"Hackerista" [mp3 removed]
Short Moog-y composition (although not done with a Moog; the Mutator filter is again prominent). I end up having to write these jazzy lead bits so it's not just the same thing repeating and then they end up being the thing that I hum and that kind of defines the song.
"Turntable Turncoat" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]
My scratch sample collection once again on display, played in a couple of different virtual instruments. About nine seconds in this one actually starts rocking. (This has everything to do with painstakingly assembling loop order and nothing to do with live spontaneity.)
Fractaloid cube deformation rearranged. Don't know who posted the original science GIF to dump.fm or where it first came from but to quote the '80s synth duo Voice Farm, "It's my idea now."
Hexagrama is a circular music sequencer based on "sacred geometry" that triggers notes on a virtual plugin instrument; here is a video demo (hat tip dataisnature). It's intriguing to watch for a couple of minutes as you puzzle out the connections between image and sound. With your eyes closed the music gets less interesting; likewise, with the sound off, there's not much doing with the clockwork graphics. The confluence of sight and sound is thus giving you pleasurable fake insights--because the sum is more than the parts you think you're learning about structural relationships in music but you're really not.
Michel Chion's book Audio-Vision discusses momentary sound/image correspondences in film, true hybrid experiences that can't be reduced to their components and that I believe are mostly accidental. Having made a few videos with sound I kind of came to loathe the search for those magic crossing-over points. They happen and can be exciting but then there's the other 80% of the video where the music and image are just bobbing along with absolutely no reason to be together.
Am slowly drifting to the conclusion that the music you hear in your head when looking at a painting, and the images you see behind your eyelids when listening to music are phenomena more worth pursuing and thinking about than any actual conjunction, and that sound and image are ultimately most valuable to us in their zones of maximum competence, to borrow an idea from the dreaded Clement Greenberg. Contrary to his argument, this doesn't mean you have to work in those zones; compartmentalizations are choices we make.
Update: Minor edits.
Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz found this "awesome generic sentence" in a Twitter post:
In a financial world ruled by ________, we will continue to be hit with “sudden” crises as a result of __________.
He invited commenters to fill in blanks and the results were pretty funny.* The original tweet is typical right wing oafishness ("government intervention caused the crash!").
*e.g.,
algorithms / poor modeling
fraud / fraud
Bernanke / Bernanke
zombies / eating brains
