Day: January 17, 2011

"Graphic Absence"

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"Graphic Absence" [mp3 removed]

Native Instruments' software synthesizer Absynth annoys for a number of reasons: overly arty HR Giger-ish display; odometer dials; too many presets that sound like vague electro world music.

This tune is based on a couple of beat presets that were messed with in real time: changing pitch, filter parameters and also the mix of oscillators. The changes were very disruptive, causing pops and crackles that had to be snipped out in the editing process. (Slicing out the noise or even redrawing the wave form by hand.) When my attention started lagging, listening to the live recordings, I added some drum hits from another percussion synth (Linplug RMV) with and without "midi echo." So this is a mix of organic and synthetic drum sounds, still vaguely world-folky but also American-suburban-nerdy.

MLK on samaritan wars

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The govt. says Martin Luther King would have supported US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for either or both of a pair of conflicting reasons: to fight terrorists and/or to bring humanitarian aid to the needy. That's a travesty of King's views as well as common sense. Here's what King said about Vietnam:

"I am convinced," King said, "that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society into a person-oriented society. . . . On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. . . . The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more on military 'defense' than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."