Wednesday, December 30, 2009

SPIRAL MUTOID TRIBE SOUND WASTE COMPANY

Spiral tribe soundsystem & mutoid waste company have always gone hand in hand. Calling what they did "organising some party's" is an understatement: they started a revolution that made the autorithies shit their pants.

Both renegades from their homecountry after some trials & police violence (or better said: police attacks), all because of what they believe in. Did that stop them? Hell no. They just did the same thing on the mainland. They forwarded the revolution through entire europe. Mutate & survive! Music, party's & art with a REAL message that influenced thousands, even still today.


Watch the movie here



MUTATE & SURVIVE



"mutating the refuse of modern culture into the Marvelous"


Notorious Tankhenge built by the mutoid waste company guys, from German Panzers. You see it framing the Reichstag in 1992, after the collapse of the Wall in Berlin.



In 1986 the police put a violent stop to a free festival at Stonehenge. Stonehenge became heritage listed and was fenced off as we know it today. Mutoid Waste Co. responded accordingly.

"If you want the Stones, you can keep them... We'll build our own!" and in 1987 at Glastonbury Festival a set of three 'Carhenges' were built, the ethos 'Mutate and Survive' was born.

"The 'Henge' theme has run through our work ever since that day in 1986.  Mutoid Waste made a rapid departure from the UK (runnin' from the authorities). They left Engeland to live in Berlin (Tacheless), but took their art with them. As they worked their way across Europe thousands of people encountered the characters of Mutoid Waste's world.

More on mutoid here!


Tuesday, December 29, 2009

SPIRAL TRIBE INTERVIEW




Back in 199? (The Early 90's) the rapidly emerging "Spiral Tribe" we're saying a lot of things to mainstream media.  They were releasing singles, claiming to represent a lot of people - They were viewed by the underground with an equal amount of admiration and suspicion.... 

Since Castle Morton and the Canary Wharf rave SPIRAL TRIBE have occupied quite a space on/in mass media air time/publications. They suddenly seem to be regarded by the mainstream media as spokespeople for the multi-layered festival scene.... Spiral Tribe and their rave sound system are in fact quite a new addition to the ever evolving festival scene. We met three members of Spiral Tribe who, at the time, were lying low in London having had their bus/homes and sound systems Impounded by the authorities. After a number of phone calls we were told to go to a street, we were given no actual address, when we got there suddenly two people emerged from a van "Are you The Organs?" Yeah we answered and off we went to a 'borrowed' house for a chat. No names were mentioned, no identities, so we talked to number 1,2 and 3..

Why did you hold that one event at Canary Wharf? What was so important about that site?

1: There it was, this empty, sprawling mass of concrete... bollocks - with all the money they spent on Canary Wharf they could have given every man, woman and child in Great Britain five million pounds each. You can check that, somebody showed me the total amount, check it - billions and billions they've spent on it and totally empty. There we were on this only bit of green on this island.... We knew it was going to come on top of us but it just had to be done, we were just drawn to it.
2: The other angle is that basically we've been taken away from Stonehenge and thrown out of countryside, so we will do it in the city.... And we thought, where in the city is nearest to Stonehenge? If you check out that area, first you're on the Greenwich Mean line, there's heavy ley lines around the area.... Canary Wharf itself has got a true pyramid topped by a strobe light and it's this massive pillar yuppiedom that never happened, totally empty - you've got Greenwich Observatory over the water, the Queen's House, and to top it all, in the middle of all this chaos, you've got this field, a massive open space of grass like out in the country and Mudchute Farm full of animals that would have been in the country, right next door to it. So basically, when we saw this, even though there's only two roads in we knew it had to be done, it was the place, the energy there was incredible.

So it was something you had to do because of the energy and not because of the attention it would grab.

2: Purely because of that energy and it was so similar to the power that is out at Stonehenge that we feel...

For people coming in at the start - what basically are Spiral Tribe about?

1: Its one tribe, the spiral being like the beginning, the nurse of it all, spiralling out, bringing in everything to it at the same time..... We're a tribe of people, ever growing, who set out to put on parties, basically, free parties.

Some people seem to think that you're some sort of dodgy sect

1: Yeah, I know, its weird! people think all sorts of things....

So it just 'happens' then?

1: Yeah!, We just seriously get on the flow of things and just flow with it

How did it start - did somebody sit down and say, right, Spiral Tribe exists....

2: Well, we managed to get hold of a rig by persuading one of our friends to take out a loan (which I don't think was ever paid off!). At this point we were all living in squats, so we started doing squat parties and that grew on and developed until we did a party out in Amsterdam. After that we wound up coming back and found ourselves going to a free festival in Britain, near Stonehenge, Longstock, last year, where suddenly a lot of us received very spiritual sort of feeling, we all -
1: It felt so right to be there, the sun, the moon coming up, the garden, being outdoors - it was just....!
2: And one thing just lead to another until we started doing a lot of free festivals.... We've never really known where we're going, we never really planned for the future of anything, but every now and then maybe we'll see a bunch of 23s or something that signifies something's about to come up, and we see where we're going to go from that. We never predict where we're going to be, we just follow the vibe, we follow what feels right and go with it.
1: And usually there's a 23 in the area at that moment.....
2: A lot of people wondered why we went and signed this record deal, and the way I feel about it is that we had a series of free parties, one was at Chobham Common, one was at Acton Town and the other was Welwyn Garden City. Now, each of these parties, the police came down and pulled riot gear and trashed the rig; they beat lots of people up, Acton Town was probably the worst - 750 people received injuries from the police (apparently very severe, one person allegedly losing an eye) Now at that point, we didn't have a name, no one had heard of us in the media for sure; At that stage we realised that unless we got more of a public stance, we were going to get swept under the carpet by the police, it was as simple as that. We tried getting out to media, they wouldn't listen - We tried phoning up hospitals, the police, MPs, simply to get any word, and it was a closed door. So we figured next time this happens, we either want to be able to film it, or we want to be in a position to go 'Well what the f**k was all THAT about!?' and our voice would be heard. This is the whole motive behind what we're doing.

So you've almost had to put a label on yourselves just so you can say something exists?

2: Exactly, and one of the problems was - how can you do this without getting your name known? The only way to do that is to use the Spiral Tribe name, no one takes personal profit, no one puts their name to it for personal promotion or ego or whatever.....
1: It's not about ego or the personality - everything is done in the name of Spiral Tribe and it covers any creative thing that you want. Putting it into a kitty sort of thing?
2: That's it, or blag it - we never have any money...... The whole record deal is done on that basis, there's no names, it's Spiral Tribe, there's no credit to musicians.

So when you get played on the radio what does the PRS do with the royalty?

