countdown to 11/22/13: JFK disinfo in multi-media

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convert you to papyrus

Postby IanEye » Sat Nov 15, 2014 11:59 pm

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Jeff » Fri Oct 15, 2010 9:47 am wrote:Here's a small one I'd like to throw out there, for all you language is a virus fans:



“Pontypool,” a small Canadian horror film that makes the most of its minuscule budget, is set almost entirely in the confines of a tiny radio station that operates from a church basement in rural Ontario. (The film’s title is also the name of the village that is home to the station, CLSY Radio.) Here, Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), a growling talk-show cowboy who suggests a bottom-drawer Don Imus, holds forth each morning while swigging heavily spiked coffee. By his side are his producer, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle), with whom he continually bickers, and Laurel Ann Drummond (Georgina Reilly), a resourceful technician who recently returned from serving in Afghanistan.

Directed by Bruce McDonald (“The Tracey Fragments”) from Tony Burgess’s screen adaptation of his novel “Pontypool Changes Everything,” the film captures the monotonous daily rituals of broadcasting from inside a studio that feels so sealed off from the outside world that nothing beyond the sound booth seems real. On this snowy Valentine’s Day morning, phoned-in reports of grisly events in the town seem as bogus as the Sunshine Chopper, a fictional traffic helicopter that is actually a truck parked on a hill.

The traffic reporter, Ken Loney (Rick Roberts), gives increasingly agitated eyewitness accounts of a mob surrounding the house of a local doctor, on top of another report of demented ice fishermen cannibalizing policemen. Because he is just a voice and never seen, they sound like an elaborate prank.

...

“Pontypool” eventually makes a giant satiric leap into intellectual pretension, transforming William S. Burroughs’s notion that language is a virus into flesh-eating reality. The virus is not just any language, but English, the contagion spread through terms of endearment. To survive, Grant is forced to speak in broken French.

“Pontypool” barely develops a premise that has all kinds of implications about the mass media (talk radio in particular) and the degradation of language in a culture overrun with hyperbole, jargon, disinformation and contrived drama. But when one infected character is reduced to spouting gibberish as she suicidally hurls herself at the glass booth that has become a fortress against the zombie terror, the notion that we are all being driven mad by an incessant verbal deluge makes nasty comic sense.


Though McDonald says the infected are not zombies. He calls them "conversationalists":

There are three stages to this virus. The first stage is you might begin to repeat a word. Something gets stuck. And usually it's words that are terms of endearment like sweetheart or honey. The second stage is your language becomes scrambled and you can't express yourself properly. The third stage you become so distraught at your condition that the only way out of the situation you feel, as an infected person, is to try and chew your way through the mouth of another person


And spoiler:

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The infection is cured by rendering the words unintelligible.




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elfismiles » Sun Mar 16, 2014 1:36 pm wrote:EDIT: D'OH!!!! ... I meant to post that vid in the Sandy Hook thread - not this one.

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Re: countdown to 11/22/13: JFK disinfo in multi-media

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 16, 2014 1:03 am

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: countdown to 11/22/13: JFK disinfo in multi-media

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Nov 17, 2014 7:19 pm

The CIA and the JFK Assassination

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - enshrined on the lobby floor of the entrance to CIA headquarters.

"It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government." - CIA CounterIntelligence head James Angleton, in testimony to the Church Committee.

The three letters C.I.A. recur over and over again in the Kennedy assassination saga, with many unanswered questions. Were the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro somehow related to JFK's murder? Did the CIA conduct a cover-up after the assassination, including hiding a relationship with alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald? Was Oswald in fact an agent of the CIA? Why did the CIA bury some of its knowledge of Oswald's trip to Mexico? What have we learned from the voluminous CIA declassifications of the 1990s? Was the CIA involved in the Kennedy assassination?
President Kennedy, the CIA, and Cuba

President Kennedy entered office as an advocate of a stronger line against Fidel Castro's Cuba, and was a fan of the kind of counterinsurgent warfare employed by the CIA. This changed with the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, inherited from the Eisenhower administration. Kennedy accepted responsibility publicly, but privately blamed the CIA and obtained the resignation of longtime Director Allen Dulles and others. He also implemented NSAM 55, transferring control of paramilitary operations to the Defense Dept.

For their part, many CIA officers and Cuban exiles blamed Kennedy for failing to support the operation, in particular canceling a planned second set of airstrikes. Bitterness continued as Robert Kennedy took control of Cuban operations, haranguing the CIA to "do something" about Castro. Meanwhile, many CIA and Pentagon officers viewed the subsequent sabotage program, Operation Mongoose, as insufficient to overthrow the ever-stronger Castro.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is remembered today as a Kennedy success story, but many insiders at that time viewed the Kennedy blockade as yet another sign of weakness and failure of nerve. Senator Richard Russell, when informed of the situation, was among those who advocated immediate military action to remove the missiles, telling Kennedy: "It seems to me that we are at a crossroads. We're either a first-class power or we're not.....And I think that we should assemble as speedily as possible an adequate force and clean out that situation." CIA officer William Harvey sent commando teams into Cuba during the crisis, which earned him the emnity of the Kennedys and eventual exile in Rome.

During 1963, plans for the overthrow of Castro continued, while the Kennedy administration simultaneously began pursuing a "second track" of accomodation. Tensions even within the government were so high on Cuba that this "peace track" was undertaken behind the back of the State Department, CIA, and Pentagon. One of the intermediaries, a journalist and emissary named Jean Daniel was meeting with Castro when news of JFK's assassination came.

Castro Assassination Plots

On the same day, November 22 1963, a CIA officer was handing an assassination instrument to Rolando Cubela, code-named AMLASH, in the latest of CIA attempts to murder Fidel Castro. The case officer's superior, Special Affairs Staff Desmond Fitzgerald, had personally met with Cubela earlier, and presented himself as a personal representative of Robert Kennedy. Both Fitzgerald and his boss Richard Helms later testified that RFK had not been informed.

Were the Kennedy brothers trying to kill Castro at the same time they were trying to reach an accomodation with him? Pursuing such multiple tracks would not be out of character for JFK, and the circumstantial evidence is fairly strong that he and his brother authorized at least some of the plots to kill Castro. But direct evidence of Presidential authorization has never been forthcoming. This may very well be the result of the desire to maintain "plausible denial," but it is also true that the informal stories that "the Kennedys knew" tend to come from their political enemies, making final judgments difficult. The CIA had its own agenda, as well; when Robert Kennedy was told in 1962 of plots to kill Castro involving organized crime, for instance, he was falsely told that these plots had been terminated.

Some of the figures involved in these CIA-Mafia plots - Johnny Roselli, Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana, Bill Harvey - have long been "persons of interest" in the Kennedy assassination. Roselli and Giancana were both murdered during the Church Committee's investigation. The coalition involved in these plots - mob figures beset by RFK's war on organized crime, Cuban exiles frustrated with Kennedy's inaction on Cuba, and CIA officers similarly dismayed by perceived Kennedy weakness - had both the motive and the means to turn on JFK. Whether they did so remains in dispute.

The CIA and the Warren Commission

In the aftermath of the JFK assassination, a senior officer named John Whitten was put in charge of collecting investigative data on Oswald and the assassination. Within weeks he was replaced and James Angleton's CounterIntelligence division was put in charge. Angleton's group had opened a file on defector Lee Henry [sic] Oswald in 1960 and had opened his mail under its HTLINGUAL program run by Birch D. O'Neal. With CounterIntelligence officer Ray Rocca as the main contact point, the CIA supplied the Warren Commission with information about Oswald and his wife Marina, their contacts in the Soviet Union, Oswald's trip to Mexico City, and more.

The Church Committee in the 1970s analyzed the CIA's role in supporting the Warren Commission, and found it lacking. The Committee "developed evidence which impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies [CIA and FBI] arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination, and by which they provided information to the Warren Commission."

While the most notable admission was the failure of CIA officials to notify the Warren Commission about CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, CIA withholding was not limited to that issue. For instance, a March 1964 memo notes that "Jim [Angleton] would prefer to wait out the Commission" on documents passed to the Secret Service just after the assassination, including photos of the so-called "Mexico Mystery Man." As will be seen, the Mexico City episode is replete with circumstantial evidence of a major CIA cover-up.

Angleton was also responsible for the incarceration of Yuri Nosenko, a Soviet defector who arrived in the U.S. with the seemingly unwelcome news that the KGB had had no interest in Oswald during his tenure in the Soviet Union. Angleton and other CounterIntelligence officers were convinced that Nosenko was a false defector sent by the KGB on a mission. Nosenko was locked in a small room and interrogated for more than three years, while a battle raged within the CIA over his bona fides. Because this issue was unresolved during the Warren Commission's tenure, the Commission received reports about him but did not use his information in its publications.

A prominent Warren Commissioner was former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who Kennedy had let go after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Dulles maintained some contact with the Agency during the Commission's tenure, including coaching it on what questions the Commission might ask; one internal memo summarizing such a contact included this: "I agreed with him [Dulles] that a carefully phrased denial of the charges of involvement with Oswald seemed most appropriate."

The CIA and the Garrison Probe

The ill-fated investigation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison into the Kennedy assassination was not running for long before it started to pull CIA assets into its sights. An internal CIA memo from September 1967 lists those claimed by Garrison to have Agency ties: Clay Shaw, Lawrence LaBorde, Emilio Santana, Victor Manuel Paneque, Alberto Fernandez Hechavarria, Carlos Bringuier, Gerald Patrick Hemming, Jack Rogers, William Dalzell, Schlumberger Corp., Donald Norton, and Gordon Novel. Only in the latter two cases did the CIA claim absolutely no relationship; others were at least contacts or in some cases more (Carlos Bringuier's DRE anti-Castro organization was "conceived, created, and funded by the CIA").

