Doing school. Working. Stole time to see the OSM do Ligeti’s Poeme Symphonique, which was flabbergasting and heartrending and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
week 34
– Busy times.
– I saw Richie Hawtin and Locodice at SAT last Monday. Locodice was terrible – the most generic, white-noise “tech-house” you can think of. The crowd was also terrible, which I guess I should have expected from a tour called ‘Beyond EDM’. Hawtin, however, was great: hard, funky, comprehensive effects and set flow. One day I want to see him in a tiny, tiny club, but it will probably never happen.
– I saw Cassandra Miller’s hypnogogic Bel Canto on Monday night. I’n totally biased towards Cassandra’s music as she taught me composition at UVic…but Bel Canto is a great,messy, time-streched sort of piece, filled with spectral and spatial magic.
– I went to Music Hack Day Boston. Holy shit. I am not going to try to talk about all the hacks: check them here. I did a funny hack, Where The Fuck Is The T-Pain, and a much more serious generative music framework called The Ultimate Machine.
– I need to big up the Chrome team for jamwithchrome.com: a great interface and a great technical implementation.
– Also, psobot is a genius: meet forever.fm
week 33
In my notes, nothing happened this week. To the contrary:
– I fixed the visualizer for DREAM|CITY, tested it…and it works, and does what I want. This delighted me.
– Made great progress on TimbreHero, my project for my gesutural control of music class. Need to fix the visualizations for that too.
– Saw the McGill orchestra on Wednesday. They have a *lot* of strings.
– Saw a wonderful show care of Innovations en Concert, featuring work by locals Mason Koenig and Luke Nickel, and inch-perfect choreography by Lilian Belknap.
week 32
– Nothing like powers of two.
– The music for DREAM|CITY is done. I need to master the file, fix the load times on the website, and then get tunes from Connor.
– Diego Stocco, maker of custom instruments, is a genius.
– Saw Move D at a packed Le Bleury two nights ago: what a great set. Especialy interesting to note how he brought things down from 0100 to close at 0300.
– This image is from Theremina’s tumblr, and it just blows my mind.
week 31
– I realized that I am losing the ability to print, with a paper and pencil. This is interesting, but also deeply terrifying.
– Remix 1.5.0 is out! Go and get it.
– 10 female pioneers of electronic music. Required reading.
– Houseplants as multitouch controllers.
– Done DREAM|CITY V, just have VI to go…which I am sure will take me months, now.
– I need to send serious love to Patrick Saint-Denis and his piece AIR, which I saw at a concert at McGill. It features a 8-by-24 grid of paper with fans behind them that acts as a low-resolution video screen, three performers, great sound design, and is basically flabbergasting in all the right ways.
week 30
– I’m making staggering progress on DREAM|CITY: I’m done the first four parts, and made a really good start to V tonight.
– I went to Toronto! I got to see old friends, make pies and eat turkey, and see the shockingly talented Kira Hall play both Kate Monster and Lucy the Slut in Avenue Q. A good weekend and an interesting city.
– I finished Rebecca Farrugia’s BEYOND THE DANCEFLOOR, a book about DJing and feminism. It reads a bit like a Ph.D thesis, but makes some strong points about the embedded dude culture in DJing besides. It also feels oddly dated, musically, even though the research was only finished a few years ago. Nothing moves faster than techno.
– Year of the Glitch is amazing. This is data bending images using Audacity, an audio-editing program.
– King Britt, likewise, is amazing.
week 29
– I forgot that I went to see Roman Flugel at the rapidly-becoming-essential Le Bleury a few sundays ago. He started with some stuff that touched on industrial, and then snapped into top notch deep/house/tech. A fine set that he hopefully didn’t mind me shamelessly trainspotting.
– I got my NSERC application in! Victory! And many thanks to George, Kirk, Marcelo, Ich, Rachelle, Vanessa, Dave, Pat, Zola, Steven Ness, Chelsie, and so on. When I get it, I’ll buy you all a beer.
– I’m actually and officially done (heh) the first half of DREAM|CITY. This is a weird feeling.
– Letters of Note should be essential. If not, this cognitive bomb from Robert Heinlein should make it essential.
– I saw a concert thrown by Innovations en Concert, which is ringlead by my mentor Cassandra Miller. It was…a contemporary / jazz live remix of the (baroque and pre-baroque) works of Tobias Hume. It was, I am shocked to say, utterly fantastic and deeply engrossing. The group is called Quartetski, and I can highly recommend them.
week 28
Still writing grants. Trying to avoid phrases like “My research will heal the sick and save the unbelievers” and “in accordance with the prophecy”. This is harder than you think.
– Got the new David Byrne / St. Vincent record, and it’s so Talking Heads, it really is. Maybe less African rhythms and more brass band, but a fine record just the same.
– Also obtained the complete string quartets of Benjamin Britten, of which No.3 is the runaway winner.
– Did a draft of the third part of DREAM | CITY, totally not sure about it.
– Bret Victor on how to teach programming. I don’t totally agree with him (I’m pretty sure that typing remains the best way to unambiguously tell a computer what to do), but he makes about a billion good points besides.
– Why are animated gifs still around? It’s 2012, and the only ubiquitous video format is the .gif. How did this happen?
week 27
I basically worked on a damn grant application for the entire week. But, with that said:
– I finished the second movement of DREAM|CITY. This is good.
– Saw a concert by the wonderfully mad Mario Bertoncini, which included a contact mic’d aeolian harp and a piece for bowed piano.
– And saw these two amazing things on the internet: CELLO FORTRESS and Laura Marling’s Experiments In Awkwardness.
from aesop to zomby
Yesterday I finished listening to every album I own, in alphabetical order. I started in January.
This is not as ridiculous as it first sounds. I have a relatively small music collection – about 300 albums – and I allowed myself to listen to DJ sets and things from SoundCloud and Thisismyjam besides. But no changing the order and no listening to new albums until the 300 were finished.
This did lead to some pretty ludicrous moments, like when I went through the complete Bruckner symphonies in order, and then did the same for Mahler a month or two later. Woooosh. A lot of sauerkraut, as a friend of mine would say.
I did this for a few reasons. One, why keep such music around if I don’t listen to it? Two, maybe I could delete some of it that I no longer liked! Three, maybe I’d discover a few things that I had forgotten. Four, given the rate at which art is produced, stopping to review seemed wise.
I didn’t delete anything, of course. I discovered that Hello Nasty is a much better album than I thought it was when I was 16. I discovered that Bartok’s string quartets are better than I thought they were last year. I discovered that 90’s trance kickdrums have not aged well. I discovered that my rip of Graceland has clicks in it, and that old Prefuse 73 is really good.
Did I make any deep connections with things? No. One more listen wasn’t going to make me fall in love with anything I wasn’t already in love with. In that respect, the better solution would be to spend a month listening to only one album, in order to really wrap your mind around it. That will come later though.