I need to geek out about science fiction technology for a bit, sorry.
I am surprised at all the commentary about how people won’t want to use Google’s black-magic Glass because of fashion concerns and catty rants about nerds. The reasons to not use Glass and similar tech are panoptical reasons and privacy reasons, not anything about aesthetics. (And here’s the nice Verge article)
This tech will be built into contact lenses within a decade, tops. The processing power will be in something like a necklace, which will probably include a throat mic for subvocalizations. Gear like Myo will be built into clothing for gestural control. Then this gear will be built into your body, and then we’ll really have something amazing and/or scary. This is a thing that is going to happen: anyone who thinks otherwise will be in for a shock. What it will do to our society is another matter.
It’s March. Beware the Ides of March!
– I posted a whole lot of music. There’s the short, quasi-trap EP, there’s my friend Heather singing two voice + string quartet things I did, and there’s the halfway point of my mix series.
– I saw the McGill Orchestra do a really quite rad program: Vivier’s Orion, a new piece by a doctoral student composer, Reiko Yamada, Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin, and a mindboggling percussion concerto by Jennifer Higdon. Great work all ’round.
– I found Daphne Oram’s book, An Individual Note, at aMcGill library give-away. It is filled with the best possible kind of British 1970s madness about electronics, acoustics, philosophy, biology, and music. Highly recommend.
– Did you ever wonder what 100 copies of The White Album would sound like all at once? Well, we’ve solved that problem.
Download here. A sideways, psychotic love-letter to the city of Miami and its soundsystems and love for low-end.
1: Carly Rae Jepsen – Call Me Maybe (Hrdvsion Bootleg) []
2: Rauden – Obsession [Get The Curse]
3: Nouveau Palais – Over You [RBMA]
4: Girl Unit – Ensemble (Club Mix) [Night Slugs]
5: Destiny’s Child – Nuclear (Math Rosen Remix) []
6: Kingdom – Stalker Ha [Night Slugs]
7: Fractal – Strictly Ballroom [Primal]
8: Hrdvision – Right And Tight [International DJ Gigolos]
Four of my favorite people are Richard Feynman, Hudson Mohawke, Paul Dirac, and Lunice.
So, I made some music that hopefully hits the Venn diagram of trap, theoretical physics, and the future. Check ’em out here and here, on the SoundClouds.
– Went to a great space called CFC to hear the first all-skwee set of my life, care of the Ancient Robot crew. Was interesting. Also heard a group called Master Choice play, who will be great if they can figure out that dance music doesn’t need every track to have a long, slow, tear-down outro.
– The Ninja Tune guys have outdone themselves with Beat Delete. Is this the future of vinyl? I really do suspect so.
– The Harlem Shake. I’ve seen some people talking about the ‘obscuring of culture’ around the original Harlem Shake vs. the Baauer-based meme. These are true and good comments. I feel the need to add that this has always happened with dance music, with music, and with culture in general – and it has especially happened with marginalized cultures: black, gay, latino, any sort of underground, etc. In terms of my entrance to dance music, trance came from high energy which came from disco…and if you had told any of the trance bunnies of the late 90s that they were actually dancing to music from the 70s, they would have looked at you like you were insane.
To tangent a bit, A gent named Alan Kay, who invented a very important programming language called Smalltalk made the comment that “pop culture holds a disdain for history”. This is deeply important in dance music. I don’t know if this requisite disdain for history has to go hat in hand with cultural appropriation, but they certainly reinforce one another.
Download here. Not so much a future garage set as a future set. Let’s call it xenon, not neon.
1: L-Vis – Lost In Love [Night Slugs]
2: Nouveau Palais – Drama [RBMA]
3: SecondCity – You Feel []
4: Citizen – Members Only [MadTech]
5: Cardopusher – So What U Want Me 2 Do [Classic Works]
6: L-Vis – Not Mad [Night Slugs]
7: Floyd Campbell – Drifted [Body High]
8: xxyy – Ordinary Things [Ten Thousand Yen]
9: onefourfiveone – D [Tide Pool]
Not much happened, in terms of things worth blogging about: saw lots of friends, kept my nose to the grindstone on some other things.
One of those things I have to mention here though: The Echo Nest Remix.js testbed is live.
If you ever wanted to, in your browser, write code to re-order the beats of a song based on timbre, I’m delighted to say that you can now do that. More where that came from soon.
Download here. Two 4.4 sets in a row – I’m getting soft, but the techno remains hard and heavy.
1: Bhoo – Elastik Phone [Underbelly]
2: Noah Pred – Monotasking (Brendon Moeller Digital Resketch) [Thoughtless]
3: Nautilis – Zero Gravity [3024]
4: Don Froth – REflex (Anthony Shake Shakir Remix) [UNO]
5: Reese & Santonio – How To Play Our Music [KMS]
6: Blawan – What You Do With What You Have [R&S]
7: Kommune1 – Helios [Magic Wire]
8: Jeremy Greenspan & Laurie Spiegel – Drums&Drums&Drums [Jiaolong]
– I went to the coldest rave I’ve ever been to – IglooFest, featuring Ben UFO. I can tell you that a windy -18 is very cold for a dance party, but not too cold. That fact that Ben UFO has amazing taste in music doesn’t hurt either. In 2013, he sounds like nothing so much as a total distillation of British dance music – house, disco, afrobeat, dubstep, nuskool, techno, and so on. He mixes like Juan Atkins, a sort of casual, make-it-look easy flow between tracks that is actually very hard to do. Highly, highly recommended.
– I somehow went to see the various Oscar-nominated shorts, and I can tell you that Asad is great, as is Head Over Heels.
– Night Slugs Allstars 2 is out. But you’ve already got it, I’m sure.
– Bless the CIRMMT concert series. I saw a great hyperguitar performance by Guillaume Barrette, and then an utterly mad jam by Preston Beebe, performed by Zachary Hale, on Ian Hattwick’s magic surface. Said surface listens to vibrations on it (in this case marbles spinning in bowls), and then plays things backed based on the frequency content of the vibrations. This sounds strange, but it makes instant sense when you see it.
Download here. Indulging in some bigger-room house music, by way of some spacier, heavier things. Look out for the chords in Seaweed, and the dueling vocal samples in the opening two tracks.
1: Lianne La Havas – Forget (Laurel Halo Remix) []
2: Four Tet – Pyramids [Text]
3: Nick Hoeppner – Seaweed [Ostgut Ton]
4: Rye & Frank Wiedemann – Howling (Ame Remix) [Innervisions]
5: Tennis – Make It Good [Life & Death]
6: Evy Jane – Ohso (Max Ulis Remix) [King]
7: Destiny’s Child – Say My Name (Cyril Hahn remix) []