1: It just goes into Spiral Tribe, just goes into the cause and we get contracts to that effect. The first idea of the record company is: instead of making music to make money, make money to make music - Cash into noise. The ideal is a cross between the ideas of punk and the ideas of psychedelia: The psychedelic ideal that materialistic values and money were a load of bollocks, but its also the punk understanding of 'We don't need money to trash the system'. Basically what you have is a bunch of people who don't want to take personal profit, lay out for stupid cars or houses, but at the same time we use money to fund the underground scene, to put out white labels, pirate radio stations to set up a communication network so that we CAN communicate stuff like Acton Town

So, who controls all this then?

Well, its kind of like the Red Indian tribes where someone will walk in and they'll know what they feel called to immediately - one will be called to the music side, one wants to be a writer so he/she gets on the case.... it's all about thinking positive.

But what happens when somebody writes something that represents Spiral Tribe and you don't agree with it?

2: What... you talk about it, y'know what I mean?......

I mean, you've got no basic leaders or anything like that so who decides to put a record out?

2: It's very free flowing.....
1: You just follow your vibe, just sort of go with it - things just make themselves apparent.
2: I think the best way to answer that question is to say we've never had to face that problem because everything that's happened, it just happened so naturally that we haven't had to think about it. How do you know that someone's not going to go and put a white label this week and say 'this is Spiral Tribe? aren't you in great danger of loads of people just jumping in there?
1: Well to be honest if that happened they'd be right, it's what it's all about. So that could go on, you could eventually have a whole country that decides to be Spiral Tribe....
1: Yeah! whole world!

So you have a government saying they're Spiral Tribe and they're passing laws, or you have a market trader selling t-shirts with your logo so he's got enough money to go down the pub or hire a video and vegetate....

2: No, it comes down to the vibe, your understanding of the vibe, people can say they're Spiral Tribe but think about karma a second - it they're gonna do it for money or their ego then it'll be karma that gets you in the end.

Are you going to be able to hold on to that?

1: As long as we can get the element of, no name, no face - you know, our photographs are skinheads, dark glasses - no features, no one you can recognise, no idol......
2: The thing we'd like to see is everybody putting out a white label - in this day and age the thing that's freed up this particular part of the underground scene, techno, whatever, is stuff like the sampler, the Atari computer, the DAT machine, video cameras - the point is that now technology is cheap and available and people are setting up their own bedroom studios. Now if your motive isn't money or ego and all want to do is put music out, you can do that without going to the record companies. The only reason we're going to a record company is because we were getting beaten up by the police and we realised that by sticking our necks out we had to protect ourselves in someway. But if you just happen to want to put some music out for music's sake there's no reason to got to a record company anymore - we found out that they just screw about all the time.   

Monday, December 28, 2009

THE BASSLINE CIRCUS



"From a fusion of Desert Storm sound system and other mentalist performance all stars came The Bassline Circus"

Formed in 2003 Bassline Circus represents the transformation of some of the UK's and Europe's most high-profile illegal rave outfits into a legitimate organisation. Bassline Circus is a crew of performers, musicians, mechanics, visual artists, tour bookers, truck drivers, creatives, logistics, humanistics and holistics. It's most active members have dedicated years to this project with very little financial comeback. Most of the time they are working for nothing but the love and the belief that one day it will pay off somehow. They support the believe that the system wont supply the means for a vast majority of the population to express themselves and that you must create your own reality. The system creates a virtual reality, by tv or other media.

DON'T BE FOOLED!

A little history of Bassline Circus can be found on their website or below.



HISTORY

NOT FOR PROFIT

Bassline Circus is a not for profit organization based around a central ethos of create, innovate, educate, activate and of course, mutate. We are a traveling circus troupe, a production company, performance agency, a tent and equipment hire company, an education institution and much more.

LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

We have spent the last five years in the heat of the furnace that is life in modern London, growing and developing our style, gathering and garnering talent and ideas like a giant artistic pirate ship, plundering the pool of raw skills that is out there, creating a hardcore, dedicated crew. Like all good things, time and energy have evolved this thing, from the nucleus of a good idea, into a vessel through which is channelled a whole load of creative and perceptive ideas.
This project is born from the ashes of the European and British festival, free party and circus scene, and is a direct result of what happens when circus meets the dance floor.

DIVERSITY AND HERITAGE

Such diverse groups as Desert Storm, Total Resistance, Sound Conspiracy, NoFit State, Reclaim the Streets, Foolhardy Folk and many more all find their influence and legacy here in this new skool mashup of people and culture.

JUMP AND SPREAD OUT

Sound Conspiracy was an international crew based in Europe, comprised of several different sound systems of the day, Total Resistance, Facom Unit and OQP. They spent years in Italy putting on massive illegal raves before heading off to Bosnia and Republika Serbska for a summer of madness before heading further east. First to Istanbul, and then on through Turkey Iran and Pakistan to India, where they spent the winter in Goa and the Summer in Manali before heading back to Italy a year and a half after they left. They got back just in time to join in the Millennium celebrations in the south of France. This epic journey, which was started with fifteen trucks and buses, over thirty people and ten dogs, and which finished with just three vehicles seven people and two dogs can be seen as a documentary as part of the world travelleradventures dvd.

TOTAL RESISTANCE

This collective of travelers was born in England and traveled all over Europe and beyond, a strong family massive drawing loads of different people for many different reasons. Freedom of expression and free from exploitation, death to the oppressor and fuck the shitty system were some of them, as was self styled survival in the case of heavy oppression. The political atmosphere in the early nineties against travellers was such that some kind of resistance was needed, both spiritual and physical, and in some ways we are trying to keep some of this spirit, travelling families with a focus on staying clear of the pitfalls of modern society, the apathy, the addiction and the melancholy. Trying to create a positive environment for our children to grow, for our art forms to flourish and for our brains to try to avoid the kind of dead end bullshit cul de sacs of thought that the mass media and tv try to force us in every fucking day.

RESIST! - Quoted from Basslinecircus.org


ADVERTIGO 

In preparation to their Advertigo tour Network23 caught up with the Bassline crew and made a documentary about these tekno-circus nomads that was formed in the aftermath of the World Travellers Adventures.



click the image or download it here (right click & save as)

Advertigo is one of the shows in which Bassline Circus brings you its spectacular mix of high wire antics, genetically modified street arts and new skool music. For this show the crew cooperated with Pierrot Bidon from Archaos¹. In the famous Big Top tent you can experience its full tilt, multi-media show with digital film and graphics, high energy physical circus skills and the infectious sounds of new skool beats. This is circus as you've never seen it before. You can view the show reel below.
[¹]: Archoas is an alternative circus that dates from back in 1987 and on. - http://www.archaos.fr



More info on ADVERTIGO.

- http://www.myspace.com/basslinecircus
- http://www.basslinecircus.org

Sunday, December 27, 2009

KRAAKVERBOD


Pamflet over het kraakverbod.
Ksu-c - 14.12.2009 01:13

Een informatief pamflet over wat de nieuwe anti-kraak wet betekent en wat er te verwachten valt als deze aangenomen wordt. Bij gevoegd als PDF in Nederands en Engels.

