The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

Irish Fiddle

This is unusual, I think. This past weekend, we went to a flea market near
our place in Brooklyn, and I bought a Sony TC-864 portable audio reel-to-
reel tape recorder, from 1964. It works perfect, and is rather heavy,
around 12-13 pounds. Anyway, there was a five-inch reel of tape on it,
recorded with four separate mono tracks, each about 45-50 minutes. They
are apparently Irish field recordings from nearly forty years ago. I found
the fiddle fantastic and complex, and have put up (greatly compressed) the
first 48 minutes at my site. I have no idea who the fiddler is. There is
also vocal, some guitar, some flat-picked violin (really), and some odd
'experimental' work to come, if people are interested. I'll leave these
recordings up for a few days - please check out -

http://www.alansondheim.org/ir1.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/ir2.mp3

I prefer the second, but both are amazing. If anyone can identify the
fiddler, please let me know - somewhat should release this material, if it
hasn't been.

- Alan

Bondage of Existence


We were talking about Second Life this evening and I realized something,
that no matter how much you critique the application/site, you talk about
events there - and events as if they're happening in the 'real world.'
What other environment generates such a self-created ongoing diegetic?
Things falling from the sky, people griefing others, people wandering
around, creating and destroying, talking and talking, maybe making a liv-
ing. SL plays the 'real world,' of course however defined. And that is its
strength - semantics and content moving among ordinary subjectivities.


"There exists not one being who is unenlightened from the awakening to his
own nature By their very intrinsic nature the beings in hell, ghosts,
animals, gods, titans, men and even worms and so on in the dung, are
eternally blissful, for they do not merely experience the pleasure of the
gods and the titans." (Hevajra Tantra, trans. Farrow and Menon.)

http://www.alansondheim.org/holdme.mp4