View current page
...more recent posts
Liebovitz Casts Art Stars in Fashion Wizard of Oz
Very, very lame. (via NEWSgrist)
Kristin Lucas sent this Happy New Year card and I decided to borrow it. Throughout the year I will continue to think of artists who have worked with game imagery who should be in 8-Bit: The Kvetcher's Cut--it should certainly include her because she practically invented the scene (the part I like anyway, the "I'm not sure if technology is really our friend" part).
It's 2006 now on the East Coast, so happy new year! I didn't get very many songs posted. mp3 blogging is not like dj'ing. Slow work. More semi-abandoned rhythm tracks:
"Tesla's Tribe" [mp3 removed]. From Reaktor, specifically a drum sequencer called Scenario II, just spat out today, another sparingly tweaked preset. I added the electronic buzz and '80s snare and cowbell samples from the Drat Fink Archive. Might ultimately fade this in or out of something else.
"Eternal Hiphop" [mp3 removed]. A pattern from the Electribe Rmkii rhythm synth played ad infinitum. Digital signal processing but analog filtered to add some exciting panning.
This is Stefan Schwander, one of my personal musical gods, who records as Antonelli Electr., among other aliases. I'm posting 3 tracks (briefly!!!!!) that he recorded under the name Repeat Orchestra. Schwander's gift is knowing when a musical phrase of the barest few notes has enough intrinsic worth to hang an entire 6 or 7 minute song on it. In this sense musical minimalism (of the techno variety) is very different from Minimalism in the art world, where practitioners had a kind of studied indifference to beauty. Sheet metal boxes on the gallery floor and all that. I see this more as how much can you take out and still have something ultimately seductive and danceable?
[tracks removed]
Two orphaned rhythm tracks.
"Limelight Barely Remixed" [mp3 removed]. And I mean barely--it's a Reaktor preset from the Limelight rhythm synth. Both glitchy and loungy--very pretty. About all I did was record it and fade it.
"Super Slow Tango" [mp3 removed]. Not super slow like Super Slow Tetris, just slow for a tango. I made this with the soft sampler Kontakt.
I've decided to mix in assorted unfinished rhythm tracks from my studio with other music on my hard drive tonight. If you have Traktor you can make your own damn DJ event. Some of this material will be removed in the cold, realistic light of January 1 so grab it while you can! Here's a funk carioca track, probably from Brazil--don't know what he's singing but why do I think "valeni" is something dirty?
[track removed]
Fellow artist/bloggers Marisa Olson and Abe Linkoln are ringing in the new year on a page where they are remixing each other's videos. Here's the URL, but it's not working for me--some people say they can see it and others say they can't. Marisa explains the concept of the blog here. One report I got from someone I asked to test the URL: "i can see it. and i watched a video. painful, but fun.* ----- cant see the remix (which is actually pretty interesting) but i can hear it. some problem with quicktime."
Anyway, in the spirit of blogging on New Year's Eve, I think I'm going to post some drum machine tracks I haven't figured out what to do with yet. Bang in the New Year on that Internet thingie, as it were. Hell, I've gone out every year since I can remember, New York being the mad social whirl that it is. This will be a form of symbolic public reclusiveness, with soundtrack. Hope you'll hang around!
*That must be Abe Linkoln's.
Last night vertexList gallery hosted a semi-private screening of the documentary film 8-Bit, directed by the gallery's proprietor Marcin Ramocki (who is also an artist) and produced by Justin Strawhand, who did the cinematography. The subject is art and the video game, but several distinct cultures and subcultures overlap: the big three being conceptual art, gamers, and electronic music but within that the demoscene, chiptunes, gameboy music, and miscellaneous odd hacks. It's a PBS-quality collection of talking head interviews (including yours truly wearing a suit jacket and doing his best critic impersonation), interspersed with concert footage, video clips, and a kaleidoscope of stills that underscore and comment on things being said in the interviews.
Highlights include the stage appearances of Tree Wave and Bodenstandig 2000 at Jeffrey Deitch last spring, Cory Arcangel discoursing on Nintendo cracking and the different types of synthesizer sounds in '80s computers, Alex Galloway's explanation of his Nam Jun Paik-like physical hacks bringing out the inherent flaws and coding errors in console games, footage from Eddo Stern's trippy, deconstructed Vietnam war game landscapes, Joe McKay on Audio Pong and the attempted or presumed realism of early hockey games, and it must be said, my withering putdown of gameboy music followed by Nullsleep telling me to fuck off from the stage at Deitch. A movie with an eternally adolescent pursuit at its core just wouldn't be complete without a good food fight.