Via a nudge from Tim Prebble’s substation.co.nz:
1. What are the last 3 things you purchased? Cab fare home. Dinner. Lunch. 2. What are the last 3 songs you downloaded? Tracks from Miles from India, Kosma’s New Aspects, and Earth’s The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull (all from emusic.com). 3. Where were the […]
This is from Rudy Rucker’s recent novel, Postsingular:
But you have to be kidding about including all that data. Just do a link. If you put too much into a metanovel, it’s as dull as a nearly empty file. Everything and Nothing are the same, you feel me? Aim your frame.
The speaker is one Darlene, the […]
From Steven Millhauser’s short story “The Next Thing” in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s magazine:
And I seemed to hear, along with the clatter of shopping carts, and voices in the nearby aisles, the dim sounds of a summer night: laughter on a front porch, dishes rattling through an open kitchen window, a shout, a […]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Generative music-maker Kenneth Kirschner is the subject of a new interview up at tokafi.com: “[Q:] Your music is electronically processed to a large extent. Why then, are you still interested in the piano as a basis? [A:] I think piano is often for me the clearest and most direct […]
“The design is such that the sound of the book being opened onto a table has infrasonic content, too low for human hearing. The book briefly vibrates at eighteen hertz, which is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. … It’s a book that forces you to read it.”
That bit of sci-fi product design is […]
Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) Excellent interview with soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone, ever cantankerous and reticent to share (guardian.co.uk), though he does take the time to (advisedly) criticize Hollywood’s distinction between composing and arranging: “In the history of music, composition is instrumentation.” … (2) A review of a solo show by William Anastasi […]
Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) Apparently this (link) is a half-hour video of the duo FM3 (Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian) playing chess with their Buddha Machines at the De Appel museum of contemporary art in Amsterdam, November 2005 (via chaile.org). The sound quality isn’t great, but eventually people shush and the music […]
Quick Links: (1) The Freesound Project is “a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds,” at freesound.iua.upf.edu (via makezine.com). Among the highlights is a “remix tree,” in which users add samples of previous entries, forming an outline-style branching tree of derived sounds. … (2) Also via makezine, the WorldEar project, a somewhat utopian sound-art project […]
Radio Free Albemuth was Philip K. Dick’s last book. It makes a fitting subject for the Sine Fiction series of scores for classic science fiction novels, if for no other reason than its protagonist works in the music industry. Technically, Radio Free Albemuth isn’t a classic, as it’s one of Dick’s least known full-length books. […]