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"Anthropos Essentia" [4.8 MB .mp3]
The title is copped from A. A. Attanasio's book Centuries, 1997. The A.E. were an earth colony on Mars trying to live "old school"--rejecting ion washes and Simviv (and therefore longevity), growing their own food, and warring with the Cogs (robotic minions of the Silicon Mind). One of the colony members wrote a profound piece of music called the "Datum Surface Raga," which helped the metasapient earthling Rafe von Takawa find spiritual equilibrium, much as the datum surface expresses a kind of average level of the shifting Martian topography. The Anthropos Essentia have a secret that will not be revealed here.
Update: made various edits throughout the song, and it's now shorter in length.
"Bass-o-matic" [mp3 removed]
This is the piece I was describing here, process-wise. All the sounds came from the same model of drum machine, with filtering and other sampler manipulation. Mostly they're my samples, but a few came from a Linplug kit that recorded the same piece of analog gear. One thing I'm happy about is the way the song switches meter several times, getting progressively looser and more "rockin" as it goes along.
I am working on a piece of music that is coming along slowly. I am creating "phat" sounds (to my ear anyway) with a hardware drum machine and sampling them, one hit at a time as well as in loops. The samples are then being loaded into various samplers as "drum kits" which can be played with the same MIDI notes used to trigger the original sounds and loops, in addition to any new notes I want to write. What this is doing is dramatically expanding the range of the drum machine. Besides being able to play polyrhythms it can now treat the drum hits as "pitched material," meaning I can write tunes for the tom-toms and flexible "multi" channel (used to synthesize cowbells and such). When raised or lowered in pitch these no longer sound like drums, but rather unusual synthesizers, which can be further modified with a bevy of effects (compression, phasing, resampling) built into the samplers. My plan is first to write a piece consisting entirely of sounds from the original machine, and then to use the sampled kits as rhythm instruments on subsequent tunes. Slow work, but I'm learning a lot.
Tom Moody
Vortex 1, 2006, a work in three parts:
a. ink jet collage on paper, 19 3/4 X 16 3/4 inches
b. DVD-R, loop of animated GIF
c. Blog History:
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34049
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34065
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34085
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34135
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34459
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?37166
http://tommoody.us/images/aug06/andor1photoreal.gif
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?37311
Tom Moody
Vortex 2, 2006, a work in three parts:
a. ink jet collage on paper, 20 3/4 X 16 3/4 inches
b. DVD-R, loop of animated GIF
c. Blog History:
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34125
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34145
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34152
http://tommoody.us/animation/AndOr2_Anim_photoreal.GIF
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34459
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34854
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?35330
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?37166
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?37311
http://tommoody.us/images/aug06/andor2photoreal.gif
Hey, progressive bloggers, can you please, please stop using Robert Fisk's name as a verb? The veteran reporter for The Independent has been a staunch, pointedly critical source of news about the Middle East for years, a beacon in the smog of propaganda that passes for reportage on this side of the pond. For reasons that make absolutely no sense (see the comments to this post), warmonger troglodyte bloggers started using his name a while back to mean "assiduously refute a blog post." It has an unpleasant sexual ring, as in "fisting."
To be less precise, Wikipedia defines it as "a point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or a news story." But why should this be associated with Fisk, as opposed to any other journalist? It's not like the term "bowdlerize," meaning censor, which was named for a man named Bowdler, a censor. There is some etymology in the comments: apparently the term originated with Andrew Sullivan or Instacracker, but it is nonsensical, even as a smear. In any case, given that these blowhards mean it as an insult, why would anyone opposed to Bush's various wars want to do that? Robert Fisk is our friend. Jane Hamsher, others, could you please stop using it? It's even worse that writing "ANWR" instead of Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, a trick right out of Frank Luntz's pro-pollution handbook.
devil tail mandala--artist unknown
Trite Image of the Day
This page respectfully dissents from Regine's and Paddy's granting of Image of the Day status to the above jpeg, and The Telegraph's original designation of it as an "image of the week." That is, assuming those titles carry with them some honorary weight and don't mean "sensational but trite image of the week."
Here's how the Telegraph describes it: "Visitors walk under 'Head On' by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. The installation consists of a pack of 99 life-sized wolves, fabricated from painted sheepskins and stuffed with hay and metal wires, barreling in a continous stream towards--and into--a glass wall." Regine helpfully adds: "Only the first ones crash into it, but the pack chases after the leader."
The above photo is to art what Steven Spielberg's cinematography is to movies: visually dramatic, epic in scale, pompous, obvious. Actually that's not fair to Spielberg, who's greatest sin is indulging in razzle-dazzle imagemaking that has nothing to do with his plots. For example, why have a long bike chase if ET could levitate the bicycle all along? Because chases are so...cinematic. But the bicycle flying in front of the moon is kind of striking. One or the other--you can't have both. Cai Guo-Qiang faced no such choice. He has created a singular story, the theme of which is "Think for yourself, dude; following others can, like, lead to tragedy." As if that wasn't bad enough, he has his wolves flying through the air like Santa and his eight tiny reindeer. Why? Because it looks dramatic in the gallery. Please.