January 2014

Hard at work on my second Bandcamp LP. Thanks again to the people who bought the first one and for the intrepid "first followers" who gave shoutouts on Twitster.
Right now I have eighteen potential candidate songs, some published, some not, and some getting makeovers. Ones with "actual '70s breakbeats" are acquiring reconstituted, holistically related grooves with no deadly litigation bait. This is a fun but time-consuming project of replacing beats with "legal" drum hits, and in the process altering the rhythm beyond even a computer's recognition. Am learning what goes on in the mind of a '70s drummer but also thinking what a modern, relevant version of that beat would be.
Am continuing to have some fruitful back channel discussions with fellow musicians in the micro-genre of whatever-our-genre-is. For me it's defined in part as "visual artists invading music" and not having the usual biases about performer hand skill genius, the naming of chords, or the sentimentalizing of keys (e.g., "A Minor is suitable for expressing 'the sad effect' -- what rubbish). A piece of music is an artificial construct like a painting, where time-based authorship is sidelined and conventional emotional states are thought of as cliche.
My interest in samplers is not so much for quotation as for harvesting waveforms. Simple waveforms intrigue on their own, without connections to '80s music.

Am reading Curtis Roads' Microsounds, a book about granular synthesis. That reminded me about Xenakis' "Concret PH," a pre-digital granular work made with short tape snippets of the sounds of smoldering charcoal, arranged in clouds that moved around the inside of a World's Fair pavilion.

Update: Minor edit for tone.

You're angry. You've been out of work for months, your retirement savings are dwindling, and the water in your town is polluted. So you decide to organize resistance... by clicking on stuff.

iCitizen is not a bad joke -- it's a real iPhone app designed to siphon political rage into meaningless screen-touching, or rather, "tak[ing] part in polls to let your representative know where you stand on hot-button topics." Here are a couple of the "revolutionaries" responsible (they actually call themselves that):

hat tip sm

Lawrence Lessig is walking across New Hampshire because of corruption, or something, in Aaron Swartz's memory, he says. I don't particularly want to sign up for HuffPo just to comment on this article, so here's my comment:

The US attorney and prosecutor who hounded Swartz still have jobs and are pretty smug about it. Lessig works at Harvard, a cushy job. Swartz, however, is dead. Not sure if walking across New Hampshire helps that situation.

earlier lessig-doubts