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"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.
