Comics author (Planetary, Fell), novelist (Crooked Little Vein), and general web presence (warrenellis.com, freakangels.com, the mailing list BadSignal, the podcast 4am) Warren Ellis writing via his Twitter account this past Tuesday:
Sometimes I’d rather listen to my Buddha Machine than anything else.
Follow his tweets at twitter.com/warrenellis. (I occasionally update mine: twitter.com/disquiet.)
The site is currently being upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (wordpress.org), the content management system in which it is published. The only thing left to fix is the post topic links (free, gadget, netlabel, etc.), which aren’t currently functioning.
If you’re a regular reader of this site and you come upon anything that doesn’t appear to be functioning as it should, please shoot me an email. Thanks.
Update: The tags are now functioning properly, so feel free to look for gadget-related info about netlabels and instrumental hip-hop (aka i-hop).
Wondering what musical thing the DS will do next after Electroplankton? How about simulating a full-fledged synthesizer? The new KORG DS-10 from AQ Interactive reproduces the late-1970s MS-10 on the popular Nintendo handheld.
The product’s ad site (at aqi.co.jp, from which the above image is borrowed) says it’s for Japan only, but the site is available entirely in English — and it includes a club-ready sound file that evidences the electro verisimilitude of the port (MP3). More details at gizmodo.com, engadget.com, musicthing.blogspot.com and createdigitalmusic.com.
The turntable crew called the X-ecutioners were the Mills Brothers of hip-hop and the Harlem Globetrotters of hip-hop, all wrapped up in one multi-LP ensemble of intensely calisthenic musicality. Key among them was member Rob Swift, who has surfaced with a new group effort, a trio named Ill Insanity, which teams him with two other one-time X-men, DJs Total Eclipse and Precision.
A full track off their new album, Ground Xero (Ablist), “5 Fingers of Death” adds guest DJ Q-Bert for a disarmingly understated effort of live beatmaking, with select vocal fragments that mesh with the rhythms and texture of the constantly moving vinyl (MP3). It’s available courtesy of the great retailer fatbeats.com, which has the album for sale in CD, LP and DRM-free MP3 format. More info at djrobswift.com.
Complaints that the Nintendo DS cartridge Electroplankton has no “record” feature have been answered. Not by some cheat code that reveals a command to record the sounds produced by users on the ingenious sound toy. No, instead by the increasing number of musicians who treat the Electroplankton as an instrument, plain and simple. No one looks at a clarinet and says, “Pity it doesn’t have a record function.” Electroplankton-enthusiast musicians just hook up a microphone, or an analog-to-digital converter, and add the game’s inherent generative samples to their tool set.
The forums at various video-game websites are a good place to fish for Electroplankton-based songs. Last month (at boards.gamefaqs.com), an individual going by yangfeili linked to two such pieces: the mix of aquatic frivolity and electro-carillon that is “Holy Plankton Ocean Temple” (MP3) and a rough draft (“napkin doodle,” jokes the composer) of the darker, more insistent “BeatNESvania: Sea of Agony,” which includes an industrial-style vocal sample (MP3).
You can record Electroplankton compositions without a microphone — you just have to transcribe them as a series of instructions. (The image above, of a typical Electroplankton interface, is borrowed from the ones included in the gamefaqs.com repository.) In another forum thread at boards.gamefaqs.com, a composer-user named Dumbledope describes how to make a tidy little loop system in one of the game’s underwater interfaces, named Hanenbrow. Here is the meat of the composition, but do click through for further details:
Press the A-button to show the degrees.
Position the launching leaf at 57 degrees.
Position the bottom right leaf at 8 degrees.
Position the middle right leaf at 273 degreesNow for the only difficult part. You have to use the speed that is exactly one unit slower than the default speed. Press left on the d-pad once to do this. If you hold the button too long, the game will interpret that as a speed shift of more than one unit. The reason this is difficult is that “too long” is actually pretty short. Try to only tap left on the d-pad; don’t press it too long.
This transcription method of reproducing Electroplankton music is quite handy, as is the method of posting screenshots of a given set-up. It’s as if the game’s developer, media artist Toshio Iwai, has re-introduced the concept of sheet music at a moment when studio-based compositions had seemed to relegate it to the recycle bin of history.