A pamflet about the new anit-squat law and what is expected to happen when it is passed. PDF file attached.

Pamflet in het Nederlands -

Pamflet in English -

Kraakverbod

de nieuwe wet die kraaken criminalisieert in Nederland.

In 2008 begonnen drie politieke partijen (CDA, ChristenUnie en VVD) te werken aan de nieuwe "Kraken en Leegstand Wet". Het beoogt een complete criminalisering van elke vorm van kraken in Nederland. De tweede kamer heeft op 15 oktober 2009 vóór deze wet gestemd. De voorstanders van deze zogeheten kraakverbod waren te vinden bij VVD, ChristenUnie, SGP, CDA, PVV en de eenmansfractie Rita Verdonk.

Voordat de nieuwe wet in werking treedt moet de Eerste kamer hier nog over stemmen. Dit was op 1 december geplanned. Het lijkt er nu op dat dit even is uitgesteld vanwege aanvragen van spreektijd door een aantal fracties. Na goedkeuring door de eerste kamer gaat de wet voor ondertekening naar het staatshoofd. Er is een gerede kans dat de wet dan in werking treedt op 1 januari 2010.

Wat staat er specifiek in deze wet?

De wet bestaat in zijn algemeen uit twee delen.

Het eerste deel beslaat veranderingen in Het Weboek van Strafrecht, Het Wetboek van Strafvordering en de Uitleveringswet. Dit zijn de nieuwe artikelen die het kraken moeten verbieden.

Het Wetboek van Strafrecht:
- verandering in art. 138
- nieuwe art. 138 sectie a
- bestaande art. 138 sectie a wordt art. 138 sectie ab
- verandering in art. 139 sectie b
- vervallen van art. 429 inclusief alle secties.
Het Wetboek van Strafvordering:
- verandering in art. 67 sectie b
- nieuwe art. 551 sectie a.
Uitleveringswet:
- verandering in art. 51 sectie a.


Het tweede deel van de wet betreft veranderingen in de Leegstandwet en de Huisvestingswet. In het kort streven deze voorkoming van leegstand na, evenals het beboeten van eigenaren die hun bezit leeg laten staan.

Wat betekent deze wet?

De eerste deel van de wet (waarop de focus ligt van dit pamflet ) criminalisieert kraken in het algemeen en maakt het strafbaar. Art 138a stelt dat een ieder die een leegstaande woning betreedt of erin verblijft angeklaagd kan worden voor kraken wat verboden is bij wet en dus strafbaar. Dit kan bestraft worden met een geldstraf van de derde categorie of hechtenis tot een jaar. Als er sprake is van geweld of dreigementen kan dit bestraft worden met een geldstraf van de vierde categorie of een gevangenisstraf van maximaal twee jaar. Als het kraken gepleegd is door twee of meer personen (in vereniging) kan dit leidden tot een strafverhoging van een derde.

Dus de nieuwe wet zal tot twee grote veranderingen leiden:
- Het kraken, wat betekent het bezetten van een gebouw dat leeg staat of niet in gebruik is, zal totaal verboden worden. De leegstandsduur doet er dan niet meer toe aangezien art 429 (wat een jaar leegstand voorscheef voor een rechtmatige kraak) komt te vervallen. Het kraken van gebouwen die niet leeg staan of nog in gebruik zijn, is natuurlijk nog steeds strafbaar onder art 138 met een maximale strafoplegging van een boete van de vierde categorie of 2 jaar gevangenisstraf.

- Alleen al het zich bevinden in een gekraakt gebouw zal ook strafbaar worden. Dit betreft een ieder in elke gekraakte huis. Hoe lang een huis gekraakt is doet er niet toe. Dit betekent dat iedereen die in een kraakpand verblijft, dus niet alleen de bewoners maar ook bezoekers automatisch een strafbaar feit plegen. Ook gasten die kunnen aantonen elders te wonen kunnen worden aangehouden en vervolgd.

Het nieuwe art 551a houd in dat in het geval van een misdrijf zoals bedoelt in art 138, 138a en 139 van het WvS (Het Wetboek van Strafrecht) elke politie agent een huis kan betreden zonder opsporingsbevel en elke aanwezige aldaar kan arresteren evenals het verwijderen van alle bezittingen, of opdragen deze te verwijderen. Dit artikel houd verder in dat de eigenaar geen aangifte hoeft te doen om een ontruimings procedure in werking te stellen. Het eigenaar kan zelfs op dat moment in het buitenland verblijven (wellicht zich schuil houden voor justitie),maar de smeris heeft als nog het recht om zijn bezit te verdedigen tegen krakers.

Wat betekent dit in de praktijk?

Het nederlandse parlement sugereerd keiharde repressie gedurende de eerste zes maanden na in werking treding van de nieuwe wet. Hierdoor zal, verwacht de Tweede Kamer, de grote meerderheid van krakers en hun sympathisanten afgeschrikt worden, en zal er ook een tweedeling onstaan tussen de zogenaamde harde-kern en de rest. Zij vertrouwen erop dat de zogenaamde harde-kern krakers een zeer kleine minderheid vormen en met gemak gecontroleed kunnen worden door de repressie organen. Na dit half jaar verwacht het parlement dat kraken „uitgestorven” zal zijn.

Dit is hoe de dames en heren politici hun theorie ten uitvoer zien worden. In de practijk zal het echter anders uitpakken. Het openbaar Ministerie geeft nu al aan dat zij en niet het parlement de uitvoerende instantie is en zelf wel haar prioriteiten zal stellen. De vraag blijft of het OM, de politie met burgemeesters als korpsbeheerders genoeg middelen zullen hebben om de wet ten uitvoer te brengen. (denk aan hoeveelheid politie, materiaal, celruimte etc) op de manier waar het parlement om vraagt. De burgemeester zal nog steeds de beslissende stem hebben met betrekking tot ontruimingen . Echter als deze besluit om niet tot ontruiming over te gaan kan de eigenaar een procedure aanspannen tegen de beslissing van de burgemeester. Zulke gevallen hebben zich in het verleden ook al voorgedaan en over het algemeen krijgt de eigenaar dan gelijk van de rechter.

Ook is het belangrijk om na te denken over veiligheids vraagstukken. Als kraken als misdrijf te boek komt te staan kunnen er legio nieuwe opsporingsmethodes aangewend worden en veel gemakkelijker worden ingezet, zoals telefoon taps, langere voorarrest voor zittingen etc.

