options Exchange. It was a blazing hot day and there was a sense of creative chaos with different stuff going off in all directions - one minute you were with thousands of people dancing in the streets, then you looked down an alleyway and there were people fighting with riot police. The latter seemed completely overwhelmed, I don't think anyone - authorities or activists - knew what to expect. At some point the crowd began to disperse, not in ones or twos, but in processions heading off in different directions. I remember a load of us slowly heading through an underpass with a huge sound system on a lorry shaking the walls with techno.

It was the peak of the Reclaim the Streets idea - in many different countries protests were accompanied by electronic beats from mobile sound systems. In London the police became wise to the tactic, and some of the activists also began to agonise about whether partying was getting in the way of politics (always a bad sign in the development of movements).

Stefan Szczelkun's film really captures the atmosphere, including some of the different musics on the day - drumming, samba, and at one point people dancing to Leftfield's Open Up (with John Lydon singing 'Burn Hollywood Burn'):



 The image below is from a Reclaim the Streets flyer given out in the lead up to J18. The central quote 'To work for delight...' comes from Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life (click image to enlarge):




The full text of the leaflet read:

On June 18th the leaders of the eight most powerful nations will meet for the G8 summit in Cologne, Germany. Their agenda will be the intensification of economic growth, "free" trade and more power for corporations as the only way towards a bright future. But these 'leaders' are not in control... Our planet is actually run by the financial market - a giant video game in which people buy and sell blips on electronic screens, trading life for money in their search for ever-higher profits. Yet the consequences of this frenzied game are very real: human lives, ecosystems, jobs and even entire economies are at the mercy of this reckless global system.

As the economy becomes increasingly global and interdependent those resisting its devastating social and ecological consequences are joining forces. Around the world, the movement grows - from Mexico's Zapatistas, to France's unemployed, to India's small farmers, to those fighting road building in the UK, to anti-oil activists in Nigeria - people are taking direct action and reclaiming their lives from the insane game of the markets. Resistance will converge on June 18th as hundreds of groups simultaneously occupy and transform banking and financial centres across the globe.

If you act like there is no possibility of change for the better, you guarantee that there will be no change for the better. The choice is ours.

Carn'ival n. 1. An explosion of freedom involving laughter, mockery, dancing, masquerade and revelry. 2. Occupation of the streets in which the symbols and ideals of authority are subverted. 3. When the marginalised take over the centre and create a world turned upside down. 4. You cannot watch carnival, you take part. 5. An unexpected carnival is revolutionary.

'To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection'

Cap'italism n. 1. A system by which the few profit from the exploitation of the many. 2. A mindset addicted to profit, work and debt which values money more than life. 3. An unsustainable ideology obsessed by growth despite our finite planet. 4. The cause of the global, social and ecological crisis. 5. A social system overthrown at the end of the 20th century...

A massive carnival in the world's biggest financial centre - the city of London - will be Reclaim The Streets' part of the day. Let's replace the roar of profit and plunder with the sounds and rhythms of party, carnival and pleasure!

Friday June 18th - An international day of protest, action and carnival aimed at the heart of the global economy: the banking and financial centres.

Reclaim The Streets. Meet 12 noon, Liverpool Street Station, London EC1. Bring a radio and disguise yourself to blend into the City. Office worker or bike courier costumes work best!

Don't play their game, call in sick on Friday June the 18th

Do not underestimate the power of global resistance

Text of the AAA leaflet given out on J18:
Stop Star Wars: Military out of Space - Association of Autonomous Astronauts

While film fans wait for the new Star Wars movie the real thing is already taking shape above our heads. Space technology is a key part of the military machine being used to destroy people and buildings in Yugoslavia and Iraq. And the US and other governments are actively planning to deploy new weapons in space capable of wreaking even more destruction on planet earth. Today the Association of Autonomous Astronauts are demanding that one of the key players in the space arms race - the Lockheed Martin corporation - hands over its resources to us for the development of peaceful, galaxy-friendly community based space exploration.

