Source: ARTnews.com.

This past November, two dissident voices of French postwar music were the subject of retrospectives in New York. The resolutely unclassifiable Luc Ferrari (1929–2005) was warmly celebrated in “Stereo Spasms,” a two-night program of performances at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn on November 18–19, while the series “Recherches Filmiques” at Anthology Film Archives (November 21–27) spotlighted his work in cinema, both as a filmmaker and as a composer of scores. Meanwhile, musician Éliane Radigue (b. 1932) has been the subject of “Intermediate States,” an ongoing program organized by Blank Forms in collaboration with Radigue herself. That Radigue and Ferrari should be toasted in parallel is appropriate: while their work took wildly different forms, both figures began their careers in the orbit of musique concrète, or music created by manipulating recorded sound on tape. They separately broke from this blueprint, cultivating practices that have proven radically prescient.

Source: The Guardian.

Very little about the band has changed in the two decades since. Rather, it is the culture around them that has changed, and some of that is due to the group itself. They are the heaviest band this century has seen so far, and like the giant celestial body they share a name with homophonically, they exert a massive amount of gravity on the culture that surrounds them, drawing more into their orbit while radiating giant waves of creative energy back outwards. Put simply, it’s not all that weird to hear them on daytime radio.

Source: The Guardian.

The Gong mythos was a fantastical sci-fi narrative involving the peaceful Planet Gong, its small green inhabitants, the Pothead Pixies, and their healing gurus the Octave Doctors. The Pixies had propellers on their heads that doubled as aerials tuned into the telepathic transmissions of Radio Gnome Invisible (an interstellar pirate radio station) and they travelled by “glidding” in flying teapots (a stoner-friendly joke on flying saucers).