4,571 research outputs found
The singer and the song: Nick Cave and the archetypal function of the cover version
Throughout his career, from The Boys Next Door, through The Birthday Party, and with The Bad Seeds, Australian singer / songwriter Nick Cave has balanced his own set of creative voices alongside those of others through his choice of cover versions. Cave’s 1986 album with The Bad Seeds, ‘Kicking Against the Pricks’, is a collection of cover versions that spans American folk idioms (‘Black Betty’, ‘Hey Joe’, ‘The Singer’), Tin-Pan-Alley balladeering (‘Something’s Gotten Hold of my Heart’, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’) and left-field alt-rock (‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, ‘The Hammer Song’). Cave’s first single as a solo artist beyond the confines of The Birthday Party was a cover of ‘In The Ghetto’, made famous by Elvis Presley, and the cover version has been a noticeable presence in Cave’s work both in his live and recorded output ever since. This chapter seeks to understand the uses of Cave’s choices of cover versions, both in terms of the idiosyncrasies of his own interpretations, and the context within which Cave places himself as part of a wider musical community. Cave’s relationship to a pantheon of elder statesmen figures (Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen for example) is understood as not only one of recognising influences, but also of placing Cave within a specific tradition or lineage. Equally, certain song forms such as the folk ballad or the blues lament are utilised to give shape and form to Cave’s wider concerns outside of the specific cover version. Cave’s reimagining of John Lee Hooker’s ‘Tupelo’, or Dylan’s ‘Wanted Man’ from The Firstborn is Dead (1985) provide clues to the uses of the cover to both articulate the individual interpreting the song, thus placing it within a personalised lexicon, and to connect the singer to traditions, or archetypes of performance that resonate in specific ways. Cave’s covers are never wholly reproductions, at times they are reworking's that might be seen to reconnect a song to a potential ‘lost truth’, at others they may be seen as parodies or homages that have more transparent aims. However at all times, the connections between Cave the singer and the latent archetypes inherent in the song provide provocative and loaded connections and values. This paper seeks to understand how Cave’s choices of cover versions, and his approaches to interpretation, shape not only the musical moment, but also our perceptions of Cave as an artist in a broader sens
‘You should try lying more’: the nomadic impermanence of sound and text in the work of Bill Drummond
Bill Drummond’s work straddles the worlds of popular music, literature and art. Through his books, music and artistic interventions Drummond has engaged with the (im)permanence of culture while manifesting a network of creative associations that give shape to a nebulous series of artistic efforts in a variety of media. His latest project, The17 and its associated book of the same name, explores the impermanence of musical expression, a theme manifested by his deletion of the KLF back catalogue in 1992 and his burning of £1 million pounds in 1994.
Yet the concentration on impermanence in Drummond’s musical work is balanced by the possible permanence of language, manifest both in his books and leaflets, as well as in his artworks which are highly logo centric, whether they be graffiti or the painted scores for the 17 project. This article explores Drummond’s work through the Deleuzian filter of nomadism to interrogate the tensions between that which is now and that which has the possibility to always be. Drummond stands in many ways as an anti-theorist, engaging with music, literature and art in nomadic ways that are not always intended by him, providing a network of connections that might seek to evade the very conception of the network itself
‘You should try lying more’: the nomadic impermanence of Bill Drummond
Bill Drummond’s work straddles the worlds of popular music, literature and art. Through his books, music and artistic interventions Drummond has engaged with the (im)permanence of culture while manifesting a network of creative associations that give shape to a nebulous series of artistic efforts in a variety of media. His latest project, The 17 and its associated book of the same name, explores the impermanence of musical expression, a theme manifested by his deletion of the KLF back catalogue in 1992 and his burning of £1 million pounds in 1994.
Yet the concentration on impermanence in Drummond’s musical work is balanced by the possible permanence of language, manifest both in his books and leaflets, as well as in his artworks which are highly logocentric, whether they be graffiti or the painted scores for the 17 project. This article explores Drummond’s work through the Deleuzian filter of nomadism to interrogate the tensions between that which is now and that which has the possibility to always be. Drummond stands in many ways as an anti-theorist, engaging with music, literature and art in nomadic ways that are not always intended by him, providing a network of connections that might seek to evade the very conception of the network itsel
You should try lying more: the nomadic impermanence of Bill Drummond
Bill Drummond’s work straddles the worlds of popular music, literature and art. Through his books, music and artistic interventions Drummond has engaged with the (im)permanence of culture while manifesting a network of creative associations that give shape to a nebulous series of artistic efforts in a variety of media. His latest project, The 17 and its associated book of the same name, explores the impermanence of musical expression, a theme manifested by his deletion of the KLF back catalogue in 1992 and his burning of £1 million pounds in 1994.
