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News From Babel
News from Babel were an English avant-rock group founded in 1983 by Chris Cutler, Lindsay Cooper, Zeena Parkins and Dagmar Krause. They made two studio albums with several guest musicians (including Robert Wyatt) and disbanded in 1986. History In the wake of English avant-rock group Henry Cow (1968–1978), Art Bears (1978–1981), a song-oriented group, was formed by three of Henry Cow's members, drummer Chris Cutler, multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith and singer Dagmar Krause. In Art Bears' wake, News from Babel emerged in 1983, comprising Cutler, Krause, Henry Cow woodwind player Lindsay Cooper, and United States harpist Zeena Parkins. It was Parkins's first "rock group" and the first time she had recorded with her harp. This new group followed the song-oriented approach of Art Bears, but with a different musical emphasis. Cooper composed the music and Cutler wrote the song texts. News from Babel were purely a studio group, and its formation, name and first album were inspired ...
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Lindsay Cooper
Lindsay Cooper (3 March 1951 – 18 September 2013) was an English bassoon and oboe player and composer. Best known for her work with the band Henry Cow, she was also a member of Comus, National Health, News from Babel and David Thomas and the Pedestrians. She collaborated with a number of musicians, including Chris Cutler and Sally Potter, and co-founded the Feminist Improvising Group. She wrote scores for film and TV and a song cycle ''Oh Moscow'' which was performed live around the world in 1987. She also recorded a number of solo albums, including ''Rags'' (1980), '' The Gold Diggers'' (1983), and ''Music For Other Occasions'' (1986). Cooper was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the late 1970s, Cutler, Chris, ed. (2009). ''The Road: Volumes 1–5'', p.3 (book from ''The 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set''). Recommended Records. but did not disclose it to the musical community until the late 1990s when her illness prevented her from performing live. In September 2013, ...
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After Babel
''After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation'' (1975; second edition 1992; third edition 1998) is a linguistics book by literary critic George Steiner, in which the author deals with the " Babel problem" of multiple languages. ''After Babel'' is a comprehensive study of the subject of language and translation. It is both a controversial and seminal work that covers a great deal of new ground and has remained the most thorough book on this topic since its publication. Director Peter Bush of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia described the book as a "pioneering work which revealed all communication as a form of translation, and how central translation is to relations between cultures." Daniel Hahn at ContemporaryWriters.com wrote that "It is extraordinary in making a real contribution to translation studies, while remaining fairly self-contained and accessible to people who have never before given the matter a second thought." ''Aft ...
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Marxism
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand Social class, class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, no single, definitive Marxist philosophy, Marxist theory exists. In addition to the schools of thought which emphasize or modify elements of classical Marxism, various Marxian concepts have been incorporated and adapted into a diverse array of Social theory, social theories leading to widely varying conclusions. Alongside Marx's critique of political economy, the defining characteristics of Marxism have often been described using the terms dialectical mater ...
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Cabaret
Cabaret is a form of theatrical entertainment featuring music, song, dance, recitation, or drama. The performance venue might be a pub, a casino, a hotel, a restaurant, or a nightclub with a stage for performances. The audience, often dining or drinking, does not typically dance but usually sits at tables. Performances are usually introduced by a master of ceremonies or MC. The entertainment, as done by an ensemble of actors and according to its European origins, is often (but not always) oriented towards adult audiences and of a clearly underground nature. In the United States, striptease, burlesque, drag shows, or a solo vocalist with a pianist, as well as the venues which offer this entertainment, are often advertised as cabarets. Etymology The term originally came from Picard language or Walloon language words ''camberete'' or ''cambret'' for a small room (12th century). The first printed use of the word ''kaberet'' is found in a document from 1275 in Tournai. The term was ...
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Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisationa ...
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Rock Music
Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as " rock and roll" in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of different styles in the mid-1960s and later, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom.W. E. Studwell and D. F. Lonergan, ''The Classic Rock and Roll Reader: Rock Music from its Beginnings to the mid-1970s'' (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999), p.xi It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, a style that drew directly from the blues and rhythm and blues genres of African-American music and from country music. Rock also drew strongly from a number of other genres such as electric blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical, and other musical styles. For instrumentation, rock has centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar, drums, and one or more singers. Usually, rock is song-based music with a time signature using a verse–chorus form, ...