Advocaten die de wet onderzoeken (en eventueele gaten er in) zijn tot het conclusie gekomen dat door de manier waarop deze geschrewen is, het verdedigen van kraken in een rechtszaal welhaast onmogelijk zal worden. De enige plek om voor kraken te vechten zal op straat zijn. Door het continu kraken van vele mensen zal aangetoond moeten worden dat de wet onuitvoerbaar is en dat mensen gekraakt hebben, nu kraken en ook in de toekomst zullen kraken. Advocaten raaden ook aan om niet geintimideerd te zijn door de hoge maximum straffen aangezien een belangrijk deel hiervan bangmakerij is en het uiteindelijk aan de rechters en hun beslssingen ligt wat de strafoplegging wordt. Hierom is het ook zo belangrijk dat we ons niet laten scheidden in „goede” krakers en „slechte” krakers, harde kern of zachte kern.
De wet is nog niet ingevoerd en niemand kent nog de uiteindelijke praktijk, maar een ding is zeker. Elke bestaande kraakpand moet zijn barricades voorbereiden en hun bouwstempels klaarleggen. Wat de toekomst betreft zullen we onze strategien heroverwegen en misschien veranderen voor de nieuwe realiteit die ons in de ogen staart.

The fun is over, it's time to fight!



Saturday, December 26, 2009

HOW THE STATE CRUSHED THE FREE PARTY SCENE


VERY INTERESTING ARTICLE

 How the state crushed the early 90s free party scene !

This very recent article (2009) in the British newspaper The Guardian gives an extremely good overview of the early days of free party's, puts the legendary party's & their impact on a comprehensible timeline, alongside the upbuilding repression by the state. Very well written! It looks a lot to read, but you will be enlightened ;)


Fight for the right to party

For a brief moment, at vast and lawless raves such as Castlemorton, a generation glimpsed an alternative way of life. Speaking to survivors of the early 90s free party scene, Tim Guest tells the story of how the state crushed the dream

