This drawing accompanied the recent gameinformer.com interview with DJ Shadow about his participation in the development of the DJ Hero video game:
I’m probably mistaken in assuming that it’s an in-game representation of Shadow, but that’s the impression I got.
The plan is for this automated tool to post, every weekend, the entries I’ve made at twitter.com/disquiet in the previous seven days. This post shows the entries from April 26 through May 16, because for reasons beyond me the tool didn’t work for a while. That said, it didn’t skip anything, since the previous such post (disquiet.com) was on April 26.
Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:
● The Copyleft Potential of Ripped ‘Rock Band’ Music Tracks (gamesetwatch.com): Like CDs, the musical content of music video-games is making its way to the Internet’s back alleys, leading to a new layer of copyright issues — which is to say, opportunities for cultural appropriation and remixing. Writes Eric Caoili, "This might not seem any more remarkable than the pirated MP3s that we're already so familiar with, but you should remember that these are based on the songs' masters and stored as 'multitracked audio with isolated guitars, drums, vocals, etc.', perfect for remixing." More at the website of Flash developer Mike Nowak, the-inbetween.com. (Via twitter.com/Nobuooo.)
● Dan Hill on the Sound of Cities (cityofsound.com): A thorough survey by Dan Hill on his ever-excellent blog of the issues involving the sound of transportation, from cars to bicycles to buses, and what they mean as the contemporary urban environment wrestles with increasing density and the rising price of energy. The piece presumes that cars are on their way out, something I think it's too early to be sure about, and also seems to perpetuate the idea that bicyclists have less responsibility than drivers when it comes to looking out for the best interest of pedestrians ("A bell suffices, and after that it’s about taking due care and attention on both sides"). It is packed with rich examples on the challenge, easily dispels the recent myth that there's any concern about the relative quietude of hybrid cars, and colorfully proposes curated city sounds: "SND score Sheffield as a series of pulsing, jittery staccato tones; cars pausing at a stop-light in Ginza are suddenly part of a DJ Signify tune; Steve Roden pins up a series of aleatoric triggers across Echo Park…" (Via twitter.com/djrupture.)
● Holger Czukay on Karlheinz Stockhausen (newstatesman.com): “[Karlheinz] Stockhausen, however, couldn’t handle pop or rock music — it was not his field. And his music is mainly scored. In my group, Can, we did exactly the opposite: we improvised everything — performed with an ’empty head’ — and composed the music afterwards by editing the tape. When Can started in 1968, it was understood we wouldn’t speak of him, because we had to do the opposite. We had to kill him so that we could start something new.” From an essay by Can’s Holger Czukay on Karlheinz Stochausen.
● DJ Shadow on ‘DJ Hero’ (gameinformer.com): The game will attempt to do for turntables what Guitar Hero did for guitars. As DJ Shadow, who advised on the game's development, said, the real test of the DJ Hero controller is: “Would this make some eight year old kid who got it for Christmas want to try the real thing?” He also comments on a unique distinction between guitar heroes and DJ heroes: "I mean some of the best DJs I’ve ever seen play do nothing on a technical level that would blow any turntablist’s mind, but they can read the crowd really well and it’s all about their song selection and the progression of the music that they play over the night." (Via nobuooo.com.)
More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.
From Dan Visconti‘s May 15 piece, at newmusicbox.org, in which he recounts a recent recording session:
There is a German word for which there is no easy English translation — tonmeister — that is loosely equivalent to “recording engineer” or maybe “producer”. Maybe “sound director” would be the best translation — a lead engineer who is equally at home recording, mixing, rehearsing, and following a score. The tonmeister takes an active role in the entire process, and first spends many hours studying and marking scores, planning takes as well as a rehearsal schedule. All decisions on how to record the piece — especially the choice and placement of microphones — are ultimately based on the tonmeister’s understanding and interpretation of this score, so I’m grateful to have someone who really understands these pieces at the helm.
Sounds sort of like a sonic dramaturge.
The three tracks that constitute Intermittent, a new release by Tel Aviv-based Shay Nassi, who records as Mise en Scene, are each committed acts of sonic exploration. They are each different, and each is focused on a specific core sound and mode — grinding drone on #1 (MP3), industrial churn on #2 (MP3), and metallic rumble on #3 (MP3) — and each avoids repetition in favor of slow change. What they have in common sonically at most involves a pattern on Nassi’s part of combining high- and low-pitched sounds, pairings that interact in a variety of ways, with the higher sound generally serving a kind of aural aura.
More at the releasing netlabel, stasisfield.com.
