various modifications of OptiDisc GIF with Seacrestcheadle
December 2012
Lee Dorman RIP
Lee Dorman of the '60s group Iron Butterfly died this week.
YouTube has a song with one of his characteristic bass lines, "Soul Experience" -- a time capsule of West Coast psychedelia, with heavy spring reverb and echo-delay.
Content-wise, it has one of the stranger disconnects between verses and chorus.
It's not hard to imagine the singer (Doug Ingle) being a Manson-type crooning to one of his women. In the verses he softly and sweetly tells her to "live a little" and "don't bother painting your face." Then in the chorus the music becomes atonal and weird and he starts wailing like a horror-movie psycho: "JUST BE YOURSELF" with everything about his intonation saying "Just follow me - and Charlie doesn't like snitches."
The song perfectly encapsulates the 1960s mix of groovy slogans and mind control.
Anyway, bittersweet tribute to a man who just passed away but this needed to be written down.
Update: R. Stevie Moore, characterized by AllMusic as mixing "classic pop influences, arty experimentalism, idiosyncratic lyrics, wild stylistic left turns, and homemade rough edges" did a cover version of "Soul Experience," so there you go.
"Knife Missile's Return"
"Knife Missile's Return" [mp3 removed -- this track is now on Bandcamp]
An earlier-recorded beat (from a Richard Devine preset) loops in the ADDAC wav player module. The ADDAC's envelope follower uses the loop's rising and falling gain to trigger a filter-and-volume contour for another oscillator (to make the droning sound in the first half).
I had to manually set a Cubase tempo to match the ADDAC loop (93.5 bpm). Then I could add the melody parts (also modular-made, with some reverb and delay) and some additional percussion.
ghostery screenshot
View of dump.fm main room with Ghostery plugin installed and Facebook cookies and plugins blocked.
You can choose what ad sites' and other parasites' code to block; the purple box listing blocked and unblocked plugins is optional. Am going to keep mine on for a week or two as I surf around. It's interesting to see which sites are promiscuous trackers. Salon has 23 plugins; Eschaton has 32; Bloglines has 2. My site has Google Analytics. Have never been that concerned or paranoid about being tracked around the web as a potential customer but lately it's getting annoying to view a consumer product on, say, Amazon, and then start seeing ads for the same product showing up on sidebars of other websites. How stupid do these people thing we are? Don't answer that question.
Update: One more whack for the day (frog by Matt Furie):
more facebook shenanigans
A story about Facebook shutting down various political sites (that shouldn't have wanted to be on there in the first place) got me motivated to finally start blocking Facebook cookies and plugins that hit my browser as I surf around.
It's not enough to just not be on Facebook -- would like to be free of its slime trail.
Am trying out a plugin called Ghostery that selectively blocks trackers but also gives you a list (if you want it) of all the various third party presences on the sites you visit.
One of the items I'm now blocking is called Facebook Exchange -- this Wired article makes it sound about as creepy as you'd expect.
(According to Ghostery that Wired page is Facebook plugin- and cookie-free.)