On 19 April 1992 - Easter Sunday - Spiral Tribe, a self-described "rag-tag sound system group who came together driven by the will to keep the party going", who had been running free raves with a mobile rig across the UK since 1990, set up in a warehouse in Acton Lane, west London. To a packed house, they partied through the night. In the early hours, police officers from the Metropolitan Police's Territorial Support Group, a specialist division with duties including crowd control, surrounded the building. Those who tried to enter or leave had to face the TSG (the same group responsible for heavy-handed policing of crowds in the recent G20 demonstrations). According to witnesses at Acton Lane, some TSG were masked and had their ID numbers covered. The Spirals and partygoers barricaded the doors, but after a 10-hour stand-off, the police revved up a JCB and broke through the outer wall. Scores of ravers later alleged they were beaten in the dark of the warehouse; witnesses claim one pregnant woman was knocked to the ground. One man who tried to escape over the roof claimed to have been pushed; he fell two storeys breaking both arms and legs. No charges were brought. The next day a police helicopter escorted the Spiral Tribe convoy, 10 vehicles long, out of the London area.
Simone, one of the original Spiral Tribe members, who had fallen into the free party scene years before after working in a PA hire shop in north London, recalls: "Everyone who was there remembers exactly what happened. Being forced down on to muddy floors, being battered. It was a horrible experience.
"They were letting people in and not letting people out, then letting people out and not letting people in," she continues, talking from her current base in a Paris apartment. (Like other Spirals I talked to, she didn't want me to use her full name.) "All of a sudden you peered out of a crack in the wall, and the place was surrounded by every kind of police vehicle you can imagine. They had diggers, they were all in their riot gear, shields. We'd just been dancing for a few days, we're in the middle of an industrial estate, not really affecting anybody else around, and then all of a sudden they started bashing the wall in. They smashed up the decks, just went to town basically. Imagine people who've been up for two or three days dancing; you're a bit tripped out at this point. People were being carted off to hospital."
The Spirals were used to run-ins with the law - "we'd had lines of police directing us across fields" - but nothing like this. "At that point we realised the police were really on our case. There was a news blackout. We tried to call all the journalists we knew, and there was nothing. What happened was kind of obscene, but it went unreported. It felt like we had no way of telling anyone.
"Really, what were we doing that was so disastrously wrong? Occupying empty buildings, playing music and dancing. People of all walks of life were coming together on the dancefloor. They [the police] acted completely out of fear."
Following interim parties at Chobham Common and Stroud Common in Surrey and in the Cotswolds, where they rebuilt some of their equipment, the Spirals elected to seek refuge in numbers. Deciding, as one member recalls, "to take it easy at someone else's party for a change", they headed for the Avon free festival, a regular May bank holiday gathering near Bristol. This year, though, Avon and Somerset Police had other ideas. "They were digging trenches, no one was able to go to the site," says Simone. Police encouraged the sound systems to head towards Castlemorton Common, a few square miles of public land just east of the Malvern Hills. "At Castlemorton we had the biggest space, but our rig was not the loudest," Simone recalls. "After Acton Lane, half of our speakers were blown. But people were always offering us things to make up for lost equipment." Spiral Tribe set up in a semi-circle of trucks, with the centre stage under a huge painted spiral, and joined the party.
It was an event that would never be repeated; a brief triumph for those who wanted to party in the face of vested interests that would soon move in to crush the scene. But for that short window - four days - Castlemorton was a free festival on a new scale. Simone recalls spending some of the time hiding, in awe of the size of the gathering. "It was like, 'Oh shit, what have we done. Things are not going to be the same after this.'" Ten rigs, including Circus Warp, Circus Normal and Bedlam, Adrenaline and Nottingham's DiY sound system set up and declared their own takes on acid house, hardcore, early drum'n'bass and Detroit techno records played at double speed. An estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people gathered, brought together by the music, the freedom and the drugs: travellers, crusties, ravers and new agers - who came with dogs on strings, blue dreadlocks, shaved heads and fire-breathing kits - and just maybe David Cameron, or someone who looked a lot like him (a YouTube clip recently surfaced from Sunrise, an '88 acid house rave, showing a long-haired raver who resembles the leader of the opposition - but Conservative central office deny it is him). There was free enterprise, too, as long as you were shopping for lightsticks, whistles or Rizla.
As the ravers drummed up a party, news hounds drummed up a controversy. David Baldwin, a 37-year-old mechanic whose front garden was 20 yards from the nearest sound system, told the Daily Mail he had seen "youngsters injecting heroin in a Renault 5". Brian Clutterbuck, a smallholder in his 40s, patrolled the edge of his land with a pellet gun. Locals complained about property damage: fence posts, they said, had been ripped up for firewood, and dogs were killing sheep. The local pub and post office shut. In an echo of similar tensions two decades before, locals called the ravers "hippies".
Castlemorton was the lead story on the BBC Six O'Clock News on the Friday and Saturday nights, and the coverage drew people from across the country. (One raver remembers returning home four days later "with eyes like pandas and my mother asked, 'Did you have a good time?'" He told her he'd been at a free party. "'Yes! I know!' she replied. 'I saw you on Central News.'") People in convoys hundreds of cars long hoped those they were following knew where they were heading. Entry routes were blocked not by police but by ravers. Police helicopters flew low over the site to film, and at one point five shipping distress flares were fired at one of them. "This illustrates the lengths to which these people will go to try to prevent police access to the site," West Mercia's assistant chief constable, Philip Davies, said. "Many of them have already displayed an extremely aggressive attitude towards the police, and the safety of my officers must be one of my priorities." There were too many partygoers, in other words, for the police to shut it down.
"These people who live here shouldn't be afraid," one told the Mail. "They should join in." Another, Richard, told the Daily Express: "There is nothing wrong with what we are doing. We are here to have fun in the sun. We chose to live this way and reject the hassles associated with a conventional way of life. Some say we are dirty, but we are environmentally conscious, we make efforts not to dump rubbish. People generally have it in for us because of our lifestyle. I think many envy us because of our freedom."
In a 1970s short story anthology, Three Trips in Time and Space, three leading lights of golden age science fiction wrote of various futures where teleportation was possible. Sandwiched between two eulogies of ease and motion was a delightful dissenting voice: Flash Crowd, by Larry Niven, in which teleportation brings about a terrible anarchy, where millions wander the earth, materialising instantly wherever the latest sensation carries them, leaving destruction in their wake. This was the future that middle England seemingly feared. It was 1992: mobile communications technology had only just begun to reshape our lives (Simone recalls Spiral Tribe had one brick-sized mobile phone, which held a charge for "about three minutes - we saved the charge and we'd phone up TouchDown radio with the location of the party, which they'd announce at midnight") - yet, it seemed, crowds were already on the move.
"Castlemorton was scarily conspicuous," says Sebastian, another Spiral Tribe member. "You had this sense of, well, what's going to happen next."
Castlemorton didn't just teleport out of nowhere: the rise of the free party scene had been a long time coming. In 1981, Joe Rush, a 21-year-old punk living in Ladbroke Grove, joined the Peace Convoy, a rotating caravan of, he says, "around 40 dodgy and illegal trucks, cars, vans and old ambulances" that roved England from the Windsor and Glastonbury free festivals to smaller parties on common land. In the early days the convoy developed its own tactics to use against the police and local authorities: once, after being refused at a service station, they blocked a three-lane motorway and slow-rolled until police relented and allowed them to refuel. Later, the police response grew brutal, culminating in the Battle of the Beanfield, a police action in June 1985, at the intended 14th Stonehenge free festival. One thousand officers - again with their numbers covered - smashed 140 vehicles and beat the travellers, after which, Joe says, the heart went out of the Peace Convoy.
Rush, who later co-founded the Mutoid Waste Company sound system, traces the heritage of the Peace Convoy back to Ken Kesey's Magic Bus Trips and Acid Tours in 60s America, as well as to the tradition of travelling communities in this country, and also links it to political events such as the 1984-85 miners' strike. There were in fact direct connections: in 1989, chief superintendent Ken Tappenden, who had been involved in the miners' strike police action, started the Pay Party Unit, tasked with controlling the rave scene. The unit monitored pirate radio, tapped phones, and organised helicopters to track the organisers. After three months, they had begun 20 major investigations. As Matthew Collin and John Godfrey note in their book Altered State, the Pay Party Unit's database held 5,725 names and details on 712 vehicles. Within weeks, their 200 officers had monitored 4,380 telephone calls and made 258 arrests.
This was around the time Spiral Tribe's Sebastian, aged 17, moved down from west Scotland to London to play in a psychedelic band. A friend invited him to a party. "I thought it was going to be like a Scottish party, with a few friends standing around drinking. We went to Old Street station, where there were loads of police and ravers milling about. A car pulled up and took us to Clink Street." This was a maze of arched vaults on the site of Britain's first prison, near London Bridge, where DJs including the Shamen's Mr C championed the new rave sound. "That was my first rush of acid house," Sebastian says. "After that night, my life was very different." But the Pay Party Unit was working hard, and legislation followed. In 1990, MP Graham Bright introduced the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Bill, which raised fines for throwing an unlicensed party from £2,000 to £20,000 as well as a possible six months in prison. Nicknamed by Bright "the acid house party bill", it was a clear attempt to push the free-party scene into the licensed leisure industry, so it could be regulated. "It made a difference," recalls Sebastian, speaking to me from Paris after a long weekend of DJing in the French countryside. "The parties changed. Everything had gone into a more clubby direction. I'd been educated by mad illegal raves, and the energy was so different to what I was finding after that. There was a hunger to get back to the acid house rave thing. That was the reason Spiral Tribe came about."
In October 1990 he went to the first Spiral rave, in a squatted schoolhouse in London's Kensal Rise. "I didn't have all the fancy clothes, I didn't have what was necessary to fit in to certain clubs. You walked into Spiral Tribe and none of that mattered. It was like going back to those '88 raves. People were totally friendly; they didn't judge you by what you were wearing. I was hooked."
The Spirals staged their first party in late 1990. By June 1991 they had a mobile rig, and over the next year they travelled England, announcing their integrated ethic on their flyers: "We are here to reconnect the Earth"; "We're part of the earth; we're part of us"; "You might stop the party but you can't stop the future."
