- "@dizzybanjo: I asked in the Tate shop if they had anything on Susan Philipsz. 'Susan Who? Oh … No'" #
- That sense that somewhere at this very moment David Shields is painstakingly constructing a novel entirely from other people's tweets. #
- Good @inceptiontheapp chat: "I'm not sure under what circumstances you would use this" vs "pretty amazing piece of work": http://is.gd/iwm4A #
- Who fancy is in SF? Champagne SUV just headed toward ocean guided by dozen-plus motorcycle police. #
- "He lived in his head. Doesn't everyone? The difference is that he knew it." Richard Hell on Jim Carroll via @nytimes: http://j.mp/hKoJ1s #
- Autocorrect in iOS just turned "Richard Hell" into "Richard He'll." #
- The Organic Reactive Audio Filter: my infant, snoring on my shoulder, occasionally alters breathing due to external noise (bus, dishes). #
- Wrote twice in two days about things Yes-related: Bad Plus (covered "Runaround"), Hans Zimmer (in video for Buggles song with Horn/Downes). #
- RT @BoingBoing: Music Apps Killed the MP3 Star http://bit.ly/hWDyI6 [In which I extoll the reactive-sound virtues of the Inception app.] #
- RIP, saxophonist James Moody (b. 1925) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/arts/music/11moody.html via @rlainhart #
- Funny to see head of @mystified131 appear multiple times along the bottom of the waveform of this track by @hiddenplace http://is.gd/itIiD #
- 76,126 people now like Cage Against the Machine on Facebook. Of my 508 Facebook friends, only 11 like it. C'mon people! http://is.gd/itbbL #
- Bookies give 8-1 odds that John Cage's 4'33" wins the Christmas No 1 spot: http://is.gd/it8CB #cageagainstthemachine #
- On Goodreads accidentally clicked "Forgive Ourselves, Totally: Begin Again by Breaking Free from Past Mistakes" but meant the John Cage bio. #
- Will Robert Fripp make as much off the new Kanye as Nick Lowe made from the Bodyguard soundtrack? #
- In the 4chan movie, the @smithsonian-nixed Wojnarowicz video would be playing on all government-installed televisions/monitors right now. #
- .@Gurdonark Yeah, my biggest Win 7 issue is getting some Steam games, like Chimes, to play on my Netbook. Other netbook issue: Gimp. #
- Congrats @thicketapp @soundythingie @snibbe @hansolhuh @hypmag for Apple's recognition of "Generative Art & Sound" apps: http://is.gd/isOqy #
- Aleksei Saks of @umamusic reports: "Peter Chilvers using Bloom from his iPad on our Estonian tour. Enjoy to play with these sounds." #
- Fave (Win7) shareware of the moment: WinSplit, ResophNotes, Filezilla, Volumouse, Quintessential, Dark Room. #
- "@alexismadrigal: It's probably $100,000." And rewards Twitter, which folks might not dig. Still, about a dime for every tweet we've seen. #
- Wikileaks fails Twitter-trends algorithm. Wikileaks funding is cut off. Is there a pool to fund a "promoted" Wikileaks Twitter trend? #
- Oh, 4chan overlords, please don't slay me for neglecting to capitalize the L in Wikileaks. #
- For you WordPress(.org) users who check Twitter more than your Dashboard, there's a new security upgrade: http://is.gd/istmj #
- Brief interview I did with Bad Plus pianist. Love the electricity-free techno of title cut off its new album, Never Stop: http://is.gd/ismJx #
- Charles Stross' Accelerando prepared me for the Singularity — and for watching my infant grow. #
- “@eleventhvolume: choice for funeral song: Tango of Oblivion by Dino Saluzzi (solo bandoneon).”I think we own the same records. #
- True Deep After-Midnight Silence (Light Tinnitus Mix) #
- "@aworks: Einstein on the Beach in Berkeley. 2012!" That is great news. Thanks for the alert. Some details: http://is.gd/iqIKG #
- Trying to sort out when in Twitter to auto-retweet, when to RT, when to use quotation marks. Had been doing 2nd but am shifting to 3rd. #
- .@countrymarxist Oh, a Bloom piece? I cannot wait to hear it! #
- Major thanks @saraivry @lenpsmall & everyone @tabletmag for the whole "Hanukkah, remixed" project! http://is.gd/hXa01 http://is.gd/i7DDz #
- ♫ Hanukkah, night/track 8: “Yishama-O-Rama (Radiata Edit)”by Cut Loose (Wellington, NZ); original by Klezmer Rebs http://is.gd/hXa01 #
