Month: December 2010

If You Meet the Buddha Machine on the Road, Hack It

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In my fourth guestblog entry at boingboing.net, today I introduce the third generation of the Buddha Machine, which swaps out the ambient tones of the first two generations in favor of those from the most ancient of Chinese stringed instruments, the qin, or guqin, or 古琴. The new device is called Chan Fang, which translates as Zen Room.

Read the full piece: “If You Meet the Buddha Machine on the Road, Hack It.”

There was a Chinese movie about 10 years ago, maybe 15, in which a composer refused to write music for the emperor. I think the two men were estranged childhood friends. In the subtitles, every time someone said the word “qin” it would appear as “qin (zither),” as if after two hours of repetition we hadn’t quite caught on yet. People just started laughing in the audience every time it happened. (This was at the 4 Star movie theater in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond.) If anyone knows the name of this movie, I’d appreciate it. I think the plot is similar to that of the Tan Dun opera, The First Emperor.

The Return, and Expansion, of Yoyo Pang! (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Netlabels work on their own schedules. Take the one known as “yoyo pang!,” which back in 2006, 2007, and 2008 released individual songs as self-contained singles on a semi-regular basis. Then last year, just one, a morsel titled “Lupita” that appeared in October 2009 (disquiet.com). And then, a longer silence than ever, well over a full year — until last week, on December 8, when suddenly an entry popped up in the site’s RSS feed. (Side note to netlabel proprietors: If your site doesn’t have an RSS feed, you’re doing a serious, even egregious, disservice to the musicians who are recording music for you.) Not only was there a new YYP! release — this time by Mi-kuhmi and titled Suara Lucu — it contained not just one but three tracks. It’s a first, a proper EP from a formerly singles-only netlabel.

Each of the three tracks — “Cajaja de Música” (MP3), “Pixie Cup” (MP3), and “Intonarobore” (MP3) — have at that foundation a kind of glistening glitch, like so much tinsel fed through a battery-operated sampler.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/yoyo08/yoyo08-MI-KUHMI-01-cajaja_de_msica.mp3|titles=”Cajaja de Música”|artists=Mi-kuhmi] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/yoyo08/yoyo08-MI-KUHMI-02-pixie_cup.mp3|titles=”Pixie Cup”|artists=Mi-kuhmi] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/yoyo08/yoyo08-MI-KUHMI-03-intonarobore.mp3|titles=”Intonarobore”|artists=Mi-kuhmi]

“Cajaja de Música” sounds like a cyborg’s half-remembered sense of a childhood spent in a room of kid’s instruments, the notes broken and reorganized in a haphazard manner. The piece is touching and sweet, but also unnerving, with its frayed, unresolved melodies. “Pixie Cup,” which appears to be constructed at least in part with the sound of a paper cup, makes “Cajaja” sound downright poppy by comparison — it’s the same room of instruments, long after the kid cyborg have been moved to another facility, and nothing but the wind is left to rattle the old toys. “Intonarobore” mixes in vocal snippets that would scare an adult.

Home page for the Spain-based Mi-Kuhmi at myspace.com/mikuhmi.

On the 14th Anniversary of Purchasing This Domain Name

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It was 14 years ago today that I purchased the Disquiet.com domain.

I thought I’d make some cursory notes as a means of marking the anniversary. I’ve typed much of this in various forms and contexts over the years, but it’s helpful to reflect on it again.

I’d had a web presence on various sites since 1994, at generic URLs hosted by Netcom and Calweb and elsewhere, but I’d felt it was time for a proper home. Also in the running were cilantro.com and yellow.com — at least as memory serves, because according to Whois both of those had already been purchased by someone else by the end of 1994. (Perhaps they’d momentarily lapsed when I was making my decision?)

I went with “disquiet,” the word borrowed from the title of the best known book of the late Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet, as it’s commonly known in English. As far as I know I’m the first person to own the URL. Such a thing sounds fantastical today, when common-word (even semi-common) URLs are hard to come by. The recycling of domains over the years brings to mind that great essay by Colson Whitehead (see nytimes.com, November 11, 2001) about becoming a New Yorker:

[Y]ou are a New Yorker the first time you say, “That used to be Munsey’s” or “That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge.” That before the Internet cafe plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

There isn’t exactly a direct correlation with the Internet, no commonly experienced “Oh, I remember when that URL was an online grocery delivery service, before it was a tech-news site, before it was a discussion hub for enthusiasts of East German munitions.” More applicable is the opening sentence of that same Whitehead essay, which begins, “I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else.” Today, there is a generation that was born on the Internet, born into the Internet (perhaps, some argue, ruined for life without it, though that’s a subject for a different, more considered essay — though for the record, that is not my point of view), while all of us older than that generation came to it as a recently discovered, mostly undeveloped, and seemingly infinite territory.

Whenever I think back to that URL purchase, I remember needing to use a fax machine to handle some of the (then literal) paperwork. It took days for DNS servers to recognize a new website (yeah, gather ’round the campfire of burning cathode-ray monitors, youngins). Phone calls were necessary, and (again, if memory serves) identification — it was very much like crossing a border.

