Plug: three of my drawings can be purchased in the Gazelli Art House online shop. Am very pleased to be rubbing retail shoulders with Archigram, Laura Brothers, and others.
April 2016
"Nursery Rot"
"Nursery Rot" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]
The main synth voice here is a bit obnoxious -- like a Casio version of a someone's approximation of a ring-modulated trumpet. I just "went with it" and tried to build a short song around this timbre. The "lead" sounds are from sampler modules. A background theme running throughout is a sine and square wave "interleaved" and "bit-rotted" using the Segoh "bit rot" chip for Tiptop Audio's Z-DSP digital processing module. The drums are from various MIDI groove and sample kits in Linplug's RMV drum sampler (recently discontinued so now it's "vintage").
"Downsampled Rave Stomp"
"Downsampled Rave Stomp" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]
This tune uses a couple of hardware sampler modules. Many of the sounds are reduced from a CD-quality 16 bit depth/44.100 sample rate to 8 bits and/or a 22.050 Khz sample rate, in order to be playable in the modules. When the samples are triggered at different pitches they lose some further sound quality. But then they are recorded and mixed with other sounds in Ableton at "32 bit float" (that is, high quality). Ableton changes the speeds again so they conform with the pitch and bpm of the project. Then the samples are saved back down to mp3. Small wonder some of these "stabs" are the audio equivalent of passed-around, screenshotted Instagrams (note topical reference).
social media detoxing with Travis Hallenbeck
Travis Hallenbeck just concluded a web residency [link may hang but it will load] where he spent a month away from social media and tried to reconnect with the old world of just following links around the web and finding stuff. The concepts are discussed in an interview titled A Disillusioned Netizen. Worth a read.
Hallenbeck said that when you stop posting on Facebook they hit you with emails saying "we love you, come back and visit [names of your friends]." Not an exact quote, but yuck.
The Art Guys, Situation Sculpture #4: Designated Natural Area
More wonderfully deadpan quasi-Earth Art [Internet Archive] from Houston's Art Guys. An ordinary median strip is designated as a "natural area," with documentation photos of flora (patches of dead grass), fauna (bird feathers), artifacts (discarded candy wrappers), and "wayfinding" (spraypainted utility markings).
A previous Situation Sculpture was The Flying Stump (no longer flying).