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"Godhopper" [mp3 removed]
"Looplament" [mp3 removed]
From now on all my song titles are going to be three-syllable neologisms. Nah, it's just a coincidence that these two ended up with the Burgess/Huxley/Womack style newspeak. "Godhopper" is sort of a private joke, I think maybe two people over at FMU and/or some old prog heads will get it. I'm chafing over whether to make it more elaborate and satisfy the lust for nerdy solo-ing it seems to imply or just leave it. "Looplament" is a bit different from what I've been doing: it's slow, meditative and dorky, as opposed to fast, intricate and dorky.
"Suite 6 (E-Piano)" [mp3 removed]
One of the Sid songs rescored for synth and two electric pianos. A Latinate riff makes it fairly buoyant while the Rhodes moves it closer to Soft Machine Six territory. (Did I say I love Soft Machine Six?)
Drawing by Roy Stanfield, from a series based on random picks from Google Images. I think that's the way to go with this otherwise obsolescent skill called "drawing," so much slobbered over by art buyers. Thanks to all those search engine bots we're drowning in each other's image-effluent. Hand-rendering these pictures "personalizes" the sludge-flow while inexorably adding to it. Art is not an act of resistance but participation in a vast system of fascination and voyeurism. Signed, Baudrillard Junior. (Having said all that, I like this drawing--Steve Mumford should look and learn to see how the "courtroom style" can be used effectively.)
The clunky, slowly rotating cams (as in camshaft, not webcams) in Douglas Repetto's just-ended installation at Location One reminded me of this piece by Francis Picabia, consisting of cardboard and string stretched loosely in a picture frame (sorry I don't know the work well enough to tell you what's written on the cardboard). In my copy of Brian Wallis' Art After Modernism, the Picabia serves as an illustration for Benjamin Buchloh's famous essay "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression."
It's arranged on the page in a before and after demonstration, with a later painting of Picabia's showing the artist posing with two beautiful women. The point supposedly being that Picabia was part of a wave of avant gardists from the 1910s who regressed to classical or conservative painting styles later in the 20th century. I always found it a hoot that Buchloh (or Wallis) thought Picabia's late work reinforced the status quo. What, bigamy? (Yeah, I know, fantasies of male over-empowerment, yadda yadda.) The man was never more out of favor with the art world than when he was painting nudie images out of French erotic magazines--those canvases didn't really become market-viable until relatively recently, after David Salle said "Hey, these are good!" There are inherent problems when a critic with absolutely no sense of humor uses an arch-ironist like Picabia to exemplify anything. Yes, Picabia wrote about the "return to order" in the '20s, but we should be talking about his art, not his spin du jour."Slow Hooterville" [mp3 removed]
For Sidstation and analog drum synthesizer; additional percussion: Linplug RMIV.
A few months back I asked some questions* about how "tracker music" differed from early breakbeat hardcore and sequencer-based music generally, and I've still been somewhat confused. This post by Marius Watz, which Marisa Olson recently reblogged on Rhizome**, helped me quite a bit.
The arcane art of tracking takes what I like to think of as a hacker’s approach to making music. The interface is primarily numeric, notes are entered via the keyboard, length, parameters, effects are often entered in hexadecimal notation, and code flies across the screen as if you were looking at the opening credits of The Matrix. What’s not to like?*My questions from last April were: "I'm still curious (and googling) about the interrelationship of the Atari demoscene, amigatrackers, and early rave and 'ardkore. How much was hobbyist/cultist vs real club/dancefloor breakthroughs? Also how much was actually hacked and/or open source vs just using the products companies were selling? Then or now? From the wiki article it sounds like the Akai and the tracker software were inseparable 50/50 partners in defining the 'tracker' sound. Is that the same thing as 'classic' breakbeat rave or breakbeat techno? The article makes 'tracker' music sound like a cheesy variant--did that happen later or was tracker music always the music of hobbyists/Atari cultists? Finally, is the 'tracker scene' mainly a European thing?"
Kuro5hin has a good article and how-to on cutting up breakbeats with tracking. It lists possible software (such as Renoise) and gives a step-by-step breakdown of how to go about murdering the Amen Break (the biggest drum’n’bass break of all time…) For more insights into the origin of tracking culture, Salon.com has an article [from 1999 -ed] called MOD Love.
The Salon.com article points out that the analogy that tracking is to music what code is to software is a bit of an overstatement. Tracking, which involves writing notes and effects in hexadecimal code, is still much like sequencing. Its true significance seems to stem from the fact that tracking started as a DIY culture, by kids who had no access to professional equipment (and frequently, no musical training). But tracking also allows a mechanical approach to music that makes it attractive to practitioners of drum’n’bass, breakcore, digital hardcore or plain old noise.