Clay Shaw, the man Garrison charged with conspiracy in the JFK murder, testified under oath "No, I have not" to the question "Mr. Shaw, have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?" The truth of this answer may depend on the meaning of the word "work." It was later revealed that Shaw had been an informant to the CIA's Domestic Contacts Service during the period 1948 to 1956. More interestingly, a document surfaced which seemed to imply that Shaw was cleared for "Project QK/ENCHANT." Other persons cleared for this project include J. Munroe Sullivan, Shaw's "alibi," Peter Maheu (son of Robert), and no less than CIA officer E. Howard Hunt. The nature of this project is still classified; what little information there is suggests that those cleared for the project may possibly have been "unwitting," and that it may have been related to gathering information from businessmen. Certainly there is no indication it was assassination-related. Author Bill Davy (Let Justice Be Done) also uncovered a CIA memo which appears to confirm Shaw's use of the alias "Clay Bertrand," which was central to the trial.

Whether Shaw had any deeper relationship with the Agency, perhaps related to the International Trade Mart he was Director of, remains unsubstantiated though disputed. Certainly the CIA was worried about his prosecution - CIA Director Helms' assistant Victor Marchetti revealed in the 1975 that Helms held meetings where he would ask "are we giving them all the help they need?" CounterIntelligence officer Ray Rocca held meetings on 20 Sep 1967 and 26 Sep 1967, and incorrectly predicted that "Garrison would indeed obtain a conviction of Shaw" (Shaw was acquitted after an hour of deliberation). The Agency also produced a series of 9 numbered memos tracking the Garrison investigation (see sidebar), and circulated to station chiefs a guidebook for defending the Warren Report, with specific strategies for refuting the critics.

Beyond the monitoring of Garrison, there have long been allegations that CIA agents infiltrated the DA's staff, which certainly produced its share of defectors and leakers. Many stories swirled around William Martin (who had been a former CIA contact), William Wood aka "Bill Boxley" (also former CIA, though known as such by Garrison), and anti-Castro exiles Bernardo de Torres and Alberto Fowler. The truth of the level of infiltration of Garrison's staff remains murky. The real attack on Garrison came from the mainstream media, including an NBC reporter who had formerly worked for the CIA, NSA, and Robert Kennedy - Walter Sheridan. The Justice Dept. also played a role, including taking the step of flying JFK autopsy doctor Boswell to New Orleans during the trial to be ready to rescue his floundering colleague, Dr. Finck.

The Last Investigation

The post-Watergate Church Committee documented CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro in great detail; its probe into the Kennedy assassination was more limited, as seen in the name of the slim volume "The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies." But this report was highly critical of both the CIA and FBI; Senator Schweiker told a TV audience that "the [Warren] report...has collapsed like a house of cards" and spoke of "senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up."

The Church Committee's unfinished business fell to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which got off to a rocky start. Shortly after Chief Counsel Richard Sprague declined to sign CIA secrecy oaths and began asking pointed questions about Oswald's visit to Mexico City, he began to be denounced in the press and even by his own committee chairman, Henry Gonzalez. The committee was almost terminated before it really got started, rescued only by the dual resignations of Gonzalez and Sprague, and the untimely apparent suicide of key witness George DeMohrenschildt on the eve of a refunding vote.

Justice Department organized crime expert G. Robert Blakey replaced Sprague, worked out secrecy agreements with the CIA, and the Committee was re-launched. The CIA was never really a suspect of the new HSCA investigation, though the Committee gained access to a huge number of CIA files and questioned many Agency officers in great detail. Of particular interest was the issue of Oswald's sojourn to Mexico City. This episode, glossed over by the Warren Commission, posed grave questions: did the FBI err when it determined that recorded phone calls of a person calling himself Oswald, talking to foreign embassies, did not match his voice? Was the CIA lying when it reported that such tapes no longer existed? Why did CIA cables reporting the visit contain obvious falsehoods? Was the CIA hiding pre-assassination knowledge that Oswald had been to the Cuban embassy, and if so why? Was Oswald in league with a KGB assassinations expert, or was this connection planted as part of the Kennedy assassination plot? Was the Oswald visit part of an approved CIA operation?

These questions have not been adequately answered to this day. HSCA staffers compiled a report entitled "Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City" (aka the "Lopez Report" after one of its co-authors) which addresses some of them, and takes issue with CIA's positions in many instances. This report was not released by the HSCA, but was declassified in the mid-1990s, with many redactions. The Committee's investigation generated a great deal of hostility with the CIA; one memo from Chairman Stokes to CIA Director Turner essentially accused the Agency of lying about the existence photographs of Oswald taken in Mexico City.

The HSCA concluded in its Final Report that "The Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy." But even the write-up supporting that conclusion noted the Committee's difficulty in determining whether Oswald had been an agent of the CIA, unexplained anomalies related to CIA's file on Oswald, the allegation of an officer that he had personally seen a report from a CIA field office which had "interviewed a former Marine who had worked at the Minsk radio plant following his defection to the U.S.S.R.," among other allegations and issues.

The relationship between the CIA and the HSCA, particularly some of its staff, was often tense. Neatly summarizing some CIA officers' frustrations with what they thought were inexperienced and overzealous investigators was one internal memo reviewing an HSCA writeup. CIA officer Chuck Berk wrote the following, regarding the allegation that the CIA withheld information from the Warren Commission: "For instance, if we had reports on why the monkeys lost their tails in Zamboango, it would not be provided as it had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination (although HSCA investigators might think it so)." [For readers for whom this reference might be too obscure, here is a link to the traditional song entitled Zamboango.]

HSCA Chief Counsel often sided with the CIA in such disputes, and now regrets it. Two decades after the Committee closed up shop, Washington Post journalist Jefferson Morley discovered that the CIA liaison officer to the Committee was not what he appeared. George Joannides, brought out of retirement to help guide HSCA staffers in their document requests, had been from 1962-64 the case officer for the DRE, the very Cuban exile group which with which Oswald had had multiple interactions in the summer of 1963. Thus, a person knowledgeable of one of the most sensitive areas of intersection between the CIA and Oswald was in a position to monitor and manage the HSCA's investigation in this area, Told of this, Blakey said that if he had known he would have had Joannides on the witness stand rather than as liaison, and wrote a tirade against the CIA, which said this of the Agency: "Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story. I am now in that camp." Significantly for the HSCA's findings, he also wrote: "I now no longer believe anything the Agency told the committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity."

Was Oswald a CIA Agent?

Was, then, Lee Harvey Oswald a CIA agent? No documentation to that effect has ever emerged, though the HSCA was duly wary of certainty based on that alone, particularly in the face of a memo from the head of the CIA's "executive action" unit which talked of "forged and backdated" files to "backstop" the record on such activities. The Committee also heard from a former CIA accountant, James Wilcott, who said that he had paid out money to an "Oswald project," but the HSCA could not corroborate his account and disbelieved it.

Oswald's defection to the USSR has long attracted interest; he and many others defected precisely at a time when US knowledge of the Soviet Union was lacking (prior to satellites), and many observers have long suspected that he was part of a "false defector" program. This suspicion was fueled by the U.S. Government's curious treatment of the man who declared he would give radar secrets to the Soviets - the government loaned him money to return to the U.S., never prosecuted him, and claimed never to have even debriefed him.

While no official acknowledgement of such a false-defector program has been forthcoming, the CIA did admit privately to HSCA staff that at least one officer named Thomas Casasin had "run an agent into the USSR" and like Oswald this agent had come back with a Russian wife. Interestingly, Casasin had written a memo on 25 Nov 1963 that he and another officer in the Soviet Russia division had on Oswald's return discussed the "laying on of interview(s)," but "I do not know what action developed thereafter." For its part, the HSCA failed to mention Casasin's having "run an agent into the USSR" in its published defector study.

Oswald's odd behavior in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 is also a source of speculation about his motives and associations. His pro-Castro activities, including pretending to be the head of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee--Oswald was its only member in the city--seem bizarre, except perhaps when looked through the lens of the CIA's ongoing anti-FPCC intelligence operations. Jim Garrison discovered that an address stamped on one of Oswald's handbills, 544 Camp Street, was the address of a building holding the offices anti-Communist operative Guy Banister. Banister's secretary Delphine Roberts told investigator Anthony Summers that Banister had told them that Oswald was "associated with the office," and Garrison's staff was told by Banister's widow that she had discovered FPCC leaflets among her husband's possessions. Garage owner Adrian Alba testified that, among other activities, he had seen an FBI agent in a car passing an envelope to Oswald. And as noted earlier, at a time when Oswald got engaged in a street scuffle with DRE delegate Carlos Bringuier, the DRE's case officer was George Joannides, the officer who would later be brought out of retirement to serve as liaison to the HSCA.

Returning to the CIA files on Oswald, the HSCA was concerned about Oswald's "201" file, which was opened in November 1960 but contained materials dated from prior to that time, suggesting that there may have been a prior file on Oswald. Ann Egerter, who opened the 201 file on Lee "Henry" [sic] Oswald on the basis of a State Dept. about several defectors, denied that the handwritten annotation "AG" meant "agent." But her CI/SIG unit in CounterIntelligence was primarly tasked to protect the Agency from penetrations or moles: "We were charged with the investigation of Agency personnel who were suspected one way or another." She also noted that "Operational material is not stored in 201 files."

