I need to send some serious props to the students and performers at NEC’s tragically named “Sick Puppy” (http://www.sicpp.org/) summer new music week. Despite the iffy branding, they play and premiere great music. Highlights included two Xenakis percussion jams, an Earle Brown structured improv piece, piano suites by Dorothy Chang, a Murail piece about a magic boat, and two cello premieres: one from Adam Roberts, and one from Ulrich Kreppein.
I look to be going to NYC for HAMR at Columbia: will probably be doing some stuff around detecting shitty beatmatching, and will be talking about Remix a bit too.
Quick hits:
– Books about DJing and club culture that I need to read.
– Get Lucky, covered in various historical styles.
– An app that avoids social interaction.
Probably 54?
– I went to New York! There are pictures.
– Via Theremina, I have a crush on the paintings of Paul Morstad.
– I’ve been thinking about software engineering and Marshall McLuhan: how do our tools influence the quality of our code? Does being able to run code quickly in, say Python, lead to lousy code? Or have there always been terrible programmers, regardless of language?
– I am delighted to say that the most prosaic paper I will ever write (‘A Quantitative Review of Mappings in Musical iOS Applications’) has been accepted by SMC 2013. In theory, this means that I’ll be in Stockholm in early August – get at me if you will be there also.
– I also started a mix for a friend’s wedding. It is already the hardest thing I have ever done. I also have to keep it a hushmost secret, but I can say that it involves doo-wop, Digital Underground, and Tom Waits. More as it breaks.
– I changed this website! I need to add the cute JS songwriter and it will be done.
– Some great work about The Future: Sensory Augmentation. This is at least half the promise of AR for me, not just the Glass / HUD that everyone’s hating on these days.
– I saw Four Tet: he was amazing. I can’t say enough good things about his music or his show. I also need to shout out Anthony Naples, who has great taste in music but is an adorably iffy beatmatcher, and the crazy-deep opener, Ricardo Donoso, who played a live set straight out of deepest Bedrock circa 2001: no drums for 20 minutes, no hi-hats for 50.
There was also a serious raver there: baseball cap, big pants, strung-out beard, doing a liquid-skip sort of dance. He was apparently totally sincere, and looked my age or younger. So given that I was 7 years too late for actual rave culture, where did this cat come from?
Probably more like 52: ah well.
– I am trying to only listen to music written by female artists or by groups that are at least 50% female; this is called “All The Ladies’ Singles”. If I have time, I will do something with The Echo Nest’s API to help me with this…
– The first instance of this is Ellen Allien’s LIsm, which is amazing: it covers all the academic electronic cliches, does them better than most people in academia do, and then adds electro and techno,
– I accidentally went to see James Blake on Wednesday night: he’s still a monster. I can’t think of very many artists that appeal to ballad-loving girls, serious bro / bass dudes, techno heads, and jazz cats. I also loved how his loops would catch crowd noise at the start, as people cheered the start of a new song.
– Then, I went to see the Boston Pops play parts of Fantasia: Symphony Hall still sounds luscious. It makes me wonder how much of how we think of ‘classical’ string and brass sounds was affected by that hall, and by the importance of the BSO in the last century.
More importantly, I got to hear a member of a major orchestra screw up: a certain percussionist was late late late in an entrance. I never knew that the Gone With The Wind theme was that funky.
They played a first half of film music. Sigh. Beethoven 6 was just wonderful though, as was Rhapsody in Blue. I don’t care much for much of the Pops rep, but man, the hall sounds glorious
I’m in Cambridgeport, slowly unpacking things at Brambleberry: I have a million things I want to do over the next eight months:
- Re-build this website
- Fix all my passwords
- Write my thesis proposal
- Hack up a draft of my thesis project.
- Keep making martinis
- Make What We Talk About When We Talk About Beethoven, a piece for human and chatbot.
- Make my ISMIR music submission with Ryan Groves.
- Start and maintain a group-blog about how to learn about the future of music. (First part is done!)
- Finish my third Mario 1 quartet.
- Finish my time-stretched Brian Ferneyhough thing: got that done already too.
- Finish a mixtape in honour of my friend’s wedding.
- Papers and documentiation for: my algorithmic Xenakis project, my Tonnetz, the Ultimate Machine, remix.js, and Kenzie’s NYPD mix
- And go outside!
Download here, and thanks for listening. This one is for Ray Bradbury, and you.
1: God Within – Raincry [Hardkiss]
2: Leftfield – Left of Life [DDB]
3: Hybrid – Burnin’ (Breaks) [Y4K]
4: Beber & Tamra – You Wonder (Starecase Vocal Remix) [MOb]
5: Katcha – Touched by God (The Light Remix) [Hooj]
– School is done. The last classes of my Master’s degree, which is a weird thought. Now I just have to make & write a thesis.
Speaking of school, this is what I made:
It’s a realization of Euler’s Tonnetz, with some topographical dodgery: it is equal tempered, but not a torus, because making a cylinder is easier than making a torus. There’s a speaker in one end, so it can be played as a stand-alone controller, or as a midi controller: just press a note to play it.
I’ll do a full write-up about it soon, with gory details of how it works, how it didn’t work, and so on.
One more to go! I’m as surprised as you are:
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Download here. There’s a direct connection, for me, between old dance music and old science fiction – and this set has touches of both.
1: Man With No Name – From Within The Mind Of My 909 [Strut]
2: This Ain’t Chicago – Ride The Rhythm (Acid Not Placid) [Strut]
3: Raudive – Traffic [Running Back]
4: Storm Queen – Let’s Make Mistakes (Club) [Environ]
5: Virgo – In A Vision [Rush Hour]
6: Virgo – Do You Know Who We Are? [Rush Hour]
7: Pachanga Boys – Time [Hippie Dance]
– I mentioned school, right?
– All I need to do is point you towards Aaron Diaz’s masterful Zelda cover: Clockwork Empire.