I've concluded that the scenes were completely separate in the late 80s/early 90s: tracking was the domain of hackers making mostly chiptunes or cheesy rave tracks, while Rob Playford, A Guy Called Gerald and other mainstays of early breakbeat and jungle were using primordial versions of programs like Logic, hardware sequencers, and more pricy (?) samplers. What's happened in the last few years is a late merger of the two styles, with trackers being used to trigger samples in very fast "jungle-like" music. In the earlier thread we had some miscommunication but I think I'm clear on this now.
**Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/nov/26/the-arcane-art-of-tracking-vs-the-amen-break/
My photos from Douglas Irving Repetto's show at Location One, 26 Greene St., NYC; the exhibit will be open one more day (tomorrow, Saturday, November 26). Microphones at the bases of mylar cones pick up room sounds, which trigger sensors causing the wooden cams to turn, making twine move on pulleys stretched across the room (think Fred Sandback meets Cronenberg's Spider), which in turn jiggle vertical sheets of mylar, making abstract reflections on the wall shimmer ever so slightly. As the press release describes it, "the piece 'breathes' in sympathy with the ambient sounds in the gallery, rippling and reflecting light when there is a sound and resting, invisible, when there is silence. Because of the transparency of the mylar strips, the effect is subtle and eerie, a gossamer membrane that functions as acoustic barometer, making visible sonic phenomena that are often heard, but rarely seen." The effect is not as dramatic as we're used to in this age of pyrotechnic insanitaria, but I believe that's the point.
Repetto's site documenting the piece is here.
"Suite 6" [mp3 removed]
No. 7 in the Sidstation/analog drum machine series. I'm especially happy with the drumming on this one.
Nos. 1-6 are here. I continue to mess with them, so they gel as a series, with similar volume levels, "dry" sounds as opposed to special-effected, etc. I cheated a bit to get the number to 7 by including both versions of "Protest Song." But no one says I have to stop at 10; I can always do more and edit. But I'm already itching to start polluting these with more softsynths and virtual percussion.
Happy Thanksgiving. Please be sure to read Sidney Blumenthal's Salon essay on Dick Cheney's climb to power. It tracks this warped creature from his palace coup (with Rumsfeld) kicking the moderates out of the Ford administration, to acting as point man for the Iran Contra traitors during his years in Congress, to engineering Gulf War I (supposedly the "good war" but as bogus as the current one IMHO), to picking himself for Bush Jr.'s VP, to his big moment--the opportunity to put all his world-dominating plans into action: 9/11. One of the most noteworthy things to me is that, yes, Cheney is a man of ruthless ambition, a bureaucratic inside player, and all that, but he's also largely incompetent. He completely had the Soviet threat wrong, right up until the USSR collapsed, and he consistently overstated Iraq's threat to the Middle East in both wars he got us into. Vice President for Torture--already planning his retirement to Eastern Maryland, where he will live off his stolen taxpayer money until his ticker finally gives out. Here's hoping he gets some Pinochet action, late in life, when he's all ready to relax. And here's hoping history properly places him on the dark side of America, along with Joseph McCarthy and the Boston Strangler.
Going back through my email, realized I forgot to plug the second appearance of the Nick Hallett-curated video program 23 REASONS TO SPARE NEW YORK. D'oh, it was last Friday and Saturday, Nov. 18 and 19, at MONKEYTOWN, Williamsburg's premiere video eatery. "23 Reasons" is a reel of music videos Hallett put together of experimental rock tunes, all by local bands, featuring Animal Collective, Antony & the Johnsons, Black Dice, Grizzly Bear, Jason Forrest, Liars, and others, and includes my web video "Guitar Solo" (tastefully memorialized in DVD form above--nice wall texture, huh?).
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
But [Montana] governor [Brian Schweitzer] is no fan of the Democratic Leadership Council -- the centrist outfit, once headed by an ambitious Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton, that is populated by Washington, D.C., lobbyists and funded by their corporate overlords.I suppose we could feel the same way about any "cultural elite." Hollywood in LA, Madison Avenue in NY. But of those elites, only the one in DC has the power to appropriate our money and kill untold numbers of people. I share Schweitzer's frustration, watching powerless from afar this grotesque DC culture where rich lobbyists mingle with rich, big hair news media and rich helmet haired Congressmen at parties. You want to knock all their heads together and say: "You're a bunch of effete screwups!" It hurts instead to have to watch them all "get on the same page," and "get behind" the Iraq debacle, the Bush tax cuts, the anti-bankruptcy bill and other horrors.
"Washington, D.C., is a giant cesspool filled with special interests," Schweitzer said. "Unless we change the culture of Washington, D.C., we're not going to change the country."
