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Cyanide & Happiness

In case you’re not aware, those with a commercial interest in media content (creative expression) are pushing to have DRM and copyright protection systems built in to next-gen technology. Now watch this:

If the commercial interests get their way, doing what this guy has done would be not only illegal but actually impossible: the hardware simply would not allow it to be done.

Read Free Culture. Make art that confronts IP laws head-on. Share it with Creative Commons. We need to permeate this stuff so deep into our society that any attempt to legalise it will be clearly absurd. Don’t let the fuckers win.

Hello children.

It’s very, very cold today.

I’m going to go sit in front of the heater and read books.

Ta ta.

Performance artist Rachel Bevilacqua has lost custody of her ten-year old son after a judge saw some pictures of a (performance art related) conference she went to.

This is what can happen when you have a society hung up so deeply on sex. Those interested in exploring the ideas run off out and do what they do, believing they are free to do so. And, of course, you get a deep conservative rejection of the whole movement, and a subsequent massive social stima attached to any kinds of expressions of sexual deviance, or of even just questioning the ideas around sex itself. At this stage I wish I knew more about the history of attitudes to sexuality, especially in the late 19th century — as I understand it, they were then at a vaguely similar point in the apparently cyclic progression of societal attitudes to sex as we are at now.

The significance of this to me is that Rachel has lost custody of her child because of her art. The supposedly most free society on the planet has demonstrated that its freedom comes with limits — as of course all freedom fundamentally does.

I went last night to see Me and You and Everyone We Know, a film by Miranda July, who is also a performance artist and an amazing one at that. This film is very, very beautiful, and you should see it. It has a soundtrack by Michael Andrews who also provided the music for Donnie Darko. He appears to like lo-fi; this is Good.

So by being a student I managed to score cheap tickets to the DJ Spooky show Rebirth of a Nation down at the Opera House on Saturday night.

Spooky’s aim was to bring the basic idea of remixing, as it can be used to make music, to video: take two or more sources, modify them only slightly, and recombine them. The new meaning, the artistic merit, is supposed to come from the combination itself.

The show itself was very unassuming, trying (and succeeding) to be as unpretentious as possible. There was no curtain, and at the start of the show Spooky came on stage and explained what he was doing in very simple terms. If the aim was to break the barrier between performer and audience, then I think it worked.

As for the actual show, it was interesting, and at some parts moving (mainly due to the music — I was quite impressed by much of that). It’s very difficult to be objective about it because I work with live video and/or audio software on a daily basis, so I know what’s possible. Spooky had gone down the avenue of just plain playing the video, doing very little to no processing on the spot. Some of the clips were altered, with the addition of images of circuitry overlaying the actors, and boxes and ovals following them round on screen. But it was very much what it set out to be: the application of DJ techniques, as in, playing to records at once and crossfading, to film.

Commentary on the film itself — the KKK propaganda film, Birth of the Nation (which was the first film to be screened in the White House apparently) — was handled mainly by the music, although even then there was a feeling that Spooky was trying to let the film speak for itself. The racial element was fairly absurd to our eyes, and as such I don’t think it really needed much help to be critical of itself.

I’m wanting to set up an SMS gateway for this website (and for future projects I might be involved in) so I can send bulk text messages from my computer, rather than texting everyone I know by hand via my phone (which takes literally half an hour and breaks my wrist).

So, phoning and calling and searching turns up the following options:

Clickatell operate an SMS gateway that serves both Vodafone and Telecom. To text a Vodafone mobile currently costs 0.8 ‘credits’, which works out at 6.5c, and to Telecom, 3 ‘credits’, which is 24.5c.

However, Telecom offer a service called eTxt, which has a $10/month access fee and then costs 10c per text to Telecom phones. That means that if I send 69 messages to Telecom phones every month, it works out at the same price per text (24.5c) as Clickatell. If I send 70+ messages, it starts getting cheaper: 200 messages –> 15c/message, 500 messages –> 12c/message, etc.

(Vodafone’s TXTmail service is 17c per message plus a $35 montlhy fee so Clickatell is obviously far better here.)

This means that if I implement some kind of system that figures out whether a phone number is 027 or 021 and then chooses either Clickatell or eTxt to send the message, I can get a bulk SMS service for super cheap (if I send enough in a given month), regardless of network.

Fantastico. Wonder if I could on-sell this?

@Happy, Wellington, Tonight (March 16 2006):

Wicked gig. I like free jazz, especially when it has DJs.

A friend sent me this, it seems to come from the Lefsetz Letter:

Broadband jump-started Napster. Acquiring files at 56k is just too damn slow except to do on a whim. But back in 2000, only college students and early adopters had high speed connections. Now seemingly everybody does.

…

But, after downloading iTunes and listening to music on your computer, suddenly you don’t want the disc. It’s as superfluous as those CDs that software companies used to distribute their programs on. Why now you just download files from the Web.

So, all around, things are bleak for the record labels. They’re selling tunes in an obsolete format and the thunder comes from a completely different kind of entertainment medium. Looking to protect their old business model, they’re trying to sue into submission customers who have adopted new ways of acquisition they’ll never give up and are trying to monetize and protect elements of band promotion that are hindering the breaking of acts.