- "police believe Ronni Chasen was killed in a botched robbery." Terriers anyone? World has pulled flip on Law & Order. #headlinesrippedfromtv #
- This rain makes me wanna contact-mic my roof, but for the time being I'll just continue to record sounds with my pen (and keyboard). #
- This whole Wikileaks thing is moving from Transmetroplitan (gonzo journalism 3.0) to Fahrenheit 451 (media demonization of media defiance). #
- Early warnings: @eleventhvolume on Sleazy's accomplishment on Peter Gabriel's solo debut cover design http://is.gd/ip9Qp #
- The pulsing red background to the Inception app looks like if Mark Rothko had collaborated on Brion Gysin's Dreammachine. #
- Do we pay "longbox tax" when we cough up $1.99 for e-comics? Seems pricey, like paying for convenience of not having pile of pamphlets. #
- Anonymous 4 and 4chan should collaborate for some early hacker polyphony. #
- Just got wrong-number call asking for the IT director. That could have been fun. "See that plug, yeah, just pull it out." #
- Thanks for the interest in Roach/Freeman Immersion Station app. Congrats, @abre_ojos @HillfieldMuncky @Humean; I'll be in touch with codes. #
- Want free copy of Roach/Freeman app Immersion Station? Tweet me @disquiet. 3 random wins in 1 hour, sooner if 40 reply. http://is.gd/ioL9n #
- Have 3 copies of Steve Roach & Eric Freeman Immersion Station iOS app. Read up here http://immersionstation.com/ Contest starts on the hour. #
- .@Richard_Kadrey Sweet, a mellotron app. I love the Korg DS-10, and all these generative things popping up. #
- Motorcycles and Cars (Breathing of Infant Sleeping on Shoulder Mix) #
- Tomorrow I'll give away copies (i.e., freebie codes) of Steve Roach's iOS app, Immersion Station. First I need to figure best way to do it. #
- RT @robinrimbaud I'm just mastering [new Turner winner] Susan Philipsz's new vinyl release too so stay tuned for that very special edition. #
- ♫ Hanukkah, night/track 7: “Hava Nagila”remixed by Roddy Schrock. Original by Paul Toshner & Felix Benasuly (poi43.com). http://is.gd/hXa01 #
- Good conversation going on ramifications of app instruments (copyright, etc.) http://is.gd/in5yq I'll weigh in after I get Vietnamese food. #
- Thanks for the good wishes, regarding @boingboing, folks. More to come. Very excited for Susan Philipsz's Turner; great news for sound art. #
- .@countrymarxist If you record with Bloom, I'd love to hear it. #
- RT @telstarlogistic celebrate Dark Matter Awareness Week http://bit.ly/fiLpNK [Oh that's why the 12/2 ep of Nikita was titled "Dark Matter"] #
- Words that 25 years ago I never dreamed I'd have the opportunity to type: Winners of Steve Reich remix contest announced: http://is.gd/imqRy #
- RT @xenijardin Yo, Marc Weidenbaum, Welcome to @boingboing guestblog http://tinyurl.com/3yxd4bb Turner sound art: http://tinyurl.com/36g5n3j #
- It's like if Eric Satie made industrial music today at home: baby's vibro-chair in living room, while washing machine rumbles in the rear. #
- Tuesday noon siren, followed by house-rattling bus. #
- Susan Philipsz, now the first sound artist to win Turner Prize: http://j.mp/hBdwHQ This is great. I was just glad she got shortlisted. #
- Distant Traffic (Creaking House and Hard Drive Mix) #
- ♫ Hanukkah, night/track 6: “Chanukah Chag Yafe”remix by @ocp_pt_vu (João Ricardo), original by Alexandria Kleztet http://is.gd/hXa01 #
- These 100s of Wikileaks mirrors make me feel like I'm living in @warrenellis's Transmetropolitan or one of @doctorow's young-adult books. #
- Terriers has been canceled. I need to drown my sorrows in dim sum. #
- Rattly Cardboard Scavenger Truck (Soggy Night Mix) #
- Keith Rowe with Oren Ambarchi and Crys Cole, shot last night: http://is.gd/igLZZ As always, great performance photos from downtownmusic.net. #
- ♪ Listen(ing) to a drone minus the drone, by @vuzhmusic, who calls it "a map of the freckles on the skin of the drone": http://is.gd/igwIH #
- RT @osakimandias It's not rain I care for, it's the sound of the rain. And a day that is aurally good becomes subtly better in other ways. #
- ♫ Hanukkah, night/track 5: New Klezmer Trio's “Thermoglyphics”remixed by @robotdancerobot aka @mrbiggsdotcom http://is.gd/hXa01 #cyborgfolk #