Today I helped Jim Bassett haul the new Datamantic server down to a co-location facility in the bowels of Lower Manhattan. Datamantic is his company, which will be hosting Digital Media Tree in addition to more traditional business clients. I thought it might be interesting to document the physical hardware and where it will live, since the Tree and this blog are just cyber-abstractions to most people looking at it. Above is Jim booting up the unit. The images below are the server, first with the lid removed showing off all the hot-swappable drives, fans, and power supplies, and then installed in its modest cage in the Data Center. The Center itself is a trip, a labyrinth of boxes within boxes, rivers of overhead cables, and no people, except a couple of tech guys who stay in the office to get away from the omnipresent insane hum of hundreds of server fans and an enormous cooling unit that chugs away 24/7.
The press release for an upcoming show I'm in called
, aka the O Show, can be found in this .PDF file. The exhibition opens November 30, with a reception on Dec. 11, at SICA, on the Jersey shore, and is organized by New York curatorial combine MatCh-Art. I'm showing the DVD of this animated GIF. Other artists include Lisa Beck, Louis Cameron, Moriah Carlson, Orly Cogan, Mark Dagley, Joel Edwards, Rob Grunder, Francis Holstrom, Sharon Horvath, Jim Houser, Jasper Johns, Chris Kasper, Laura Ledbetter, Jim Lee, Monique Luchetti, Noah Lyon, Andrew Masullo, Rob Matthews, Derick Melander, Matthew Northridge, John Phillips, James Rosenthal, Savako, Randall Sellers, Mark Shetabi, Jordan Tinker, John Torreano, Alice Wu, B. Wurtz, and Nami Yamamoto. More as the date approaches.
"Two Bass Salad" [mp3 removed]
Number 5 in the Sidstation/drum machine suite. Bouncy and minimal. Will likely be remixed with more panning effects and possibly some kind of break or bridge, but this is the guts of it.
Now every Bush Administration underboss is stepping forward to declare he or she was "not Bob Woodward's source" for the earlier-than-Scooter outing of CIA agent Plame's non-official cover. A la "I was not Deep Throat." This is like Evil Watergate, with Woodward transformed over the years from a valiant underdog reporter into another lying White House stooge. Meanwhile, Congress reenacts the McCarthy years, attempting to destroy the reputations of those who challenge Bush's war fantasy, the latest being Congressman Murtha. This is all corrupt, inside-DC stuff. It's perfectly clear to the multitudes outside the Washington nuthouse that:
1. Whatever you think of the CIA's use of torture to gain information, exact confessions, etc in undisclosed foreign locations, recently revealed to include prisons in the former Soviet gulag (I think it's wrong and hurts us in the eyes of the world), as long as you're willing to agree that sometimes their secret agents do protect us from mass murderers (and it's very hard to concede this after the spectacular failures of 9/11), then there's probably a consensus that blowing an agent's cover for politics (in this case, selling a bogus war) harms everybody.
2. Bush lied us into war with the help of Congress and the press. To suggest the war is failing is to state the obvious. What is the mission now? To "beat the insurgents"? Did America invade Iraq to conquer it and hold it as a colonial territory? Most people don't think we did.
"Protest Song Variation" [mp3 removed]
"Marching Morons" [mp3 removed]
Moving ahead with the projected "ten songs for analog drum machine and Sidstation"; these are two more, recorded with the new gear.
Paper Rad Info is a blog about Paper Rad. However, it is not Paper Rad. That is here. Above is the Dooman Group. a spinoff band named after Dr. Doo; the photo came from Flickr. Inspiring!
And I confess I missed this Art in America article on Cory Arcangel, which discusses his collaboration with Paper Rad at Deitch Projects, among other activities. Fortunately I have the web to keep me up to date on print. We'll know a zeigeist moment has occurred when Cory is no longer called a "computer artist" and is just called an "artist."
Photos off the TV from The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926, a full-length animated film dir. by Lotte Reiniger. Amazing stuff, all silhouettes, inspiring this exercise in couch-potato photojournalism. More on the film (thanks to dave).
Dear Music Diary, I wrote some posts about the difficulties I was having recording a recently acquired analog drum machine. The sound was either clipping or too quiet. I had some good suggestions for ways to compress the drum sounds and those were much appreciated but I finally solved the problem by getting a firewire sound card--the MOTU 828mkii. The audio/digital converters are better than my three year old computer's and the sound is just generally better. I'm using it with a laptop, also recently acquired, which has more RAM and is also better and faster as a music-making machine. Also I can use two screens with it. So once again production will slow down as I migrate programs and sound files to the new environment.
