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"One to Thirty" [mp3 removed]
This is drum and bass. This is that note.
From indymedia: William Kristol Gets Pied
William Kristol, founder of the Project for a New American Century (a leading neo-con think tank) and a key figure in American foreign policy for over 20 years, was hit by what appeared to be a cream pie tonight in Richmond, Indiana. Throughout his speech, given at Earlham College, he defended the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war and state terror and was in the process of comparing current policy challenges to those of the early Cold War when a young man calmly lifted himself onto the stage and quickly walked to the podium, splattering a delicious dish all over the speaker as well as the college's president (collateral damage, perhaps?).It's not quite the Cronenbergian exploding head I thought it was when I first saw the photo, but I'll settle for a pie for this war-mongering moFo. I realize "Americans don't care about the war," which is why Bush squeaked in again (with a little cheating), but many of us here in the New York metro area are tired of having this violent, inept cadre in office. They're admitting they failed in Iraq, otherwise Wolfowitz and Feith would be moving up in the Defense Department, instead of being shunted aside.
Unfortunately, after a period of shock, many people in the audience stood and clapped to show support for Kristol (for a total of three standing ovations), including many self-professed peace activists and liberals who were afraid that this succulently sweet action would discredit Earlham College. They apparently forgot, perhaps due to his liability as a speaker, of Kristol's central role in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, his long efforts as a Harvard-trained political scientist to provide the intellectual justification for the Bush agenda of foreign intervention, and his current place as an architect of a war in Iraq which has claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives.
This month's Bookforum has two--count'em, two--Serious Novelists sneering at the French for liking "bad" American writers. John Banville looks down at "enfant terrible" Michel Houllebecq's infatuation with H. P. Lovecraft and Gary Indiana can't believe a writer as great as Emmanuele Carrere (accent grave over the first e rejected by my browser) likes Philip K. Dick. This is in two different articles, mind you. Well, get over it, you losers. Much as it disgusts you, those unsavory recluses had what the first George Bush called the "vision thing," which (respectively posthumously and belatedly) caught the popular imagination (especially filmmakers'), while few outside of the editorial offices of Bookforum, where the flame of genteel writing is perpetually kept burning, know who John Banville and Gary Indiana are. I swear, sometimes I think the literary clique exists only to bash H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. They've clearly run out of other things to write about.
(Lovecraft is on the cover, by the way--he sucks but sells magazines. "Enfant terrible" is the headline writer's phrase; I don't think Banville actually uses it.)
"Procession (Cooked)" [mp3 removed]
This is the tune I posted previously with more fleshed out (slap) bass and some atmospheric sweeps. The mood is a bit eerier and the bass drum quite insistent as befits a marching band of otter-like creatures in LED-mesh raiments moving slowly through the streets after ketamine has been dumped in the village water supply.
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Update: The DVD scan collection is still going strong but the ministeck patterns have been removed. What happened? No lawyer threats, I hope. The page now identifies its creator as Stacia Yeapanis, artist and curator of the DVD museum.
"Procession (Raw)" [mp3 removed]
This is a bare bones version of a tune I'm working on. I've since moved it along several stages, adding more instruments and a bit more elaborate drumming than this lone, slightly hamhanded tom, but this draft has its charms. A sort of folk processional (why does everything I write end up sounding Irish? some deep genetic roots I didn't know I had?) is played on a very flatulent sounding Sidstation, then repeats with some bright house-y chords with a sampled Absynth.
I'm teaching myself to write in Cubase and it's painfully slow because it's not as intuitive as Harmony Assistant, the other program I've been using, or my old Mac. The scheme relies more on key commands and shortcuts that you only learn by accident, or belatedly discover buried in the fine print of the manual. Ultimately the advantage will be more control over more instruments, being able to mix midi and sound files, and having access to some of the juicy plugins that are out there. (Again--I would never talk this way about Photoshop filters: I think music engineers "get it" better than art engineers.)
This week, dear diary, I've learned: (1) how to reset Kontakt to reduce latency (note lag); it's still not 100% but is vastly improved; (2) how to trigger a 120 bpm sampled beat so it plays in sync with a midi part (after some experimentation, I reset the tempo track to 122 bpm and added a triggering note every four beats, which is the length of the sample); (3) how to sync the Sid with an external midi clock; (4) how to turn off program changes in the Korg I'm using as a midi controller, so the Sid's presets don't keep switching as I dial around the Korg. I'm also getting a better handle on bending notes with the Korg's filter knobs.
Bonus: "Procession (Panning Wah-Wah Organ Version)" [mp3 removed]
Images from Frankie Martin's installation "One Minute Rave," at Canada. Press a button outside a cloth-draped doorway, enter the room with the black light, strobe, and cardboard cutout DJ, and you have exactly one minute to freak out. Actually you can do it multiple times, but you have to keep sticking your hand outside the doorjamb to hit the switch that activates the music and lights. Some very nice handcrafted work, geometric patterns, psychedelic drawing, and pure kitsch from the era of smart drinks, glow in the dark whistles, and floor shattering bass lines. Which is still going on in many parts of the country, and/or in a state of being perpetually revived, as the '60s psychedelic thing continues to morph with new technology and new crops of initiates. The vibe might also be "the early years of rave" before the DIY spirit gave over to corporate interests, if that era ever in fact existed. Maybe it's just an ideal rave of the mind. To put it in some historical context, this was to the early '90s what Kenny Scharf's black light rooms were to the late '60s, but less sardonic and more girly--and I mean the latter in a good way. It's truer to the spirit of the show than saying "post-feminist" and it's certainly not grrr-ly.
Momenta Art in Williamsburg has its annual benefit coming up and I'm donating a piece. Jeez, the last time I did this was four years ago, shortly after I started this blog. Here's to both of us still being around in the world o'ephemera that is the art scene. I tried something new with the piece above, which is gluing the paper--many little cut out pieces printed with "drawn elements" from my home computer--directly onto a piece of plywood. I was expecting to struggle more but this came together fairly quickly--I'm happy not to drag out the process. Now, if I was Fred Tomaselli I'd collector-ify the piece by pouring polyurethane goo all over it, but I kind of hate that restaurant table decoupage look so I think I'll just give it a light coat of matte fixative and call it done. I like seeing the texture of the paper clinging to the wood--I also left some wood showing on the front, which I didn't expect to do. All this could change tomorrow but I only have a few more days to screw with it.