January 2014

Belated thanks to Paddy Johnson for her plug of my LP release on Bandcamp. She calls it micro-fundraising but my cleverly-worded announcement actually said "If you've been a reader/RSS follower this is a way to support the blog without me having to do annoying fundraisers." Maybe that was disingenuous, but I would love for you to buy the LP so that you can have, as one listener said, "something in heavy rotation on my home server," not because my blog needs financial support. I have no staff (despite occasional use of the editorial we) and hosting fees are cheep. When it's time for this thing to die it will just stop one day.
A curator once told me "your blog is your art." This was irksome because he was making a studio visit and pointedly ignoring the artwork on the walls he'd asked to come look at. (This was before I showed the blog as art, but that was a performance, not a Mary Kelly-style life work.)

All that said, I greatly appreciate everyone who bought the LP (including Paddy) or even tossed in a little extra, whatever the reason.
I'm proud of the music and felt like it kicked up a notch at the end of 2013. I wanted to show my own commitment to it by making it non-free.
Am pretty much ready to go with release #2 but have been debating whether to restrict it to tunes I consider catchy or whether to include some of the art shit.
I kind of feel like if I'm asking you to pay you should have 10 tunes that are somewhat fun to listen to, in the post-8 bit, not quite PC Music mold (more great tunes over there by the way, and free d/ls).
This means either saving up the "art" tunes for a later "difficult" omnibus or continuing to release them piecemeal on the blog, with production notes as I've been doing.

Unlike yours truly, Paddy is having a fundraiser (or just concluded one, with a benefit upcoming) and I recommend you kick in. I wish she hadn't used a quote from Holland Cotter saying that magazine-style online efforts were an improvement over (by implication) those nasty unidimensional (ick) solo blogs. His exact words: "a feisty mix of voices [that is] a welcome alternative to the one-personality blog of yore." Of course he'd say that, as a New York Times journalist who lost much Godlike power in the last decade to those pajama wearing goofballs who can incidentally write circles around boring mainstream journos.

OK, that's a gross exaggeration, but I keep coming across demonstration music and videos that possibly intrigue more than the products they're designed for, or at least, function quite well as aesthetic entities outside their educational frame. Case in point, tybamm's super-miniwave generator software [YouTube demo], intended for creating 8-bit wavetable waves for the Doepfer A-112 sampler module (Eurorack format). I tried using the software but it's only vouched for as a W7/32-bit tool and I'm W7/64 (one reason I don't hold myself out as an 8-bit artiste -- too many bits). REBOL and the software are above my skill level anyway so for the moment I'm resigned to being a voyeur. What's happening in the demo is tybamm is creating sound waves for eventual transport via MIDI dump to the A-112. Once they're loaded, the module (first and foremost a sampler) is played like a wavetable oscillator with sound output that can be filtered, enveloped, etc in the modular hardware.
On a pure design level you gotta love the Russian constructivist-style graphics being created out of blue lines before your eyes. And unlike, say, Soundcloud waves that resemble long turds, there is a compelling relationship here between the sculptural shapes of the waveforms and the music they produce (which you can hear in real time as the wavetables are being prepared).

Last March, following a Simon Reynolds recommendation, I discussed a popculturecrit blog by Carl Neville called "Holding Out for a Hero." It appears Neville took it down but have not seen this before: when you go to a dead Blogspot link you are prompted to sign into Google, and if it IP-recognizes you, it pre-inserts your login name and offers a box for a password.
(I've bailed on most Google products but they seem eager to have me back.)
The login screen makes it look like the content is still there but "private" -- it doesn't say yea or nay about what you'll see when you (re-)enter the bosom of the Google Family of Fine Products.
I don't particularly want to find out. Of course, as the purchaser of Blogger many years ago, Google has a right to exploit dead links as a snare for new customers but still, it looks Dark Pattern-like to me.