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Music

Guinea-Pig Fleet — Fire Raids (2022 Deconstruction)

February 12, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
Guinea-Pig Fleet — Fire Raids: Tokyo Like “Hiroshima Tattoo,” the two-disc “Fire Raids” set is one of the old recordings that I have returned to with equal parts fondness and regret. Originally released in 2002 and composed in a bit of a frenzy, after a crash course in the horrors of US incendiary bombing raids in Japan, these tracks were really inspired by the awful logistics of the fire raids: the precise spacing of the planes, the distance from first to last bomber, the grids used to produce maximum destruction in the targeted cities, etc. The accounts of the “Meetinghouse” […]
fiction

“Recollections of Six Days’ Journey in the Moon,” by an Aerio-Nautical Man (1844)

January 29, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
Being a devoted lover of travelling, partly on account of the agreeable dissipation of mind it produces, but more especially the dignity and consequence derived from breathing the air of foreign lands, I have been seriously aggrieved at this lamentable exhaustion of novelty, and more than once, like Alexander, sat down and wept that there were no more worlds to explore. The planets and other heavenly bodies most especially attracted my attention, and of these the Moon, which is at the bottom of so many sublunary influences, and without whose aid the adepts of Natural Philosophy would be so often at a loss to account for various phenomena, appeared to me the most interesting.

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encyclopedia entries

Anarchist Encyclopedia: Archies (Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers)

January 20, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
This ending designates the different powers that exercise authority and command in society, powers that are harmful from every point of view, incapable of insuring true order, whether it is a question of monarchy (monos, one alone), power left to the arbitrary will of one individual, or of oligarchy (oligos, few in number), the power of a clique (an olig-archy of businessmen, politicians, soldiers, etc…, enslaving the world to its whims, — one hundred tyrants instead of one), or of all the archies past, present and future.

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Libertatia Laboratories

Libertatia Laboratories — Audio Experiments

December 30, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur
In both musical and visual art, my approach is essentially a matter of collage. This is, perhaps, not so far from the method of synthesis that guides my historical and theoretical work or from the dynamics of poetry. I am quite conscious that all of this activity is a matter of construction and that construction is often a matter of bricolage. We work with what the world has left us — and the creative activity is the reassembly of some of the bits in ways that appear useful. The current batch of recordings are very much products of the pandemic, […]