- Light Rain on Wood, Glass, Concrete, Tar, and Grass (Desktop Computer Hard Drive and Fan Mix) #
- You can criticize governmental bloodlust regarding Wikileaks without thinking the best diplomacy means naked diplomats in glass embassies. #
- Finished reading a book. It was cool, like a whole buncha tweets in a row (a lot, too many to count) someone had printed out and bound. #
- Noon Church Bells and Passing Aircraft (Closed Windows on Cold Day Mix) #
- Ownership of a ukulele presents a much greater threat to commercially recorded music than does filesharing. #
- No, your fingers are not numb. Those are calluses: ukulele calluses. The irony: finding strumming more challenging than the chord stuff. #
- ♫ Hanukkah, night/track 4: Diego Bernal riffs on “Ose Shalom”by 4th Ward Afro-Klezmer Orch http://is.gd/hXa01 + 22tape's http://is.gd/i7DDz #
- It's a Lone Wolf and Cub kinda day. #
- Wikileaks: Chinese government "obsessed with…threat posed by…Internet to their grip on power." http://is.gd/icyf4 Sure it's only China? #
Month: December 2010
Bloom + Birdsong (MP3)
The brief description of the track “Morning Forest Bloom” by Travis Nobles mentions that the piece of music includes a field recording that Nobles borrowed, with permission, from the Creative Commons site freesound.org. Those, however, aren’t the only found sounds on the track. At over half an hour long, it is comprised largely of musical notes that will be familiar to anyone who has used the iOS app Bloom, a generative music work developed by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers.
“Morning Forest Bloom” first came to my attention when Nobles participated in what has turned out to be a fairly lengthy discussion of music apps on this site earlier this week (“A Bloom Is a Bloom Is a Bloom”, with 27 comments and counting). The discussion dove in deep into whether an app is an instrument, and whether the developers of music apps fully understand what they are doing when they use the term “instrument” to describe their efforts. Do they give up ownership, for example, of the sounds? As one participant, Nipperkin, put it, “Whatever the designer/coder intended on making and marketing it, once it is out in the world, people are going to use as they wish.”
Nobles makes no great claims for his work, describing it as “not particularly creative … but … pleasant to listen to.” Mixed, as they are, with the field recordings of birdsong, the Bloom notes bring to mind the last truly great Eno album, Thursday Afternoon, which is an ecstatic occurrence of daybreak ambience. Pleasant, most certainly.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/travisnobles. More on Nobles at his blog, hiddenplacemusic.blogspot.com. That field recording is by someone who goes by inchadney at freesound.org;
Liked the Movie, Loved the App: Inception
Have a piece up from this morning at boingboing.net taking a look at the brand new iOS app for the film Inception. The app is no mere highly branded phone fodder (you know, the ones packed with framed still images, weak interactive mini-games, and links to trailers for unrelated movies). It’s a lovingly realized rendition of the RjDj app, done in collaboration with the folks behind the film, including director Christopher Nolan and the film’s composer, Hans Zimmer, overseen by Michael Breidenbrüker of RjDj parent company Reality Jockey. Full piece: “Music Apps Killed the MP3 Star.”
Dream Machine: Four screen shots from the iOS app for the film Inception
A cursory search of this site finds almost two dozen mentions of RjDj since September 2009, most of them Twitter observations typed somewhere out in the world, where the software has taken a busker’s trumpet and turned it into a cellophane ribbon of ambient sound, or has echoed a pneumatic drill until it’s a dank minimal-techno beat. Often as not, these moments have felt filmic, bringing to mind sequences in Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, when the light technological mediation of experience was enough to make one feel just ever so slightly in the future.
