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Artist and Bodenstandig 2000 musician drx (Dragan Espenschied) has stepped up to the plate and showed us his gnomes.
I think if the uptown Abstract Expressionist who was hiding his gnomes had done ones this good his dealer wouldn't be screaming but thinking of ways to reinvent him as an artist in the Peter Saul/Basil Wolverton school.
Beautiful-sounding, twisted logic from the antiwar sister of an American in Iraq:
Victory being out of the question at this point, the only democracy my brother is fighting for in Iraq is our democracy. The only constitution he is in Iraq fighting to defend is our Constitution. If my brother dies, it will not be for a mistake but rather because of his deeply held belief that the time it takes us as a people to figure out through democratic processes that we are wrong is more important than his own life.Great, lovely, but what about all the Iraqis he's helping to kill while we democratic idiots figure out what we did wrong? The essay in the Washington Post where this paragraph comes from is just comforting sophistry from someone stuck between the rock of her convictions and the hard place of her brother's participation in a war that has needlessly slaughtered people who never threatened the US. She's ultimately enabling his bad choices (or our leaders') with this desperate argument.
"Massively Huge" [mp3 removed]
Happy and e-piano-y tune for the holidays. The back story is I found this bunch of samples buried inside a Reaktor "groovebox" called Massive. (Not to be confused with Massive the synth, also from Native Instruments--but of course they will be.) The samples are supposed to be raw material for further slicing and granular weirdness in the beatbox context. I find that kind of music to be mushy, arty and same-y but I really liked the samples by themselves. So I moved them into a sampler and gave them pitches and wrote simple tunes for them. The piece has a kind of kitchen sink feel, with house music piano chords rubbing up against mangled electronic percussion stabs, but it moves along. The drum tracks are 3 different machines playing at once, two hardware and one soft.
(Similarities to London Elektricity are happily acknowledged, although breakbeats are hardly used.)