- Bruce Sterling at SouthBy, natch.
- Hannah Donovan remains brilliant.
- Jan Chipchase on being a ‘young creative’ – I think his definition is not the same as mine, but it is not a bad one.
- I’m really sad to say that I didn’t know about the NAMES Memorial Quilt – but my god, what an amazing thing, and what a terrible time.
- Amazing page about DSP basics, by Jack Schaedler.
week 115
week 110.5
– Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald did an AMA. Essential. My TOR node is up: is yours?
– Charles Stross is on depressingly good form here, I think.
– I knew about Eno’s Oblique Strategies, but I did not know that my man Marshall McLuhan had his own version: The Distant Early Warning.
week 109
So, I moved to New York. It’s been, as they say, real.
– Amazing intro / discussion of African science fiction.
– You can execute arbitrary code in Super Mario World. I mean, honestly.
– Crash Override is important.
– Tahir Hemphill is also pretty important.
– Let biometric feedback manage your friendships. No, really.
week 106
- Augmented Hands. I repeat my prediction that all human senses will eventually be mediated by computers.
- The Turing Complete User. This is a thing that I keep thinking about, in terms of how much humans should know about the technology that they use in very vital and / or intimate ways. I don’t drive…but many people that I know who do drive can’t do anything if their car breaks down. What is the appropriate model for using computers?
- Machine learning algorithms try to understand art, results are amazing.
- Dave Sirlin has a podcast, natch.
- Oh no, people are using samples tackily. Sherburne has a point, for sure…but it’s not like dance music, or indeed music, has ever been decent about stealing ideas from people. Shit goes back to the Baroque, at least.
- Caribou has made a 1000 song mixtape. Yeah.
- Teufelsberg impulse responses. (!!)
- Sterling, Lebowsky, and Doctorow talk about the state of the world.
brahms it up
Two years after I had the idea of blowing up Brahms scores by modifying the .jpg files, I finally have a done thing:
Details and link to the score are here!
2014: tracks of the year
As you can see by the lack of shows, I barely went out this past year. But, there were still some tunes that did serious things.
Caribou – Can’t Do Without You
During the Subdivision 5 Year, Longshanks dropped this in and then left poor Nathan Docksteader to deal with the fact that the tempo changes and there’s no outro. I was too busy peaking to notice, however. What a record.
Tiga – Bugatti
I said BUGATTI. I said BUGATTI. I said BUGATTI.
Plaid – Hawkmoth
Perfect chords.
And, of course, don’t forget the Jam page. And that Hush closed. Hell of a year, all things considered.
2014: shows of the year
Well, MUTEK. Tim Hecker, Shackleton, Holly Herndon, Robert Henke, Archie Pelago, Magic Mountain High, Ricardo Villalobos, Pinch, Lee Bannon, The Mole + Family, and all those troublemakers at Picnique the day after (Ricardo, Pinch, Move D).
Also big big big love to Sub|Division for their entirely great five year party
2014: concerts of the year
As ever with concerts, the ‘honorable mentions’ should really get as much love as those mentioned in more detail…
Erin Gee – Swarming Emotional Pianos
I saw lots and lots of the iterations towards this show, and I am nothing like an unbiased observer of my friend Erin’s work, but I have to tell you, this thing was immense.
Sibelius – Violin Concert in D Minor
With Byungchan Lee on solo duties, the McGill orchestra knocked this one out of the park.
Holst – The Planets
Ok, ok, so McGill has a good orchestra, sure, good talk. Them playing a historical favorite of mine was probably overkill.
Those honorable mentions: John Chowning’s Voices, outdoors at ICMIC; the grad recitals of Nadia Pona on bassoon and Amahl Arulanandam on ‘cello; magic from the Universite de Montreal care of Myriam Bleau’s Soft Revolvers and Patrick Saint-Denis’ City?; shoutout to McGill’s own Eliot Britton for Metatron and to McGill opera for A Midsummer Night’s Dream…and, again to the orchestra and Jane Archibald for Strauss’s Four Last Songs.
2014: albums of the year
Objekt – Flatland [Pan]
To quote a good friend of mine in IRC, “what is happening”.
FKA twigs – LP1 [Young Turks]
Well, what is happening here is that a supremely talented youngster is shaping the world in her image – as it should be.
Caribou – Our Love
This is the least consistent of the last two Caribou albums – the sloppy dance tropes can go, but the but the life-reaffirming high points are so high.
Honors out to: Plaid – Reachy Prints, Forest Swords – Engravings, UNESCO’s Anthology of African Music, and Bach’s Six Partitas, as played by Glenn Gould.
2014: sets of the year
Jam City – EARTHLY III
Because it has such a sense of itself, of chromed-out Ballardian futures.
Daniele Baldelli – Beats in Space, August 2014.
Undeniable jams from one of disco’s cosmic originators.
Leon Vynehall – FACT Mix 429
The blurb for this says “organic, natural-sounding house music”, and that’s really all that’s going on here…but it is going on so so well.
Honorable mentions to Acid Arab’s RA Mix, Kode 9 doing RA 400, Jacques Greene, my man AFK, Mala x Loefah from 2006, Jackmaster’s XLR*R mix, Claude Speed for FACT, DJ Food’s Children of the Sun set, Ron Hardy live from 1987, and so many more.