Ray Rocca, a CounterIntelligence officer who had been a liaison to the Warren Commission, was questioned by the HSCA about why the CI/SIG group would have been the one to open the Oswald file. After a seemingly evasive exchange in which Rocca brought in the DDP (operations) branch of the CIA, the HSCA questioner responded "Again, though, Oswald had nothing to do with the DDP at this time, at least apparently." To which Rocca responded: " I'm not saying that. You said it."

After all these years, it remains unclear whether Oswald was an agent of the CIA or of any other intelligence agency. An entire book, Philip Melanson's Spy Saga, was devoted to the circumstantial evidence that he was. Alternative theories include that Oswald was operating with people like Banister outside the CIA per se, or that perhaps he was manipulated without being witting of exactly who he was dealing with. Author Peter Dale Scott has even argued that Oswald's file, more than the man himself, was the subject of an intelligence operation, specifically CounterIntelligence chief James Angleton's famous search for a Soviet mole. Some dismiss all this, saying that Oswald was simply a loner and malcontent. If this were true, then Oswald's strange capers effectively would make him an agent of his own one-man intelligence agency, a theory no less strange than any of the others.

Friends and Agents

If despite the anomalies Oswald was not connected to U.S. intelligence, the same cannot be said for many of his associates. For some of them, persistent allegations of such connections remain unsubstantiated. For others, declassified files prove connections to varying degrees, though the ultimate meaning of those connections is subject to debate.

Oswald's "best friend" in Dallas was a curious and well-connected oil geologist named George DeMohrenschildt. Long suspected of early ties to French intelligence, or perhaps German intelligence, DeMohrenschildt himself admitted an association with the CIA's Dallas office head, J. Walton Moore. As a businessman, of course, such association might be routine, except that DeMohrenschildt further said that he had talked about Oswald with Moore; DeMohrenschildt also apparently encouraged Oswald to write a report about his experiences in Minsk which in some parts reads like an intelligence report.

Declassified files show that in 1976 DeMohrenschildt wrote to then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush, pleading that he (DeMohrenschildt) was being followed and his phone bugged, admitting he had been a "damn fool" for beginning to talk and write about Oswald. Bush's staff almost dismissed the handwritten letter as a crank, but Bush confirmed to them that he knew DeMohrenschildt, had roomed with the latter's nephew at Andover. Bush wrote back a letter, declining assistance and saying in effect "have a nice life." This was not to be. Six months later, on the day an HSCA investigator named Gaeton Fonzi tried to reach him, DeMohrenschildt apparently took his own life with a shotgun. This event so shocked the Congress that it renewed funding for the Committee, which had been in danger of being terminated due to the Sprague-Gonzalez scandal.

Some others in Oswald's orbit had clearer Agency connections. Journalist Priscilla Johnson, who interviewed Oswald during his defection in Moscow and later befriended Marina, had in the 1950s attempted to join the CIA. Though this never happened, she maintained multiple contacts with Agency officers and was cleared for various information-gathering projects. Johnson attracted interest of assassination researchers not only because of her book Marina and Lee, which reinforced the Warren Commission view of Oswald just as the HSCA was gearing up, but also due to curious events such as her participating in the finding of a bus ticket "proving" that Oswald had been to Mexico. Senator Russell for one was highly skeptical that the federal agencies had missed finding this ticket among Marina's possessions all these years.

Priscilla Johnson was hardly alone among journalists in having CIA contacts. Dallas Morning news reporter Hugh Aynesworth, another longtime commentator on the case, was in contact with the Dallas CIA office. A declassified memo described a working relationship with multiple Miami Herald journalists. As Congress discovered in the 1970s during investigation of intelligence abuses, the Agency had developed many intimate contacts with the media. The contacts with Johnson and Aynesworth and others is not sinister per se, but it does raise the legitimate question of bias.

One other close associate of Lee and Marina Oswald was Ruth Paine, a Quaker housewife who befriended Marina and gave her a place to live when she and Lee were separated, who got Oswald the job at the Book Depository, and in whose house much of the incriminating evidence was found. Ruth's sister, it turns out, worked for the CIA under Air Force cover. Was Ruth a "babysitter" for Marina, as some suspect? In 1968, Marina told the Orleans Parish Grand Jury why she had cut off contact with Ruth after the assassination: "I was advised by Secret Service not to be connected with her, seems like she was…..not connected…..she was sympathizing with the CIA. She wrote letters over there and they told me for my own reputation, to stay away."

Perhaps it is not surprising that a returning defector would find himself surrounded by people with contacts in the intelligence world. But it should give pause before giving full credence to the oft-told stories of the "loner" Oswald, stories often told by these same sources.

Confessions of Involvement

"Someone would have talked," goes the old refrain. In the case of some CIA officers and others associated with the Agency, they did talk. But who's listening?

In 2007, legendary Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt died, leaving behind a taped "confession" in which he claimed knowledge of the plot to kill Kennedy but not active participation, describing himself as a "benchwarmer." Hunt named names - including Lyndon Johnson, Tracy Barnes, William Harvey, Frank Sturgis, and others - but provided no substantiating details. For many observers, the hard-to-credit confession was a "last laugh" and a parting gift to his ne-er-do-well son, who has attempted to capitalize on it.

Other confessions have carried a bit more weight. David Morales, Chief of Operations at the JMWAVE station in Florida where he trained Bay of Pigs participants and by some accounts was involved in assassination operations, was getting drunk one night with childhood friend Ruben Carbajal and a business associate named Bob Walton. Both men said that Morales went on a tirade about Kennedy and particularly his failure to support the men of the Bay of Pigs. Morales finished this conversation by saying "Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?"

John Martino was not a CIA officer or agent, but did travel in circles which intersected with many of the Agency's anti-Castro activists, including Morales and soldier-of-fortune and later Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis. Martino told family and associates that he had been involved in the assassination in a peripheral way, and that "The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn't know who he was working for--he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theatre. They were to meet Oswald in the theatre, and get him out of the country, then eliminate him. Oswald made a mistake...There was no way we could get to him. They had Ruby kill him."

CIA Records on the JFK Assassination

The FBI was the primary investigative body in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, and continued that work on behalf of the Warren Commission. But the CIA became involved as well, particularly in foreign aspects - Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union and his contacts with Soviet and Cuban embassies several weeks prior to the events of Dallas. During the later Church and HSCA investigations, the Agency's anti-Castro murder plots and other operations became a prime focus.

CIA files in the JFK Collection held at the National Archives number on the order of a half-million pages, and the vast bulk of them are online on the MFF website (although in some cases the National Archives' copy has been re-released with fewer redactions). The records fall into several sub-collections:

• Oswald 201 file - A small pre-assassination file, which then became the CIA's primary post-assassination investigative file.

• Segregated Collection - Split into two portions, one stored on paper and the other microfilmed, these are the files made available to the HSCA. They contain a great deal on anti-Castro personalities and groups.

• Russ Holmes Work File - This JFK assassination document archive was maintained in the CounterIntelligence division by an officer named Russell Holmes.

Other smaller collections include the Latin America Division Work File (the group was charged in the 1970s with looking into Castro's involvement in the crime), and files from the Office of Security, the Deputy Director of Plans, and other miscellaneous files.

Important CIA reports of interest to a wide audience are the Inspector General's 1967 Report on CIA plots to kill Castro, volumes one and two of an Inspector General's report on the Bay of Pigs, and the recently-released "family jewels" report compiled during the Watergate era.

More may be forthcoming. The CIA is currently in a legal battle over the records of officer George Joannides, and has admitted to the existence of 1100 assassination documents withheld in full. The completeness of existing collections remains in doubt in some instances, and falsification of certain records has been alleged by researchers who study them. Nonetheless, the declassifications of the 1990s delivered a wealth of information; much of the preceding discussion is only possible due to records released since 1993.

Was the CIA Involved in the JFK Assassination?

But what about the big question - was the CIA involved in the Kennedy assassination? Certainly there were those in the Agency - particularly among those involved in the Bay of Pigs and other anti-Castro operations - who came to hate President Kennedy over lack of action to remove Castro. This intensified in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the spring 1963 crackdown on exile groups operating against Cuban targets (and Soviet ships) from U.S. soil. When the Castro assassination plots were revealed in the 1970s, means was added to motive, and this led many to suspect that the CIA, or at least some officers and agents of it, were involved in Kennedy's death.

But is there any direct evidence of such involvement, beyond the meager confessions noted earlier and the discredited allegation that Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were two of the three "tramps" found in a boxcar not far from Dealey Plaza?

The evidence is circumstantial, but not absent. First of all, there is no serious question that the CIA has been involved in cover-up of its pre-assassination knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald. In particular, the official story of the Oswald visit to Mexico City is fraught with problems. Overwhelming evidence exists that at least one tape of a person calling himself Oswald, contacting the Soviet Embassy, were available on November 22, and not "routinely recycled" as CIA officials later claimed. More importantly, FBI agents in Dallas who listened to recordings determined that it wasn't Oswald's voice on the tape.

The complex Mexico City story, not easily summarized, smells of cover-up in many other ways. The HSCA's Lopez Report flatly states that the CIA's contention that it didn't know Oswald had visited the Cuban Embassy until after the assassination is simply "incorrect". The idea that Oswald was an unimportant "blip on the Station's radar" was disputed by no less than CIA Mexico City station chief Win Scott, and one headquarters officer told the HSCA that when the name Oswald came on the radio after the assassination "the effect was electric." Propaganda officer David Phillips told HSCA investigators many contradictory stories; investigator Dan Hardway told author Gaeton Fonzi that "I'm firmly convinced now that he [Phillips] ran the red-herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie that I could trace back to him. That's what got him so upset. He knew the whole thing could unravel." Other agency employees dispute the official story in various ways. Explaining why CIA Headquarters sent out two cables on the Oswald with false information, prior to the assassination, officer Jane Roman said, "To me its indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need to know basis."