From the Blitz to the Moon
Space and military technology have always gone hand in hand. In the Second World War, thousands of people were killed in London and other cities by the Nazis' V2 rocket. When the war finished, Werner Von Braun and the other scientists responsible for the V2 were given new jobs by the US government. The V2 technology was refined and served as the basis for both intercontinentaI Ballistic Missiles (nuclear weapons) and the Apollo Space programme that sent people to the moon.

Satellites of death

A high proportion of the satellites launched into space serve military purposes. The 1991 Gulf War saw the US combine data from surveillance, meteorological and communications satellites to deploy its war machine with lethal effectiveness. It's been the same story in the current war on Yugoslavia. For instance, B-1B Lancer bombers have been used "equipped with advanced cluster bomb units which use satellite navigation to detect and destroy targets (Guardian 3.4.99). Naturally this super-accurate space age technology hasn't stopped people being blown to bits in hospitals, houses, old people's homes, prisons and on bridges.

Star Wars - the sequel

Military satellites are only the start. The US Space Command (part of the US Air Force) is actively planning the deployment of weapons in space. According to General Joseph Ashy, commander in chief of the US Space Command (motto 'Master of Space'), "we will engage terrestrial targets someday from space. We will engage targets in space, from space" . In the 1980s Ronald Reagan's Star Wars programme was derided as a Cold War fantasy. Now the plan to deploy weapons in space to 'defend' the US from missile attack is back on with the Ballistic Missile Defence programme. These 'defensive' weapons could be quickly adapted to attack enemy satellites or targets on the ground.

Cassini - nukes in space

The use of lasers and similar weapons in space would only be feasible with powerful energy sources, and public opinion is already being softened up for nuclear powered weapons systems in space. In 1997 NASA launched the Cassini space probe to Saturn with 32.8 kg of radioactive plutonium on board. Fortunately this rocket did not blow up on take-off (unlike many recent launches), but Cassini is due to pass close to earth again in August 1999 with potentially catastrophic results if anything goes wrong.

Lockheed Martin

Today military and space technology are concentrated in the hands of the same big corporations. With Lockheed Martin, the two areas are even co-ordinated in the same section of the company - Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, based in Sunnyvale, California. Lockheed have reaped millions of pounds from the US space programme as a key contractor for NASA. Today, LM Missiles and Space are involved in the space shuttle programme and the development of the International Space Station. At the same time they are continuing to develop Trident missiles, nuclear weapons currently deployed by the US and UK governments in nuclear powered submarines in oceans across the world. Lockheed Martin UK is a major defence contractor for the Ministry of Defence, completing the installation of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles on Royal Navy submarines just in time for their use in Yugoslavia.

AAA

The Association of Autonomous Astronauts is opposed to the commercial and military exploitation of space. We really don't think it's worth going through all the effort of getting into space just to live by the same rules as on earth. What attracts us to space exploration is the possibility of doing things differently. We are not interested in finding out what's its like to work in space, to find new ways of killing. We want to find out what dancing or sex feels like in zero gravity, to find new ways of living.

As part of the J18 global festival against corporate exploitation we demand that Lockheed Martin decommissions its weapon-making capability and hands over its resources to the AAA. We will be outlining our programme of community-based, galaxy-friendly space exploration in our Space 1999 festival, which starts today.
There is some footage of the AAA J18 protest in this AAA video.
Other relections: Christoph Fringeli at Datacide - 10 Years J18 199; Ian Bone.

Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program

Ras G hails from South Central Los Angeles via outer space and seems to be consciously placing himself in the afro-futurist tradition of Sun Ra and George Clinton.

Last year Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program put out an album called Ghetto Sci Fi with tracks including Beyond the Sky, Afrikan Space Rhythms and Sign Me Up, with its double-edged sample at the beginning about the requirement for all aliens to register with the National Space Administration.

