Rob Ray

Per this intriguing 1995 The Independent article, it seems the US CIA put millions into modern art!

"So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers' expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes."

Tonight I have a 15 minute sound piece titled Manchester Machinations on Phillip Von Zweck's Helloween themed show on WLUW 88.7FM Chicago, IL. Manchester Machinations is a mix of field recordings I made while in Mancheseter, UK this fall.

Tune in from 10pm - 2am on any Sunday night to hear Phillip's great show! Something Else has been a beacon of great music and sound art since 1995. Check out the Something Else MySpace page to see what it's all about.

Looking for something awesome and different to do this Halloween (or any other day?)

Free Radicals (Jen Hofer and I) have a new bicycle adventure called ¡A Spin of the Wheel!

¡A Spin of the Wheel! is available on the Gothtober website! Just click the button labeled "20" on the haunted boombox.

You get a set of 6 adventure cards for your bike and 11 awesome tracks by some our most favorite people!

Load up your mp3 player, stick those spoke cards in your wheel, and go on ¡A Spin of the Wheel!

Da Crouton
Dark Dark Dark
Jason & Pharis Romero and Friends (feat. Amy Hofer)
L@s Cafeter@s
Listing Ship
Missincinatti
My Survival Kit
Pitch Like Masses
Poolyard
The Cooling Time
Triple Chicken Foot

A really great chat between Nato Thomspon and Temporary Services at creativetime.org

"There is no guarantee that any language artists use to describe their work will be all-purpose and comprehensible to all audiences. However, because we make such a strong effort to engage diverse audiences that may not be up to the minute on whatever theoretical gobbledy-gook is in fashion in the art world, we try to talk about our work in terms that hopefully will not alienate people that discover our projects outside of art spaces and exhibitions. Sometimes it takes a variety of terms or examples or descriptions to connect with people."

Just finished my new set of glasses for the Les Figues auction! Check em out!

The mighty Jen Hofer and I contributed a quilted paper collage of the Enola Gay Hangar in David Earle's new The Open Daybook! If you're looking for a really cool daybook this one is pretty awesome. It isn't stuck in 2011, you can use it every year for the rest of your days. The book comes out on November 2nd, but is available for pre-order through Amazon.

"The Open Day Book serves as a perpetual calendar that can be used in a traditional manner, but also lets you interact with the work of more than 300 of today's most captivating artists, all of whom have visually responded to a day of the year."

I'm making a set of six glasses cut from bottles for the Les Figues benefit auction! Les Figues, by the way, is an awesome press. Come on out to the auction!

After many experiments, I'm concluding the best way to make a glass from a bottle is by scoring them with a bottle cutter, running the score over the flame of a candle and then dousing the bottle with cold water. You'll then need do so some sanding with 150 and 600 grit wet/dry sandpaper in order to create a nice smooth edge for your lips! It takes some trying. You'll do about a dozen that look horrible before experimenting and getting the hang of it!

My six glasses will have their own little storage crate and accompanying audio CD with recordings of the bottles as they are being transformed into glasses.

Here's what one looks like after cutting.

My buddy Bert Stabler just finished a totally awesome solar powered inflatables project. Bert and I traded a number of emails on how it might all actually work. And... it worked! It's so great to see things go from "It seems like it should work." to totally rad pics of the finished thing! For those on Facebook, you can check out the photos here. For those not on facebook, I took a screenshot. Go Bert! So great!

Peter Van Hoesen & Cio D´or Live @ Harry Klein Club, München - 01-05-2010 by R_co

I created the "Strange Sounds in Strange Places" workshop for the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in Manchester, UK. The goal of this workshop was to explore listening as an investigative and situating action and also to explore sound composition and performance as interpretive and expressive actions.

We took a bus from downtown Manchester northwest up to the LIVIA forest. The historical and contemporary land-use diversity of the LIVIA area is stunning. The once extremely polluted River Irwell meanders through remnants of mansions, Industrial Revolution-era dyeing plants, landfills, and sewage treatment facilities. A large cemetery, many industrial processing facilities, suburban housing and a prison all border the area. It is a sensorial wonder and ripe for great art making.

For the first half of the workshop I took participants on an acoustic ecology exploration. While walking around the area I asked participants to stop whenever they saw or heard something interesting and investigate further. We used this worksheet I created to guide our observations.

For the second half of the workshop, participants created their own outdoor sound installations using mp3 players and battery operated amplifiers. The results were amazing! One group created a hidden spinning industrial plant in a tree. Another group created a camouflaged underground party. The third group created secret motorway and train route inside a concrete tube! Great stuff.

I also handed out my "Strange Sounds in Strange Places" zine, briefly discussed solar technologies, and gave a quick overview of wind powered tin can resonators.

A big thanks to Liz Hardwick for shooting and editing video from the workshop!

Lots of great old school Acid House classics.

Warehouse Trax Mix - Carl Taylor by The Black Dog

Ken Block's Gymkhana 3 video is insane.

If nominated tonight, he just might have a heart attack! That is, if his script tells him he should.

Tom Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, with a band! Best quote in the interview... "I've also been in contact with Andre from Outkast recently." OMG! OMG! OMG! I would die...

I'm psyched to announce that Drunken Boat Issue 12 is now live at http://www.drunkenboat.com.

Drunken Boat 12 is my first issue since joining the Drunken Boat editorial team back in April. Ravi Shankar and I co-curated and edited the Desire and Interaction portfolio and I'm pretty darn happy with how it came out!

if you like what you see we sure could use a donation or two... or three.