…

The hardest thing to do is get someone EXPOSED to an act’s music. To hold them back from it, to limit the possibility of exposure, makes no sense. Certainly not for companies like NBC. Whose “Lazy Sunday” SNL skit injected new life into a tired show via ubiquitous distribution on the Web. NBC reacted by sending a cease and desist letter to youtube and then putting the video on THEIR SITE ONLY! As if nbc.com was a regular stop on the surfer’s rounds. No, you’ve got to put the product where people AGGREGATE IT, presently youtube and google video.

The product was originally at Napster. ALL of it. But then the labels parceled it out to many sites, none of which have any significant traction other than iTunes. The key is to create BEHEMOTHS, one stop shopping, not a bunch of out of the way loser 7-11s. Maybe there’s only room for one online store, but by insisting on copy protection and sale at a high price the labels have given the power to Apple, Apple hasn’t taken it. The end run would be to authorize another way of acquisition, one without copy protection, that would allow people to have a lot of material at a low price.

And they must do this quickly. Before their businesses are decimated. The longer they refuse to play by Net rules, and allow consumption of mass quantities by everybody, the more they fall behind the curve, ceding the territory to all-in-one bands who DON’T MIND giving their music away for free. THAT’S what the major labels are doing, marginalizing THEMSELVES!

There doesn’t appear to be any kind of an archive for the Lefsetz Letter but you can sign up there.

Any structure that one can believe in is corruptible, except music. Any structure or belief system that one can organise one’s life around is fallible, except music.

I’ve just moved to a new house, and one of my new flatmates is a Buddhist and a philosophy student. We got to talking tonight, and we ended up talking about morality, about how to structure a world to ensure peace, and eventually, god/spirituality/truth/goodness.

Now, I’m mostly a secular kind of guy. I feel spiritually complete, I’m as happy as I want to be, and indeed, need to be. I’m not on any spiritual path, and I don’t feel like I’m searching for anything, or wanting to attain any enhanced mental or spiritual state; I’m happy. My friend Linda Joy is equally secular, and humanistic, and unbelievably happy, and devoted to music with a kind of religious fervour; this is something I have learnt from her, and something that I think every musician, indeed every person, should be.

Music is truth. At a live gig, if the night is good, the musicians play well, and the music is amazing, everyone knows it — the musicians know it, the audience knows it. Shared magic happens.

This is the ultimate goal of all musicians, and by extension, of all music: to share Music with an audience. This goal is incorruptible, because the truth only happens when the musicians let it happen; and when the musicians let it happen, the audience knows. It’s not something you can fake, not something you can imagine or put on. Either it’s there, or it isn’t. There are no masks to hide behind, there are no hidden agendas or secret plots, there are no power disparities. There is just Music.

Music will change the world. Musicians, who are as we speak beating out the templates for the next cultural revolution, are collaborating with other musicians from around the world at the speed of email, of podcasting, of the time it takes to find another musician’s website or a netlabel and send out a sliver of communication.

Our land is Creative Commons, our communication is podcasting, our religion is Music. We are a strength that cannot be beaten, an incorruptible force of truth.

We are making the future.

We are making it right.

In response to Seven Sand wrote:

i was waiting for a climax to drop cuz it felt like it kept building

Today in my Sonic Arts class we were discussing acousmatic music, and one of the things that came up was the possibility for acousmatic music to be music freed from the tension/release ‘emotional’ structure of Western music (classical and pop).

It made me rethink my response about ‘having to work on’ the build and release structure of my tracks. The need for climax and building is specific to Western music, and is a potential weakness of a lot of dance music, especially things like trance, which operates exclusively via an exaggerated (some would say cliched) emotional build-climax-release-structure. For an illustrative example of non-Western music, check out these podcasts by Arabic violin player Sami Abu Shumays. There is nothing in the way of build and release here, at least not in the Western sense. The emotional structure of the music seems flat to us as Western listeners (of course it isn’t, it’s just a different way of listening — but that is one of the things that acousmatic music is about exploring, and why it sometimes gets ‘unemotional’ or ‘dead’ criticisms levelled at it).

Moreover closer inspection reveals that macro-scale build and release is not even universal in Western music. For example, hip-hop follows a verse-chorus-verse structure, yes, but there is very little in the way of build/release, except perhaps for the treatment of the verse and chorus. Certainly the beat (the ‘instrumental’ part) stays steady and usually does neither build nor release. If we turn to dance music, there are some forms that are about the build/climax/release, such as trance or drum’n'bass, but for straight techno and house, even though the overall mix the DJ is building may build/climax/release, this is not necessary and certainly not something that I specifically look out for when I’m out dancing — I just want wicked chunky beats that I can dance to.

I mentioned in my comments that I’m more interested in drop-downs than climaxes. Well, maybe I’m actually more interested in maintaining an energy level and just exploring the stillness. I’ve always loved the music of Gas and Rhythm & Sound for this very reason, and I still believe these are territories that haven’t been fully mined, and as such are rich for further exploration.

Of course, making music like this is bloody hard. Stay reading this blog, and you’ll get to watch me improve over time.