Yet the concentration on impermanence in Drummond’s musical work is balanced by the possible permanence of language, manifest both in his books and leaflets, as well as in his artworks which are highly logocentric, whether they be graffiti or the painted scores for the 17 project. This article explores Drummond’s work through the Deleuzian filter of nomadism to interrogate the tensions between that which is now and that which has the possibility to always be. Drummond stands in many ways as an anti-theorist, engaging with music, literature and art in nomadic ways that are not always intended by him, providing a network of connections that might seek to evade the very conception of the network itsel
Continuous Dynamical Decoupling with Bounded Controls
We develop a theory of continuous decoupling with bounded controls from a
geometric perspective. Continuous decoupling with bounded controls can
accomplish the same decoupling effect as the bang-bang control while using
realistic control resources and it is robust against systematic implementation
errors. We show that the decoupling condition within this framework is
equivalent to average out error vectors whose trajectories are determined by
the control Hamiltonian. The decoupling pulses can be intuitively designed once
the structure function of the corresponding SU(n) is known and is represented
from the geometric perspective. Several examples are given to illustrate the
basic idea. From the physical implementation point of view we argue that the
efficiency of the decoupling is determined not by the order of the decoupling
group but by the minimal time required to finish a decoupling cycle
Optimal states and almost optimal adaptive measurements for quantum interferometry
We derive the optimal N-photon two-mode input state for obtaining an estimate
\phi of the phase difference between two arms of an interferometer. For an
optimal measurement [B. C. Sanders and G. J. Milburn, Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 2944
(1995)], it yields a variance (\Delta \phi)^2 \simeq \pi^2/N^2, compared to
O(N^{-1}) or O(N^{-1/2}) for states considered by previous authors. Such a
measurement cannot be realized by counting photons in the interferometer
outputs. However, we introduce an adaptive measurement scheme that can be thus
realized, and show that it yields a variance in \phi very close to that from an
optimal measurement.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, journal versio
Two-dimensional Site-Bond Percolation as an Example of Self-Averaging System
The Harris-Aharony criterion for a statistical model predicts, that if a
specific heat exponent , then this model does not exhibit
self-averaging. In two-dimensional percolation model the index .
It means that, in accordance with the Harris-Aharony criterion, the model can
exhibit self-averaging properties. We study numerically the relative variances
and for the probability of a site belongin to the
"infinite" (maximum) cluster and the mean finite cluster size . It was
shown, that two-dimensional site-bound percolation on the square lattice, where
the bonds play the role of impurity and the sites play the role of the
statistical ensemble, over which the averaging is performed, exhibits
self-averaging properties.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure
Book launch and discussion
Book launch event for Nick Drake: Dreaming England (Reaktion 2013) at the NN Cafe, Number 9 Guildhall Road, Northampton, NN1 1DP, Thursday 3rd October 2013.
Author Nathan Wiseman-Trowse talked about and read from his book on the musician Nick Drake. Music was provided by Gregg Cave and Ant Savage and the book's photographer Paul Hillery DJd. The event was publically promoted and around sixty attended
Atom Lasers, Coherent States, and Coherence:II. Maximally Robust Ensembles of Pure States
As discussed in Wiseman and Vaccaro [quant-ph/9906125], the stationary state
of an optical or atom laser far above threshold is a mixture of coherent field
states with random phase, or, equivalently, a Poissonian mixture of number
states. We are interested in which, if either, of these descriptions of
, is more natural. In the preceding paper we concentrated upon
whether descriptions such as these are physically realizable (PR). In this
paper we investigate another relevant aspect of these ensembles, their
robustness. A robust ensemble is one for which the pure states that comprise it
survive relatively unchanged for a long time under the system evolution. We
determine numerically the most robust ensembles as a function of the parameters
in the laser model: the self-energy of the bosons in the laser mode, and
the excess phase noise . We find that these most robust ensembles are PR
ensembles, or similar to PR ensembles, for all values of these parameters. In
the ideal laser limit (), the most robust states are coherent
states. As the phase noise or phase dispersion is increased, the
most robust states become increasingly amplitude-squeezed. We find scaling laws
for these states. As the phase diffusion or dispersion becomes so large that
the laser output is no longer quantum coherent, the most robust states become
so squeezed that they cease to have a well-defined coherent amplitude. That is,
the quantum coherence of the laser output is manifest in the most robust PR
states having a well-defined coherent amplitude. This lends support to the idea
that robust PR ensembles are the most natural description of the state of the
laser mode. It also has interesting implications for atom lasers in particular,
for which phase dispersion due to self-interactions is expected to be large.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures included. To be published in Phys. Rev. A, as
Part II of a two-part paper. The original version of quant-ph/9906125 is
shortly to be replaced by a new version which is Part I of the two-part
paper. This paper (Part II) also contains some material from the original
version of quant-ph/990612
FIGHTING JUVENILE PREJUDICE IN FILM: THE MAKING OF HOUSE I LIVE IN
At a working Hollywood dinner party held shortly before the surrender of the German armies in early May 1945, four progressives brainstormed about making a movie short for young Americans on the democratic significance of the war while its lessons were still timely. One of the reformers present that evening was Frank Sinatra, the bobbysocks singing idol who also spent the war years giving Four Freedom talks to his teenage fans. The other three were Frank Ross, an RKO producer with humanitarian sentiments, Albert Maltz, a screenwriter with unreconstructed Marxist views, and Mervyn LeRoy, a veteran director of social problem films that had inspired Sinatra as a boy
- …