The issue of a cover-up related to the Mexico City visit is hardly academic. Allegations that Oswald was in league with the Soviets and Cubans, and had been in contact with a KGB assassinations expert while in Mexico City, fueled the fear of World War III and helped put together the Warren Commission. Lyndon Johnson told Senator Russell that, after Earl Warren refused to serve on the Commission multiple times, "I just pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City," and Warren relented, reportedly with tears in his eyes.

There are indications that the Mexico City visit was a CIA operation of some sort, possibly related to operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee "in foreign countries" where the CIA told the FBI in September 1963 that it was "giving some thought to planting deceptive information which might embarrass the Committee in areas where it does have some support." A sensitive CIA operation might explain why FBI Domestic Intelligence officer Marvin Gheesling took Oswald's name off a watch list the day before a cable reporting the Oswald visit reached Washington DC. Oswald had been on this list, which ensured that incoming information on Oswald would be routed to the FBI's espionage division, since 1959.

But there are many motives for cover-up. If there was an intelligence connection to Oswald, and the Mexico City visit was part of this, might this alone explain the need for a cover-up? Perhaps CIA leaders decided it could simply not afford the embarrassment of an association with the man alleged to have killed the President?

This many years later, with inadequate investigation of these issues by those empowered to do so, reaching definitive conclusions is difficult. John Newman, a former military intelligence analyst who has studied these matters closely, concluded in a recent update to his Oswald and the CIA that there was one man with his fingerprints in all the right places - legendary CIA CounterIntelligence chief James Angleton. Angleton's division opened the Oswald file in 1960 and had it under close wraps in 1963, thus controlling the time bomb of information coming from Mexico until it was too late. CounterIntelligence officers were involved in the cabling of false information about Oswald surrounding that trip. Angleton also took over liaison functions with the Warren Commission, launching the CounterIntelligence division's long history with the post-assassination investigations. Newman writes that Angleton was one of very few who could be the "designer" of a plot which created such explosive information about Oswald and then kept it dormant until November 22, 1963.

Newman's analysis notes the importance of focusing on the actions of individuals - it is nonsensical to say that an agency as large as the CIA killed Kennedy. Even those who say that the assassination was run "from the top" of the Agency often excuse John McCone, who was after all the Director. The CIA is highly compartmentalized; the number of Agency officers knowledgeable about the Castro murder plots, for instance, was not very large. The "need to know" test limits access to knowledge of any covert operation, let alone a plot to murder the president of the United States. But the allegation that CIA officers were involved in such a plot, while never proven, has only grown in strength over time, gaining the adherence of many who have studied the assassination closely.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Dion did not write "Runaway", Del Shannon did.

Postby IanEye » Wed Dec 17, 2014 11:06 am

Hugh Manatee Wins » Sun Jan 20, 2008 2:54 pm wrote:Apologies for this IE-HMW interpersonal dialogue.
We had a big misunderstanding weeks ago which has snowballed
and needs to be sorted out.
But if read, you'll find out that Tom Stoppard is a MI6 spook.



Image


@35:53, the Brothers Ferrell (not to be confused with the Farrelly Brothers) discuss noted MI6 spook Tom Stoppard's involvement with the Lucas film "Revenge of the Sith".




.
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Re: countdown to 11/22/13: JFK disinfo in multi-media

Postby MinM » Sat Jan 31, 2015 9:18 am

@Adam_Jacobi · Lego Movie 2 got DARK. RT @Brocktoon23: Well, I just found out that this is a thing. Obviously, I am buying it.
Image

ImageThe Associated Press @AP · Judge says Lee Harvey Oswald's casket belongs to brother, not funeral home that sold it for $87,000: http://apne.ws/1wKrfvw

http://justiceforkennedy.blogspot.com/2 ... -lees.html

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=21659

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=21623
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Re: countdown to 11/22/13: JFK disinfo in multi-media

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Wed Feb 04, 2015 6:33 am

I don't want to give this more than it's worth, the link is there but I am only quoting a pair of the salient paragraphs as it relates to the topic of disinfo and the method through which a bug light of a headline is used to draw the insectiod brained conspiros and anti-conspiros in unison with the lone gunman theory.

What the Warren Commission Didn’t Know
A member of the panel that investigated JFK’s death now worries he was a victim of a “massive cover-up.”
By PHILIP SHENON
February 02, 2015

...Slawson’s most startling conclusion: He now believes that other people probably knew about Oswald’s plans to kill the president and encouraged him, raising the possibility that there was a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death—at least according to the common legal definition of the word conspiracy, which requires simply that at least two people plot to do wrongdoing. “I now know that Oswald was almost certainly not a lone wolf,” Slawson says.

Slawson is not describing the sort of elaborate, far-fetched assassination plot that most conspiracy theorists like to claim occurred, with a roster of suspects including the Mafia, Texas oilmen, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, southern segregationists, elements of the CIA and FBI, and even President Johnson. Slawson did not believe in 1964, and does not believe now, that Fidel Castro or the leaders of the Soviet Union or of any other foreign government were involved in the president’s murder. And he is certain that Oswald was the only gunman in Dealey Plaza.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... 14812.html


What irritates me most is that they take what has become one of the more important lines to a ridiculed conspiracy theorist's and use in a paragraph that is supposed to render this story startling. Of course, it is startling, but for all the wrong reasons.
Slawson’s most startling conclusion: He now believes that other people probably knew about Oswald’s plans to kill the president and encouraged him, raising the possibility that there was a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death—at least according to the common legal definition of the word conspiracy, which requires simply that at least two people plot to do wrongdoing. “I now know that Oswald was almost certainly not a lone wolf,” Slawson says.


What I cannot understand is, why would they even bother insofar as it has long been painfully obvious that nobody cares anymore.
Seeing the world through rose-colored latex.
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Re: countdown to 11/22/13: JFK disinfo in multi-media

Postby MinM » Sun Feb 15, 2015 11:48 am

@Variety · #ICYMI James Franco to star in Hulu's Stephen King Kennedy assassination thriller http://bit.ly/1KQFV3C
Image

Image@RottenTomatoes · James Franco to star in @Hulu original series 11/22/63 ---> http://tmto.es/IYkOQ

keywords: james franco, propagandist, warren report apologist
*****
MinM » Mon Apr 29, 2013 7:54 pm wrote:
@Zap2it: J.J. Abrams wants rights to Stephen King's '11/22/63'; 'Zero Hour' and 'Do No Harm' get… http://goo.gl/fb/wabZK

https://twitter.com/Zap2it/status/329006754488799232

IanEye wrote:This is on the heels of Stephen King's latest novel "11/22/63" , which also espouses the lone gunman meme.

It is starting to annoy me.

So, I figured I would start a thread to keep track of these mentions in any of the various media I take in, and see if this trend snowballs as we approach the 50th anniversary of the events in Dallas.

I did end up reading that King book by the way, it is awful. Even the parts that mainly deal with the concept of time travel suck.

This is interesting to me because lately my facebook page is riddled with my friends comments thanking Mr. King for making statements against Mitt Romney. So, King is seen as a hero to the Left, even as he spreads the lone gunman meme.

Perhaps that fits in with 8bit's "Why Is It Right Wing To Think The Media is Brainwashing?" thread.

Perhaps not.

It might be interesting to those who have no intention of reading the novel to see who King thanks first for their "useful source-materials" :

Image

"Useful source-materials"? It would be tempting to label these guys with the Orwellian term "Useful Idiots", but it obviously goes beyond that. Before he was exposed as a plagiarist, Gerald Posner inadvertently revealed his CIA-ties. As for those others...
In that Education Forum link there also happens to be a debate about the merits of NY Times book review of Dan Moldea's book by Gerald Posner:
Ron Ecker wrote:Posted Yesterday, 07:36 PM

http://www.moldea.com/RFKReviews.html

Impressive! Includes excerpt from a New York Times Book Review by Gerald Posner. Leave it to the NYT to choose Posner to write a review of a Kennedy assassination book. These people are beyond any decent description.

Actually, as I recall, Moldea's book did a good job of proving a conspiracy, then on the last page he strangely concludes that Sirhan did it alone. I wonder if someone had a gun to his head as he wrapped up his manuscript.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry251248

Of course the evidence suggests that Moldea was blackmailed into concluding that Sirhan acted alone:

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2007/08/ ... trust.html
I know from a first-hand source -- whom I will name, if legally pressed -- that Dan Moldea had privately complained that the major publishers had "blackballed" him after he wrote a book called Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football. The blackballing stopped the moment he agreed to write a book about the Robert F. Kennedy assassination pushing the "lone nut" hypothesis...

viewtopic.php?p=282075#p282075

Much the same way Norman Mailer was blackmailed into supporting the lone nutters...

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry218745
Jim DiEugenio wrote:Posted 31 January 2011 - 03:26 AM

In 1973, Mailer published a book, Marilyn, (really a photo essay) with the assistance of longtime FBI asset on the Kennedy assassination Larry Schiller. He recirculated the tale again, inserting a new twist. He added the possibility that the FBI and/or the CIA might have been involved in the murder in order to blackmail Bobby ( p. 242). In 1973, pre-Rupert Murdoch, the media had some standards. Mailer was excoriated for his baseless ruminations. In private, he admitted he did what he did to help pay off a tax debt. He also made a similar confession in public. When Mike Wallace asked him on 60 Minutes (7/13/73) why he had to trash Bobby Kennedy, Mailer replied “I needed money very badly.” ...

