|
Association Of Musical Marxists
The Association of Musical Marxists (AMM) was a political and cultural organisation based in London, active between 2010 and 2015. It was founded by former members of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) (SWP), including writer Ben Watson and Andy Wilson, with the aim of uniting revolutionary politics with avant-garde and improvised music. The AMM challenged the professionalisation of both politics and the arts, advocating instead for creative spontaneity, radical history, and collective pleasure. Its events were communal and combined political discussion, poetry readings, musical improvisation, and drinking, seeking to dissolve boundaries between politics and culture. The AMM manifesto emphasised a commitment to revolutionary art and a rejection of what they perceived as the commodification of culture. They advocated for embracing great music as a pattern for reshaping humanity and as a key to the dialectic. By combining improvised music with revolutionary politics, the AMM aimed to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Socialist Workers Party (UK)
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a far-left political party in the United Kingdom. Founded as the Socialist Review Group (SRG) by supporters of Tony Cliff in 1950, it became the International Socialists in 1962 and the SWP in 1977. The party considers itself to be Trotskyist. Cliff and his followers criticised the Soviet Union and its satellites, calling them state capitalist rather than socialist countries. The SWP has founded several fronts through which they have sought to coordinate and influence leftist action, such as the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1970s. It also formed an alliance with George Galloway and Respect, the dissolution of which in 2007 caused an internal crisis in the SWP. A more serious internal crisis emerged at the beginning of 2013 over allegations of rape and sexual assault made against a leading member of the party. The SWP's handling of these accusations against the individual known as Comrade Delta, later identified as Martin Smith, led t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Heartfield
James Heartfield (born 1961) is a British lecturer and historian. Life Heartfield has written books on the history of the British Empire, including ''The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society'' (2016) and ''The Blood-Stained Poppy: A critique of the politics of commemoration'' (2019). Heartfield has written for ''ArtReview'', ''Blueprint'', Spiked Online, and the ''Times Education Supplement''. His Ph.D. thesis (awarded by the University of Westminster) was published as ''The European Union and the End of Politics'', in 2013. In May 2006, with Julia Svetlichnaja, he interviewed the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. Heartfield worked as a vaccinator during the COVID-19 pandemic. Politics Heartfield is a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and was previously a writer for their magazine ''Living Marxism''. In 2002 he helped set up the Audacity campaign for more house-building. He has written in favour of Israel's right to independence. Heartfield stoo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morning Star (British Newspaper)
The ''Morning Star'' is a left-wing British daily newspaper with a focus on social issues, social, political and trade union issues. Originally founded in 1930 as the ''Daily Worker'' by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), ownership was transferred from the CPGB to an independent consumers' co-operative, readers' co-operative, the People's Press Printing Society, in 1945 and later renamed the ''Morning Star'' in 1966. The paper describes its editorial stance as in line with ''Britain's Road to Socialism'', the programme of the Communist Party of Britain. The ''Daily Worker'' initially opposed the Second World War and its London edition was banned in Britain between 1941 and 1942. After Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union joined the Allies, the paper enthusiastically backed the war effort. During the Cold War, the paper provided a platform for critics of the US and its allies. This included whistleblowers who provided evidence that the British military were allowin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chris Searle
Chris Searle (born 1 January 1944) is a British educator, poet, anti-racist activist, and socialist. He has written widely on cricket, language, jazz, race, and social justice, and has taught in Canada, England, Tobago, Mozambique, and Grenada. He has been associated with the Institute of Race Relations since the 1970s, and is on the editorial board of ''Race & Class''. He writes a weekly column on jazz for the left-wing newspaper '' Morning Star''. Life Chris Searle was born in Romford, Essex, in 1944. He was a young cricketer for England, and graduated in 1966 from the University of Leeds. That year he went to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where in 1967 he completed an M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, which included a thesis on the East End of London poet Isaac Rosenberg. He became a schoolteacher in Canada, and then in 1968–69 taught English at a secondary school in Tobago, in the West Indies. His 1972 work ''The Forsaken Lover: White Words and Black Peo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lumpy Gravy (1967 Album)
''Lumpy Gravy'', also known as ''Lumpy Gravy (Primordial)'', is the recalled original debut solo album by Frank Zappa. It is an entirely orchestral recording written by Zappa and performed by a group of session players he dubbed the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra. Zappa conducted the orchestra but did not perform on the album. It was commissioned and briefly released, on August 7, 1967, by Capitol Records in the 4-track Stereo-Pak format only and then withdrawn due to a lawsuit from MGM Records. MGM claimed that the album violated Zappa's contract with their subsidiary, Verve Records, and the album was recalled. In 1968, a second version of the album was released by Verve on May 13, 1968, which consisted of two musique concrète pieces that combined elements from the original orchestral performance with aspects of surf music and spoken word. The original 1967 album was reissued in 2018 under the title ''Lumpy Gravy (Primordial)''. Recording Following the rel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American guitarist, composer, and bandleader. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed Rock music, rock, Pop music, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and ''musique concrète'' works; he additionally produced nearly all the 60-plus albums he released with his band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. His work is characterized by wikt:nonconformity, nonconformity, Musical improvisation, improvisation sound experimentation, Virtuoso, musical virtuosity and satire of American culture. Zappa also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. He is considered one of the most innovative and stylistically diverse musicians of his generation. As a mostly self-taught composer and performer, Zappa had diverse musical influences that led him to create music that was sometimes difficult to categorize. While in his teens, he acquired a taste for 20th-century ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zappanale
