My 33 1/3 book, on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, was the 5th bestselling book in the series in 2014. It's available at Amazon (including Kindle) and via your local bookstore. • F.A.Q. • Key Tags: #saw2for33third, #sound-art, #classical, #junto • Elsewhere: Twitter, SoundCloud, Instagram

Listening to art.
Playing with audio.
Sounding out technology.
Composing in code.

tag: IFTTTgram

All the Mod Cons

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

[ February 15, 2020 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

When a prospective* choice for a shower head looks a whole lot like an old-school telephone. Alexa truly is everywhere.

*No, not really my style.

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Ain’t That Grand

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

[ July 21, 2019 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

Bionic piano
Augmented piano
Cyborg piano
Extended piano

What Sound Looks Like: An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

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What’s in a Name?

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

[ April 9, 2019 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

In Grant Morrison’s comics, even the tiniest thing is extravagant — unfolding in hyper-dimensions to reveal internecine complexities of psychedelic detail and epic ramifications — and this was apparently the case as early as his first serialized series. (This panel is from the first collected edition of Zenith, with art by Steve Yeowell, from characters designed by Brendan McCarthy. I’m catching up with very early Morrison comics, thanks to a friend’s recommendation. I’ve read much of what came after Flex Mentallo, but I’d never read Zenith, which was serialized in 2000 AD beginning in the summer of 1987.)

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Safe Harbor

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

[ April 8, 2019 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

When the crackdown got serious on peer-to-peer sharing, the peers went underground, and then underground some more. Hardware saw a resurgence in pass-around thumb drives loaded with chunks of cultural history, but wifi connections to the disparate network remained the preferred mode, albeit with heightened attention to security and privacy. The peers forsook all but the most rudimentary forms of sharing. Nothing was left to the servers of publicly traded companies. Nothing passed through software certified by the app stores baked into the firmware of mobile phones. Nothing was posted without being cleaned of all but the most essential metadata. Caution was taken, in particular, regarding which internet service providers were truly data-agnostic in their functioning, and safe harbor was marked in public spaces with a simple but effective graffiti.

What Sound Looks Like: An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

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What Sounds Looks Like

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

[ April 5, 2019 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

If you’ve ever been required to read contracts on a regular basis, you may know this feeling. The feeling: each paragraph, each sentence, each clause, sometimes even each word feels on its own like an individual vestige of an individual previous incident. The document in front of you is a clot of those numerous and varied incidents, all metastasized amid what was once likely a quite brief, concise, and even innocent document. The innocence was lost in a lengthy sequence of events that required clarification and amendment, and clarifications of amendments, and amendments of clarifications. Certainly some of the initial text reflected actual forethought: someone had considered a misreading of intent (how the spirit might be failed by the letter), and made sure to write — to embed — the specific meaning into the document. But that’s not the feeling you have. The feeling you have is where the scent of some previous incident rises from some bit of language, and with it the full sense memory of that incident you had not, yourself, actually been present for. And when you lift your face up from the contract, you face the real world, and in the real world there are similar clarifications and amendments, some providing helpful orientation, others downright dispiriting in that they evidence fully how sometimes even the most obvious thing needs to be written out in capital letters and affixed with a messy glob of tape.

What Sound Looks Like: An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

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