frey

I’ve been putting together 21 cds for my brother’s 21st birthday, (almost) all netlabel stuff. He’s (among other things) Mogwai/Slint/Chicago post-rock fan, and in searching for CD-burning-friendly free stuff I stumbled across a band called Milhaven, on netlabel 12rec.

new orleans
a simple plan

12rec.014 (full release)

The chord progression on New Orleans is something special. Up at the studio at school where I’m in the process of attempting to write some electroacoustic techno (you’ll hear it as soon as I’m happy with it which is far from yet), I am experimenting with convoluting a signal with what amounts to the entire track, to try and encode the chord sequences in to the music.

The signal is about a ten second snippet of some horribly clipped digital feedback that I made at 192kHz, played on to a reel-to-reel tape player at 15 ips (inches per second), slowed down to 3 1/4 ips and played back into the computer, and then digitally stretched (phase vocoded) out to 32x the original length (about five minutes). The phase vocoding has given the ground hum and tape hiss (the machine is hardly ever used) these wonderful ephemereal qualities — the 50hz kind of phases against itself making for a subtly shifting mechanical drone that sounds like it has about five dimensions.

Now imagine that, kind of smeared through with this. Which is Creative Commons ShareAlike licensed, which means I’m allowed to do so, officially and loudly and legally.

I love you, world.

http://negrophonic.com/words/archives/archive_2006-m06.php#e388

My first time in Berlin, a few years ago, I had this horrible horrible creepy host who basically told me where McDonalds was then pointed out the club I was playing at. As I sat in the club waiting for something — anything — to happen, a German girl came up, asked me for drugs, then started hitting on me. I was like: wow, I’m in Germany! The first person to approach me in this country is a real live stereotype-filled citizen — how quaint. Of all the people to be objectified by, this is one of the better possibilities. I Am The Virile Black Man Who Probably Is Selling ‘Ganja’.

Nice. I’ll be reading more of this one… (via a Pitchfork article about the digital licensing of 60,000 albums from China, 1920s-present day — that’s 30,000 hours of music, or about three and a half straight years — via an email from Andrew Clifford on the Audio Foundation list). What a twisty web of interlinked interwebbery.

Tell me, is this not the most awesomest thing ever?

Dan aka Panoramica, a fellow Wellingtonian laptop-musician and While_you_were_Sleepingite, has put up some music from the New Zealand Music Week live-to-air he performed for The Session, Radioactive 89fm.

Go listen, it’s class. And big ups to Pete and Andy. Besides supporting local acts, The Session is as far as I can tell one of the only radio shows in the whole world to regularly feature netlabel material alongside CDs and vinyl.

On the netlabel tip, last night while looking for music for my brother’s 21st present I stumbled across this sound of someone gently torturing a stunningly beautiful morning. It’s from an old (2004) release by Mystified, called Transient, on Australian netlabel Dreamland Recordings and you can get the whole thing from archive.org. I love the broken-analog-gear feel to it, how he’s turned a pitch fluctuation artefact from a fluttery tape into the centrepiece of the whole thing.

(edit 27/6/06: link updated)

The first bleep workshop has now been and gone, and a mighty time was had by all.

more photos…

First of all, a big thank you to the people who came along. We had some good noodlings, and made some nice sounds, and by all accounts much fun was had all round.

There will be another workshop in six weeks time, on Sunday the 23rd of July, so if you missed the last, or just don’t want to miss the next, keep this day free and all shall be good. At this stage it looks like we’ll be doing some kind of a circuit bending workshop.

In the short term future we have a gig next Wednesday the 21st of June at Happy at 8pm, and some people need to play. If you can come along and you want to play please let me know ASAP, as I’ll need to get some things organised for it. Oh, and anyone who didn’t come along on Sunday is most welcome. We’re going to need as many amplifiers as we can get hold of, as Happy’s PA only has a limited number of inputs for us to use. Either that, or many mixers so we can bounce it all down to one output. But if you can provide any equipment like this please do let me know.

more photos…

See you at the next one… :-)

ps, there’s now a bleep mailing list, and you should join.

Roomology

Drinking whiskey laced with vodka can not not produce drunkenness: a room first entered evokes in you an immediate involuntary mental sensation. The human mind senses environments by instinct, scans and evaluates them for properties like ambience, lines of sight and darkness. The horror genre, invented by the partisan architect Horace Walpole, thrived on the discovery that rooms can scare you to death. The grassroots study to this little understood effects of space on mind that transpires through everything humans undertake, as after all you are always somewhere, is called psychogeography.

So much cool stuff! Aaargh. (Social Fiction)

The Pacjappers

D-SYSTEM
Functions of the machine
to disable the common activities as playing an instrument or speaking or also making a sound activities. Maybe we can use it to transform a keyboarded text to a kind of musical sounds.
The real project is to take a reality or an activity and to give another reality, so the user must learn or use his environment in a different manner than normally.

Seems to be a system designed to separate pitch, volume, and verbal information, and then recombine them so that the pitch triggers the words/volume, volume triggers pitch/words, or words trigger pitch/volume. Err.

I’m going to try to meet some of these people when I’m overseas next year, yesss…

I do like their aesthetic, too.

The Year In The Internet 2005

We asked some people what their top ten links of the year were for 2005. This is what they said.

- Michael Bell-Smith & Cory Arcangel

THE PEOPLE

* David Moore and Nicholas Reville of The Participatory Culture Foundation
* WFMU station manager Ken Freedman
* Writer / Comic Chelsea Peretti
* Fake is the New Real
* Interenet User Travis Hallenbeck
* Artist/Musician/Blogger Tom Moody
* Editor/Writer/Former Videogame Designer Simon Carless
* Artist/Curator Marisa Olson
* Internet User Guthrie Lonergan
* Computer Programmer Cory Arcangel and Curator Hanne Mugaas
* Artist Michael Bell-Smith
* Internet User Brett O’Connor

sorry, i’ll do some real content later.

The Believer – The Syncher, Not the Song

Allegedly, though, Ikari’s animation was also the vector that carried “Dragostea din Tei” to a nineteen-year-old kid named Gary Brolsma in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. He liked the song; he made a video of himself sitting in his chair in front of his computer, dancing to “Dragostea din Tei,” and posted it as a Flash video to a site called Newgrounds on December 6, 2004. He called it “Numa Numa Dance.”

Brolsma’s video singlehandedly justifies the existence of webcams. His squarish head and shoulders are in the center of the shot. He’s got a short haircut, glasses that are slightly too small for him and reflect his computer’s monitor, and cheap headphones; he’s sitting in a dismal-looking suburban room. And he is going for it: rolling his eyes back in his head, shaking his face, shooting his hands into the air with the beat, saluting along with the word salut, gesturing grandly, lip-synching the whole thing with his grand opera of a mouth, flirting with the camera, utterly given over to the music. It’s a movie of someone who is having the time of his life, wants to share his joy with everyone, and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. In other words, it’s a movie of a total geek.

I think I’m going to enter something into this. It has an amazing toy thing on the front of its website, and it’s in Mexico, and South America seems to be shaping up to be a very exciting place from a music perspective…