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Me Yee Owu Den - K. Frimpong and His Cubano Fiestas

1980

A hypnotic Ghanaian afro-funk journey

The 1924 Mikiphone Was The World’s First Pocket Record Player. The pocket size phonograph sponsored by the Moulin Rouge.

The Mikiphone pocket phonograph was designed by Hungarian brothers Miklós and Étienne Vadász, and mass produced under licence by Masison Paillard of Saint Croix, Switzerland.

Formed by a consortium of local watch makers in 1814, Paillard began making music boxes from about 1860. Just before the turn of the century, the company added cylinder phonographs to its catalogue, switching to disc gramophones in 1905. In 1913, Paillard developed an electric AC gramophone motor, and from 1927 the company built electric amplifiers for gramophones, and later radio equipment. Somewhere between those two developments, Paillard made around 180,000 of the Vadász brothers’ Mikiphones.

The Science Museum in London says the first machine was made in 1923, and in November 1924 patented and licensed by Paillard, which, as Earthly Mission notes, churned the thing out between 1925 and 1927.

Surrounded by the hypnotic rhythm of his own sculptures in motion, legendary artist Alexander Calder is shown working in his studio in this clip from visionary photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter’s 1950 film Works of Calder, featuring a soundtrack by John Cage.

Renowned for his ability to “sculpt with air,” Calder dedicated his seven-decade career to observing the complex nature of movement, pioneering kinetic sculptures, called mobiles, which prefigured the work of a diverse range of contemporary artists such as Richard Serra, James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson.

“Time, space and the actuality of the moment are integral components of Calder’s oeuvre,” explains Alexander S. C. Rower, President of The Calder Foundation. “Perhaps Sartre most aptly described the intuitive nature of his pieces when he compared it to ‘a little hot jazz tune, unique and ephemeral, like the sky, like the morning.’”

Premiered at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in January 1951 and virtually unseen since, the film came about after a chance encounter between Calder and multi-Emmy-winning actor Burgess Meredith in a cocktail bar three years earlier.

The pair enlisted Matter to adapt his photomontage techniques to moving image, and create the surrealist portrait of the artist and his mobiles under the hazy light of Roxbury, Connecticut.

View of Macuto, Venezuela

Palm trees in Ocho Rios, Jamaica

Antoine Dougbé et L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou 1977 - 1982 (Analog Africa No.44)

Mambo Ry-co - Ry-co Jazz

1961

Smooth. Sharp. Ry-Co