Friday, September 26, 2008
LAV DIAZ sings: IMPIYERNO (HELL)
His monumental epic films: Ebolusyon ng Pamilyang Pilipino, Batang Westside, Heremias, etc... known infamously for their length, are also acknowledged for it's depth and weight on human and social consciousness.
Hailed as "The Martyr filmmaker" in an issue of Rogue magazine, Philbert Dy writes:
"If I had a thousand lives to offer, I would offer them all to God," said Lorenzo Ruiz defiantly to the tribunal that would put him to death. One would imagine that Lav Diaz, placed before the same judgement, would say much of the same; though he would replace the word "God" with "cinema".
ANG PINAGDAANANG BUHAY
written & performed by Lav Diaz
from the album "IMPIYERNO: Songs From & Inspired By The Cinema Of Lav Diaz"
cinamatography by Albert Banzon
edited by Lawrence S. Ang
translation by Dodo Dayao
produced & directed by Khavn De La Cruz
The Life Lived
When you woke up one morning
No one was beside you
No friend was waiting
Orphaned by your solitude
Playing in your mind
The road once travelled
Abandoned footprints
Dreams that died hard
You walk down the street
Under their stares
The shadows that dog you
Ghosts of days past
Everyday you struggle
Crawling in gloom
Fighting to arrest
Your consciousness weakening
As severe fatigue hits your body
Drowning in times passage
You hope it will lose its gravity
This weight you bear
Hope for the storm to calm
Wade in the rain
Embrace your loss
Dont fear your solitude
And in the end all you will remember
Is a face looking down
Is a name receding
Is a love unrequited
And in the end all you will remember
Is a picture fading
Is a name receding
Is a love unrequited
And in the end all you will remember
Are the names receding
The shadows dissolving
Of the world youre leaving
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
MAURICIO KAGEL HAS DIED!!!!
Mauricio Kagel has died!
Another original and influential genius has left us!
Mauricio Kagel, 76, Writer of Avant-Garde Music, Is Dead
Mauricio Kagel, an avant-garde composer whose often absurdist works blurred the boundaries between music, theater and film, died on Wednesday in Cologne, Germany. He was 76.
His death was announced by his music publishing house, C. F. Peters Musikverlag. No cause was given.
By temperament a dadaist and provocateur, Mr. Kagel drew on the musical examples of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In “Anagrama,” a work from the 1950s, singers and instrumentalists were called on to emit notes, squeaks, whispers and shouts corresponding to an elaborate system derived from the letters in a Latin palindrome.
In works like “Der Schall” (1968) and “Acustica” (1968-70), he made use of cash registers, car horns, ratchets and walkie-talkies to create bizarre aural effects, and in works he described as “instrumental theater” he prescribed specific attitudes and gestures for the performers to enact.
Mauricio Raúl Kagel grew up in Buenos Aires, where his parents had fled from the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Although he took private lessons on piano, organ and cello, as well as in singing, conducting and theory, he was self-taught as a composer.
After studying literature and philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, he collaborated with an avant-garde group, the Agrupación Nuevo Mundo; helped found the Cinémathèque Argentine; and wrote film criticism. In 1955 he became the chorus director and rehearsal accompanist at the Teatro Colón.
At the encouragement of the composer Pierre Boulez, he left for West Germany in 1957 and settled in Cologne, where he conducted concerts of contemporary music with the Rhineland Chamber Orchestra and was a visiting lecturer at the Darmstadt summer courses for new music.
In 1969 he was named director of the Institute of New Music at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne and the successor to Stockhausen as the director of the Cologne Courses for New Music. He helped found the Cologne Ensemble for New Music. In 1974 he became the professor of new music and theater at the Musikhochschule in Cologne.
Among his more notable works are “Staatstheater” (1967-70) a disassembled opera, minus plot and libretto, consisting of nine sections to be performed in any order, and the film “Ludwig van” (1970), whose soundtrack derives from pages of Beethoven’s music plastered on the walls of a set representing the composer’s studio. Because the sheet music wraps around edges and curves, Mr. Kagel in effect held Beethoven up to a fun-house mirror.
From New York Times
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Electrostatic Sound Conference III (NMAM)

Mark Laccay is an award winning Audio Engineer who is the CEO of Sonic Logo Multimedia Inc. and a managing partner of Sweetspot Studios. He has worked as a Sound Designer for various films and is the main audio consultant for the "Dr. Jose Maceda Collection Digitization" Project. As an educator he taught audio classes at DLSU-CSB. He recently returned from the Austrian Academy of Sciences where he acquired a certificate of Audio Tape Restoration and Digital Audio Archiving.
Mannet Villariba is a performance artist, painter, sound artist, visual programmer and designer. He has been active in diverse fields of art and design - including research and development. Yielding the outputs of sounds, images, and light through analyzing and transforming the numerical values gained from various sensors and input devices, he is a Visual Artist pursuing sensual peculiarity and interaction. He is a graduate of Bachelor of Fine Arts, Major in Painting at the University of Santo Tomas.
Click here for the flyer.