Last month he put out another album, Brotha from Another Planet. Nice review at Bama Love Soul which should whet your appetite: 'you would most likely need an extraterrestrial being to translate some of the sounds he manages to construct/deconstruct..but definitely in a good way. At first listen you begin to hear influences of the unpredictable free jazz styles (though not a jazz album) of Sun Ra, Coltrane, and Horace Tapscott, the heavy, in the red, Dub bass drops of King Tubby, and undoubtedly the dustiest, dirtiest drums of hip hop peers J Dilla, and label mate Flying Lotus. Add randomly scattered static, scratches, vocal samples from various films and records, crazy left and right pans (especially if you listen through headphones) and you are ready for some serious space traveling'. Check out Alkebulan from the album here - a video with lots of clips from Sun Ra's Space is the Place.

Still finding my way around all this, but all I've heard so far sounds great. There's an interview with him here (where he sings the praises of London bass including dubstep and grime):

The Mouse Organ and the Hoot Planet

The death this week of children’s programme maker Oliver Postgate (1925-2008) has prompted an outpouring of nostalgia from everybody raised on 1970s British TV. And I don’t see why I should be any different. Some of my earliest memories are of Pogles Wood and Noggin the Nog, but it’s really Bagpuss (made in 1974) and the Clangers (1969-74) that had the biggest impact, programmes Postgate famously made with his co-collaborator Peter Firmin in a cowshed in Kent. Music was an important part of both programmes.

For the unitiated, Bagpuss was set in a bygone shop run by a girl called Emily (played by Peter Firmin's daughter) - a shop where nothing was sold, but things just waited in the window for their rightful owners to claim them. The show featured folk songs sung by real folk musicians - John Faulkner (the voice of Gabriel the banjo-playing toad) and Sandra Kerr (the voice of Madeleine Remnant, the singing doll). But most memorable was the high pitched singing of the mice who shared the shop with Bagpuss the cat - and who maintained The Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ.

The Clangers was set on a planet populated by pink mouse like creatures and their friend the Soup Dragon (inspiration for Scottish indie band The Soup Dragons). There was also a cloud that floated over the planet dropping musical rain drops. In one episode, Tiny Clanger is floating in space on her music boat – with her friends the flowers - when she encounters the Hoot Planet, made up of musical horns. Later, her brother makes an ill-fated attempt to make a rocket ('now what has Small Clanger made - a rocket, I don't like the look of that') and a soup pipeline, something that is contrasted unfavourably with Tiny's invention, with the help of The Music Trees, of a Pipe Organ ('Listen. Music I wonder what that is?... Tiny clanger has made an organ... very good, yes now that is better, that is something really useful').

Not hard to read an implicit anti-militarist message here (music is better than missiles), not surprizing either as Postgate was an active peace campaigner for most of his life - see writing at his website. I actually saw him once in the 1980s speaking at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally in Canterbury. I also once met the grown-up Emily Firmin from Bagpuss in a squat in Brixton. Well I guess we all have to move on from cuddly toys, even magical ones that come to life when we're not looking - but it's nice to remember them too.

For Laika

Thanks to John Hutnyk at Trinketization for reminding me that today is the 51st anniversary of the launch of Spuntnik 2, with its passenger Laika the dog becoming both the first mammal in space and the first space fatality a few hours later.

I've discussed the first songs in space by a man and a woman, but perhaps the honour should go to a dog whimpering in zero gravity. There have been quite a few Laika references in music - indeed there's both a Finnish band called Laika & The Cosmonauts and a UK band, Laika (who I once saw at the Venue in New Cross supporting, I think, Spirtitualized Electric Mainline).

The best of a number of songs referring to the dog is by Arcade Fire - not so much a song about the dog as one evoking the sadness of Laika being sent away to die as a metaphor for the fate of an errant brother ('Our mother should have just named you Laika! It's for your own good, It's for the neighborhood').

A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld

... or at least the 'sounds' of pulsating stars detected by the Corot space telescope in France. Have a listen, some interesting noise from the outer shores of Stellar/Helio Seismology. Did you know that the Sun 'forms a spherical acoustical resonator with millions of different normal modes of oscillation. Due to the waves' long life times, destructive interference filters out all but the resonant frequencies, transforming the random convective noise into a very rich line spectrum in the five-minute range'.

