♪ Ehud Banai, סרט רץ www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7N9... Lovely echo of Bob Dylan's "Series of Dreams".

אהוד בנאי - סרט רץ

omny.fm/shows/kan-en... This is a stellar interview w/ former Israel ambassador to the US, MichaelOren, & Israel public broadcaster Kan's host David Ze'ev. Insightful, to the point of the various complications that tie but also set apart the U.S. & Israel in the current war w/ Iran. Recommended.

The Trump-Netanyahu tightrope ...

i24news https://i24news.tv/en and #Israel public broadcaster Kan https://kan.org.il/content/kan/kan-reka/p-10861/ are good English language sources on politics, security, military, culture in Israel. (i24news seems more hawkish to me than Kan.)

sources

Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory — in his essay “Bad Air” Brett Beasley explores The Doom of the Great City (1880), a piece of Victorian science fiction considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/bad-air-pollution-sin-and-science-fiction-in-william-delisle-hay-s-the-doom-of-the-great-city-1880?utm_content=bufferb6f4d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

♪ Can, "Vitamin C" www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrkU...

Can - Vitamin C (Official Audi...

Finally falling into CAN... How could I've overlooked them for so long? I mean, I knew their name, their fame in what so awfully has been called "Krautrock", their influence on Anglo-Saxon musicians and bands like David Bowie, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees...

And it is not that the avantgarde and progressive music scene in Germany between the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s eluded me, starting with Stockhausen and his pupils (Stockhausen, in a sense, being the godfather of Kraftwerk and Can). But I never really listened to the music of CAN.

What strikes me with CAN is in part their technical abilities and prowess, notably Jaki Liebezeit (drums), Holger Czukay (bass), Irmin Schmidt (keyboards). These were/are sophisticated musisicans, and it shows (or rather: sounds).

Listening to only a few records on YT, without having dived into their catalogue of records yet, I'm struck by the immediacy of their play. There is no distance between me as listener and them as musicians on the records. Liebezit's drum is on point, every beat direct, and directly into the ear.

Listening to younger, more recent productions, with all the emphasis on soundscape, rhythm, basslines, the immediacy of CAN's music is still unreached. CAN's productions are so sophisticated that one can easily forget that their main records are 50 to 60 years old. Timeless. Have a listen.

Illustrations from Albert Robida’s La vie électrique (1890). While the flying cars have not (yet) come to pass, Robida's imagining of life 60 years in the future includes many prescient visions, such as a proto Zoom, Netflix, hyperloop + smart doorbell: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/albert-robida-la-vie-electrique