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The Work (band)
The Work were an English post-punk rock group, founded in 1980 by multi-instrumentalist/composer Tim Hodgkinson and guitarist/composer Bill Gilonis, with bass guitarist Mick Hobbs and drummer Rick Wilson. The band toured Europe in 1981 and 1982, and recorded their first album, ''Slow Crimes'' in 1982. After a tour of Japan later that year and releasing '' Live in Japan'', the band split up. In 1989, the Work reformed to record ''Rubber Cage'' and performed throughout Europe between 1989 and 1994, releasing another album, ''See'' in 1992. A live album, ''The 4th World'', recorded in Germany in 1994, was released in 2010. History Ex-Henry Cow co-founder Tim Hodgkinson began recording with Bill Gilonis in 1979. They experimented with tape collages which led to the creation of an independent record label, Woof Records and a band. Enlisting the services of Mick Hobbs and Rick Wilson they formed the Work, a post-punk rock group. In 1981, the Work made their first recording, an EP ...
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Bill Gilonis
Bill Gilonis (born 1958) is an English guitarist and composer. He co-founded the gritty experimental rock group The Work in 1980 with Tim Hodgkinson. The group was active intermittently until 1993, recording four albums and touring extensively, including in Russia, Japan Finland, Yugoslavia and Switzerland. Gilonis has also worked as a producer, sound engineer and/or musician with (among others): Robert Wyatt, News from Babel (Chris Cutler, Lindsay Cooper, Zeena Parkins, Dagmar Krause), David Thomas, Peter Blegvad, Ut, Lindsay Cooper Film Music Group, Hail and The Hat Shoes (with Catherine Jauniaux, Tom Cora, Charles Hayward, and others). Other projects include: writing and recording the music for Frida Béraud's one-woman theatre piece, "Aus den Haaren gezogen"; a collaboration with Anja Burse on Wild Thing, an audio-visual installation piece; and a multi-media piece for the Val de Travers exhibition about Absinthe in Neuchatel, Switzerland (with Luigi Archetti, Jeroen Viss ...
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Sally Potter
Charlotte Sally Potter (born 19 September 1949) is an English film director and screenwriter. She is known for directing ''Orlando'' (1992), which won the audience prize for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival. Early life Potter was born and raised in London. Her mother was a music teacher and her father was an interior designer and a poet. Her younger brother Nic became the bassist for the rock group Van der Graaf Generator. When asked about her background, which influenced her work as a filmmaker, she responds, "I came from an atheist background and an anarchist background, which meant that I grew up in an environment that was full of questions, where nothing could be taken for granted." When asked about what she learned about filmmaking from trying to do it as a seventeen-year-old woman in the UK in the 60s, Potter laughs.You know, most kinds of securities are illusions, and we need to kind of duck and weave as filmmakers, go with the flow, go where the harvest is. ..I ...
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Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, ''The Colossus and Other Poems'' (1960) and ''Ariel'' (1965), as well as ''The Bell Jar'', a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death in 1963. ''The Collected Poems'' was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts and the University of Cambridge, England, where she was a student at Newnham College. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England. Their relationship was tumultuous and, in her letters, Plath alleges abuse at his hand ...
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Letters Home (News From Babel Album)
''Letters Home'' is a 1986 studio album by English avant-rock group News from Babel. It was recorded at Tim Hodgkinson's Cold Storage Recording Studios in Brixton, London, in 1985 and 1986, and was released in 1986. It was their second album and included guest vocalists Robert Wyatt, Dagmar Krause, Sally Potter and Phil Minton. Krause (no longer a member of the group) was listed here as a guest and only sang on two songs.''Letters Home'' LP liner notes. Picking up where '' Work Resumed on the Tower'' left off, ''Letters Home'' continues News from Babel's exploration of "Marxist politics and personal alienation" set to a blend of rock, jazz and cabaret. The music on the album was composed by Lindsay Cooper and the song texts were written by Chris Cutler. The album's title was named after '' Letters Home'', a collection of letters written by Sylvia Plath. For technical reasons, the original LP release of this album was pressed on a 12 " disc at 45 rpm, and not the standard 33⅓ ...
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Single (music)
In music, a single is a type of release, typically a song recording of fewer tracks than an LP record or an album. One can be released for sale to the public in a variety of formats. In most cases, a single is a song that is released separately from an album, although it usually also appears on an album. In other cases a recording released as a single may not appear on an album. Despite being referred to as a single, in the era of music downloads, singles can include up to as many as three tracks. The biggest digital music distributor, the iTunes Store, accepts as many as three tracks that are less than ten minutes each as a single. Any more than three tracks on a musical release or thirty minutes in total running time is an extended play (EP) or, if over six tracks long, an album. Historically, when mainstream music was purchased via vinyl records, singles would be released double-sided, i.e. there was an A-side and a B-side, on which two songs would appear, one on each si ...
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