November 2007

Most of my free time lately that would otherwise go to blogging has been committed to converting a mass of my music to CD.
As mentioned previously, I eliminated about 100 songs (because they were collaborations, fragments, "early experiments," or just weren't wearing well), which left me with about 125.
I have been learning to use the "Audio Montage" feature of Steinberg's Wavelab to make discs where the volume levels are more or less uniform and the tracks have some sort of flow. These are not mixes or montages, though; one track just follows another. After doing a "greatest hits" volume I threw in the towel on trying to pick "the best" and started grouping them alphabetically.
Here's what I have so far:
CD1. 19 tracks, random alphabetical.
CD2. 21 tracks, A-C
CD3. 20 tracks, C-H
CD4. 20 tracks, H-R (in progress)
CD5. 19 tracks, S-Y
CD6. 13 tracks, Electribe (the ones I did mostly on a "groovebox" last year fit together better as a group)
CD7. 12-15 tracks, Sidstation (in progress)
CD8. ____tracks, "classical" and miscellaneous experiments (projected)

I've been listening to a CD of Dutch electronic music from the Philips laboratories from 1958-1963, and reading about all the restorative efforts with regard to the analog tapes in the company vaults. Every scrap of tape is lovingly fussed over, and one CD of the four CD set consists of alternate takes and audio "raw material."

Back then electronic music wasn't even polyphonic--you had to run several tape recorders simultaneously and record that to get a master tape. Everything that took an eternity and was precious then can be done easily and quickly on a laptop now. So what happens to the resulting mega-hours of music of the tens of thousands of home computer musicians? Instead of a few scraps lovingly fetishized, you wind up with a mass of organized sound that's actually a burden for your friends to listen to once. Nevertheless, my vague plan is to send CDs around to a few folks who were foolish enough to say they liked my tunes, to be listened to if and when they have the time. These sets are mainly for me. I wish I could say they were helping me to be self-critical but with 125 tunes obviously I like everything I do. A lot.

Some commentary by yours truly on other people's pages.

The thread at Paddy Johnson's concerns "art about the art world," on the occasion of a show on that subject at Momenta Art.

The thread at Nasty Nets is a response to a Joel Holmberg revisitation of a conceptual work from the '60s. I have a fondness too for pictures of hippies drawing lines in space, etc.

Eileen Jones:

The critics who've now decided to approve of the Coens have to find a way to justify the violence they so deplore. Here's Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times giving it a try: "But as the story unfolds with the awful inevitability of a modern myth, it’s clear that the Coen brothers and [novelist Cormac] McCarthy are not interested in violence for its own sake but for what it says about the world we happen to live in."

Yeah, right. The Coens aren't interested in violence for its own sake like the Japanese makers of samurai films aren't interested in violence for its own sake. There’s no beauty or artistry or pleasure or kick or significance in representations of violence qua violence. Heavens no, Priscilla.

More:

Anyway, the story here is not that the Coens are great—we know—it’s the fact that a mere two-decades-plus into their feature filmmaking careers, the Coens have found broad acceptance with American critics. Now they tell us, based on seeing No Country for Old Men, that the Coens typically "combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos" (A.O. Scott, New York Times). All right, then! Even the Village Voice, that malignant foe of all that is good, especially Coen films, has come around a bit, with Scott Foundas opining that No Country is the Coens' "most measured, classical film of their 23-year career, and maybe their best."

Getting uneasy yet, true Coen admirers? You should be. Something very wrong here. Who the hell watches Coen films for measured classicism? Nobody who really likes them, that's who. The Coens mastered film classicism with their ABCs and zoomed on from there. No, what we have here, instead of critics damning the Coens with faint praise, is critics damning them with loud praise. You keep reading these reviews and you realize the damning part is indeed woven into the praise itself. ("Mischievous high spirits"? What are they, elves?) Or else it’s just about to emerge in the next sentence...