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry218745

viewtopic.php?p=459270#p459270

Who knows what Stephen King's excuse was?

viewtopic.php?p=459417#p459417

Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKpaineM.htm
Jim Garrison later suggested that Ruth Paine might have been involved in setting Oswald up as the "patsy". Garrison points out that Paine's father " had been employed by the Agency for International Development, regarded by many as a source of cover for the C.I.A. Her brother-in-law was employed by the same agency in the Washington, D.C. area." He also claims that he had tried to "examine the income tax returns of Ruth and Michael Paine, but I was told that they had been classified as secret.... What was so special about this particular family that made the federal government so protective of it?"

In 2002 Thomas Mallon wrote a book about Ruth Paine's involvement in the case, Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy. Unlike Jim Garrison Mallon took the view that Paine was completely innocent of any involvement in the Kennedy assassination conspiracy.

Ruth Paine is currently working for a Nicaraguan relief group in St. Petersburg, Florida.


Nicaraguan 'relief group?' Funny. That's the kind of cover that Oliver North's fronts used to help with the Reagan Wars in Central America...

viewtopic.php?p=120202#p120202

One decade after his literary attempt to mitigate Ruth Paine's role in the JFK assassination. Thomas Mallon is back to reinforce the Bob Woodward - Carl Bernstein - Seymour Hersh myth that is "Watergate".
Image
Mallon has been all over NPR the last few days to reindoctrinate the unwashed masses:
'Watergate' Revisited: Inside The Criminal Minds
February 25, 2012

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Psymon.

Almost any scandal in the world these days is described as a something-gate. The phrase dates back to the summer of 1972, when five men were arrested in the middle of the night during a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C.

The subsequent scandal brought down Richard Nixon's administration, made him one of the most notorious men in American history. Anytime someone observes: what did they know, and when did they know it; it's not the crime, it's the cover-up; follow the money, or third-rate burglary, it's a Watergate reference - whether they know it or not.

The Watergate crime and scandal have been exhaustively documented. But now, a great historical novelist has run it through his imagination. Thomas Mallon's new book is called "Watergate: A Novel." Tom Mallon joins us in our studios.

Thanks for being with us.

THOMAS MALLON: Thanks for having me.

SIMON: With so much on the record, what's left to be imagined by a novelist?

MALLON: Mostly how it felt, I think. I thought if you were going to do this as a novel, you had to get inside the people who were there. And so, I tried to tell the story from essentially seven different points of view and see what it felt like. And I avoid most of the big events that people - they certainly occur. But I don't tell the story the way you would tell it in nonfiction. I tell it more as a series of private dramas and try to give certain intimacy.

SIMON: As you will learn on tour, there are Watergate buffs...

MALLON: Oh, yes.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SIMON: ...like there are Civil War buffs and jazz buffs who will catch you on the smallest bit of misinformation, or imagined information. How important was historical accuracy to you?

MALLON: I refer in the acknowledgements of the book to the always sliding scale of historical fiction. And I think you really have to make these decisions book-by-book and almost scene-by-scene. I don't violate any of the big historical moments, dates. You know, Richard Nixon still resigns at the end of this book.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)...
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/25/147262946 ... inal-minds

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/23/147063867 ... rnate-take

viewtopic.php?p=449737#p449737

Thanks for the heads-up on this phenomenon, IanEye. :thumbsup001:
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humble bragging our way into heaven

Postby IanEye » Wed Feb 25, 2015 10:16 am

Image
@15:33 Harris Wittels asks, “Doesn’t it seem like a lot of celebrities are dying right now?”
in the midst of a conversation about mortality and substance abuse.
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Re: countdown to 11/22/13: JFK disinfo in multi-media

Postby RocketMan » Mon May 11, 2015 3:20 am

File under WTF. Then again, it's a fairy tale show so it all makes sense...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-f ... k_20150510

The ABC drama capped off its fourth season with a trek to an alternate reality, and revealed the foe they'll be facing next.

[Warning: this post contains spoilers for the Once Upon a Time season four finale, "Operation Mongoose."]

For the second season in a row, the Once Upon a Time finale took place in a world that was different than the norm.
-I don't like hoodlums.
-That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
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popping & locking at Ian's request.

Postby IanEye » Fri Jun 12, 2015 7:49 am

Image


Subject: Humanity’s Lens: “Being There” - Prologue

IanEye wrote:Good Morning All,

I made a new post in the Culture Studies section:

Humanity’s Lens: “Being There” - Discussion

Enjoy!






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the Fort Ian Times

Postby IanEye » Fri Jul 03, 2015 12:01 pm

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Image



A man named Wells interviews a cult leader ( in 2 parts).

*



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Image

@ 01:25:25 Dana Gould shares his thoughts on the phantom clown phenomena.

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Re: countdown to 11/22/13: JFK disinfo in multi-media

Postby MinM » Mon Oct 12, 2015 9:44 am

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Re: countdown to 11/22/13: JFK disinfo in multi-media

Postby MinM » Mon Feb 15, 2016 4:18 pm

Earth-704509
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e-ae-ie-ae-ie-ae-ie-ae-ie-ae-ie-ae-ie-ae-ie-ae-ie-ae-ie-ae-i

Postby IanEye » Sun Mar 20, 2016 1:10 pm

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Image
Image
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"There was a big culture of taking acid and staying in at the time, instead of doing E and going out.
We were more into that, hanging out and getting weird, hearing the way weird things sounded weird.
We were doing stupid stuff like plugging a TV into an effects unit and then running it off a drum machine and watching telly."

- Sean Booth




In the run up to the May Bank Holiday of 1992, Avon and Somerset police set out to put a halt to the Avon Free Festival, an outdoor gathering running annually since the 1970s that drew travellers, new agers and crusties from across the United Kingdom. Attempts at crowd dispersal succeeded only into funnelling thousands into the neighbouring county of Worcestershire, where on Castlemorton Common, an estimated 25,000 crusties and weekend ravers met for an outdoor party that would last one week. At that point, it was the largest event the UK’s burgeoning free party movement had ever seen.

The tabloids were scandalised; the police, unable to break up a gathering of that size, were humiliated. At the close, several members of the anarcho-hippy rave crew Spiral Tribe were arrested and had their vehicles and sound system impounded. Questions about UK rave culture were raised in Parliament. Legislation was on the way. 20 years ago this year, John Major’s Conservative Government introduced the Criminal Justice And Public Order Act 1994, a sweeping bill that included within its many clauses a direct attack on the free party movement. Section 63 is to the outdoor rave what Form 696 is to the licenced grime event, giving police the powers to remove “a gathering on land in the open air of 20 or more persons… at which amplified music is played”.

As if preempting the possibility of some smart-arse lawyer pulling out, say, a 12" of Xenophobia’s nutty E-anthem 'Rush In The House' with a “And do you really think this qualifies as ‘music’, m’lud?”, Section 63 included a helpful sub-clause clarifying just how broad the state’s definition of music in this case was: “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” The wording no doubt felt watertight to whichever dreary apparatchik had been called upon to draft it, but Rob Brown and Sean Booth – two b-boys from Rochdale who met through Manchester’s graffiti community some years earlier, and now produced music as Autechre – looked at Section 63 and saw a loophole to tug at.

In September 1994, Autechre released a new EP, Anti, on Warp. Consisting of three tracks recorded at the same sessions as the duo’s forthcoming long-player Amber, its turquoise sleeve was sealed with a black sticker that bore the following message: “Warning. Lost and Djarum contain repetitive beats. We advise you not to play these tracks if the Criminal Justice Bill becomes law. Flutter has been programmed in such a way that no bars contain identical beats and can therefore be played under the proposed new law. However, we advice DJs to have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non-repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment.”

The music of Warp Records has seldom felt explicitly political, but Anti felt like satire of the best stripe: both angry, and smart. By breaking the seal, the sticker warned, “you accept full responsibility for any consequential action resulting from this product’s use”. Brown and Booth were serious, too. All proceeds from the record were to be donated to the political pressure group Liberty, and the communiqué ended with a final statement: “Autechre is politically non-aligned. This is about personal freedom.”

Autechre were not the only UK group to come out with an artistic response to the Criminal Justice Act. The Prodigy’s 'Their Law' and 'Repetitive Beats' by Retribution, a dance supergroup featuring members of Fun-Da-Mental and System 7, were both directly or indirectly inspired by the Bill. But it’s hard to think of any precedent for a track like 'Flutter': a musicological protest song, undermining repressive legislation not through punk posturing, but studio subversion. As a tune, meanwhile, it bangs. Translucent melodies hover, aurora borealis-like above a tumult of slappy snares and dotty kicks that convulse in ever-more complex sequences.

Reputedly built from a string of 65 distinct drum patterns linked together, the ingenious thing about 'Flutter' is that it sounds repetitive: it moves fluidly, nimbly, never tips into abstraction or misses a beat. Meticulously constructed, it delivers its political statement like a coup de grace. 'Lost' and 'Djarum', meanwhile, explore bordering territory: the former a melancholy piece haunted by wisps of vocal and dappled synth; the latter contrasting the grating with the pretty as if in anticipation of the style Aphex Twin would explore next year with 'I Care Because You Do'.