This was where people of my age, in their mid- to late-teens at the time, discovered the parties. It's hard to picture those days now, before the internet, when mainstream press had a tighter control over how we saw events like this. Word reached us through friends, or from pirate radios such as TouchDown and Rush FM. At warehouses and squats, UV paint across the walls, we gathered to dance all night to pitch-shifted breakbeats that had yet to be harnessed for TV adverts. The music, impenetrable to many - like me - before their first pill, seemed uniquely British: the harsh beats and melodic breakdowns seemed to dramatise the disjoint in our lives, between life in an impersonal money-focused state, and the new easy honesty we were discovering with each other. The open spirit of those parties seemed like a gateway to a possible future. We told each other things we hadn't said before, and we told them to strangers too. Back then, even the rivalry between sound systems and police had occasional friendly moments. I remember one early morning in mid-1992 walking back through an east London park with the owners of a sound system, lugging a speaker each, as a TSG riot control van followed us. We heard the crackle of their PA system and picked up our pace, fearing arrest. "You should have borrowed our sound system!" they joked through the megaphone, then revved away.
"It was a whirlwind two years, really, but we packed a lot in," says Simone. Spiral Tribe's living arrangements were typical of the dozens of sound systems across the UK. "We were all pretty much squatting. Not everyone. Once we hit the road, we used to sleep in the truck, under the truck, take turns in sleeping. It wasn't that important really. The first parties in London were fivers in. That gave us enough money to pay the DJs a bit, print flyers for the next party and a bit of diesel for the generator. We ate vegetable curries a lot. We didn't need much, really."
Most of the sound systems worked to ensure they left little damage after their parties. "We always wanted to leave as little trace as possible," another Spiral member recalls. "After Castlemorton, we hung out until Wednesday, Thursday, clearing up, leaving the site impeccably clean. Then, as we pulled off site, the police asked us, 'Have you been at Castlemorton?' Everyone said: 'Yes,' and that was it. Everyone was nicked. Everything was impounded. They really went to town."
Simone had left for London the day before. That day there was a knock at the door, and she was arrested. "They took every scrap of paper off the wall. We had a mini-office, where we did photocopying and everything, and they took it all."
In all, 13 Spiral members were charged with public order offences. Their trial became one of the longest and most expensive cases in British legal history at the time, lasting four months and costing the taxpayer £4m. The police used any tactic they could to support their case. "We even all had our handwriting analysed," says Simone. "We had a messy office full of stuff, and they were trying to ascertain who'd written some philosophical rant. It was incredible. Actually, in the end it turned around in our favour. There was no conspiracy to bring down the government, which I think they were looking for. In the end everything was thrown back in their face, and the jury saw that. It was painful, laborious - luckily, there was a good team of lawyers, everyone had to go in every day and have their chance on the stand. Everyone was just as honest as they could be. There was nothing to hide." All 13 were acquitted. According to one witness, a superintendent approached a group of Spiral members on the steps outside the court and said: "I just want you to know that I don't agree with what is happening to you here. This is a political stitch-up."
After Castlemorton, police pressure on free parties did not relent. Some ravers believe there was an explicit agenda to extend legal licensing hours while cracking down on free parties. In that sense, superclubs such as Cream and Ministry of Sound have their direct roots in the repression of the roving sound systems. And the police tactics worked. "One weekend after Castlemorton we tried to put on a party," says Sebastian. "We had five back-up venues, and every time we arrived at the next one, the police had already closed it down. It was really difficult to put things on under the name Spiral Tribe, so it was either disband the name, or take it out to Europe. Half of the crew went to Europe, and half stayed in London."
"Where could we go?" says Simone. "They'd taken every last coin out of our pocket, impounded all our equipment - we weren't getting that back. We went to France, and it took on a new form."
There were already UK sound systems spreading across the continent. Mutoid Waste moved to Berlin, where they were when the Wall came down. With Bedlam, another sound system, they held a party by the Brandenburg Gate. Joe and the other Mutoids built a Stonehenge out of scrapped East German tanks they found in an abandoned base. After the party, and without permission, they hoisted two decommissioned MiG fighter jets on to trucks and headed further east.
"There were travellers, ravers, intellectuals," recalls Joe. "It was a crazy, mixed crowd."
"The country that really connected was France," says Sebastian. "Spiral Tribe went to Berlin, and they didn't want to know. They didn't have any need for the free party scene. Because you can go to a club all night, and the drinks aren't expensive, and the security don't get in your way."
Back in the UK, it took a few years for the law to catch up with the state's intentions to wreck the party. But when it did, it arrived with the infamous Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 63 (1)(b), which outlawed outdoor parties. In an unusual foray by civil servants into music criticism, the wording of the act defined "music" as that which "includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". Following the act, if there were more than 10 of you and you looked like you were waiting for a party, even if the land wasn't privately owned, you could be told to leave, and if you did not, or if you returned, you faced up to three months in prison.
Sound systems such as Spiral and Bedlam realised they could not return to the UK. They began a slow migration across Europe, sowing the seeds of rave culture, starting parties that evolved into big-name modern festivals.
In the course of the decade, the music itself took on a more central focus. In 1990, Sebastian (who still records techno under the name 69db) had commuted from a Leeds music course to London every weekend to attend Spiral Tribe parties. During the week he found himself drifting downstairs at the college to the recording studio, and making electronic music which he brought to London at the weekends. He suggested a Spiral label, and found himself handling the music and recording side of Spiral Tribe. The group had previously issued white labels, sold through friends, but through a connection with Youth from the band Killing Joke they landed a deal with Butterfly Records and a £40,000 advance for an album. "We built a recording studio into the back of a showman's trailer, and we pulled it around Europe," says Sebastian.
The French techno scene has moved towards live-performance techno. "Some live sets have gone up to 22 hours of live playing," says Sebastian. "We're mostly based in France now." These events in the French countryside attract up to 50,000 people. There the Tribe members remain, continuing to promote the cause of gathering under the banner of music, outside the commercialised system of pop. "Britain is very good at presenting music in certain ways," says Sebastian. "Ever since the Beatles, we discovered it made money. But music's a much bigger thing. It can really bring people together."
"Spiral Tribe could not now organise a festival in the UK," says Simone, referring to the likelihood that the police would find out and shut it down before it happened. According to Joe Rush, communications technology has paradoxically made it harder to arrange events outside the system. Police monitor websites, and, according to Joe, track phones. "In the old days, the police had some advantages - they had radios and we didn't. Now everyone has mobile phones. But it works both ways: it's much easier for police to track people."
Some sound systems have found a new kind of compromise. In 2001, Mutoid Waste returned to the UK. Joe Rush and co have parlayed their showmanship, honed across Europe, into events held under the name Trash City, whose giant installation shows, featuring robots, drag queens and cancan girls, are a regular feature at Glastonbury. Rush's income now comes from these events, as well as sales of his sculptures. They've come to a more reasonable understanding with the authorities. "In the Thatcher years, the battle lines were drawn," says Rush - an older punk now, with a weathered face and a worn leather jacket - in his warehouse studio in London's Old Street. "You were either one of us or one of them. It's more relaxed now. We've agreed: we have security, crowd control, health and safety ... We toughened up. We grew up. It used to be we felt everyone should be like us, but we realised we were part of society, not an alternative society." He's not alone: Bedlam have capitalised upon their expertise with easily installable sound systems into Noise Control, a successful sound system speaker business.
Nonetheless, in Britain, legislation continues to eat into our freedom to gather and party. New security regulations for live performances include a long list of prohibitive restrictions, including the need for police checks on performers. It's hard to see what motivates such control on the part of the state, except for fear. What is it about young people gathering together that provokes such a severe, sometimes brutal, response? Villages can have fetes, children can have fairs, but something about so much youth in one place scares someone. As Simone told me, "What was it that was so bad about what we were doing? We didn't leave much damage. Castlemorton is still as beautiful as it ever was."
In the tension between travelling sound systems and local landowners, it's tempting to draw grand conclusions about a schism in our nature. Joe Rush does: he sees the conflict between free parties and the state as "an age-old tension between itinerants and homesteaders". It's also tempting to romanticise the itinerant life. Who hasn't dreamed, if only in adolescence, of throwing aside commitments and living the life of the road with a surrogate family? Of course, dreams are what you wake up from, and life on the road is not all parties. Everyone I spoke to had faced problems on the road: violence, excessive drug use. Rush admits that ketamine and heroin interfered with the extrovert optimism that ecstasy had encouraged. He has a theory that the arc of a movement echoes the arc of that movement's drug of choice. "Punk was speed, an angry, dizzy rush. With ecstasy, there's a euphoric rush, then you're monged out and down. That was how things were." But the highs outweighed the lows. "The party is the best form of interaction there is," says Rush. Mutoid's solution to their troubles was to remain in motion. "We met people who were inspiring, and people who weren't," he adds. "The uninspiring people couldn't keep up." Like most of those I spoke with, Rush is still in motion. "I go wherever the work is: the UK, Japan... I live in the corner of my studio, or a friend's flat, or the back of a truck." Spiral's Simone chose the life aged 17, and she hasn't looked back. "At the time you don't really think about it. It wasn't a conscious thing. It just unfolded. I gave myself to it, which was mad, perhaps, but it's definitely been worthwhile. We put our whole selves into it."
In March, Mutoid Waste were part of Space Ritual '09, a regulated event - they appeared inside the revamped Roundhouse in Camden Town, as invited guests. Back in the winter of 1991-92, over Christmas and new year, Spiral Tribe squatted that same building. "The Roundhouse was a big shift, coming back into London and occupying such a prominent landmark," remembers Simone. She reckons 10,000 people passed through the doors. There were power cuts and door troubles, but for over a week the party went on. On that New Year's Eve, I took my first pill - a white cap and then a red and black - and, along with a group of friends, saw in 1992 from the roof of the Roundhouse. It felt like something new to all of us; a breeze from outside our regular lives. Afterwards, I went home and told my cat over and over again that I loved him.
My own circle of friends fell into the orbit of the free party movement, and we loved it, then we moved on. Seduced by secure homes and shiny cars, we made our choice. Most of us, driven by some blend of risk-avoidance and ambition, chose to remain in this world of salaries and rent payments, a life drifting in and out of our vast field of office farms. We plumped for a more widely accepted definition of freedom: we picked freedom of acquisition over freedom of movement. The world we saw from the roof of the Roundhouse was a world we loved, but not enough. You choose and you lose. But we should remember to be grateful for those who choose otherwise - especially now, when we have a drought of alternatives at the very moment we might need them.
Sebastian sees the power of free parties to foster a collective feeling as almost religiously transformative. "Day-to-day life is difficult for people," he says. "Going to work every day is all right for the few who have the job they wanted, but most people don't. And that means they're paying their taxes and paying their rent. One of the things that was good about the free party scene at the time was that you'd go out and get this incredibly good feeling from people. It's the incredible power music has."

