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dance, you fools, we’re sinking!

January 5, 2008 · by · in

Micah – Greenstone (Sad Mix) [Proton]
Pigon – Promises [Dial]
Martin Skogehall – Viagra Falls (Djinxx Edit) [Mezzotinto]
Sasha – Who Killed Sparky [emFire]
Mark Ankh – Dreaming (Medway Remix) [Sound Evolution]
Naveen G – Torsades [Emote]
C79 – Silent Violence (Quiet Riot Remix) [Pacific Front]
Simon Baker – Bandit [20:20 Vision]
Pryda – Odyssey [Pryda]

Cobblestone Jazz – Dumptruck [Wagon Repair]
Cortney Tidwell – Don’t Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up (Ewan Pearson Remix) [Ever]
Silver City – Bari Girl (Ewan Pearson Remix) [GU]
Moonbeam – What Dreams May Come [Mezzotinto]
Future Funk Square – De-Mystified (Andy Page Remix) [Default]
The Youngsters – The Third Knife [20:20 Vision]
Radio Slave – Bell Clap Dance [Rekids]
BBE – 7 Days & 1 Week (Rollo & Sister Bliss Remix) [Kosmo]

begin again

January 3, 2008 · by · in ,

School started today. Oddly enough, the worst part was getting used to a new math prof. Speed, then, is the order of the day:

– I’m playing at Hush on Friday, January 11th, opening up for Shiloh. You should come.

– NYE was fantastic. John Howard and Death To Sexy rocked Hush, then Dust and I brought down the house at the Sunset Room, and then I went to bed. Then I somehow ended up drinking at a friend’s house at 7 PM on New Year’s Day. Ooops.

– Braeden and I are working on a mix. The ball is in my court for tracks 2 & 3: more as it breaks.

– Ideas: If you were a music student, would you want free webspace from the University, as an online resume / promotion space? What if there were mics in all the practice rooms, with a “post to website” button that would upload what you were just practicing to said webspace? What if there were headphone cues in practice rooms, so you could work on your quartet / quintet / sextet across practice rooms, without needing 037 or 016 to be free? Or do you all just want more practice rooms? (Credit is due to David (?) for the micing practice room idea, which is where all of this started.)

music will not last

December 31, 2007 · by · in ,

Much to my surprise, I find myself a music student. While I’m not entirely sure how it happened, I can tell you that the School of Music at UVic is a mind-boggling place for a science kid who likes techno to end up.

See what I mean? These are deeply serious people. If you’re a typical music student, you have to audition to get in, you have an appointed lesson for your instrument once a week, you have to play for masterclasses and recitals of all shapes and sizes…and you have to hold down decent marks in five courses. Woosh. I do not exaggerate when I say that the skill level that undergraduates display would rate a master’s degree in, say, computer science.

The music school is also a bit of a cult, or maybe “closed system” describes it better. It lives in this odd, self-perpetuating, historical vacuum, filled with the ghosts of surly German men. These ghosts loom overlarge, watching as music students reproduce their centuries-old melodies and harmonies with such perfection that only other music students will notice their flaws.

Some of these students then become teachers, and go out into the world and indoctrinate small, innocent children into their way of life. A subset of these children eventually end up at UVic as music students and a further subset of these new music students become teachers, and the cycle begins anew. It’s like salmon spawning. Only with more bassoons, more strict counterpoint, and fewer bears in rivers.

God, I love bears. Let me also make it very clear that in addition to loving bears, I don’t think that the cult / conservational aspects of the school of music are a bad thing, even if they can sometimes come on a little strong. I do, however, think that everyone should go down to Hush or Lucky or somewhere and get right crunked out from time to time. A little bit of populism never hurt anyone.

(I would take this chance to write about musical styles as a memetic virus, but that’s neither here nor there. Will get to it later.)

If you’re me and you snuck into all this through the back door marked Music & Computer Science, it can be a little overwhelming, and more than a little humbling.  I lack the skill, even after DJing for almost 7 years, to perform at the required level, and Brahms didn’t write any sonatas for laptop and turntable, for some reason Way to go, Brahms. What a dick. (I’ll just have to write them myself.)

“please, don’t tell me…

December 28, 2007 · by · in , ,

…that I’ve been fucking an android. Or, do tell me that I’ve been fucking an android.”

