October 2013

"Robot Jox (Ethnic Forgery)"

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"Robot Jox (Ethnic Forgery)" [mp3 removed]

Borrowed Can's term "ethnic forgery" to denote the kind of fictional world music I heard here after the composition fact.
Have been working on Reaktor "sample maps" of previously-used percussion hits and modular synth recordings, which can then be plugged into various Reaktor instruments. This one uses a modular synth map as the sound source in Krypt (a granular ROMpler). Two "sessions" -- one loud, one quiet -- were recorded and overtracked in Cubase.

"Keystroke Mountain"

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"Keystroke Mountain" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]

Grand piano + "urban beats" -- that's all you need to know.
The beats are all tweaked, using FX presets pretty much exactly as intended.
A nice thing about having a PC with a little more speed and memory is I can play sampled piano with all the convolution settings and no overload spasms.
The undulating granular sounds during the drum break were made a couple of years ago using Reaktor Photone and analog filter sweeps.

pollock as cave man

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From Art News, after MOMA turned up more, or clearer hand prints of the artist during a recent canvas-cleaning:

Now more than ever, the work evokes the walls of a prehistoric cave, the oldest known mark-making of primitive man.

“He’s declaring his identity free of language in the most elemental way,” Temkin says. “He wanted to bring modern art to that same level of essentialism. He’s harking back to a period when humankind was not far past the ape stage.”

Oogah me painter. (You don't get to call abstract artists stupid -- only art magazines get to do that. Also, this is the latest effort by MOMA to reinvent Pollock as a figurative artist, previously having done it with Pepe Karmel's computer analysis of Hans Namuth photos to show the reassuring human form underlying all that weird chaotic stuff.)

tip of the sabretooth skin hat to bill

sold

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1379735435532-dumpfm-reneabythe-screen

GIF by Rene Abythe re-enacts the recent "Paddles down" cyber-auction where my OptiDisc GIF was "bought in" by a consortium of private investors and will now be viewable only on approved institutions' "art computers." A mobile device (above) was used in the bidding, employing a complicated algorithm developed in a recent Rhizome "Seven on Seven" symposium.
This is all nonsense, of course, pertaining to the ongoing obsession of new media types with $$$, and the uneasy marriage of start-up culture with the anti-capitalist avant garde. Have an art idea? Don't starve like Van Gogh -- get backers and monetize it! No backer likes your work? Crowdfund it! The crowd hates your work? Then maybe you aren't really an artist!