Posted on Leave a comment

Tingling Tongue to Treat Tinnitus

Tingling Tongue image

Pertinent to so many in the audio industry, there is potential help on the horizon for tinnitus sufferers. A new study has used a combination of wideband noise and electrical stimulus to the tongue to treat tinnitus, with promising possibilities.

Maybe all that battery licking by audio engineers over the years and testing systems with pink noise has actually saved their hearing… I’m hoping researchers will find that listening to Merzbow while licking batteries is the ultimate tinnitus treatment.

Posted on Leave a comment

Z’ev – Rhythmajik

So excited to find this amazing rare book by Z’ev! He was an amazing performer and a very experimental, avant-garde musician. He was mostly focused on percussive instruments, but he performed them almost as if dancing, and made otherworldly soundscapes rather than merely providing a ‘beat’. He was often credited with inventing or being a large part of ‘industrial ambient’, but that’s quite a superficial view of his work, in which he collaborated with a very wide cross section of both underground and popular musicians and artists.

I’ve been interested in his often hard to find albums for years, but I didn’t even know he’d written a book until I found this in a local second hand book shop today.

And what a book! It’s an incredible mix of mysticism, mathematics and music, essentially using sound, rhythm and music to create healing and magical effects (“majikle” as Z’ev calls it). It manages to throw together elements of the Qabala, astrology, the tarot, numerology, elements of mathematics and various mystical and magical approaches in a very original, extremely well thought-out system.

Z’ev also manages to make the system spiritually very open – meaning that it doesn’t focus on any one religion or magical practice, but gives a nod and appreciation of many spiritual systems without making it confusing or jumbled. But despite that, it’s not an easy read!

Anyway, I’m sure this book will be another great companion on our journeys through spiritual sound, magical music and mystical mathematics… And no, you can’t borrow it!