Tom Moody

tom moody

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 since ~~2000~~ 1999. 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.

I 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:

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. Yes there's clipping and distortion; I'm learning mastering in my spare time to prevent this in the future. Both of these will be recorded again--they're my learners. One thing I haven't been doing is giving the kick drum its own track for the final mix. [Update: the louder versions have been re-recorded and the quality is better.]

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.

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