The Village Voice on the yuppie rape of the High Line:
Although the landscape architects expect to use existing vegetation as a guide for the park's greenery, concrete walkways will replace the uninterrupted fields of tall grasses—lush and green in the summer or dried golden like wheat in the fall. Chances are much of the Chinese bittersweet, with its pert orange berries, will be replaced by a plant that won't aggressively overtake its neighbors. And the trees struggling upward, which have dug their roots deep into the railroad bed, will be rooted out."A guide for the park's greenery"--you gotta love it. They're killing the vegetation and completely replacing it in order to save it. That's the American Way, in Vietnam, Iraq, and limousine lib NYC. Pardon the invective, but fuck all y'all.
Interesting factoid I just learned: Cory Arcangel, whose hacked Nintendo cartridge piece Japanese Driving Game is depicted in the GIF above, is a relative of Pop artist Allan D'Arcangelo. Not sure the exact kinship--a cousin, but no one in the family's exactly sure how many steps removed. D'Arcangelo passed away in the '90s (and since we're talking about a distant cousin, this isn't a story of art world dynasty building, much as that might disappoint the dish-minded); some images via google are below. A frequent theme of D'Arcangelo's was road signs and American auto culture. The affinity between his art and the above piece of Arcangel's--which subtracted the cars from an '80s video game leaving the highway, signage, and surrounding landscape--is amusing. D'Arcangelo isn't as well known as Lichtenstein or Warhol, but I've always liked his work. He's one of those "impure Pop" artists, like John Wesley, whose personal style usually peeks out from behind the genre's bland corporate facade.
Update: According to family members Allan is Cory's great uncle.
New media/infoTech/social activist non-profit the THING recently moved to new headquarters in what they're calling the Death Star, the big AT&T building at 6th and Walker in NYC. Rebelling against the bourgeoise strictures of documentary photography that tyrannically emphasize "clarity," Robbin Murphy shot these photos of the Nov. 9 housewarming (and welcome for residency artists Jan Gerber and Daniel Pflumm). Heisenberg, call your photo lab.
Less probabilistic are these views inside the Death Star, the erstwhile manual switching center for the former phone monopoly, which appears to be mostly gutted and is being renovated as a newer-media telecommunications complex (besides THING headquarters, it will host various co-location facilities, such as The Hub at 32 Sixth, described by the developer as follows:
The Hub at 32 Sixth is a true carrier-neutral, co-location and interconnection facility that boasts a robust and growing number of communication providers. Strategically located on the 24th floor of 32 Avenue of the Americas, The Hub has quickly become the primary point of convergence for all buyers and sellers of bandwidth in the New York Metro area. Its co-location facility currently hosts nearly 40 terrestrial carriers and a growing portfolio of content providers, ISPs, and enterprise tenants, as well as an expanding range of wireless providers, making The Hub the interconnection power house.)
In the mid '00s modernist painting and sculpture enjoyed a powerful resurgence among artists bored with the dominant conceptualist tropes of bland photography and turgid written narratives. Leading the charge in the return to quirky subjectivity were Jason Duval (top, at Marvelli), Dorota Kolodziejczyk (middle, at Morgan Lehman) and Ross Knight (bottom, at Team). These works all combined a deft formal sophistication with a rock-solid understanding of art history and the right time to reintroduce themes their teachers and forebears might dismiss as atavistic. (E. Worthy, Early 21st Century Art, Memehouse Publishing, 2038). (Of the three artists' work only Knight's truly merits the adjective "quirky"--still searching for the right word but wanted to get this up.--e.w., I mean, t.m.)
An earlier post on Eric Doeringer and his dustup with a Chelsea dealer declined to mention the dealer's name until someone (me? why should I do it?) called and verified that said gallerist did indeed sic the cops on Doeringer for selling "bootleg paintings" on 24th Street. As far as I know, no blogger ever followed up on this basic journalistic courtesy, but everyone just piled on with Doeringer's version, sliming Mike Weiss as "probably a Republican" and worse. Today an actual newspaper--the New York Times--did an actual story and even got Weiss's side of it. It's pretty weak. From Randy Kennedy's article:
In a recent interview, Mr. Weiss confirmed that, yes, he had called the police. He said he did so for reasons that might be condemned in the art world but that made perfect sense for any businessman like himself who has to pay a huge rent.Chelsea was always about creating a haven for upper middle class collectors, far from the subways, the plebes, and messy hubbub of the city. Weiss is just articulating one of the unspoken assumptions of the neighborhood. My guess is the "top feeders" don't like seeing Doeringer out there any more than Weiss does, but are too smart to come down on the wrong side of the First Amendment issue. Also, it's gauche to mention any class bias. Should Doeringer get kudos for teasing out these assumptions?
