July 2008

Miss using my twitter account because it was a place to dump media references that I don't have the energy to explain here. (I also miss the weird real time passive interaction with friends.) But since Twitter Central can't store more than 10 pages of posts, fuck'em.

Traversers in Brian Aldiss's Hothouse:

Millions of years in the future. The moon slows the earth's rotation to a stop. The moon also stops rotating. Earth continues to revolve around the sun. The moon leaves earth's orbit and trails earth at a "trojan point" in its solar orbit.
Only one side of earth and moon face the sun. Plant life dominates the daylit earth. Also descendants of wasps, termites, and humans.
Traversers are giant free-floating spider-like plants that went higher and higher in the atmosphere to escape wasps.
Eventually they adapted to space and live on radiation.
They use their webs as space elevators to climb out of earth's gravity well, then eject oxygen*, grow considerably in size and "traverse" space between earth and the moon, using their web ejection as propulsion.
Earth and moon have a permanent network of silky cables connecting them, and the traversers go back and forth.
On earth, traversers descend because they still need soil to live.
On the moon, they have brought plant life with them and the moon's day side acquires soil (from the decaying corpses of the giant spiders, initially) and an atmosphere.
Humans (much smaller, greener, and more primitive than us) also go back between the worlds using the traversers as space ships.

*in "globes" attached to the cables that are used later for descent to earth.

My condolences to Aron Namenwirth for the loss of his mother, Cynthia Bloom Namenwirth. She was a prolific painter and Aron has written a tribute to her on his blog. Some of her work can be seen on the walls of artMovingProjects, the gallery Aron runs in Brooklyn with Nancy Horowitz, at a recent musical event there. My thoughts are with Aron and Nancy.

Recently found Kevin Saunderson's Faces and Phases on beatport and d/l'ed it. He is one of the "Belleville Three" (Detroit Techno) guys along with Juan Atkins and Derrick May.

Gritty, direct, occasionally straight-up acid house-sounding, but where it's diverging into techno is the use of noise and potentially grating samples. Percussive sounds such as hats and claps rarely vary. It's just pow-pow-pow-pow while low-res samples growl and wail (well, not really, it's more musical than that). Nowadays software makes it so easy to add randomization and subtle filtering to the percussion so these hits sound deliberately minimal, when it was really probably the best the machines could do. (Am guessing it's mostly the 909 drum computer since the hats sound like samples of hats rather than synthesized hats.)

Was searching around online for the Virgin (sublabel) disc from 1988, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit that introduced the Belleville Three and others to Europe. Surprisingly it seems not to have been reissued. Would love to hear that time capsule and imagine how it sounded to ears unfamiliar with these musical strategies. I actually know people who think electronic pop music innovation started and stopped with Kraftwerk but that's just wrong.

[Related: Pitchfork interview with some of the innovators.]

[Unrelated: Philip Sherburne on the malaise in the current dance scene. I am not feeling this because I am not producing tracks for the dance floor. It's still fun for me because I have no rules to obey.]