The adoption of RjDj as a part of the massively popular Inception franchise is a great opportunity for reactive sound to reach a broader audience.
It’s also a useful reminder of how context is essential in adapting to new ways of thinking about, and participating in, sound (and, yes, a marketing budget and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s blue eyes do help). As of this writing, the Inception app has a four-star average rating: 36 five-star, 11 one-star, 12 in between — and at least two of those negative reviews are purely technical (Bluetooth and iPhone functionality issues). The latest version of RjDj has, by coincidence, exactly the same number of five- and one-star reviews, but far more (38) in between — and out of the 8,631 reviews that RjDj has received thus far (Apple lets you see the ratings for the latest version of an app, and for the app over the history of its iterative upgrades), it has a three-star average rating, but there are more one-star reviews (2,187) than there are any of the other stars (five-star comes in a close second, at 2,160).
Sound, it’s worth noting, was an essential part of the structure of Inception. The film signaled a shift between dream levels by using an orchestration of a maudlin Édith Piaf pop song heard elsewhere in the film, slowed down almost beyond recognition (see: “On the Sudden Popularity of Glacial Sound”).
Anyhow, the full BoingBoing.net piece: “Music Apps Killed the MP3 Star.”
PS: I also realize that somehow I’ve managed to write two times in as many days about things that resolve back to the prog rock band Yes. In the Boing Boing piece on Inception, I reference Zimmer’s association with the band the Buggles, which was founded by two people who worked with Yes (Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes), and the day prior I interviewed the Bad Plus, who covered Yes’ “Long Distance Runaround” on its 2008 album, For All I Care.
Industrial Industrial Music = Folk Music (MP3)
About a third of the way through Durán Vázquez‘s recent podcast at cronicaelectronica.org, there is a tea-kettle whine to end all tea-kettle whines.
[audio:
http://download.cronicaelectronica.org/cronicast068.mp3|titles=”Casa das Atochas (August 19 2010)”|artists=Durán Vázquez]
http://download.cronicaelectronica.org/cronicast068.mp3|titles=”Casa das Atochas (August 19 2010)”|artists=Durán Vázquez]
It is high and it is shrill, and it is pitched like a war cry and it is as insistent as a hungry infant. And yet, it is thoroughly enjoyable (MP3). It has, in this context, the quality of a high lonesome yodel in a country song, or of a piercing clarinet solo in a klezmer performance. The context is a roiling whir of mechanized activity — brushed-metal static and turbine roars, fissures of static magnified for the ear. Which is to say, it’s industrial industrial music. And which is to say, it is folk music: like much music made from the sounds of the automated environment, it’s a music that takes the world around us (the world we ourselves made: the built environment) and transforms it into something celebrates those sounds, and frames them for consideration outside their everyday context.
At almost 24 minutes in length, it’s a hefty listen, moving slowly through territory at once alien and familiar. According to a brief note, the recording was made live during a “Tan inauditos!!” (translated: “So unheard!!”) performance at Casa das Atochas, A Coruña City, Galicia (Spain), on August 19, 2010.
Best Acoustic Techno of the Year (Bad Plus Interview)
The Bad Plus — the jazz trio best known for its covers of Black Sabbath and Vangelis, not to mention György Ligeti and Igor Stravinsky — is the rare jazz band that functions like a rock band. That’s what I focused on when interviewing Ethan Iverson, the group’s pianist, for a short piece recently. It’s available at csindy.com. The title track of the new Bad Plus album, Never Stop, may be the best electricity-free techno ever (a category that could do with more material). It was composed by the group’s bassist, Reid Anderson. It’s the band’s first album ever with no covers; it’s all originals by the band members (drummer David King, in addition to Iverson and Anderson). The editor gave my interview a great title: “Compose Yourself.”
And here are a few things that didn’t make the printed interview, due to length:
¶ The “Never Stop” song was written for an Isaac Mizrahi fashion show.
¶ Asked if he’d ever tried augmenting his piano electronically (in addition to the band’s interest in Aphex Twin, and the techno-ness of “Never Stop,” Iverson has played with digi-celllist Hank Roberts), Iverson said, “Reid works on electronica every day but I don’t know much about it. I just play the piano.”
¶ There are no current plans for remixes. Said Iverson, “What a nice idea — no plans yet, but you never know.”
Full story at csindy.com.