"We've seen what happens in SoHo," Mr. Weiss said of street vendors. "Where there's one, then there's two and three and four."
He added: "Let's say I own a Victoria's Secret and then there's someone outside selling fake lingerie and bras. It just detracts from what you're doing."
Of Mr. Doeringer's art itself, he said he did not want to pass judgment but then immediately did. It is not even original in its appropriation, he said, noting that this is an art-world idea that has been explored thoroughly by many artists already. (Only two artists have complained about the "bootlegs," [Doeringer] said, and in those cases he stopped copying their work.)
"Personally," Mr. Weiss said, "I think he's an opportunist and that he just wants his 15 minutes."
"Noa and Alphonse" [mp3 removed]. A slightly more elaborate version of "Clip City." It doesn't clip anymore, and has been turned into a quiet minimal techno tune that I'm actually pretty proud of. Every analog drum track was recorded as a separate .wav file, then those were run through an analog filter to create more separate .wav files, then everything was cross faded. The Sid tune from "Clip City" is now a Reaktor tune, mixed way down so it weaves in and out of the drum sniggles. The detuned note that runs through the whole thing is a drum setting called "multi."
Tonight: TRANSPARENT PROCESSES
curated by Nick Hallett
featuring LoVid, Gibson + Recoder, I Love You, and Ray Sweeten
at The Kitchen, 512 W 19th Street NYC
Wednesday, November 9th at 8:00 PM
www.thekitchen.org for more information
ticket price is $8, and this show will sell out (probably already has, but call 212.255.5793; I can't come but want to support this --tm).
Here is the curator's statement:
The Kitchen presents an update of the 60s Psychedelic Lightshow, an evening of live visual music, expanded cinema, and nouveau psychedelia called Transparent Processes.
Here's what it's all about: the artists in this show avoid using laptops. Instead, they build or customize their own "audiovisual hardware" out of consumer electronics devices like film projectors, TV sets, and oscilloscopes. [...] By operating in a DIY fashion, these artists are able to sculpt electrical impulses into audiovisual performance. I call this style of creating "transparent" because it gives the audience a keener sense of how process relates to product, and demonstrates the basic principles of synesthesia, maximizing multimedia's ability to address the intersection of the senses.
LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) perform on their "Kiss Blink Sync Vessel," a homemade audiovisual synthesizer. Working like a television signal scrambler, the instrument uses electronic sound to interrupt video signals and filter the feed into swirling, hyper-kinetic animations. I Love You (Seth Kirby and Ana Matronic), in their debut performance, titled Open to Above, employ a collection of vintage “color music” instruments like the optical theremin, which uses a photocell to transform light into sound, creating an environment in which pure light can be both seen and heard. In Override, the duo of Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder strip the cinematic experience down to its barest essentials, demonstrating how the mechanized movements of the film projector and barely-audible sounds of film itself can be manipulated to produce delicate plays of shadow and diffused light. Ray Sweeten takes the opposite approach in Vatican Satellite, sending electronic sounds into an oscilloscope (a device used to collect electrical measurements, commonly used by physicists and in medicine) which graphs its input onto a readout screen, transforming basic acoustic forms into visual geometry.
Oh yeah, and check out these beautiful posters by Kayrock and Wolfy. There will be a few on sale at the show...
Above are my Eric Doeringers: he calls them bootlegs of more famous works by "name" artists, and sells them at an open-air table outside art fairs and in the bleak Chelsea gallery district. I consider Doeringer a "name," too--a practicing appropriationist in a lineage with Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Sherrie Levine, and especially Elaine Sturtevant. His craft is good and he has an eye for the most generic "knockoffable" commodities in a practitioner's oeuvre. The critique of authorship and authenticity is especially welcome with Chelsea dealers going nuts pushing said brand names to Bush millionaires: Doeringer is a kind of Mini-Me of the hard-working gallery owner.
Generally he is tolerated, but today a Chelsea gallerist decided he'd had enough, and allegedly sicced the cops on Doeringer. The artist was forced to fold up his table, box up his wares, and move on. James Wagner has a blog post on this. I confess I heard from Doeringer about this earlier in the day and felt that if I were going to be a journalist, I should call the dealer and hear what he had to say, since this particular gallerist has been supportive of unknown artists through publications, curating, and the like. As with the right wing echo chamber, now it's news, though, because someone posted about it. It's just rumormongering at this stage, and this page will priggishly withhold the dealer's name until someone gets a comment in the inevitable first amendment pile-on. Not that it sounds like there can be two sides to this. Assuming it's true, calling the cops for "selling art without a peddler's license" in Bloomberg's incarceration-happy Manhattan is bad karma, bad vibes, and censorship, since it's art we're talking about here and not hot watches.