No one can say that THE INVISIBLES aren’t quotable, even if they’re slightly less than coherent from time to time. To move on: I can’t not link to this slightly visionary, slightly creeeeeeepy interview with David Levy, author of a book called LOVE AND SEX WITH ROBOTS. You wish I was making this up. Or, you don’t.

In less pornographic news, I have two new clips posted: Oceanography and the aforementioned Beatles project, EVOLved. Go and listen to them right now.

I also look to be DJing on New Year’s Eve at the Sunset Room, tagging with Dust. We’re on at 0400, by the looks of it, for all those who are still awake and dreaming.

Finally, I’ve been doing rather a lot of reading. I can, much to my surprise, highly recommend HALTING STATE, by Charles Stross. I can mostly recommend SPIN, by Robert Charles Wilson, and CAMOFLAUGE, by Joe Haldeman. And, of course, Neil Gaiman’s STARDUST is perfectly lovely.

More coherent thoughts to come, once school re-starts and I have lots of spare time. (Nyuk nyuk nyuk)

i’m not even angry.

December 26, 2007 · by · in ,

“I’m being so sincere right now. Even though you broke my heart. And killed me. And tore me to pieces. And threw every piece into a fire.”

Welcome to PORTAL. Always remember: the cake is a lie.

In addition to being a fantastic concept with a fantastic game around it, with a fantastically snide plot and fantastic presentation, writing, and voice work around the plot, Portal is actually a textbook example of learning in game design. The titular portals that drive the game are a bit of a mindbreak. This only increases once you discover all the things you can do with portals.

The designers deal with this by slowly and exactly introducing each concept, maneuver, and mechanic. They also supply a horde of visual cues, some subtle, some obvious, to help you on your merry way. By the time the bottom drops out, the User is totally competent at manipulating portals, boxes, momentum, enemies, and laser beams – all of which become pretty important pretty fast.

I mention this super-geeky subset of game design because of a book I was given called A THEORY OF FUN, by Raph Koster. If you’re interested in game design at all, practically or abstractly, you should read this book.  Koster is occasionally cryptic and meandering, but the text as a whole is filled with wisdom of the highest order, about the nitty gritty of design and the overarching philsophy of games, play, and learning.

2007: shows of the year

December 23, 2007 · by · in

I can’t really pick one out of a horde of good nights out this year, so I’m just going to list off my favorites:



Battles, Maximo Park, Planet of the Drums, Phil K, Steve Reid & Kieren Hebden, Kid Koala.

Of those, Steve Reid & Kieren Hebden maaaybe stand out a little. Maybe Battles do as well. Tough to say. I’m also kind of surprised that there was no standout DJ performance for me this year. Phil K was Phil K, and Kid Koala is pretty sick, but no one DJ made me stand up and say yeah, as it were. Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I just need to drink more.

happy solstice,

December 21, 2007 · by · in ,

I am deeeeeeelighted that today is the winter solstice, and that the days will be getting longer for another six months. I, for one, have had enough of dark skies at four in the afternoon.

On a less mythic note, it looks like Resist has gone under too – info is from CMD, care of Morgan King, whom you may remember from “I’m Free” on Northern Exposure.

…Remind me to write a post about how much of crime it is that no one cares about history in electronic music.

“but what is the secret of orgone, that which men would give their lives for?!?!”

December 19, 2007 · by · in , , ,

– The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison, is totally mad.  It’s like Michael Moorcock took his most sideways Jerry Cornelius yarns and made them all into a Vertigo comic book.  I don’t think that Moorcock’s influence on a generation of British authors can be overstated.
– David Byrne is a bit of a fruitcake, but his discussions about the music industry make for good reading.

– I’ve been having ideas again.  It would be nice if there was a way for me to track and order the music that I actually end up playing when I DJ, as opposed to the music I take with me to each gig, as opposed to my music collection as a whole.  And then sort them by most played, least played, etc.  Traktor / Serator people, do your browsers do this?

– More ideas:  My desktop since I moved back to Victoria has been a pair of fairly abstract images from Desktopography 2.  I’ve also noticed the rise in widgets and counters and information-at-a-glance.  OS X deals with them by hiding them until you summon them up.  What if they were integrated directly into your background though?  A really cliche implementation would be an ocean image that gets stormy as the weather gets worse.  I think a purely abstract version would be better.  Colors & shapes represent your RSS feeds, your friends lists, the weather, your agenda, CPU stats, etc – and they’re all pretty and subtle, but are right there if you need to look at them.

