Old Buzz and New

11th Mar 2013

Then I found the Magic Catalog, an ebook index of Project Gutenberg
books, linked up so that you can immediately download books and add
them to your Kindle, without using a computer or Amazon. It’s in a
useless order, though – it’s not sorted by the book title, or by
author.

So I thought I’d fix that. Here’s the prototype, sorted by the
author’s last name!

The KLF (also known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Timelords
and other names) were one of the seminal bands of the British acid
house movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s.[1]
Beginning in 1987, Bill Drummond (alias King Boy D) and Jimmy Cauty
(alias Rockman Rock) released hip hop-inspired and sample-heavy
records as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, and on one occasion (the
British number one hit single “Doctorin’ the Tardis”) as The
Timelords. The abbreviation of the band has long been a mystery; It is
widely believed to stand for “Kopyright Liberation Front”, however in
an interview in Wired 2010 Bill joked that it stood for “Kentucky
Liberation Front”, meant as a satire of the United States as the band
saw it at the time.[citation needed] The band is also known as “Kings
of low frequencies”, see [2], [3]. As The KLF, Drummond and Cauty
pioneered the genres “stadium house” (rave music with a pop-rock
production and sampled crowd noise) and “ambient house.[citation
needed] The KLF released a series of international top-ten
hits[citation needed] on their own KLF Communications record label,
and became the biggest-selling singles act in the world for
1991.[citation needed] The duo also published a book, The Manual, and
worked on a road movie called The White Room.
From the outset, they adopted the philosophy espoused by esoteric
novel series The Illuminatus! Trilogy, gaining notoriety for various
anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of
billboard adverts, the posting of prominent cryptic advertisements in
NME magazine and the mainstream press, and highly distinctive and
unusual performances on Top of the Pops. Their most notorious
performance was a collaboration with Extreme Noise Terror at the
February 1992 BRIT Awards, where they fired machine gun blanks into
the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. This
performance announced The KLF’s departure from the music business, and in May 1992 the duo deleted their entire back catalogue.
With The KLF’s profits, Drummond and Cauty established the K
Foundation and sought to subvert the art world, staging an alternative
art award for the worst artist of the year and burning one million
pounds sterling. Although Drummond and Cauty remained true to their
word of May 1992—the KLF Communications catalogue remains deleted in the UK