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PALESTINE/COULTER/MATHOUL | Maximin
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pitchforkmedia.com | John DarnielleReview - Ten Records That Render Life Bearable...Whilst Simultaneously Making the World Seem Like a Malevolent and Overwhelming Place, and Two Activities That Fill Up the Endless River of Empty Hours That Flows Elegantly Before Me in a Cascading Arc Across the Horizon; by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats 7. Palestine/Coulter/Mathoul: Maximin (young god records) This won't be released until the end of October, but once it comes out there are some stereos on which it will continue playing until time stops. Drone music from a composer named Charlemagne Palestine about whom lots of people apparently know lots of things and have lots of opinions. I'd never heard of him, but I played this thing at ridiculously high volume when I first got it and I almost saw God....
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Devendra Banhart | Oh Me Oh My... | Review
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All Music GuideJason MacNeilThe first thing that strikes you is his utterly unique and soft voicewhich seems a mix of Nick Drake and Marc Bolan. "Roots (If the Sky Were a Stone)" is a perfect example of this, as Banhart uses his vocals and an acoustic guitar to get his brief yet often memorable points across. Originally recorded on shoddy and broken four-track recorders, the songs have a definitive roughness and audible hiss on nearly all of them, giving them a certain authenticity rarely found. Cars can be heard driving past in "The Charles C. Leary," but that performance is only one of the many highlights here. A number of the tracks are less than or just over one minute in length, often stream-of-conscious poetry put to music. The fragility heard in "Nice People" resembles Victoria Williams but evolves into a Syd Barrett song structure, speaking of "wide ass suits and lion tattoos." Barrett can be discerned throughout the record, especially during "Gentle Soul." "Cosmos and Demos" lends itself more toward Pink Floyd performing something from Echoes, perhaps the acoustic-oriented "Fearless." Lyrically the songs are quite odd and occasionally nonsensical, particularly "Michigan State." Here Banhart speaks of a friend who......
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PALESTINE/COULTER/MATHOUL | Maximin
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pitchforkmedia.com | John DarnielleReview - Ten Records That Render Life Bearable...Whilst Simultaneously Making the World Seem Like a Malevolent and Overwhelming Place, and Two Activities That Fill Up the Endless River of Empty Hours That Flows Elegantly Before Me in a Cascading Arc Across the Horizon; by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats 7. Palestine/Coulter/Mathoul: Maximin (young god records) This won't be released until the end of October, but once it comes out there are some stereos on which it will continue playing until time stops. Drone music from a composer named Charlemagne Palestine about whom lots of people apparently know lots of things and have lots of opinions. I'd never heard of him, but I played this thing at ridiculously high volume when I first got it and I almost saw God....
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Charlemagne Palestine | Interview
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The Wire | Louise GrayInvisible Jukebox(with thanks to) The Wire September 2002 Charlemagne Palestine was born into a Russian Jewish in Brooklyn in 1947. From an early age he trained as a cantorial singer in the synagogues of New York. At 11, he spent a year playing conga for Tiny Tim in Manhattan clubs. Later, he began ringing the carillon at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church, which was particularly responsive to the sonic overtones and drones and repetitions. Palestine was drawn into the 1960s New York art scene, and soon came into contact with Tony Conrad, who was his conduit to Andy Warhol’s and La Monte Young’s groups. He also worked with Indian classical singer Prandit Pran Nath. After graduating from the NYC High School of Music and Art, he researched synthesizer composition at NYU’s Intermedia Center. When its director, Morton Subotnick, moved to California Institute for the Arts (Cal Arts), he took the fledgling composer with him. There, Palestine encountered the Bosendorfer piano, whose harmonic spectrum provided with the sonic clarity he needed. While at Cal Arts, he built a drone machine to pursue lines begun with his earlier four hour organ work, Spectral Continuum Drones. Though he was associated......
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Charlemagne Palestine | Biography
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Electronic Arts Intermixintensely personal and often violently chargedThroughout the 1970s, Charlemagne Palestine produced a seminal body of performance-based, psychodramatic videotapes in which he activates a ritualistic use of physicality, motion and sound to achieve an outward articulation of internal states. Intensely personal and often violently charged, these phenomenological exercises are characterized by a visceral enactment of physical and psychological catharses. Performing in isolation with a hand-held, moving camera, Palestine taps the body as a conduit for the self. The very titles of his pieces -- Internal Tantrum (1975), Running Outburst (1975) -- suggest literal and metaphorical catalysts for release or escape from confinement. Movement and sound, as they relate to the body and the voice, are the vehicles through which Palestine expels internal energy. Ritualistic vocal expressions -- hypnotic chants, trance-inducing tones -- become physical translations of anguish and pain, as does the use of the video as an extension of the body. Running frenetically with the camera or strapping it to a moving motorcycle, Palestine uses motion as metaphor. Challenging identity and perception, he positions the viewer behind the camera, in a subjective point of view. Seeing through his eyes, moving with his body, the viewer is both participant......