I’ve kind of had a crush on the Monome for a while, for good reason: It’s totally sick. I had the idea to load each button with a sound, or a MIDI pattern, or a tempo change paramter, or an effect parameter, and so on, with some random organization and some random set of things. The performance would then be this drunkard’s-walk style game of discovering what sort of things are in the interface, then how they’re organized, and then how to make a pleasing sound with them. One could then add proximity based rules and really make shit interesting.
I also had a flash of mad genius when I should have been studying math, and instead watched Hollas play some air violin for a bit. This, obviously, ended with three or four of us sketching out the controls for Violin Hero using the Wii remote and nunchuck, including microtonality, bow position, pizzicato, glissando, and vibrato. But, as you can see, we were (kind of) beaten to the punch. Betcha can’t play Ligetti on that though.
Our man in Memphis talks about genres, DJing, and production. Give it a read here. You can find The Sky Patrol’s Tide Pool catalog here.
As you may have heard, Amazon just dropped Kindle: a wireless e-book, e-paper, and blog reading device. I, obviously, have never used one, and I am loath to disagree with luminaries like Mr. Gaiman when he says it’s wonderful…but I certainly won’t be using one when they cost $400, are ass-end ugly, and aren’t solar powered.
Kindle is a nice idea, and is probably a good implementation of that idea. (Again: it could not be ugly and it really must be solar-powered.) But it’s an idea that has not yet arrived, and that won’t arrive until books are traded like music was before the iPod hit. Napster peaked in February 2001 – the iPod launched in October of that same year. Until e-books are that ubiquitous, Kindle is so much kindling.
There’s also the classic argument about why books will never stop being made, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Unrelated: a great post from Test Industries about Amato going out of business. Ah,vinyl. I’ll miss you.
Firstly: This Thursday, Hush, mad techno and dance music. Come. Yes.
Secondly: The Laptop Club is, amazingly, a collection of 7 to 9 year old kids who draw out designs for laptops. These are astonishing. I am twenty-five of your earth years old, and I parse The Intertubes in a totally different way from these kids. Absolutely worth looking at.
Thirdly: Burial – ‘Untrue’. This is a fantastic album. I don’t know if it’s as good as his first one, but it’s very close to that high bar, and it’s far easier to listen to: lots of vocals, lots of lush pads, lots of pretty / melancholy depth. Really, “melancholy” is the word I’d use for this one. ‘Untrue’ comes from a sad, sad place. It kind of has to. After all, it’s been 15 years since hardcore, and all the drugs have finally started to take their toll on the ravers who are suddenly staring at the wrong end of 30. Buy the ticket, take the ride. With that said, even if you didn’t take that particular ride at that particular time, ‘Untrue’ is still very much worth listening to, as a memory of whenever Things Were Like That, for you.
This is some sick shit. Yes. I speak nothing but the truth to you, and if you have even the most cursory interest into popular music and sampling culture, this album is a must hear. The obvious standout is the amazing ‘Paper Planes’, which lifts the entire guitar riff from The Clash’s ‘Straight To Hell’, along with gunshots and cash-register sounds as percussion hooks. The main producers for the album appear to be Diplo and Switch, along with M.I.A. herself, and they did a job. Other standouts are ’20 Dollar’, ‘Boyz’, ‘Mango Pickle Down River’, and ‘Bird Flu’. Well recommended.
Play it!
Radio Free Sasha – Dead Reckoner [Bootleg]
Fairmont – Fade To Saturate [Border Community]
Spooky – Stereo [Generic]
Mendel – Out Of The Dark [Unsigned]
Luke Chable – Skyline Road [68]
Stel – Heart Full Of Napalm [Hope]
Led Zepplin – They Just Won’t Let Me Be (Phil K vs. PQM) [Abducted]
Hybrid – Sleepwalking [Distinctive]
I am also djing with the immortal DJ What at Hush on Thursday, November 22nd. It will be ridiculous. Come out and drink too much with us.
(also bought the new Burial and M.I.A.’s latest, but more about those later)
The Dumpster is a visualization of ~20,000 break-ups that were posted to blogs, LiveJounal, MySpazz, etc, in 2005. Welcome to the future, two years ago. William Gibson (and Marshall McLuhan, for that matter) would be proud.
The interesting thing for me is that The Dumpster only displays excerpts from each blog, and no links to the blogs in question. Obviously, this is done for privacy reasons – but there’s no need to do so. And wouldn’t it be just so Internet if you could link out to to these people?
I wanted to eliminate those elements in the game that made players think ‘It’s not my fault that I can’t do this’.
^^ The greatest (and maybe the most under-rated) game designer of the modern era drops some pure science. Full interview with Shigeru Miyamoto is here.
Finished THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN a few nights ago. Wooosh. Gene Wolfe is a helluva writer, but certainly not an easy one. He’s somewhere between Michael Moorcock and Neil Gaiman, with a touch of Borges thrown in. I’d certainly recommend the quartet to serious sci-fi (and even to literature people, for that matter), but with the proviso that there is a lot here, and you will have to beat it to death from time to time. Hopefully I can find time to give it a re-read sooner rather than later.
Also went to see the Aventa Ensemble perform: they did Kaija Saariahos’ Lichtbogen, which I really enjoyed, Gregory Lee Newsome’s in media res, which had some lovely moments, and Pierre Boulez’ Derive II, for which words like “titantic” and “mind-boggling” seem lacking. It was a serious concert: I wish I had understood more of it.
Finally, I finished Bioshock, with the good ending: it seems to be a trend that modern games don’t end well, both in terms of a final cutscene and the final few gameplay hooks. With that said, it remains a landmark title in so many ways…but it could have been a landmark in one or two more ways that could have fundamentally changed how video games are played, made, and perceived. More after the jump, with HUGE SPOILERS. (more…)
