Rustie, Jackmaster, Oneman @ Le Belmont
Hot damn. This was sonically colossal, had a perfectly diverse / messy crowd, and featured two smooth-as-silk DJ sets before Rustie’s smash and grab.
Ben UFO @ IglooFest
COLD. I have never been this cold in my life, and the set was totally worth it. Ben UFO will grow up to be the British equivalent to Laurent Garnier, mark my words.
Four Tet @ Middle East
I wasn’t sure what to expect out of Mr. Hebden – what I got was a glorious live reconstruction of his latest tunes, on two non-Mac laptops, no less.
Honorable mentions out to Justin Carter at Mr. Sunday, Soulelujah at Zuzu, the monster that is James Blake, and Move D at Glasslands. Also, special bonus mention to Cobblestone Jazz / Hrdvsion at Lucky, which I suspect will be one hell of a NYE show…
Strauss / Strauss / Ligeti – 2001
The NY Philharmonic did two sold out nights doing a play-along to the entirety of 2001. The weirdness of watching a movie with 2,700 other people aside, it was a fantastic performance: dense and hypnagogic for the Ligeti, brassy and climbing for the Strauss.
Chaya Czernowin – Upstream
Czernowin knows.
Honorable mentions to Nadia Pona’s grad recital, the Bozzini’s Composer’s Kitchen concert, Preston Bebe’s jam that involved throwing popcorn around, the Boston pops doing Fantasia (and the percussionist who blew an entrance!), and SCIPP’s Xenakis freakout.
Holden – The Inheritors
Astonishing.
Julianna Barwick – Nepenthe
Some wags at work called this ‘slowed-down Enya’ – which is basically true, but in all the best ways.
Julia Holter – Loud City Song
Holter, for me, sits at this nexus of classical / pop and electronic / acoustic, and does it so well. I wish I could make music like this
Honorable mentions to Ellen Allien’s ultra-future ballet score, LISM, everything that Laurel Halo did, Purity Ring’s amazing Shrines, Ikonika’s Aerotropolis, DJ Rashad’s gorgeous/sad/heavy Rollin’ EP, the new Burial, of course, the new Boards, of course, and Norah Lorway’s I’ve Had Dreams Like This.
DJ HENNESSY YOUNGMAN – NSA BANGERS
Clearly the mix of the year. Fuck the NSA, long live Hennessey
James Holden – RA 367
A companion piece to his masterful album. Holden continues to be a Holden – which, really, is more than enough.
Mr. Saturday Night – Live at Gowanus Grove
Mr. Carter and Mr. Harkin are just two very good DJs, just playing a closing party at a just-perfect venue.
Honorable mentions to: Julianna Barwick’s FACT mix, Solid Steel’s “Funky Eno”, Jackmaster’s Mastermix, Ewan Pearson at Panorama Bar, EVOL’s Acid Megamix, and so many more.
December 21, 2013 · by
thor · in
art
Happy solstice: Sun, it will be nice to see you again.
– My last day of my internship at The Echo Nest was today. I will miss them.
– The good people at This Is My Jam are doing their Jam Odyssey again this year. If you want to actually know what I cared about this year, it’s a pretty good place to start.
– The School for Poetic Computing
– The NSA paid RSA to weaken one of their random number generators. This is disgusting on every level.
December 15, 2013 · by
thor · in
art
Apparently nothing happened this week. I am packing to move back to Montreal, realizing how much of a hermit I’ve been this year, and thinking of ways to fix it.
– So this is really interesting: Bespoke controllers.
– TWO HOURS from the Paradise Garage closing party.
– In other DJ set news, I am slowly catching up with my massive backlog. Some highlights have been Deepchord’s RA Podcast anbd the Mr. Sunday Night / Gowanus Grove closing party
– Julia Easterlin put out a summary EP in October: you should buy it.
I went to Brooklyn, I went to a hack day, I built a thing called grid, which touches on a few things that I am wrestling with for my master’s thesis.
Grid takes an image from Wikipedia, turns that image into, wait for it, a grid of buttons, and then maps those buttons to pitches, based on the scale that you specify. The mapping is based mostly on the colour, and slightly on the location of each button in the grid.
Specifically, the mappings are:
- Colour saturation is volume: more colourful colours are louder.
- Pitch class is hue, mapped to the given scale: hue, like pitch, wraps around.
- Octave is brightness: lighter colours play higher octaves.
- Timbre is the RGB values: they scale a sine, triangle, and square wave.
- Filter frequency is diagonal: the x + y location in the grid.
The synthesis is all done in WebAudio. This hack would be much more impressive with a good synth behind it, which I will try to build at some point.
This is related to my thesis in terms of converting abstract geometries into mappings. In this app, the mapping is set, and I’m taking the first steps at going from the Real World to abstract geometry. It’s probably the simplest abstract geometry possible, but it will do for now.
November 25, 2013 · by
thor · in
art
Also, I am going to NYC next weekend for the Monthly Music Hackathon! The theme is Automatic Music – it’d be great to see you there.