Brown and Booth had made their Warp Records debut two years earlier with a pair of tracks on the label’s pioneering Artificial Intelligence compilation (which also included Alex Paterson, Speedy J, and Richard D James under his Dice Man pseudonym). Artificial Intelligence, which its sleeve image of a virtual reality avatar with spliff in hand, vegging out to his Pink Floyd and Kraftwerk vinyl, appeared rather urbane and civilised next to the dreadlocked heathens of the free party scene, and the artists within would become pretty much a who’s who of what would for better or worse become bracketed – in the US, at least – under the unlikable term of Intelligent Dance Music. A selection of Q&A's printed on Artificial Intelligence’s inner sleeve finds Autechre citing Edgar Froese and Chris Franke of kosmische Krautrock pioneers Tangerine Dream amongst their recent influences, and you can certainly hear that on their two contributions, ‘Crystel and ‘The Egg’: tuff electro rhythms linked to crystalline, beautiful synthesiser melodies.



Trying to identify a clear trajectory to Autechre’s career is probably a fool’s errand, but looking over their discography, the Anti EP feels like a turning point; a sort of hinge linking the ambient house of their early work to the arid, alien computer music that would follow. Indeed, how you play Flutter feels crucial. On the CD version, we hear it at a speed equivalent to the vinyl spun at 45rpm. But on a note on the vinyl sleeve, Autechre suggest that it can be played either at 45 or the slower 33 1/3rpm. Pitched at 33 1/3 it’s a pretty thing, in line with the dreamy drifts of Amber. At 45, it moves at a relatively spry 140bpm – surely by no coincidence, the pace of much early breakbeat rave, before the harder-faster lure of ‘arkdore pushed the tempo higher – and pointing towards future Autechre: the dark, skittering abstractions and gnomic melodies that run through LP5 and EP7.



Castlemorton might have sounded the death knell for the free party scene, but by 1994, like much of Warp’s roster, Autechre were on a rather different path. In the years following Anti, they tunnelled into their music to make something timeless and undateable, inspired by malfunctioning hardware, generative software, the radical geometries of architect Santiago Calatrava and the game theory of mathematician John Horton Conway. Shows were played in pitch darkness, to eliminate the details of their surroundings and focus attention on the music, and complexity became a sort of guiding principle, culminating in imposing – fair-weather fans might say impenetrable – releases like 2001’s Confield and 2002’s Gantz Graf.

Even as Autechre have moved further out, though, they’ve retained an emotional resonance, a heart inside the glitch. “Quite often when people discuss emotions in music they only think of happy or sad as being emotions,” Sean wrote on the electronica forum We Are The Music Makers last year, “when in my opinion emotions are a lot more than that”. To this end, we can see the word scrambles of Autechre’s album and track titles – 'Inhake2', 'Piobmx19', 'Cap.IV' – as a means of freeing themselves from the dead weight of language, a platform from which to imagine new feelings, unnatural energies, impossible structures.

Anti stands out in the Warp Records catalogue because of its politics. Warp’s benighted position in the 1990s, assisted by their sharp branding and the cerebral leanings of its artists, often served to make the label appear an outpost: hermetically sealed from the broader dance scene at large. Politics, by and large, was not their thing. So there is something perversely satisfying about the Warp purist’s favourite group, a duo whose music has so often resembled short-circuiting androids, making a stand for civil liberties.
All the same, though, even shorn of its political statement, Anti would stand out. In the morphing rhythms of 'Flutter', we can hear Booth and Brown happening on something that feels close to Autechre’s essence: the sound of a group pledging never to repeat themselves.

.





.

Austin Chronicle: Are the components of chance in your music premeditated or do you stumble upon elements and allow them to run amok?

Sean Booth: Even though a lot of it is deterministic, there’s quite a lot of feedback within the software. I’ll use conditionals. If one thing is occurring, another should occur, or if one occurs too much, another should occur or not occur, but the thing occurring may also have conditionals attached to it, which relate, to say, a third thing that may have conditionals relating to the first. You can quickly get into territories where you can’t necessarily predict the output of the system.
But I still wouldn't call that chance. I would say it’s a limitation of my brain, of not being able to perceive the pattern that’s there. When I discuss chance elements and randomness – because there are lots of different types of randomness – certainly where computers are concerned, there’s no such thing as pure random. It’s just implementations of different ways of achieving something that’s unpredictable to a human in a given context.

AC: You’ve shifted to a more software-oriented approach from strictly using hardware in the Nineties. How has that treated your work and how has it played with your sense of improvisation?

SB: With hardware, you can do a lot of things similar to software. You can use analog sequencers to overdrive each other. You can quickly get into areas where you can’t determine the output. Its output will change quite a lot, to the point where it might not perceptively repeat itself.
With software though, we’ve been able to make more complex ways of working. I’ve never had an issue with predictability. I’m going to respond to something regardless of whether I knew if it would react unpredictably or not.
So I suppose it’s different now. Obviously the nature of building software patches is different than working analog sequencers or drum machines. But we were always trying to get the most out of our gear. It led to using old equipment in ways that were perhaps unconventional at the time.

AC: What about Cygnus inspired you to bring him on tour?

SB: I’ve been a fan of his for about 10 years. We used to hang out on the same message board. He would spam us with these fucking amazing tracks. They always banged out to me. They were quite electro-influenced, but early on there was more of an IDM feel. There was also this weird soul thing going on. And he just has an ace grasp of crisp soul chords that remind me of Detroit – that utopian futuristic soul sound that I can’t nail at all. I literally had no idea where this kid was coming from.
I don’t think he understands his talent. There are so many pretenders doing dance music to a real fucking entry level standard. He just blows my mind – both his talent and how unknown he is. You have labels signing lesser artists with more shine than he gets. Nobody's heard of him and he’s fucking amazing. I know there’s hundreds of artists out there who don’t get any shine with all these mainstream people out there ....
Philip is an example of someone who can be retro and forward simultaneously. Because he’s much younger than me, I see his interest in electro as fascinatingly asynchronous.

AC: Like a nostalgia for something he didn’t live through?

SB: Right. Exactly. A bit like Boards of Canada when they came out in the Nineties. A nostalgia for something he wasn’t there for originally. There’s so much house and techno coming out, but so much of it lacks the essence, whatever it is.

AC: In the early Nineties, you played a role in the rise of pirate radio. How did that experience influence the trove of material you bring to your music?

SB: It was an interesting thing to happen to us. We were initially invited to a station by these guys we met on a bus, which is so random. We ended up DJing for them in 1988, then we had a load of records stolen, and then we got invited to do an interview. At the time, we were just trying to promote our material. We would do anything at that point. We weren’t really getting many opportunities. We went to the interview on Homeboy Juju’s show. After the interview, they offered us jobs as DJs and we had enough records to pull it off.
We didn’t really have enough money to keep buying records every week, so we approached a local store to offer to do a Top 10 if they loaned us records for a couple of days each week. So we’d go in there on a Saturday, get a load of records, do the show on Sunday, and bring the records back Monday. That worked out really well. We had the pick of any new release we wanted. We’d buy the ones we really liked, and the rest we would play.
At the time, we saw it as an opportunity to play demos and the tracks we were working out. Most of the tracks we were doing were a little bit ahead of what was coming out, and we were more interested in making the kind of music for people to listen to at home. There wasn’t enough of that music coming out in ’91. There just wasn’t. There were bits and we’d sneak them into sets. We’d have this thing where we’d be playing really bangin’ Belgian techno tracks and then suddenly this abstract weird ambient techno track out of nowhere would pour out, and then it would be loads more bangin' Belgian techno.
That was the way music was being released; the weird, chilled-out, interesting tracks tended to be on the B-side of this hard brutal dance music. We knew the audience was the same. We knew the people making the tracks were the same people, but there was this taboo about mixing up these disparate types of music. In that respect, it was kind of genre-defining in a way. There wasn’t a genre for all these B-side tracks because there wasn’t a way to categorize them. We felt there was a lot of open territory.
On a Joey Beltram record, there would be a track on the B-side that was a 95 BPM weird hip-hop track. It wouldn’t get any plays because it was selling to all these DJs who would just play the hard tracks.
Occasionally you would hear one of these tracks in a mix or you might hear it in a chill-out room. And there was this weird thing where the only place you would hear weird dance music would be in chill-out rooms inside the clubs and at raves. You wouldn’t even hear them when you went back to people’s houses after the club. They’d all be sitting there listening to 140 BPM hardcore tracks waiting for their E to wear off.
Around the same time as our show, we would stay in on Saturday night. One of us lived in a shared house, so we’d all go there, take acid, and listen to records all night, because there were records we knew we wouldn’t get to hear if we went out. And they were really important records. Autechre kind of grew from this idea that you can make dance tracks that are primarily for people to listen to away from the club, because they just didn’t fit with other genres.
It was almost the stratification and the genrefication of the music that made what we did happen and become a genre. Even though we didn’t want it to be a genre. With radio, you have types of latitude you can’t find in the club. It’s a shame. When I first started going out, it was a lot more mixed-up.

AC: Since pirate radio, have there been other techno-cultural bridges that have had a similar impact on your compositions, and have you found a similar level of freedom with the advent of the Internet and how it took absolute pull?

