map posted to dump.fm by ben_dover
February 2013
"Massive Spring Forward"
"Massive Spring Forward" [mp3 removed -- a newer version is available on Bandcamp]
All done in Octatrack sequencer. The main beats are an Electribe Rmk II riff sampled, sliced, and reorganized. The basses and synths are .wav files I've been recycling in recent tracks, with speed and length settings altered (or not) and some added effects.
Loosely inspired by the mod tracker techno I've been listening to. The Octatrack is hardware but certain aspects of its design are very tracker-like, particularly the "arranger," which has a list view of patterns that is paged down at whatever tempo you set (in this case 172 bpm). Also these samples, massaged as much as they are, are not exactly artifact-free. The piquant hint of cement mixer rumble can be heard at high volume but most of the tunes I'm doing I listen to fairly quietly.
The hyperactive synth solo at the end wasn't working for me until I added a sample with three notes -- these triplets are played at superhuman speed and are sort of arpeggio-like. The synth snippet was taken from Reaktor's Oki Computer 2 and reminds me of an 8-Bit sax.
10 years of snow-covered cars
2003:
2006:
2013 (yawn):
Some of my favorite Gawker gripes about how much the Weather Channel magnified this storm in the NY area:
Yes: last year The Weather Channel—which owns Weather.com, Weather Underground, and a host of other weather-related sites—announced it would begin naming winter storms...
The truth is there is very little attempt being made to hide the fact that this is a money play. In case the inclusion of "Draco" and "Nemo" (just some Greek and Roman names, nothing to do with any recent children's movies, don't worry) and "Gandolf" (the "Bert Sampson" of fantasy names) didn't tip you off, the announcement itself makes it clear that this is about punching up the weather story: "A storm with a name takes on a personality all its own," writes Tom Niziol. Such "personality," he claims "adds to awareness."
As in awareness of the Weather Channel, Read notes. As in, Google awareness (and Twitter hashtags).
Yesterday afternoon, The Weather Channel whipped itself up into such a frenzy over the East Coast's upcoming snowstorm that its website exploded from the inside, vomiting maps, janky mountain graphics, and CAPSLOCKED WEATHER WARNINGS all over its homepage.
numbercult, "Generator"
...generative animation recorded in real-time [vimeo]
via dataisnature
Watch in fullscreen if possible. A slightly more pared-down, elegant version of '90s rave videos, where we gawked at a single pulsating machine from multiple POVs, with zooming, cropping, and rotation in precise sync with a techno score. Here lathed, exploded-view robotic cylinders spin like spitted birds on raster line rotisseries, toggling rapidly between horizontal and vertical orientations, as the soundtrack coughs out a melody of reverberated clicks and digi-beeps.
Other selections on the numbercult page recall the Hexagrama video complained about a while back, where a kind of false equivalency is suggested between music and visuals. "Generator" claims to do that somewhat ("a virtual machine that produce[s] music as its by product") but we can manage to enjoy it without looking and listening for clues to the shared structural foundations of all sensation. Whereas other compositions such as "Collision Music," seductive as it is, seem like self-proving hypotheses to illustrate such philosophical themes (dataisnature invokes Hesse's Glass Bead Game in discussing it). It's obvious that a computer program employs the same temporal triggers to make an image change color and a sound go bleep but at some point a human, arbitrary decision was made of what variables to employ in the respective spectra. There is no actual translation between "blue" and "boing."