By Tim Guest

original article - the guardian (July 2009)

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE - DESERT STORM SOUNDSYSTEM


   
IRONY?23?:
Desert Storm : D-Storm

The name's Ironic, really. But you have to be extreme to maintain momentum and keep doing what you have to do in this end of Millennium Eurostate.

Don't be fooled. DStorm are aware that doing free parties - as tough as it is in Europe - is a holiday compared to Armed Conflict.

Let's face it Camouflage does look good, but that's no need to get confused over what Military IS or what it DOES. Confusion CAN arise when you get mixed up about whether the person getting shat on in the latest War deserves it or not.

This Misses the Point!
Any side is the wrong side. Wars are a product of the Economic machine we live in. If you're a part of that machine, paying taxes, buying products, drawing your dole. You're guilty as much as anyone else.

BE AWARE! WAKE UP! Send aid! But long term you may as well send a Band Aid, It'll all be happening next time.

WHY? It's all about the key to the executive toilet. Everyone wants to crap in style. Sure as shit Milosocrack, ain't slumming it. He's got one if those shitters that wipe your arse for you. This Toilet Envy is one of the major modern reasons for War. Race and Religion are just excuses.

D-Storm aim to combat this modern failing by making it cool to shit with a shovel.

Drop out, while they drop the Bombs. Left Wing and Right Wing have no meaning anymore. It's Money. The Oil the War machine needs is money. Flipside, it's due to a need of Money that the Machine needs War.

The Machine is the Global economy. Are you part of the machine? If you are, what can you do to withdraw your energy from the Machine. Think about it.

More info here
And here

Also watch world traveller adventures part 2!

LIVING BY THE HOUSE-TEKNIC




Spiral tribe statements bundeled. Click on pics for bigger size.
This quotes say it all..

Thursday, December 24, 2009

OKUPE BACKUP#1 - ARCHIVES 1992/2003


FUCK CHRISTMAS, BUT HERE IS A GIFT
for those who are/where unable to buy it them selfs..
or those who are willing to.. but have no clue of it's existence.


Released in 2006 "Okupe Backup#1" was the first Okupe tracks CD/DVD compilation with Starsk visuals on Cyberskum music, archives movies, pictures and more... Vinca Petersen also cooperated with this publicaton.

REMEMBER, IF YOU LIKE IT.. YOU BUY IT

visit OKUPE FROM MARS

AUDIO CD
01 Babylon'Joke* & Arobass - Sgalna Flight 5:48
02 X.Tech* - Forget Ya Freedom 6:04
03 FKY - Unplugged On Mars 1 6:35
04 Cyberskum - Mental Stuff 5:54
05 FKY - Le Meilleur Choix 1 5:38
06 FKY - Cosmos 1 6:00
07 Cyberskum - Muzik MuzikMuzik 5:25
08 Cyberskum - Keskumplex 6:12
09 Cyberskum , Blackee* - Ultimo One One 4:20
10 X.Tech* - You Know Whats Up Kids 6:11
11 X.Tech* - Ya'Ready 4 Diss 6:21
12 X.Tech* - Apocalipz 13 6:16


VIDEO DVD

Visual Mix by Starsk with audio from Cyberskum
Clips from Teknival Fontainebleau 1995, Teknival 16 Italy 1996, Solar Sonica Italy 1998 and various parties, pictures and flyers from 1993 to 2003


Right click & save as..



REMEMBER, IF YOU LIKE IT.. YOU BUY IT

SUPPORT OKUPE AND ALL OTHERS!

RANDOM FREE ART PIC


Click on pic for bigger size!

Again by the porg, because he kicks major ass!

More here

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

CIRCUS VIBE TRIBE



WHAT IS VIBE TRIBE?

"We are a community-based, fluoro-inspired collective motivated by the exchange of energy, the sharing of idea and resources and the music of the Global Tekno Movement.

Our immediate aim is to create free-space, multimedia events in which people of all races, sexualities and cultural backgrounds can come together creatively and participate in one of the most ancient aspects of human life - DANCE

Our events combine music, art, video, performance, circus skills and interactive installations. We encourage people attending Vibe Tribe events to become actively involved and to feel a part of the Tribe, if only for one night.

