May 2008
"Blistering Alpha"
"Blistering Alpha" [mp3 removed]
This is kind of a goof on trance music. It is a mashup of two earlier tunes that I noticed had the same bpm.
Thomas M. Disch '80s Computer Game
From the science fiction author's Wikipedia entry:
In 1987 Disch collaborated with New Jersey software company Cognetics Corp. and games publisher Electronic Arts to create the interactive fiction text adventure Amnesia, which could be played on the Commodore 64, IBM PC or Apple II computers. The title, based on technology pioneered by Cognetics' Charles Kreitzberg, was produced by Don Daglow and programmed by Kevin Bentley. It showcased Disch's vivid writing, a stark contrast to other game-programmer-written text adventures of the time, and his passion for the energy of the city of New York. Although the text adventure format was dying by the time Amnesia was released and it enjoyed limited success, the game pioneered ideas that would later become popular in game design by modeling the entire Manhattan street map south of 110th St. and allowing the player to visit any street corner in that part of the city in their quest to advance the story. Although the limited floppy disk capacity of the 1980s computers caused much of Disch's original text about the city to be cut, many Manhattan sites and people were described with unique loving distortion through the Disch lens.
This explains (or at least backgrounds) the virtual world "Wyomia" in Disch's 1991 horror novel The MD. From childhood the evil protagonist spends his spare time building a personal world of torture and murder that grows increasingly baroque as he ages. Disch is in cyberspace himself, '00s style--just discovered a LiveJournal where he publishes mostly verse. Disch's sf culturecrit memoir The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of is a great read.
Electric Jazz Thoughts
Simon Reynolds (yay) vs Stanley Crouch (boo) on 1970s fusion or "electric jazz" (a better term). (Not a forum, just the former writer discussing the latter on his blog.)
Reynolds on Crouch:
...it's bracing to read someone pungently and often waspishly espouse a completely opposite ideology of jazz to the one I'd adhere to (both out of taste and out of instinct), i.e. this neo-conservative vision Crouch has controversially pushed in tandem with his ally Wynton Marsalis via the Lincoln Center and that Ken Burns Jazz series (which I never watched). Basically their stance (crudely summarized) is that the essence of jazz is "swing" and blues feeling; it must be played on acoustic (and non-effected) instruments in real time; for this reason, the fusion era was an "aesthetic death valley."
Crouch on Miles Davis' In a Silent Way:
Davis's sound was mostly lost among electronic instruments, inside a long, maudlin piece of droning wallpaper music.
Reynolds responds:
The swipe at "electronic instruments"--he's talking about the shimmering electric pianos of Zawinul and Corea and Hancock--one of the all-time great sounds in music!--plus McLaughlin's fantastic guitar. "Wallpaper": he's slurring as "décor" what is really the album's great innovation, its environmental, immersive quality, the way a mood is stretched out to become an ocean of sound (and Macero's later production of Miles on specifically "He Loved Him Madly" I think it was, got cited by Eno as a major influence on him coming up with ambient). As for "maudlin"!!! - I cannot figure that one out at all.