The summer of 1996, I’d left print for the web, left seven years at a print magazine for what turned out to be almost six at a web firm. I’d left print less because I saw a professional opportunity than because I recognized that the Internet was something I wanted to participate in while rules were still being made and norms were still being set. Such thoughts were reflected back at me over the course of the past year when I read about the “locked in” nature of programmed technology in recent books by Kevin Kelly, Douglas Rushkoff, and Jaron Lanier.

At first Disquiet.com was just a place for me to post articles after they’d run their course in whatever print publication I’d written them for. Then I began to receive emails asking when I’d next be publishing something online. It seemed like a weird question — the factual answer was, “I’d be publishing something online as soon as a proper amount of time had passed after I’d first published that same thing in print.” Then it occurred to me to just write things for the site. Blogging comes second nature to us today, but it was a revelation to me when I, say, added a date stamp to an article for the first time (at the suggestion of my coincidentally Portugal-reared friend Jorge Colombo).

Anyhow, if you’re reading this, I’m writing this because you’re reading this. That’s as simple as it gets. It’s been 14 amazing years, with more to come. Apparently December 13, 1996, was a Friday, which means the URL was purchased on Friday the 13th. So much for bad luck.

A Brief Introduction to Netlabels

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The third entry in my spell of guestblog activity is up at boingboing.net. It’s an introduction to the world of netlabels. Those are online record labels that actively release their recordings for free, with the enthusiastic participation of the musicians they work with. For newcomers to this site (and there are quite a few, owing to the readership wake that results from the good ship Boing Boing), netlabels make up a substantial chunk of the material that constitutes the Disquiet Downstream, the weekdaily recommendations of free and legally downloadable music. Check out the piece, “Netlabels: Release, Remix, Repeat” — and certainly give a shout out to your favorite netlabels in the process.

John Cage: Biography, Hit Single, Website

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Star Eyed: The late composer John Cage, the subject of an unusual amount of attention this year.

¶ Cage Unbound: Critic and composer Kyle Gann rightly is confused (in a post at his website, artsjournal.com/postclassic) by the New York Times asking John Adams if he actually listens to John Cage‘s music (at nytimes.com). The occasion is Adams reviewing (at nytimes.com) Kenneth Silverman‘s recent Cage biography, Begin Again. Adams’ response is not much more comforting than is the doubt inherent in the Times’ question:

It sounds absurd to say that Cage was “hugely influential” and then admit you rarely listen to his music, but that’s the truth for me, and I suspect it’s the same for most composers I know.

Gann lists In a Landscape, Experiences 1 & 2, Dream, and The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs as pieces he gets “an urge to hear now and then, and have to put them on.” As always, his site’s commenters are especially informed. Gann has his own Cage book out this year, focused on 4’33”, the piece of which Adams says that people overstate its artistic value and thus “confuse art with philosophy.” I read the Adams review late because I was finishing my own review of the Silverman book. I think the only things we really had in common were using the word “maverick” and noting that the book is a straight biography not a “critical” one. While reading the book, I had the idea to do a week where I link to freely available recordings of Cage’s work that I love, to help, in some small way, dispel the notion that Adams, sadly, perpetuates. I have a general impression that 4’33” has become so famous that there’s a lot of people (not Adams, certainly, but the general public) who think John Cage was a stand-up philosopher and/or avant-garde visual artist who made a single musical prank, rather than a well-educated, well-trained and prolific composer who became a public intellectual through sheer force of intellect and charisma. And who also made visual art.

Reviews of the Silverman are beginning to spill out. There’s one in the Dallas Morning News in which Olin Chism writes, “This being 2010, Silverman covers Cage’s amours — mostly with men but sometimes with women — in considerable detail.” Adams, it’s worth noting, says that the book is lacking in “delicious details.”

Chism’s review has an odd note. In it, he writes, “If there is one deficiency in Silverman’s biography, it is the lack of a way for the reader to hear any of Cage’s music. A CD with samples would have been nice.” But the copy of the book that I have includes a URL at which Knopf, its publisher, has posted sample audio, courtesy of the Mode Records label. And throughout the book there are notations that one should visit the website to hear music that complements the text. The audio is at knopfdoubleday.com/beginagain. The very first track, the prepared piano work Bacchanale (1940), performed by Philipp Vandré, is exactly the sort that I would feature in a week-long promotion of Cage’s not just listenable but enjoyable music.

¶ In the Name of …: It’s certainly likely that some of the musicians involved in the “Cage Against the Machine” project know as much about John Cage as did some of those involved in “We Are the World” knew about Africa, but it’s still a great idea. More details at facebook.com/cageagainstthemachine about how a new, star-studded rendering of 4’33” (among the participants are Billy Bragg, Orbital, the Kooks, and Guillemots, according to a piece at theglobeandmail.com) is taking on British schlock pop in an annual popularity contest. A video apparently will debut Monday at the home page of the Guardian newspaper’s website, guardian.co.uk.

¶ Building Trust: And, previously unknown to me, this is the website of the “Official blog of the John Cage Trust”: johncagetrust.blogspot.com. Laura Kuhn, who figures in the Silverman book, is its executive director. The blog’s first post appears to have occurred in October 2009.