And Now For A Bit Of Perspective

The Powers Of Ten.

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Sore TappaZ Plays Zappa – Amsterdam Blue Note, June 2010

Based in Leverkusen, Amsterdam – band leader and vocalist Christopher Klassen‘s home town – Sore TappaZ plays Klassen‘s original compositions as well as and the music of Frank Zappa.
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Lumpy Gravy – Unreleased Photos


Found on the Commodore Crush Blog:

Well, it’s about time I share these photos with everyone. I luckily found these at a yard sale in San Diego a few years ago. I bought about 10 different Frank Zappa photos, 8 of which were the original photographer’s proofs that still had red crayon circled approvals on several of the shots in the roll. I scanned them in at 600dpi (if I remember correctly) so you could still get an amazing closeup of each frame. Original cost was about 5 bucks and then bills needed to be paid and sold on eBay for $900… I think.

I believe these studio shots may be from around the time Lumpy Gravy was released. If you look closely, you can see he’s wearing the Pipco shirt underneath his cardigan. I’ll put put a new hi-res photo up every day for the next 8 days ending with the alternate versions of the Lumpy Gravy cover. As far as I know, these have never been released. Enjoy!

The parts so far: 1 | 2| 3| 4 | 5

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John Lennon’s 70th Birthday

Imagine Peace.

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Ensemble Modern on BBC Radio 3

Our good friend Xorg, a KUR regular and frequent mixer of the sardonic lipids, informs us that BBC Radio 3 is currently broadcasting (probably for only a few more days) via the BBC iPlayer – the Ensemble Modern performing Arnold Schoenberg‘s Pierrot Lunaire, recorded in May at the Sounds New Festival in Canterbury, UK.

Click here to go to the iPlayer.
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Arthur Jarvinen – In Memoriam (1956-2010)

Arthur Jarvinen, musician, composer, founder of the California E.A.R. Unit, and music copyist for the late Frank Zappa, himself passed away on October 4th, 2010.
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FZ Toy

You won’t believe this – a cut-out figure of Frank Zappa. Oh yeah(found on Fuck Yeah Frank Zappa!)

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Duo Disecheis plays Frank Zappa



Recorded Live at Incontri Musicali a Pergola – Sala dell’Abbondanza, Pergola (PU-Italy) on October 26th, 2008.

The superimposition of two sounds with different pitches. It was considered dysechia: an unpleasant and disagreeable sound. Yet time and again things that have been considered foreign synchronically have diachronically proven to be decisive for the most important revolutions in artistic languages. This is the inspiration behind the Duo Disecheis, oriented towards dissonance viewed broadly as a contrast: convergence-divergence.

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In the Beginning…

In the beginning there was a word, and the word was secret, and the secret word was…Mudshark! And for fifty years the Mudshark ruled supremely as the only secret word on the planet Earth, but one day the Mudshark became older, and began to turn yellow, and decided to go onward and upward into the cosmos as a Yellow Shark…But, in his wake, he left a void…filled by MTV and Supermarket Shopping Musik! And the family of the Mudshark became so bloated that they didn’t know what to do anymore with the legacy which the Mudshark had left behind him…They became concerned with the question of whether or not a Fish, or a beard Fish, or a Zappatika or a Central Scrutinizer Band could be a Mudshark! And how we can stop them swimming in the waters of the ocean! And the Mudshark looked on from high, and scratched his head, and scratched his beard, and he picked something living out of it, and he ate it. Then he pondered the question…”I wonder if there’ll ever be a new secret word?”

“The Secret Word”, ZAPPATiKA! Live at Zappanale #21

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Rondo Hatton Report Vol IV

A new Rondo Hatton Report has been published:

Amongst other contributions, this issue features a second submission from Kohjitsu Ohyama, author of two authoritative Japanese books on FZ, proposing a solution to the vexed question of the ‘ultimate compilation’ problem — and from the wilds of Indiana, Prof. Hollinden weighs in with the third installment of his Pigs & Ponies series.

More info and a free download right over here.

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