Vibe Tribe also produces and distributes music, supporting local independant live bands and DJs,

Any resources generated by the project go back into the project itself, or toward resources which can be shared by our community, aiming ultimately to develop ways in which the community can become self-sustaining
" - Vibe Tribe

Circus Vibe Tribe operated free (and fundraiser) parties in Sydney Park and other venues from 1993; their techno-activism consisted largely of resisting the commercial exploitation of electronic music and the privatisation of space in the inner city. Squatting disused warehouses, reclaiming public space and establishing ‘temporary autonomous zones’, ‘the spirit of punk was sustained and painted fluro as the Tekno seismic shift sent its tremors across Australian dancefloors’. Accumulating trends that circulated in the global music underground, these self-identified ‘new rave travellers’ were dedicated to what they called the ‘vibe’. Scholars of contemporary dance culture point out that a party’s ‘vibe’ is its raison d’être—with a ‘good vibe’ indicating a successful event. - Excerpt from 'Outback vibes: sound systems on the road to legitimacy' by Graham St John published in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 321–336, 2005

THE BLAG SO FAR.. (published 1995)


 (click to enlarge)

THE END OF VIBE TRIBE.. (statement 1996)
..BUT THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING NEW! 


 (click to enlarge)

SPIRAL TRIBE SYMBOLS




An "official" spiral tribe-released document to explain the meaning of their symbols to the public.


 
 

Click on pics for bigger images. 

More on spirals here

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

OFF ROAD SHOW: TECHNO, PROTEST & FERAL THEATRE



Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Off Road Show: Techno, Protest and Feral Theatre by Graham St John
Online Publication Date: 01 March 2005
Volume 19, Issue 1 March 2005 , pages 5 - 20

In this article published in the Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (Volume 19, Issue 1 March 2005), Graham St John reveals the origins of the transnational techno-circus nomadology. Just like traditional circus spectaculars, the techno-circus would become a critical means of entertaining and communicating with populations across and outside of Europe. Yet, unlike the traditional circus, their spectacular conviviality and compassionate interventions would potentiate significant intercultural outcomes. Graham also describes the influences techno-circus forces had on eachoter and the literature that influences these forces.

If you are new to our blog you might find two other publications by Graham St John very interesting.

- FreeNRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dance
- Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures.

WHO IS SPIRAL TRIBE?


"There aren't any decent circusses left. So what do you do when you want to run away and join the circus? The answer is that you run away and join spiral tribe"
the guardian



Click on pic for bigger size!

Monday, December 21, 2009

UNITED FORCES OF TEKNO



THE ONLY WAY FORWARD IS TO GROW.
THE ONLY WAY TO GROW IS TO EXPAND BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT
WE KNOW INTO UNCHARTED AREAS OF THE UNKNOWN.
THE UNKNOWN BEING THE ONLY SOURCE OF NEW KNOWLEDGE.

OUR LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS ON THIS PLANET ARE ORGANIC.
TO REGENERATE CELL WALLS, DIVIDE & MULTIPLY.

OLD BARRIERS FALL AWAY, ANCIENT PILLARS CRUMBLE & NEW STRUCTURES
STAND UP IN THEIR TURN.
ONE GENERATION GIVES BIRTH TO THE NEXT.
THE OLD GIVES LIFE TO THE NEW.

WE LIVE IN THE EVER TRANSITIONAL MOMENT CONNECTING PAST THROUGH
PRESENT TO FUTURE.

IT IS OUR MISSION TO DISCOVER THE EVER CHANGING HORIZON.
TO CONTINUALLY RE-ESTABLISH NEW PARAMETERS & TO EXPLORE & SECURE
EACH NEW LEVEL AS WE FIND IT.

IT IS OUR PURPOSE TO DESTROY THE INERTIA THAT HAS BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR
THE DEMISE OF THE LIFE FORCE ON OUR PLANET.

IT IS OUR AIM TO POSITIVELY MOTIVATE THE PEOPLE & THE NATION.
IT IS TIME TO WAKE THE PLANET UP!

THE ADVANCE PARTY, USING STATE OF THE ART DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
COMBINED WITH THE ORGANIC LIFE SYSTEM DELIVERS A MASSIVE JOLT TO
HUMAN SENSORY CIRCUITS, PROVIDING THE EXTRA ENERGY INPUT NEEDED TO
MAKE THE QUANTUM LEAP FROM TERRESTRIAL TO EXTRA-
TERRESTRIAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

by spiral tribe

Sunday, December 20, 2009

THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM


THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM can be seen as the crowning achievement of nineteenth-century philosophy. It answers all the problems of knowledge and morality that philosophers had raised, argued over, and eventually left unsolved with the conclusion that “we can never know”. Yet this great achievement received no recognition, and only when Steiner had acquired a large following of people thankful for all that he had given them of his spiritual revelation, did there arise the desire to read also his earlier work, upon which he always insisted his whole research was firmly based. Perhaps if Steiner had spent the rest of his life expounding his philosophy, he would today be recognized throughout the world as a major philosopher; yet his achievement in going forward himself to develop the science of the spirit is much the greater, and this will surely be recognized in time. Indeed, philosophy has got itself a bad name, perhaps from its too-frequent negative results, and it might even be better to consider the Philosophy of Freedom not just as a chapter of philosophy, but as the key to a whole way of life.

This is Steiner's most Important philosophical work that deals both with epistemology, the study of how man knows himself and the world, and with the issue of human freedom. In the first half of the book Steiner focuses on the activity of thinking in order to demonstrate the true nature of knowledge. There he shows the fallacy of the contemporary idea of thinking, pointing out that the prevailing belief in the limits to knowledge is a self-imposed limit that contradicts its own claim to truth. The possibility for freedom is taken up in the second half of the book. The Issue is not political freedom, but something more subtle; freedom of the will. There are those who maintain that man's thoughts and actions are Just as determined as a chemical reaction or a honey bee's behavior. Steiner points again to the activity of thinking, from which arises the possibility of free human action.


MUTOID WASTE COMPANY






The Mutoid Waste Company was a performance arts group founded in the United Kingdom by Joe Rush and Robin Cooke in the early 1980s which continued until the 1990s, when it was based in Italy.




 


Influenced by the movie Mad Max and the popular Judge Dredd comics, they specialised in organising illegal parties in London throughout the 1980s, driven at first by eclectic assortments of fringe music such as psychedelic rock and dub reggae, but then embracing the burgeoning acid house music movement by the late 1980s. They were probably also influenced by the TV show Blake's 7, which featured Mutoids, reconditioned humans who had had their personalities removed.



The group became famous for building giant welded sculptures from waste materials and for customising broken down cars, as well as making large scale murals in the disused buildings where they held their parties.





In 1989, after a number of police raids on their warehouse in King's Cross, they left the country and travelled to Germany where they became notorious for building giant sculptures out of old machinery and car parts, one of which was a giant human figure, with a Volkswagen Beetle for its chest, doing a 'V-sign' over the Berlin Wall. They had a collection of scrap military vehicles including a Russian MiG 21 fighter aircraft!



These pioneers of art, performance and partying are still at it, based in Rimini (Italy) they continue to put on parties, transform environments, make sculptures and generally mutate anything they can get their hands on!

More here.

Expect a closer look into their work very soon.