Update: Someone outside the GNYNVOVEZ (Greater New York Non-Virtual Object Viewing & Evaluating Zone) wondered how bootleg these paintings really are. Left to right in the photo above: The "Damien Hirst," painted on a Fredrix pre-stretched canvas, is decently made but cookie cutter; the colors don't match any particular Hirst. The "Richard Prince" is a scan/ink jet print of a random ad with cowboys; it's not Marlboro, or at least not any Marlboro Prince rephotographed. The "Martin Kippenberger" is an ink jet print of a Kippenberger figure, cut out and collaged onto a Fredrix canvas with little flecks of paint on the surface to look painterly, then sealed with matte varnish. So, to answer the question, his craft is good enough to make a facsimile that passes from a distance, but it's not like they're meticulous forgeries. In his studio he has 10 or 20 lined up in production like an assembly line.
Update 2: As expected, search the dealer's name in technorati and the first eight hits are bloggers dissing him. The money quote, from James' blog, is "He said that he didn't like 'seeing people walking around with tiny paintings...'"
Update 3: It's Mike Weiss! But you already knew that.
Thanks to Robert Huffman at the Modern Theory & Contemporary Criticism forum on Myspace for his photo- and gif-annotated version of the Rhizome.org interview [dead link--see below] Cory Arcangel did with me. Robert also reBlogged the item on his blog SPACEprogram. A couple of late corrections to the interview:
Digital Media Tree is the brainchild of Jim Bassett, who wrote the software and has been the low-key, creative, officially-unofficial webmaster sinceI said 2000 in the interview; I knew that Jim, drat fink, and some other Tree-ers started blogging earlier (in the first Blogger era) but couldn't find any '99 posts until Alex Wilson reminded me that his Arboretum, covering his travels in the Central Park outback (among many other things), started in December of that year. Another minor bug in the interview was this paragraph:20001999. It is a blog collective and quite active, with all of us commenting on each other's pages and posting to public and private group pages. My invitation to join the group came from artist Bill Schwarz, who has a page at www.digitalmediatree.com/schwarz/. There are features at the Tree at I haven't found in other blog packages, such as the ease of configuring pages with "use your own html" options, and the ability to spin off an infinite series of customized pages, as blogs or fixed pages. I'm too lazy to learn CSS, but actually prefer my page's under-designed html look.
In my college DJ years I was airing Can, Ralf and Florian, Tony Williams Lifetime, Iggy Pop's The Idiot, etc. My jaw dropped, in the early '90s, when I first heard [that] breakbeat 'ardkore rave stuff. I couldn't believe how good it was--it was like all my influences grew up (and sped up).I left out the "that."
Update: New Link to Cory's interview with me.
"Lysergic Interlude (Trance Moves)" [mp3 removed]. A "harder, faster, trancier" version of a previously posted tune. The ascending semitones near the end are supposed to be a joke. [Update, June 2010: With some reluctance, had to change the URL for this (the link above still works), as it was "burning up the charts" of the free mp3 sites. It's still up, just not at the same link. If you are interested in this song give me a shout and we can talk about licensing it.] [Update, April 2013: File removed to keep hosted space under 4GB]
Also, louder versions of these two songs:
"Permanent Chase" [mp3 removed]. This version does not include the analog filtering of the drums on the quiet version ([4.6 MB .mp3]). It's just the drum machine and the Sidstation.
"Clip City" [mp3 removed]. (Quiet version: [mp3 removed].) I got tired of having to raise the volume in Winamp, and since the iTunes "volume leveler" distorts them anyway, I made both tracks louder.
Update: a "self-mastered" version of "Clip City": [4.6 MB .mp3]
Update 2: The "quieter" version of Permanent Chase was remixed in 2009 and substituted for the one in this post. It is now the "official" version.
Jack Kirby Mandala
"FOR EVERY INDIVIDUAL LOSS, LEGIONS POUR FORTH!!! THE HIVE BELOW HAS BEEN RESTLESS--MULTIPLYING!"
"Two billion years ago, it [the Sun] blew up, and the Earth was blown apart with it...The exploding Sun shattered the Earth and cast the hot debris into the cold darkness of the void...A few thousand years ago, an intelligent being from a reality we had never suspected found our dust. For its own alien purposes and by its own strange science, that intelligent being read in our dust the cryptarch of our lives...From our cryptarch, the alien created us again. And not just our bodies. You remember Earth because your consciousness, which is in fact a wavepattern of light emitted by your brain, was retrieved from the vacuum, where it had been expanding at the speed of light since you died...The alien is not a spiritual being...The truth is, this being regenerated you to serve as bait for yet another alien intelligence, its enemy, a species of sapient, winged spiders called zotl. Zotl eat people."
