UNIVERSAL EAR’s research team have recently discovered that Byrne traveled back as far as 2m years to record the vocal effects created by the peculiar physiology of proto-human Homo habilis. How strange they sounded, even when singing about familiar topics like rebellion and girls.

Marguerite Humeau’s work is pursued from the relative safety of the 21st century, where she uses the scant clues available as a leaping point for a speculative reconstruction of vocal tracts lost to evolution and dust, and the operatic cries these organic sound corridors conveyed.

“Proposal for resuscitating prehistoric creatures’ is an opera which sets up the rebirth of cloned creatures, their wandering and their sound epic. They are seeking to evolve in our contemporary era.
The designer, who became the heroine of a quasi-mystic epic journey, aims at resuscitating the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tract. This is problematic from the scientific point of view: since the vocal tract is made of soft tissue, it does not fossilise. The only things that have been preserved through time are the surrounding bones. The inner parts have to be redesigned.”

The stunning wolf sequences from UNIVERSAL EAR: A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear. Hero Harley Byrne tussles with the over-protective pet of seductive Romanian inventress Nola Luna.

Bastard Film Encounter: Andrew Lampert's Bastard Film Invocation

bastardfilm:

We are buried by

We are drowning in

We cannot get out from under

The 20th century and the moving image

We are residents of 2013

Spacemen to our ancestors

Ancient to the future

Inheritors of countless reels

In all gauges and lengths

Shrunken, brittle, vinegared, broken

Musical and visual…

This Bing Crosby track laid over a 1940s screensaver exemplifies a peculiar and counter-intuitive mid-century mental disorder treatment. If you’re in good mental health it could have the opposite effect. It is the only known surviving example. Did Byrne ever go back for the lost exclusive Bing tunes? What did he do about the freaky pictures? Don’t know.

Robert W. Martens:

…definitely a kinder, gentler alternative to the electric-shock treatments which were then in vogue! The soundtrack features Bing Crosby and organist Eddie Dunstedter. An online biography of Bing Crosby notes that he was a shareholder in Mr. Stokes’ “Auroratone Foundation.” It also notes that Mr. Crosby made exclusive recordings of “Ave Maria,” “Home on the Range,” and “When You Wish Upon a Star,” for Auroratones, but there’s no mention of this film’s soundtrack “When the Organ Played Oh Promise Me.”

Maybe, but if it’s not on THIS world it’s not on Harley Byrne’s list.

hitchhikersguidetothegalaxy:

“Their songs are, on the whole, very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy being meets girl being beneath a silvery moon which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.”  -The Guide on Disaster Area songs.

An audition is a being heard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine_and_Julie_Go_Boating

Music is a particularly noncognitive expressive system, conducive to the imaginary projection of inarticulable desires. Because of the very physical qualities of music, because of the way it nonsemantically transforms and materially vibrates tissues and bodies, the performance of organized sound provides the crucial symbolic structure through which musicians achieve their “dialectical syntheses” and project their incomplete and yearned-for identities

Let’s look into reverse engineering some of these (dis)affected tissues and bodies, see if we can’t find a tune.

Barry Shank, ‘Dissonant Identities: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas’ p. 160. (via rougesfoam)

jahsonic: The “Disgust” self-portrait by Oscar Gustave Rejlander[1] is a detail from a plate from Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, chapter XI. There is another image perfect to illustrate disgust: Bitter Medicine by Flemish painter Adriaen Brouwer which I posted two years ago [2]. See disgust. cf Harley Byrne: Library of Postures & Expressions
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jahsonic:

The “Disgust” self-portrait by Oscar Gustave Rejlander[1] is a detail from a plate from Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, chapter XI.

There is another image perfect to illustrate disgust: Bitter Medicine by Flemish painter Adriaen Brouwer which I posted two years ago [2].

See disgust.

cf Harley Byrne: Library of Postures & Expressions