Of course, you're not actually hearing the stars. There is no giant microphone in space picking up sound waves, rather it is possible to infer what sound waves are emanating from the interior of stars by interpreting light images - and then to convert this data into sounds that we can listen to. If we could get close enough to the stars would we ever be able to hear them? I don't think so, because sound waves need air to travel through to our ears. Still it would be nice to find out first hand - set the controls for the heart of the sun.

(a huge ever growing pulsating brain...)

Moon-boots

It's been a while since I posted anything about space music (see here for the original Disconaut text), but I came across this fine piece of 1977 space disco the other day - Moon-boots by ORS (sometimes known as Orlando Riva Sound), a German outfit formed by Anthony Monn. You might still be able to download at Chezlubacov or The Red Room, or you can listen it to it here.

(Miraculi at youtube has put images to this track of women dancing at what looks like a Russian airport, but it's not the original video ).

First Woman to Sing in Space

We have already discussed Yuri Gagarin's first song in space. A couple of years later, a woman's voice joined the ranks of space singers:

'On June 16th 1963, for the first time ever, a woman sang in space. The singer was Valentina Tereshkova, a 26-year-old Soviet cosmonaut and former textile worker, and the song was about her homeland, Mother Russia. Valentina had left the planet human beings inhabit, with all its diverse frontiers, to become the first woman and fifth cosmonaut after Yuri Gagarin to pioneer a new order of living in the unexpected dimensions of the universe... She remains to this day the only woman to accomplish a solo flight in space for three days'.

Tereshkova had been in a folk group, playing the domra (a Russian stringed instrument). In an interview she was asked 'During his flight Gagarin sang to Mission Control and he heard them play a popular song 'Moscow night'. You also sang during your flight, can you remember the words?'. She replied: 'They were something like this:

I see the black Heaven close to me

Beneath me the Earth is full of poppies

You are awaiting me Earth

I am flying, flying, flying.

My Earth until you call me back.'

This sounds like she may have made this up, in which case this would have the honour of being the first song written in space.

Source: Valentina: First Woman in Space, Conversations with A. Lothian (Durham: Pentland Press, 1993)

I wanna be a cosmonaut

Next up in our collection of space-themed songs comes this East London punk obscurity from 1978. 'I wanna be a cosmonaut' by Riff Raff (Chiswick Records) includes the lyrics: 'I should be starring, Just like Gagarin, There’s the place for me... I wanna be a star in USSR'.

Other than being the first punk record from Romford, this is probably most notable for being the first outing on vinyl by one Mr Billy Bragg.

Download - Riff Raff - I wanna be a cosmonaut (MP3)

Yuri Gagarin - first song in space

Following yesterday's post on the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, I am starting a series of posts of space sounds. Pride of place in my cosmic record collection is this 7 inch from 1961, Conquest of Space, released to commemorate the first trip by a human into outer space by Yuri Gagarin on 12th April.

It includes recordings of Gagarin entering the spaceship ("In a few minutes I shall be launched into outer space in a powerful cosmic ship") and from the trip itself, not to mention some bars of the song that Yuri Gagarin sang during his return to earth - the first song to be sung in space (apparently it was The Motherland Hears, the Motherland Knows, tune by Shostakovich) . Unfortunately its not actually Gagarin's version on the record.

Obviously the record is very much a project of the Cold War, complete with a speech by Krushchev and Gagarin thanking the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But it is an also an artifact of a more optimistic period in which human subjectivity seemed to be expanding and the Situationist International declared that 'Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military “promotional” gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfilments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as “volunteers” of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers councils' (I'm not sure about the pillaging bit, but agree with the spirit).

Well so far the future hasn't worked out as planned - no leisure society, no moonbase alpha -but some of us are still hopeful.

