frey

Instructables.

User-contributed instructions for how to burn images onto CDRs and make a POV words thing for you shoe and make pesto.

Brilliant. Culture capturing itself. DIY coming of age. The democratisation of knowledge, particularly engineering and how-to knowledge. An end to homogonous consumerism. Fucking cool.

Combine the ideas behind BEAM robotics (tiny simple solar-powered robots built using bits salvaged from thrown-out electronics) with Audio Graffiti, but rather than using FM transmitters to generate the audio, use mechanical means, and/or combine it with light (be sure to check out the ‘crystal pummer’ video on that last link). Environmentally conscious sound art, interventions into urban space. Audio tagging, if you will.

Also I’m working on an I/O interface for my lappy’s parallel port so I can start building new interface stuff for musical performance. Or just muck about. Good times in all.

As you were…

Reports via Hard News of [tag]intellectual property[/tag] [tag]licensing[/tag] stupidity in Britain over here:

The Digital [tag]DJ[/tag] licence costs GBP200 + VAT per device — so if they use an iPod or similar, they could well need to pay more than once — on top of the existing public performance licence that club DJs need.

So if you use an Ipod and a CD player, or a computer and a discman, you will be required to have two licenses. What’s more, it appears not to discriminate between [tag]music[/tag] obtained legally (eg [tag]Creative Commons[/tag] licensed music like mine) via [tag]p2p[/tag] or whatever, and music obtained illegally.

Even more absurd:

… the license requires DJs to LIMIT their crossover/fades/blends to TWO SECONDS OR LESS. Screw that, what about those of us who beatmatch two (or more songs) for MINUTES at a time? Apparently, I can’t use my EQ either, or the loop function my DJ software comes with …

This is going to ensure one thing, of course: it will drive the makers of ‘real’ music underground, where they can fester and interbreed and generally be messy, nice and neatly (and deliberately) out of the public eye — because, in general, creative music happens amongst people with very little money, who can’t afford these types of licenses and will do all to avoid them. This could very well have a hidden benefit, of course. I’ve been spending quite some time with the punk/feral music crowd here in Wellington and it is becoming increasingly clear that real [tag]creativity[/tag] happens in shitty run-down flats filled with messy people where the rent is cheap and the mental states are bent (drug-driven or just by nature). It’s the misfits and the geeks that make [tag]culture[/tag]. The [tag]punk[/tag] ethic is to misfit by design, and the creative energy that comes out of it is astounding.

Interestingly, discussion of these social realities of ‘creative communities’ is all but completely absent from the literature and the rhetoric of the official bastions of culture — Creative NZ et al — although it ought to be pointed out that the PACE scheme, commonly known as ‘the artist’s dole’ is a stunning display of understanding and foresight, seeming to indicate an unvoiced understanding that this is the way things are. We do indeed live in a wonderful country.

(On the p2p tip, last week someone found this website by searching for ‘frey-disintentional.mp3′ [which I have yet to transfer from the old site to the new database, but will get on to that soon as..], which means my tracks must be spreading via p2p networks or something similar. Wonderful. Fly my pretties, fly!)

So you’ve probably noticed that I’ve added heaps of tracks. Don’t be shy, download and rate and/or comment. I’m doing it all for you sweeties.

.. Had a gig last night as part of the Newtown Spoken Word Summer 06 festival. It was an open mic, I recorded everything that everyone was doing then at the end did an ‘audio deconstruction’ of the evening.

This was good. One of the poets whose name I have unfortunately forgotten was doing a piece about his experiences being an alcoholic and going to an AA meeting. Among other things he described, telling us all the the while that these were true stories, rolling a car and just about killing his friend, falling onto a glass and ending up with a permanent scar, and ‘vomiting on carpets’ many times. He used phrases like, after a deliberate audience-reclaiming and laughter-diminishing pause, ‘there’s a lot of alcoholics in hastings’.

What struck me as extremely interesting and quite distressing about this was the audience reaction. There was laughter, first of all. I was on stage and could see his body language clearly, and to my mind he was reading these out not to provoke laughter but because they were important to him. Moreover, the parts of the audience that were laughing were doing so in a defensive and agressive way. The whole thing was distinctly tense – here was a poet strongly critiquing New Zealand’s frankly bloody awful binge drinking culture, and since it is Not Done to critique our drinking culture, the loudest response was an agressive, defensive laugh.

So in the audio deconstruction I played a lot with a slowed-down sample of him saying ‘vomitting on carpets’, multiple times, trying to make it sound as sick as possible.