That passage from A. A. Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth* gives you the flavor of the book: high pulp of cosmic sweep, and "pulp" is used here with reverence since it is in the discarded and unvetted we often find the best art. (The position of this page is that you can take your books about aging college professors finding passion, then ennui through affairs with young students and fuckin' stick 'em. So to speak.) Attanasio's tome seamlessly meshes heroic fantasy--his main character is a reconstituted Viking with a "ramstat flyer" instead of a longboat and his near-omniscient aliens meddle in human affairs like Greek gods--with skeptical, even new wave-y plot quirks. The novel peaks about 3/4 of the way through its 481 pages and the remainder is a series of short story-like vignettes of characters living in the biological, post-human end times before the alien's constructed binary star system collapses. Oh, yes, and it's also a love story.
The book belongs in the company of Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter and Brian Aldiss's Helliconia tales in being both epic and wised-up, although its exalted, utterly committed narrative style feels almost Biblical. Attanasio's imagination is so huge you feel your head ballooning to embrace his conception of a universe where particle physics, time travel, Lovecraftian elder gods, and medieval warriors and peasants all mesh in a grand narrative. The poetry of his language, which can be felt even in the pulpiest sentences, drives the yarn as much as the mind-blowing science. The author was in his late 20s when he wrote this (it appeared in '89) and almost perfectly balances visionary abandon and storytelling control. A close televisual equivalent might be the Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which also injects apocalytic religion into futuristic sci fi with its incendiary battles among superhuman AIs.
*The edited passage in the first para. came from an amazon reader. Link is to Barnes & Noble, a "blue" company, unlike amazon. Hit Bush backers in their wallets!
Sidney Blumenthal in Salon (no link due to subscription-only firewall):
If he [Libby had] testified truthfully in October 2004 the result would have consumed the final days of the [presidential election] campaign. His Leninist logic permitted him to protect the Republican cause, but he has tainted Bush's victory in history as surely as the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore did in 2000.Illegitimate pretenders to power still rule us. That doesn't make the 59 million who voted for Bush any less pathetic, though.
"Protest Song (Human Crab Louse)" [mp3 removed]. Work in process? Probably more like a prototype. The "found sequence"-- an Electribe rhythm pattern slowed down by about 16 bpm and reinterpreted by the computer as a melody kind of trails off into inconsequentiality every few bars, and that could be made more catchy and bouncy. The melody, such as it is now, sounds good in other Sid patches, to my ears at least, and those could be incorporated into the song with MIDI program change messages. One thing I learned is I don't have my volume problem with the analog drum machine if it's only playing a few hits (e.g. one kick, snare, clap, and one hi hat). It was only when I tried to use the full range of the machine that I had to turn the gain down--this tune is punchier and I didn't have to drop the volume.
A friend emailed to say he finds the synth sounds I'm using to be a little too much like factory presets--what come packaged with the instrument before any user programming. He says he's not sure if it's "the lack of layering, or that they're dry and don't have many filter/pitch/mod/etc controls." He likes the "Guitar Solo" video, though. I replied:
Thanks for the suggestions. I haven't made any pretense on the page of using anything other than presets. My feeling is MSPaintbrush is one big preset, and your suggestions would be like telling me I should use more layering and effects in Photoshop, to try to be more naturalistic and painterly. Not saying I'm not listening and won't absorb some of [the ideas in your email], but I like things straightforward and stupid. The guitar solo was a total one-off, I had just bought Kontakt and started turning as many knobs as I could find--it started getting distorted. The piece got more interesting when I started chopping the notes up and repeating them in a Wav editor. There's really no layering. It's just off the shelf distortion and brute surgery.
But I'm interested in the compositions being some basic, minimal, easily apprehended structure as opposed to building up a lot of texture in the sound. In "Clip City" I meant to contrast the subtle drumming with that dorky keyboard arpeggio I wrote and played absolutely dry on the Sidstation. The thought of doing a fluid, Basic Channel type drum track appealed to me, but then I just rebelled. The only analogy I can come up with is bad painting. Why would you want to do something bad when you can do something well? (A dealer once asked me that.) On "Permanent Chase" I added a little chorus effect to soften the Sid, but it's totally preset city. I really like the sounds those Swedish guys programmed! I've been lurking on some electronic music chatboards and am amazed by some of the complex things people are doing with drum programming etc. But I find the glitchy granular sound overrefined and boring. My favorite techno music is blindingly obvious. I think maybe I don't care about layering and quantizing because I like to hear all the instruments, and I like machines to sound like machines. Kraftwerk always appealed to me because it was wind up music, like looking at the inside of a watch and seeing how the gears move.