– Tide Pool Is Love is this Thursday evening at midnight.  You should tune in.

– I want to do a proper version of LOVE – kind of like The Grey Album, but with nothing but Beatles samples and vocals.  We’ll see how far the idea takes me. 

2007: concerts of the year

December 17, 2007 · by · in

Now, here’s an award I’m not qualified to give out, let me tell you. The Uvic School of Music puts on rather a lot of concerts, and most of them are free. Going to these was more than a bit of a culture shock, but I’ll talk about that in more detail later. For now, let’s talk about which ones were the best.

Terry Riley – In C (Sonic Lab Ensemble)

One of the things they don’t tell you in music history classes is that the minimalist movement (Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Phillip Glass, etc) is basically techno. Or, techno is basically minimalism – your choice. Regardless of which way you want to jump, In C is kind of a big deal. It is “composed” of 53 cells that the entire ensemble sloooowly moves through, going in and out of sync with each other over the course of the performance. This is anchored by someone playing straight eighth notes, an octave apart. If you think this would sound annoying, you should try listening to it for the better part of an hour.

But, in all seriousness, In C sounds fantastic and wonderful and deceptively simple, and it was, by far, the most fun concert of the year for me. Of coures, it wasn’t the most technically amazing, because that was…

James Tenney – Koan for String Quartet (Bozzini Quartet)

Tenney’s original Koan is pretty much just a mind-bogglingly slow glissando on a violin, and all the wonderful tonal trickery that doing that in an enclosed space entails. The version for a full quartet is even more of a headfuck. If you have perfect pitch, you may feel ill. If you’re a huge fan of electronic music in any form, you’ll be filled with glee to hear four strings basically pretend to be sine tone generators for fifteen minutes. Your head may also fall off when the cello falls cataracts down in pitch right at the end. Consider yourself warned.


Colin Tilney – Piano Sonata #14 (Ludwig van Beethoven)

You will notice that I inverted the composer and the performer for this one. You will also notice that the above picture is of two harpsichords. This is because Colin Tilney’s otherworldly, encore performance (Why don’t more people prepare encores? Surely it’s more fun than taking two curtain calls and smiling) on his fortepiano deserves all the credit here. Let’s just say that the low end of a modern piano really can’t do it justice, and leave it at that.

2007: sets of the year

December 13, 2007 · by · in

This was all kinds of tough this year – there was rather a lot of good, free music available on the internet this year. Without further ado, the winners are:

Best Heads-Down Dancefloor Rampage: JOHN DIGWEED – Live @ Inox, 05-13-07.

For me, Digweed had been kinda sloppy of late. There were some forgettable singles, some unexciting mix CDs, the Bedrock label had been spotty and sporadic, and so on. Then, this MONSTER of a live set started doing the rounds on the interwebs. The mixing is impeccable, the music goes smoothly and subtly from place to place, and the vibe is evil and sexy and dirty and driving and totally wonderful. It is, in short, a stellar and intimidating return to form.

Best “Ahhhhhhh”: HABERSHAM – Warm Art 5 Year Anniversary Mix

Warm Art is one of the longer running shows on Proton Radio, and they conjured up Georgia’s finest to weave together this lovely downtempo / chillout / experimental collection. It is tricky and heartfelt, and awfully smooth, considering the range of music. It’s a cliche that you can “hear the love” that goes into mixes, but in this one, you really can.

Best Reminder Of What DJing Is All About: SKREAM – Funk Special 2007

Holy shit, Skream’s white. Live and learn. Anyways, in addition to being a dubstep prodigal, the man has amazing, amazing taste in old funk and disco records…and enough of a sense of humour to drop two hours of them on his radioshow on Rinse.fm . The mixing is sloppy, he talks too much, and none of it matters, because the music is just perfect.

Honorable Mentions and much love to: Calibre, Steinski, Betamax Warriors, Chloe & Cul, “Slow Music From West Africa”, Tundra & Qbical, Mike Pickering, Cobblestone Jazz, Michael Fakesch, Diplo, Rennie Foster, and Condition Red.