February 2016

ptyxolopies event recap

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Ice-luncheonette

kiptok-luncheonette

Thanks to Ice and kiptok for the images of the dump screen at the ptyxolopies event at Sunview Luncheonette in Greenpoint (an actual shuttered diner that now serves as a semi-private place for talks and events).
The idea was to have dump.fm "live onscreen" before a group and talk out loud about dumps and dumping, since that is rarely done.
Some reference was made to notes of previously saved dumps, including a vocal reading of this grass dump. The focus of the evening was visual poetics and how (or whether) dump fit into that. Thanks to dumpers who actively dumped from remote locations from 8-10 pm so we had something to talk about (including toilets, "sideboobs," and special sauce containers). Am guessing there were some dumpers who wanted nothing to do with any heavy handed outside interpretation but "that's what you got."

Sunview Luncheonette talk tonight

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Please come to Sunview Luncheonette, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY tonight for the talk:

ptyxolopies: a nighght of image-textonics

8-10 pm. The address is 221 Nassau Ave. / more / event page

Organized/moderated by Joe Milutis, the event includes yrs truly and two other speakers, Cat Tyc and Nico Vassilakis.
We are anticipating strong WiFi and the ability to project and discuss dump.fm "live."
As a backup I prepared some "visual notes" that I'll also be discussing.

essays on the 2016 political race by Alan N. Shapiro; Matt Taibbi on tr*mp

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Alan N. Shapiro has put up two thoughtful posts on this year's (so far) surprising US election:

Donald Trump Casino Owner: seduced to losing by the lure of winning
Shapiro considers pulling the lever for Trump as wholly consistent with addictive gambling in a Trump casino.

Homage to Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism and George Orwell’s 1984
Shapiro explains why "democratic socialism" isn't the same thing as socialism. I sent him a comment:

Bernie Sanders’ version of socialism essentially reconstitutes the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt: improved social security, more oversight of banks, support for labor. His opponents couch this as radical, which shows how far the pendulum has swung since Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and began the gradual dismantling of the New Deal. Sanders’ current opponent, the political team of Bill and Hillary Clinton, delivered the final blow for Reagan, ending welfare and allowing banks to trade stocks again; they seek to protect this legacy in the present election.

There is a point where serving the public becomes indistinguishable from controlling it, and restoring the New Deal in an era of technocratic surveillance carries dangers. To receive medical benefits, for example, citizens’ personal data will be digitized and could be used against them by unscrupulous public servants.

Yet the private sector is no more benevolent. Capitalism in the US has drifted from production into rent-seeking (“seeking to increase one’s share of existing wealth without creating new wealth” — Wikipedia) in almost every area (cars, phones, food, travel, medicine, etc). In the current race Sanders is the only candidate advocating meaningful checks on this parasitism. The leap of faith one takes in supporting him is that ultimately one has to trust government, suitably transparentized, over private accumulators, to moderate for the “greater good.”

The Clintons represent the status quo: on the civil side, “limited government” enabling rent-seeking; on the military side, unlimited government draining the public treasury with disproportionately ineffective results. For the environment and for working people, this state of affairs is increasingly untenable, Hence the sudden upswing in public momentum for Sanders and his program.

Have had one argument with a Hillary supporter, who followed the playbook of (i) insisting she's more "electable" (even though most Americans are sick to death of her) and (ii) making little sneering cracks.

Meanwhile, Matt Taibbi explains how Tr*mp is a creature of our crappy national media. They can't stop giving him coverage and look what happened.

"If 90s Were 10s"

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"If 90s Were 10s" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

This was made with Ardour (also verve and panache). Ardour is a digital audio workstation that I'm running on a Linux PC. Finally resolved my latency issues. Still haven't found the right tool in Linux for a final "master" so I used the PSP Vintage Warmer (hat tip JP) on Windows for that.

Ardour has what I consider the working basics: "MIDI out" to control an external synth; simultaneous record/playback of the synth while other tracks are playing; audio tracks (with plugins) running alongside midi-tracks-with-softsynths (also with plugins); limiter on the master bus. Ardour mixes all this down to a 32 bit wav file (faster than Windows does).
Ardour has some limitations -- MIDI editing is pretty sparse. But also some advantages, such as a list of audio clips that shows the place of each in the timeline. Anyway, getting there.

Sonically, am continuing to explore the E-Mu Orbit 9090 soundfonts, hence the title.

"Dial-a-Melody"

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"Dial-a-Melody" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

Except for the percussion, all the sounds emanate from the Vermona Perfourmer analog synth. But all are then treated with a bevy of effects (compression, reverb, delay, and Absynth treatments) so that the analog sound is effectively buried, no pun intended. I wrote the main tune -- the second melody is literally on a dial of simple midi sequences that the Perfourmer has to test out synth patches. The Absynth effects essentially create variations on this tune.