SB: Not initially. Initially, the net grew slowly. It sort of exploded in the last 10 years. Beforehand, it was a little bit geek-level. You’d have a lot more debate and a lot less capitalization. People understood the Internet clearly back then, whereas now a lot of people getting involved seem to only understand social networks and content delivery systems, which are quite restrictive in a way.
Obviously we have an increase in speed and Web 2.0, but it’s more stratified. Where else do you go for information? You go to IRC? Loads of people I know now are on Newsnet, which is fucking weird. You don’t hear too many people talk about newsgroups anymore. They almost don’t exist. Obviously there was precedence. Once I got on the Internet, I started to understand it. In the mid-Nineties it was really different. Most of the kind of people who would be on the Internet and the kind of interactions that I was used to experiencing were all slightly somewhere on the spectrum.
Now, it’s restricted to domains and environments where people have a degree of anonymity. It’s interesting what people now consider the dark side of the Internet. Early on, that’s what the Internet was. People were fucking horrible. It wasn’t the techno-utopian paradise people make it out to be.

AC: We’ve definitely developed an online etiquette.

SB: I like the Internet a lot, but the majority of people using it aren’t going much further than Facebook or Twitter. They’re basically involved in some sort of ideological fight with a stranger or involved in some kind of weird circle jerk/echo chamber, where they all ping on some basic political issue.

AC: Not to mention that in the echo chamber, the pings are constantly mined by a corporation selling the data to another corporation.

SB: Exactly [laughs]. It’s the last environment you’d want to be voicing yourself. It’s just going to end in tears basically. I’m pretty sure it’s not good for music either, but I don’t want to get into why that might be. I can see music getting more and more stratified with people clinging to their definitions and heuristics in a way that didn’t exist prior.
I really would not like to be coming up right now. If we just arrived and we were doing music at 19 again, honestly, no one would notice what we were doing. I’m pretty sure of that. Not because it’s musically more different, but purely because of the numbers involved. It’s really hard to get people’s attention for more than five minutes. It’s getting to the point where it’s almost pointless to put releases out. You work on something for two years and then it will get tweeted for a few days. It can be pretty fucking soul-destroying.
With Autechre, we’re in a strong position. I’m not saying any of this by way of complaining, but I wouldn’t want to be a strong artist trying to make a name at the moment. I would know where to start, but I don’t know if I would achieve a level of fame.
I don’t really know much about the history of American radio, but seemingly, it used to be more local – at least in the Eighties. And you’d have scenes getting built up and eventually some of these scenes would get strong enough to be able to be exportable to people outside of the cities giving a fuck. Whereas now, you don’t really have that opportunity. The midsize clubs have closed because of gentrification. They’re either apartments, shops, or restaurants. It’s difficult for anything to flourish. You’re either tiny or fucking huge. Making that jump is really difficult.
It took us about seven, eight years of hard work to get through the transitory phase. Nowadays, I don’t even know where we would start. You have to achieve a huge level of success early on or forget it. People today put out records knowing they won’t turn into a career. It’s normal now. It used to be that every artist was naïvely idealistic. They expected to achieve a certain level of success.
I’m meeting more and more young people who know they’ll never make a job of it. They’re just doing it for fun. It seems horribly defeatist.

AC: I’m curious as to what that psychology does to the music.

SB: I reckon it just makes it really stale.

AC: Can you talk about your longstanding loyalty to Warp records?

SB: They don’t give me any stress about content. I can just deliver whatever I want and they’ll put it out. They trust us to come up with something that’s vaguely decent. We didn’t expect to be working with them after 20 years, to be honest, but I’m cool with whatever they want to do.

AC: And what about Warp’s role in the visual design of your records?

SB: Warp literally has no involvement in anything creative we do. If you see any graphics, it’s because we’ve approved them and worked with the artists. We’ve worked with a few different designers over the years. Mainly Designers Republic, who have done the vast majority of our releases. But also, a guy called Alex Rutherford. And then we did a few sleeves ourselves. In terms of Designers Republic, they’re the most awkward and the most likely to do something we don’t expect, but it’s usually something we’re into. We have occasionally not liked ideas they have come up with, but more often than not it’s something that grows on me quite quickly and I end up really liking.
Visual aesthetics obviously play into what we do. We’re visual people, which is why we put the lights off, otherwise we just think about visuals. But we don’t really think of the visual aesthetic when we’re making music. We only think about presentation when compiling for releases. And that’s partly why we use designers. They offer different vantage points.

AC: What does remaining contemporary mean to you?

SB: It’s impossible to judge what’s relevant now. The Internet has made things too diffuse for people to even know what’s fashionable. People are quite often wrong. I live in a city that has a lot of interesting music. Manchester, which is a bit like Chicago, has scenes that have been slowly developing and growing. At the moment, there’s this jungle/drum n’ bass scene that’s not being reported at all, even by journalists living in Manchester.
You can have a whole scene that's really vital and producing a lot of good records, but you won’t see any evidence of it online or in magazines. It’s partly due to the clickbait nature of the Internet. It prevents information from getting in. And it’s to the point where I don’t even know anymore; being concerned about relevance is old-fashioned now. It’s had its day.
It’s not bad to not have presence, not to be relevant. It’s more about producing work and putting it into the network to see what the results are, rather than creating some work and then promoting it until the network is aware of it. I don’t know about the contemporary thing. We’re old, right?

AC: Lastly, is Autechre side project Gescom deceased?

SB: It’s on life support. There’s been this internal pressure to produce more stuff, so it’s just a matter of getting people together. Now people are older, they have kids, they need more space, they’ve moved further apart. Getting everyone together isn’t as easy anymore. Opportunities for collaboration are rare, but there’s still material being recorded.

AC: Whatever happens, I’m looking forward to it.

SB: It all depends on who’s visiting for the weekend.


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A huge file landed in our inbox. That file is a 4 hour and 18 minute mix that basically encapsulates not just Autechre’s own influences, but also acts as a fine anthology of the greatest electro sounds of all time.
Every sub genre imaginable gets touched upon along the way, with nods to forefathers like Kraftwerk, killer cuts from Man Parrish, classics from Newcleus and retro gold from the likes of The Beat Club.
It is a thrilling ride and a truly rare treat that reminds us just why we love Autechre, as well as shining a light on a vast genre that often pays second fiddle to house and techno.

- https://soundcloud.com/dkmntl/dekmantelpodcastautechre

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These days, Rob lives in Bristol, and Sean lives in Manchester; instead of working out of the same house, they swap MAX patches from a distance, putting the finishing touches on some long-in-the-making custom production software they say will revamp the way they work and play live. After an eight-year-long absence from North America, they'll test out that new technology onstage this month, when they return to the US for a three-week tour, including a stop off this Saturday at Brooklyn's Masonic Temple. We caught up with the duo before their show in Chicago earlier this week to talk about coming to terms with the "IDM" tag, how their collaboration works long distance, and their enduring love for electro.

Considering that it was the birthplace for acid house, a huge influence of yours, is there something romantic about being in a city like Chicago?

Sean: A little bit. You can't really help it in a way. It's all part of the fabric of what playing on local radio stations in Manchester when we were kids. It was mainstream at the time, but perhaps a bit more localized, because Manchester got into that music a bit earlier than elsewhere in the UK. Manchester really got into the hard, aggressive sound of acid, the weird, wrong-sounding stuff.

Rob: There was lots of soul music around Manchester as well, and I think soul was also in the sound of Chicago.

Was there a connection between 60s Chicago soul and 80s acid tracks?

Sean: It split off in 1991, but early on, it was really mixed up by the DJs. The divisions you get now—things like freestyle and acid house were all played together. It was all about tempo and funk rather than genre definitions, which are really quite limiting.

How do you feel when Autechre gets pigeonholed as "intelligent dance music"?

Sean: People have to deal with a lot of information these days, coming in at all angles. If you can use a heuristic to navigate a map, even if it's music, it's a valid way to approach it. I don't mind that people come up with a term—it's kind of flattering to me, but it comes with this weird, self-praising mania. The term "intelligent dance music" is a purely American invention; Brits would never self-promote that way—it's kind of obscene to us. The American nature is to try and rationalize things, the genre-fication of things. Lumping us in with what was going on at Warp at the time, Americans were happy to wrap up this weird faction of artists via the Artificial Intelligence comp.

You recently did a four-hour mix for Dekmantel that was a deep dive into the sound of early 80s electro. What about that music still appeals to you?

Sean: We played their festival a few months ago, and they asked us to do a podcast. They were intrigued by our love of electro, which comes before house music. There was continuity in Manchester—all the kids that were into house music had been into electro before that. You've got this weird blend of electro and hip-hop. That's what breakbeat hardcore was, basically: mashing the two together. Autechre grew directly out of that mindset, and the idea that you can make things out of bits of each one. That's what we think about music: using these elements and putting them together in different ways.

I think of electro as the first fully mechanized music: pop music made using all the electronic components.

Sean: I glommed onto things that sounded artificial as a kid. I was into computer graphics and electronic music. Electro was the most "electronic" music I could find at the time. The trimmings in other types of music that I found maybe a bit boring or unnecessary were not in electro; it would just be some weird noises, some beats, and some really nice synth sounds. They were the nicest sounds I had heard at that point, and I was drawn to stuff on that basis. Even the hip-hop I'm into came from an appreciation of electro. I'm always drawn to that kind of futuristic feeling.

I can remember how I learned about how music worked—the dynamics of it. You can navigate this electronic music space, and it's flexible and it overlaps; it's interchangeable and disposable, too. Music is like that to me: it's this muck of things that relate to other things. I'm drawn to tracks that are hard-to-define, where you're not sure what the thing is genre-wise. I find boundaries a little bit stupid. I'm interested in working out why people think things are other different things and exploiting that. I get some weird kick out of that.

Do you guys play video games?

Sean: Not as much as I used to. I spend all my time making weird software, so I think about that in a similar way.