Zappanale is an annual music festival held outside Bad Doberan, a German town previously part of East Germany. The festival was first held in 1990, and the program features various bands performing the music of the late composer and guitarist Frank Zappa, and other "music outside the norm". Many musicians who played with Zappa have performed at the festival over the years. Background Many of the festival's organizers originate from East Germany, and grew up in a period where Zappa's music was considered unacceptable by several Eastern European communist countries. One of the festival's founders, Wolfhard Kutz, was persecuted by the East German secret police, the Stasi, for being a Zappa fan. When the German government granted citizens access to their Stasi files in 1992, Kutz learned that his file stated that he "knows how to influence the youth with Zappa". When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Kutz could openly enjoy his passion for Zappa's music, and he founded the fan club "A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guy Evans
Guy Randolph Evans (born 17 June 1947) is an English drummer. He is best known as a member of the progressive rock band Van der Graaf Generator, appearing on each of their studio albums. He is also a member of Echo City and Subterraneans. Career Whilst at the University of Warwick (1965–68), Evans played in the university band The New Economic Model. The band, which mainly played American soul music of the 1960s, played at university dances and supported bands such as Pink Floyd and The Move. There is a picture of Evans with the rest of the New Economic Model in "Van der Graaf Generator – The Book". Evans has been a member of Van der Graaf Generator from 1968 until 1978, and since their reformation in 2005. In addition to his work in Van der Graaf Generator, Evans has collaborated with other musicians, frequently with other (ex-) members of Van der Graaf Generator, as on '' The Long Hello'' project and in the K Group. He also works with Echo City, building outdoor cons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair FRSL (born 11 June 1943) is a writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, recently within the influences of psychogeography. Early life and education Sinclair was born in Cardiff, Wales, on 11 June 1943. From 1956 to 1961, he was educated at Cheltenham College, a boarding school for boys, followed by Trinity College, Dublin (where he edited '' Icarus''). He attended the Courtauld Institute of Art and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School). Career Development as author Sinclair's early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) connected with the British avant garde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as Edward Dorn, J. H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters. Later, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jair-Rôhm Parker Wells
Jair-Rôhm Parker Wells (born October 13, 1958) is an American free improvising electric bassist. He is one of the founding members of the improvising band Machine Gun with Thomas Chapin and Robert Musso and the founder of the Meeting Interdisciplinary Arts Festival in Stockholm, Sweden. He lived in Stockholm, Sweden, from 1985 until 2017. He has been a promoter of improvised and experimental music and has collaborated with Bob Belden, Karl Berger, Daniel Carter, Jaron Lanier, John Sinclair, Shabaka Hutchings, and Tony Scott. In 2017, he was in residence at EMS in Stockholm where he began work on his opera ''#blacbuc''. The work was composed on the Buchla 100 and 200e systems at the institute. Compositions from his ''Liberation'' cycle are featured as part of res·o·nant, the light and sound installation by artist Mischa Kuball at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Raised in southern Germany, Jair-Rohm moved to New York in 1978. After touring the United States for a year with a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Echo City
Echo City is a British sound sculpture and music project founded in London in 1983 by Van der Graaf Generator member Guy Evans, Giles Leaman, and Giles Perring. Its current active members are Guy Evans, Julia Farrington, Rob Mills, Giles Perring and Paul Shearsmith. Susie Honeyman of The Mekons is a former member of the group. The project builds giant musical instruments and sound sculptures called "sonic playgrounds", but Echo City has since 1985 also performed as a band. History The project creates and builds collections of giant musical instruments and sound sculptures of its own designRoger Sutherland, 'New Perspectives in Music', Sun Tavern Fields, London, 1994 called "sonic playgrounds". The original concept of these structures was to involve audiences and viewers in music making themselves. The group has run music and arts projects over many years based on encouraging participation in music and sound making. The original team formed in 1983 included Guy Evans, Giles Per ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Sedgwick
Peter Harold Sedgwick (9 March 1934 – c. 8 September 1983) was a translator of Victor Serge, author of a number of books including ''PsychoPolitics'' and a revolutionary socialist activist. Life Peter Sedgwick grew up in Liverpool and won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1956, after the Hungarian Revolution, he left and joined the ''Socialist Review'' Group, later the International Socialists (forerunners of the Socialist Workers Party). He wrote for the group's press while also getting involved in the activities of rank-and-file members. He was opposed to the International Socialists' renaming themselves the Socialist Workers Party in January 1977 and refused to join the new organisation. However, he remained dedicated to the left. Christopher Hitchens called him "a noble remnant of the libertarian left" and dedicated his book ''Letters to a Young Contrarian'' (2001) to Sedgwick's memory. For the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
