The record label Mille Plateaux meant the world to me back in the mid-1990s, and it still does. Albums from Oval, Cristian Vogel, Microstoria, Snd, Thomas Köner, and Porter Ricks, just to name a few acts, and later the essential Clicks + Cuts compilation series (the first one, which came out in 2000, had 25 tracks, from the likes of Vladislav Delay, Frank Bretschneider, Alva Noto, Pansonic, Curd Duca, Jake Mandell, Kit Clayton, and Kid 606, among others) were central and defining to my listening, especially in regard to glitch and ambient techno. The label’s founder, Achim Szepanski, died this week at age 67. I interviewed him once, in 1996, back when I was an editor at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazines, for an overview of electronic music labels, when the sheer number of them was exploding, often creating myriad sublabels in the process. “Our label gives the artists the possibility to control the production from the beginning to the end,” Szepanski told me at the time. Read the full piece here.
Category: field notes
News, essays, reviews, surveillance
Flying That Flagg!
And there's so much I didn't have room to mention
I wrote another piece for the great hilobrow.com website, and it’s about Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!
I’m one of 25 authors writing about “science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema).” Other participants include Deb Chachra on The Hyperion Cantos, Adam McGovern on Kid Eternity, Jessamyn West on the Mars Trilogy, and Peggy Nelson on Virtual Light. I initially wrote a draft of something about Challengers of the Unknown (specifically the first team-up of writer Jeph Loeb and the late artist Tim Sale), but then I decided it wasn’t science fiction enough a topic. Here’s how my piece on American Flagg! begins:
It’s 2031. America is a fractured nation ruled by behemoth corporations, terrorized by militarized cults, and hypnotized by messages piped subliminally into always-on televisuals. The planet is scarred by climate change. The government is an absentee landlord, having retreated to Mars. Only one man can save the day: a former TV star named Reuben Flagg. Rendered professionally redundant by CGI actors, Flagg instead fights crime when he’s not shacking up with one femme fatale after another (or maybe the other way around). He’s been conscripted by a private police force called the Plexus Rangers, the military wing of the sort of mega-corporation that doubles as atmospheric bogeyman in dystopian fiction. This is the world of the comic book American Flagg! (indeed, the exclamation point is part of the title).
Actually, it’s 2024 as I type this, and… well, things are somewhat familiar …
Read the full article at hilobrow.com. I have another piece there (on what I’ll describe, for now, as a movie from 1978) due out by the end of the year, and another one after that already in the works (on what I’ll describe, for now, as a TV series that debuted in 1991).
Scratch Pad: Fog, Auth, THX
From the past week
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ The funny thing about the marine layer is how you hear foghorns on sunny days, because the bay is filled with fog while the city skies are clear. Funnier still — odder still — are the days when it’s incredibly foggy out, and yet you hear no foghorns.
▰ The thrill of entering an auth-code while the number is red
▰ Morning trio for dishwasher, shower, and [some sort of sidewalk repair being done by the city involving trees and concrete].
▰ In the center lane of a three-lane street, with a school bus to the left and a city bus to the right, the car’s windows down, and it felt less like real life and more like I was in a THX audio demo
▰ The Disquiet Junto is two weeks from the 666th consecutive weekly project. You might say it’s an omen.
▰ End of day, end of week:
Pigeon’s Eye View
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
More Home Audio
Another day, another trivial yet time-consuming conundrum with playing digital audio files at home. Today there were two odd issues:
The first is a persistent matter that dates back to the earliest experiences I had trying to store albums as audio files, which is the given system doesn’t recognize the files as part of an album. I had a three-track recording, the wav files of which I downloaded, along with cover art, from a music publicist’s Dropbox folder. When I loaded them into Audio Ranger, which is the software I use to edit metadata, only the track file names appeared. The rest of the fields were blank. This lack of data is, unfortunately, quite common with promotional audio files from publicists. I added all the requisite fields, and associated the cover art with the files, and it all looked fine. In fact, when I loaded the tracks into the VLC audio player, it all worked fine. However, when I copied the files to the external hard drive that I use for my Plex jukebox system, only one track was considered the “album,” and the other two tracks were listed as unidentified standalones. I tried to fix this various ways, and in the end the only thing that worked was downloading the album as FLAC files (instead of wav ones).
The second issue was quite odd. A publicist sent me a download link to an album. It seemed vaguely familiar, but the release date was recent, so I just downloaded it, confirmed the files had the metadata (they did, because they were housed on Bandcamp, which seems to routinely handle metadata well, at least for albums with a single artist), and moved them to the external hard drive. However, the album failed to appear in my Plex system’s list of recently added recordings. I tried a few things: I noticed some non-Western symbols in the title, and so I removed those, but to no avail; then I deleted the files from the drive and retransferred them; then I deleted the files, re-downloaded them, and retransferred them. None of these approaches worked. Then I noticed something: the album seemed familiar because I already had downloaded it and saved it to another hard drive in the same Plex system. But the system didn’t alert me to the duplicate copy because I had two sets of files on different drives. The closest it came to acknowledging the issue was by failing to display the new album on the “recently added” playlist.