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Dear Music Diary, I've already reached the point in this string quartet piece I'm writing where I wanted to transition out of the lugubrious intro and into something peppier. I blocked in this sort of Euro-country dance thing but it wasn't working in 4/4 time and it was way too slow. I counted the beats to make it work--could something possibly be in 23/8 time? 23 is a prime #, I'm already feeling the math in this piece. (Googled and sure enough Genesis worked in 23/8, for the "chase sequence" in "Robbery, Assault & Battery"--Tony Banks called the rhythm "insane.") So I went with it, added another bar with 23 beats where the pizzicato strings come in, gradually increased the tempo from 120 bpm to 200, and used a slow volume fade to diminish the bass and cello parts still grinding away in 4/4. Now I'm ready to embellish on that "dance."
Final version here.
No, the blogosphere won't change the global economy...with sycophants like this asking the questions.
Remember the video that went around in '04 showing how to open a Kryptonite lock with a bic pen? According to business blogger Dave Taylor, it didn't hurt Kryptonite at all. How does he know? He interviewed the public relations manager at Kryptonite.
Q: How long did it take for your company to be aware that there was negative publicity in the blog community?Hope you caught that last part: The p.r. person can't definitively say Kryptonite isn't suing the individual who posted on an online bike forum about the lock--a product the company ultimately replaced as deficient, in numbers up in the hundreds of thousands. That's a great way to restore confidence in the brand, leaving the impression that truth can be clouded with litigation and that the truthteller will be punished by an entity with better resources.
We were aware of the Internet involvement with this issue from the first day. This included blogs and forums.
[The common "myth" of the Kryptonite story is that the company wasn't paying attention to the blogosphere and that it took weeks for it to learn that there was a problem, but as you can see it isn't true and Donna and her team were aware of the problem from the very first day. --DT]
Q: When you did learn about the negative publicity, did you see it as a crisis management problem, or did it not seem that dire?
Dave, we were working around the clock to research the allegation and create a plan for our customers. We took this very seriously from day one. Contrary to popular belief, the media attention didn't make us take notice of this situation; we were already well into creating a plan by the time the traditional media were publishing their stories. I've seen in print that only after the New York Times article on day five did we come out with a plan and talk to the media. That's not true. We were talking to the media from day one.
[Again, the "myth" of the Kryptonite story, that the company was out of touch and didn't know anything had happened until the New York Times broke the story is completely false. Indeed, it is the desire to debunk the untruths and myths about this entire situation that motivated me to produce this interview with Donna in the first place. --DT]
Q: Did your company ever consider legal action against the person who disseminated the information about how to defeat that particular type of lock?
Need to go corporate here. We don't discuss any legal matters publicly, be they in process or in theory.
"String Quartet Piece 1" [mp3 removed]. Haven't decided if this is a first movement that stops and then turns into something else, or if this basic structure will continue, with other themes gradually woven in. A bit of a departure from the electro and "new/old digital sounds" side of things I've been pursuing. More of a swerve than a change of direction--it's all made the same way.
Final version here.
Video trolling
Home movie clips of babies throwing up set to the 1812 Overture. Some serious projectile hurling here. From the mainstream media.
Japanese kids spazzing out to hardcore beats. Incomprehensible, strangely liberating mashup from a German (?) novelty (?) site (?).
"Look Around You," a BBC spoof of educational/science programming, investigates...music. I love the kids on the quiz show.
(hat tips to singe and mbs)
Bonus online animation from Michael Bell-Smith: "The Gates." You know, that piece by the couple who bamboozled the city last year.
"Cyphering" [mp3 removed]. Bears passing resembling to a monster hit by a certain German proto-techno foursome, so I called mine "Cyphering," which is Jethro Bodine's word for arithmetic. None of my music has vocals, even robots reciting cyphers--don't know why, maybe vocals are too concrete. I am working on a string quartet piece (no, really) and hope to have something up in the next few days.
"Counterdemo" [mp3 removed].
Factory drum demo with MIDI interpreted as both rhythm and melody.
"End Notes" [18.8 MB .mp4]
The .mov file above [converted to .mp4] is one version of this piece. It is a video using (i) my own music and animation and (ii) the collaborative animated GIFs I did with jimpunk in 2004 (including the opening GIF seen above in freeze frame).
I more or less composed the video for the the 13 inch screen above. The music was mixed to monaural and plays on the TV speaker or through headphones. It also looks pretty good in "full screen" mode on the computer, but I was trying to work for the worst case scenario of a cheap TV that cropped a good bit of the border. The TV version is grittier and more aggressive than the .mov file.
Below: Daisy Rock Girl Guitars, from the 2006 NAMM show (the big musical instrument trade show). Other pics, mostly of big wire-festooned analog synthesizers and the dudes who love them, are here. I wondered what NAMM stood for, so I looked it up on their website and here's what I learned:
What does NAMM stand for? NAMM stands for the global music products industry. NAMM stands for you.(The FAQ page says "National Association of Music Merchants.")