Rob: I never finished games [growing up]. But I liked ones where you could just explore and not achieve things. I preferred games that were open-ended, where you could make your own set-ups.

How would you say that your creative process has evolved over the years?

Sean: We've always got some long-term project in the background. Lately, it's making software to make tracks with; it's what we used on Exai. It's more Max patches, but it functions like a piece of software. It's quite straight-forward, but we've been designing it since 2008. There's still a weird bug in the software where it'll just die onstage. It really sounded like we planned it, though.

Rob: We just have to make sure it works for an hour.

How has your working relationship evolved?

Rob: Sonically, we respect each other's opinion, but we do have different tastes. We don't work in the same space as frequently. We don't live in the same house, and now we are quite a ways apart; I'm in Bristol, and Sean is in Manchester. Instead of sending over music files, we are quite happy to send over these lightweight Max patches instead. We exchange bits of software instead of bits of track ideas.

Sean: The software is smaller, but you can expand in so many ways. So rather than send Rob my part, forcing him to conform to it, I give him something he can fuck around with and make something out of that's more personal. We improve on each other's patches, retrofitting it. It's a more interesting way of getting utility out of our collaboration.

Rob: We can't both work on things at the same time. In a weird way, we're a bit spoiled now, sitting in our own space. It's like two studios with a glass wall in-between; sometimes we open it up, but we can shut ourselves off and report back later in the week with more modules. We're only in the same room when we're working on live stuff. If we're doing gigs, we'll splurge and jam in the real world. We have broadband, though, so we can jam from our own separate studios.

Where do the two of you tend to diverge, taste-wise?

Sean: Rob likes more 80s soul than I do. I can't handle the vocals, but I quite like the dubs of those tracks.

Rob: It hasn't changed since we first met. There was this radio station in Manchester that would go through the evening, a soul show that added in hip-hop and house over the years. But there was this two-hour section that would be soul music. You had these hip-hop kids and house kids and they all hated the soul bit in the middle, but they had to tune in to the show. But I liked the soul stuff.

Sean: Mancunians are too proud to admit this, but there's this naivety in the Mancunian approach to American music. It was more aesthetic and less about cultural meaning. We're not American, so when I first heard electro, it just sounded really abstract, inventive, and raw. Stuff like Knights of the Turntables—it was fun and playful, almost alien and artificial.

The political aspect of where this music was coming from in urban America didn't translate across the Atlantic then?

Sean: I had no idea of that. I was hearing it the way I heard Stockhausen, like, "What the fuck is going on with these sounds?" I didn't even know what scratching was at that point. This was in 1985, and I heard electro, and went, "Fucking hell. This is something else—pure and amazing." If you look at it purely in terms of the sound and science of it, it's not that far from musique concrète. But there's this cultural brick wall between the two things.

Rob: When you're that young listening to electro, there's not many people offering up classic electronic music as inspiration. We would have enjoyed musique concrète had we heard it as teens, but electro was the only thing around us that was that wild sonically.

Sean: The way someone like Mantronix took the music and made it about all these tiny edits and—that was a huge influence. We had heard these Latin Rascals edits with these fast bits with drums that sounded weirdly robotic, taking electro into this other zone. Mantronix was so micro—the details are so ridiculous and amazing. At the time, I just thought music was going to carry on doing that. Half of the tracks that we do as Autechre are about recreating the actual sensations I used to get from those things—just getting post-human and next level.

.


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Do you need to remember music to enjoy it?

Do you need to recognize it?

Since 1987, Autechre's Sean Booth and Rob Brown have been reorganizing, hearing and unhearing electronic music on our behalf. The roll call of people who borrow from them is almost pointlessly long. Did your favorite live band get squelchy and clicky in the aughts? Autechre. Were you mad when Radiohead abandoned verse-chorus-verse guitar rock to make those mongrel striations they've been releasing for over a decade? Autechre. If you encounter otherworldly music built from machine-generated noises, it owes Autechre a Christmas card.

On Nov. 1, after no promotional push, Autechre launched a page on Bleep, the Web store of its English label Warp.

Is "Ae_Live" an album? Maybe. During several weeks of communicating with Booth before and after Autechre's L.A. appearance at the Fonda on Oct. 15, I asked Booth if a new album was coming. "Depends on how you define an album," was his answer. Frustrated, I suspected "Ae_Live" was the other shoe of his answer, and it was. "These shows were intended for release, provided the recordings worked OK," Booth clarified. "The performances were good enough."

The music on "Ae_Live" rarely does anything that obvious. If you go to the four-minute mark in their Utrecht performance from Nov. 22, 2014, you'll hear whooshes, honking tones and the reflection of irregularly spaced notes. The only thing that repeats in a time signature is a low sound that resembles a kick drum. That disappears before the six-minute mark, when a passage of what could be someone hitting exposed piano strings begins. Less than a minute elapses, then the muffled timekeeping returns, slower. In almost every other kind of pop-derived music, events return in roughly the same relationship to other events, at constant intervals, even if those intervals counted out in an odd meter. Autechre inserts so many different lengths of time between sounds that a listener could be forgiven for thinking she's just hearing a stream of improvised electronic noise.

Several weeks spent listening to the live sets, though, made it clear that each set dealt with much of the same information: that piano string section (seventh minute in Utrecht, eighth minute in Dublin); a buzzing bass line that approaches melody; a bright, horn-like sound being chopped into flickers with a thin drum sound; and a watery stretch of what might have once come out of a hammer dulcimer. The software Autechre uses most often now is called Max/MSP, a programming interface used by musicians, artists who specialize in sound installations, and anyone who needs to synchronize many sounds in time and, sometimes, space. For the last six years, Brown has been living in Bristol, and Booth has been in Manchester. Exchanging Max files over the Internet hasn't slowed them down. "I'm programming a lot of the time, and then we're kind of hacking each other's stuff," Booth said. "It's a deeper kind of collaboration really, despite the distance."

If you saw one of the 18 American dates, which took place mostly in October, you heard something even more decentered than what you can hear on "Ae_Live." The duo was especially fond of their L.A. date. "It was really good," Booth said. "The crowd seemed to enjoy the same bits we did."

As for the complex interaction of algorithms and human hands that created "Ae_Live," Booth offered this explanation. "Only some aspects of the system are consistent. For example, most of the note sequencing is different each time, but the overall 'flavor' of each track is consistent. Each track has a range of possibilities, most of which are determined by a set of conditionals. We share data with each other, which we can tell our own stuff to ignore or not, depending on how much we want to deviate. A lot of aspects of the software's activity can be shared slightly in advance as well, so we can have instantaneous reactions. You do get this sometimes in jazz, obviously, but it's slightly a guessing game a lot of the time what each person's going to do. There's a rough script, but we have a lot of latitude. We tend to deviate very subtly because it's easy to just throw something into chaos. But sometimes we do that too."

That's as good a vernacular explanation as I've heard of what is, in this case, both the user manual and the score. You've heard the joke about electronic musicians standing on stage with laptops, maybe checking email for all the audience knows? Autechre's live show is the opposite of that.

Still, Autechre makes none of this easy on themselves or their audience. It is sort of hard to have a hit when you essentially have no melodies, or songs; just rhythmic hashing of waveforms not generated by human hands and later processed by software.

If you tried to use a live instrument to play a track from "Exai," say, "irlite (get 0)," you might be able to mimic the series of notes that unfold over the last two minutes of the track. If you pulled it off, you might sound like Derek Bailey trying to sit in with Weather Report. As for mimicking the half-dozen other howling sounds circling the notes, good luck.

In many ways, Autechre is the realization of critical theory formed in France during the '60s, which then reached American academia in the '80s. Writing in 1963 on the work of Georges Bataille, the artist and author Pierre Klossowski articulated the following idea: "For if the simulacrum tricks on the notional plane, this is because it mimics faithfully that part which is incommunicable. The simulacrum is all that we know of an experience; the notion is only its residue calling forth other residues."

By 1980, Jean Baudrillard has filtered the idea of the simulacrum and coined a formulation seen often now: "the copy of a copy without an original."


Autechre's music is the remix of a song that never existed, the distortion of a signal from nowhere. Though Autechre's music is almost entirely removed from the physical world — until it is amplified and becomes a physical presence that moves plenty of air — what happens inside their boxes is a gleeful sort of manhandling, digital fistfuls of sound being squeezed. "Ae_Live" is that clay being torqued and flattened by their programs, a body of work that is rarely dry or pointlessly obscure. It is the joy of machines, guided and preserved by two benevolent shepherds.

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Re: countdown to 11/22/13: JFK disinfo in multi-media

Postby MinM » Sat Apr 23, 2016 1:05 pm

Along with a steady diet of anti-semitism and obsessing about sex aangirfan/aanirfan sprinkles in a little JFK disinfo from time to time.

This is the most recent example with a little twist. In their typical throwing a bunch of crap :shithitting: out there to see what sticks brand of connecting the dots they added this nugget from Jeff Wells...

Jeff Wells quotes the following:

"There is an international cult that believes that the path to illumination and spiritual liberation is through the rape, torture and sacrifice of children.

"The cult is highly organised and protected by a network of middle- and upper-class professionals, who are either cult members, or access the 'services' of the cult (eg child porn/prostitution, rendering them vulnerable to blackmail).

"The cult is modelled on Crowley's writings, as is evidenced by the internal pseudo-Masonic 'degree' structure, the existence of OTO-like 'chapters', and the doctrine of 'strength', 'master/slave' and ritualised rape."

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... -zone.html

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... satan.html
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MinM
 
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