TOS6. Contemplative Radio

2-4pm Wed Mar 03
Lindsay Auditorium
Sturm Hall 281
U of Denver

Throughout the various waves of new age space music we encounter a common concern with sonic environmentalism for the mind. Tuning into the vast, intergalactic communications system that Philip K. Dick names “Radio Free Albemuth,” this presentation explores the dream radios, mood organs and spiritual cyborgs of new age music, with works ranging from Karlheinz Stockhausen and Steve Hillage to Robert Rich, Lustmord, and Meg Bowles. Such space music performs a technological religiosity situating terrestrial experience and mental health within the grand scale of cosmic event, as well as sustaining the belief that the human enterprise is inextricably bound in an impulse to leave the planet Earth behind.

TOS5. Space Rituals

2-4pm Wed Feb 25
Lindsay Auditorium
Sturm Hall 281
U of Denver

From the Pink Floyd’s space rock shows at London’s U.F.O. club to Hawkwind’s free concerts and the disasters of a Sex Pistols gig, media ritual surrounds these artists. Concentrating on space-related performers ranging from Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Yes, Tim Blake's Crystal Machine, and Arjen Anthony Lucassen’s Star One to Sun Ra and Parliament, I consider the spatial nature of group identity and the practice of collective deep listening and communal trance in relationship to the telematic bodies described by Roy Ascott and Derrida’s echographies of television. I’m particularly interested in conflicts between zones of cosmic spiritual identity and electronically mediated presence.

TOS3. Cognitive Dub Science

2-4pm Wed Feb 04
Lindsay Auditorium
Sturm Hall 281
U of Denver

This presentation zooms in on "memory" as a particularly important, discrete state of consciousness with powerful parallels in the use of magnetic tape in recording, manipulating and composing sound. Listening to diverse works by Brian Eno, Eno and Fripp, Richard Pinhas, Jamaican dub engineers, William Basinski, Boards of Canada, Tricky, DJ Spooky, and Kode9 + the Spaceape. I consider the relationship of the delay effect and sound recording to the phenomena of death, decay, and disintegration. Informed by the works of Jacques Derrida, I suggest a philosophy of electronic voice phenomena that helps us consider how dreadlocked systems produce sonic intelligences, Others otherwise known as ghosts.

TOS2. The German Space Program

2-4pm Wed Jan 28
Lindsay Auditorium
Sturm Hall 281
U of Denver

This presentation considers parallel inquiries into human biocomputing, cybernetic engineering, and space exploration conducted by the American space program and the German acid rock scene during the early 1970s. Swapping Werner von Braun and Timothy Leary, as it were, I present the Kosmische Musik phenomena as it reflects research and experiments in biocomputing and cyborg studies, the psychedelic sciences, and interspieces communication in the projects of John Lilly and Ed Mitchell.

Sequence 1: Stern Trek
Cosmic Jokers, “Galactic Supermarket”
Tangerine Dream, “Rubycon, Part 1”
Klaus Schulze, “Satz Exil Sils Maria”
Cluster, “03,” “01”
Conrad Schnitzler, “Contrapuntal Interstellar Radars”
Popol Vuh, “Ich mache einen Spiegel”
Harmonia, “Sehr Kosmische”
Tangerine Dream, “Phaedra”
Popol Vuh, “Aguirre”
Tangerine Dream, “Alpha Centauri”
Ash Ra Tempel, “Traummaschine”

Sequence 2: Kosmos
Thomas Lück, “Kosmos” soundtrack
Cosmic Jokers and Sternmadchen, “Der Magier / The Electronic Scene”
Amon Düül II, “Wie der wind am ende einer strasse”
Stern Combo Meiden, “In Den Kosmos” soundtrack
Manuel Gottsching, “Echo Waves/Quasarsphere”
Tangerine Dream, “Birth of Liquid Plejades”
Klaus Schulze, from Cyborg
Cosmic Jokers and Sternmadchen, “Meine Kosmiche Musik”
Outro: Soundtrack collage

The Audio Mix

A Miscellany of German Popular Music and Influences Since 1950



Here is a link to the Complete Playlist of German Space Music and its influences.

TOS1. Sonic Science Fiction

2-4pm Thur Sept 29
DMST Classroom
Sturm Hall 434
U of Denver

Throughout the history of the science fiction film, the soundtrack plots a unique trajectory from ordinary consciousness to unusual, altered states. Considering works ranging from Rocketship X-M (1950) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) to Blade Runner (1982), The Fountain (2006), and Wall-E (2008), I present the sounds of science fiction cinema in terms of the developments and transformations of consciousness from alienated, mythic, archetypal and psychotechnological states on toward the plateaus and peaks of complex cosmic and oceanic modes of consciousness.

The Audio Mix

Technicians of Space

Documenting my on-going series of multimedia lectures on consciousness, technology, and the cosmological imagination in sound and music. The current iteration of the project involves a series of six performance lectures delivered in Lindsay Auditorium on the University of Denver campus.

Lectures take place from 2-4pm on the following Wednesday afternoons:

Jan 21 Sonified Science Fiction
Jan 28 The German Space Program
Feb 04 Cognitive Dub Science
Feb 18 The Microcosms of Telharmonic Space
Feb 25 Space Ritual & Improvisational Technologies
Mar 04 Contemplative Radio

Download PDF flier/calendar/episode guide.