My friend replied that part of his confusion about the music was "that it's kind of sitting somewhere between german trance and a more minimal conceptual sound work, and I guess my personal preference would be for it to be a little more one way or the other." I'm abbreviating his comments, which were fairly detailed in how the music could go in either direction. I appreciate the suggestions but I'm resisting, as I explained in my emailed reply:
I guess my feeling is "german trance" and "minimal conceptual sound work" are both known genres, with their own sets of conventions, but the space between the two is maybe not to so mapped out. I'm not just trying to turn your criticism into a compliment. I think all my best work occupies that awkward middle ground between "failed commercial art" and "conceptualism with imagery too stupid to look at."
Where I'm still a little uncertain is, do I really need to learn to make good trance with all those subtleties you mentioned, or is it possible to fail at it for artistic purposes with only a working half-knowledge?
Part of me would like to be a club star with German girls putting their hands in the air, which is maybe why the music gets better without being entirely there as dance music. I keep working at it because I like it.
But trance is basically a dead art form. What is the point of getting really good at it?
Sounds like maybe the one that's bugging you the most is "Lysergic Interlude"? Those are definitely presets, from the Linplug Alpha softsynth: one is called "club run." I can hear everything you're criticizing about its lack of subtlety, but at the end of the day I just like that wind-up music box feel. (I subtitled it "Ice Cream Dude Sells E" because it sounds like an ice cream truck to me.) And there's almost nothing conceptual about it.
Anyway, I know the music's not perfect. I'm just leery about improving it too much because I don't know how relevant or valid "good" techno is at this point. I also feel the deconstructive art things (with sustained loops etc) are either too familiar or not fun. (Not saying [your piece you described in the email] is bad--I'm sure it's great.) There was a lot of finesse in the music in the Whitney's BitStreams show but not one composition had a beat or a melody. My hope is to keep working in the middle ground and a few good things will emerge from that process
And is if that wasn't enough, I added in a later email:
The bigger philosophical issue for me is the same issue I faced as an visual art student years ago. I had a teacher who left a note in my portfolio at semester-end saying I needed to "face very squarely" whether I was a cartoonist or an artist, because he saw the former winning out most of the time. Arguably he was right and that's why I [am where I am today], ha ha. As for making "good" techno--part of me wants to, but part of me wants to stay innocent and incorporate the misconceptions, fixes and workarounds of the self-taught musician into the final product, which loiters irritably halfway between trance and conceptual art. (The musical equivalent of my paintings, maybe.) BTW, the recent songs that matter the most to me are "Posse on Greenwich," "Glitch Western," and "Robollywood," none of which are actually that trancy.
Is it possible to contribute to a Tom DeLay legal offense fund? That sleazy criminal, sorry alleged criminal, has all the money in the world to out-lawyer and out-maneuver the poor beleaguered public official who finally indicted him. Like today, his successful tactic of getting the judge in his money laundering trial replaced because the man made some contributions to the Democrats.
What is it going to take to get rid of DeLay, the human crab louse? I'd give a hundred dollars to Ronnie Earle in Austin. Anybody else?
An excerpt from the interview Cory Arcangel did with me at Rhizome.org [dead link - see below]: "The computer still has the shock of the new, or the shock of the bad in some cases. Art world folks know painting, photo, and printmaking lore, but are less secure--myself included--knowing what constitutes talent on the computer as opposed to some easy-to-do technical trick. I thought because everyone had Paint or the equivalent on their computer and had at least made a mark or spritzed the spraycan, they could see that I was doing something more ambitious with it. I was thinking of this guy in New Mexico who made perfect perspective drawings using an Etch a Sketch. If I could draw La Femme Nikita from scratch on this toy program and actually have people (well, guys) say she's hot, then a landmark would be achieved for both Paintbrush and the computer. The problem is I drew her so realistically people assumed I was running a photo though a pixelating filter.
"When I talk about craft on the blog, just to make it clear, I'm not talking about drawing ability but things like mosaics and needlepoints that relate to the computer on a much more fundamental image-making level, the grid level. I love the cross-stitch patterns and beadwork you can find online based on MSPaint drawings. In the late '90s I was impressed by the writing of cyberfeminist Sadie Plant, who opened up for me a whole organic, non-analytical way of looking at computation. She traces digital equipment back to one of its earliest uses, as punchcards for looms, and talks of the internet as a distributed collaborative artwork akin to traditionally feminine craft projects At the time I was drawing and printing hundreds of spheres at work and bringing them home, cutting polygons around them, and then taping the polygons back together in enormous paper quilts. In my press release for the Derek Eller show we called it 'corporate tramp art.'"
Update: New Link to Cory's interview with me.