A couple of MP3s to download if you're so inclined, one of this record and another featuring a sample from it - the latter a track put together by me and Jason Aphasic under the moniker Roteraketen for the AAA compilation 'Rave in Space' (must admit my main musical contribution was bringing the sample)

Conquest of Space - Yuri Gagarin (1961) - MP3

Roteraketen - Here to Go (2000) -M4A

Space is the Place

A pleasant evening at the Camberwell Squatted Centre in South London last night, spent watching the fantastic Sun Ra film Space is the Place, as well as a short film about the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA). Later I played some of my extensive collection of space-themed music. Last night this included everything from Pharoah Sanders (Astral Travelling) to The Rezillos (Flying Saucer Attack) via Klaxons (Gravity's Rainbow), with some Derrick Carter (Tripping among the stars) thrown in.


I began accumulating this collection when I was part of the Disconaut node of the AAA (1995-2000). The premise of the AAA was a global network committed to challenging the state and corporate monopoly of space through the development of community-based space exploration programmes. Within this network, Disconaut AAA focused on dance music as a vehicle for space exploration. Some of the Disconaut material from our Everybody is a Star! newsletter is archived at Uncarved, but the full story of the AAA remains to be told - and maybe the story isn't finished yet, as AAA Kernow (not unconnected to Nocturnal Emissions) apparently relaunched itself last month. I have reflected on the AAA experience elsewhere and will be considering all of this further at this site, but for now here's the founding text of Disconaut AAA:


Disconauts are go! (from 'Everybody is a Star!', no.1, 1996)

Forget Apollo, NASA and the Space Shuttle... the most exciting explorations of space in the last 30 years have been carried out through music.

Emerging on the radical fringes of jazz in the 1950's Sun Ra (1914-1993) and his Intergalactic Research Arkestra (as his band was later known) set the space vibe in motion with interstellar explorations like 'Space Jazz Reverie', 'Love in Outer Space', 'Disco 3000', and the film 'Space is the Place' [picture is of Sun Ra in film].

Described by one critic as "a comic strip version of Sun Ra", George Clinton developed his own funky cosmic Afronaut mythology in the 1970's through his work with Funkadelic and Parliament. For instance, the album "Mothership Connection" (1975) is based around the concept of aliens visiting earth to take the funk back to their own planet.


Sun Ra and Clinton's work can be read as a sort of sci-fi take on Marcus Garvey. While Garvey dreamt of Black Star Liners shipping back people from slavery across the ocean to an African utopia, they leave the planet altogether.

Space continued to be a preoccupation during the 1970s disco boom. Derided by rock critics for its lack of serious content, disco had a distinct utopian element. In disco the intensity of pleasure on the dancefloor was reimagined as an ideal for living rather than just a Saturday night release. The implicit fantasy was of a 'Boogie Wonderland' where music, dancing and sex were organising principles rather than work and the economy. "Lost in music, feel so alive, I quit my nine-to-five", as Sister Sledge put it.

In the unpromising social climate of the 1970's, this wonderland was sometimes projected into space. Earth, Wind and Fire (who recorded 'Boogie Wonderland') combined elements of Egyptology and sci-fi with albums like 'Head for the Sky' (1973) and 'All n All' (1977) with its cover pic of a rocket taking off from a pyramid. In the late 1970s there was a rash of space themed disco hits like Sheila B. Devotion's 'Spacer' and Slick's '(Everybody goes to the) Space Base' (1979), the latter imagining the space base as disco and social centre rather than military-industrial installation.

Some of these space records can be viewed as simple cash-ins on the popularity of Star Wars and similar films of this period, but was there something deeper going on? While the sale of disco records reaped big profits for the record companies, the logic of the dancefloor was potentially at odds with the society of domination. On the floor pleasure was elevated above the puritan work ethic and hierarchies of class, race, gender and sexuality were (sometimes) dissolved.

Discos (like today's dance spaces) could have been the launchpad for explorations of different worlds on earth and beyond, powered by the Dance Disco Heat energy on the floor. In this light the disco icon par excellence, the glittering mirror ball, has to be re-evaluated. Detailed archaeological investigations of the alignment of these spheres of light suspended high above the dancefloor will doubtless reveal that they were installed to equip dancers with a rudimentary astronomical knowledge to help them find their way around the universe.