Memein’

From Caterina via Sippey, the following suggestion:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

In my case, this results in “A link attribute is denoted by a box attached to the association with a dashed line.” The book title and author info are just too long for me to want to type right now, but as you probably already noticed, it’s about data modeling. Big surprise there.

Mmmm Nice

Posted especially for Virginia, although others may enjoy it as well:

www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com

Messin wif Google

Yikes I have inadvertently monkeyed with the Google index. As mentioned below, I started a little tribe at YASNS site tribe.net called post-glitch relaxation. The idea of the tribe is for discussion of a new sort of electronica music that I’ve been noticing more of lately that comes after glitched-out clickedy experimental IDM, and does not so much reject such music, as move past it, and find a way back to a kind of dubwise groove a sense of pop smarts and melodic prettiness, while keeping the twerky signal-processed cruchy goodness of the IDM days. So and but anyways, the homepage of my (let’s face it) miniscule 6-person tribe is now the number one result of a search for “post-glitch” (minus the quotation marks) on google. That is mildly creepy, as “post-glich relaxation” is a term I borrowed from neutron star astronomy. I hope I haven’t annoyed any astrophysicists. I’m really sorry about that. I never thought it would happen.

Very Small Webcast

Today begins my (extremely) modest foray into internet radio, to be known for now as the pedicel netaudio embryonic stream. Since my eventual aim is to establish a modest presence (via pedicel.com) as a sort of boutique web-based source of a particular flavor of post-techno mp3 audio, I’m thinking of this as like an initial way to set up the vibe of the scene–;or in other words, to show off a bit of where my tastes lie. This is a real stopgap sort of measure until I gather up enough submissions and pieces of my own to launch an inaugural compilation release from the pedicel netlabel. The stream is running from an aging machine which is not attached to a pro level of bandwidth at all. For all that, as long as I keep the max listeners capped real low in the config, I’ve noticed some problem with lags and rebuffering, but not that much, compared with anything else. It seems pretty stable overall, although I can’t promise anything like 100% uptime. At some point I may try to script some sort of automated “webradio is on/off” indicator into pedicel.com, but that’s a ways off. I’m also looking for anyone with a little extra bandwidth to spare who might be able to configure and run a shoutcast server to repeat the signal and improve the bandwidth situation. The more the merrier (contact info via link on my name at bottom of this page).

Until then, the plan is keep a very short playlist (25 songs or fewer) that rotates through the day, and try to change it around every day or two. That way, if the server fills up, listeners can stay on awhile until they’ve heard everything (or, just enough for them) and then give someone else a turn. I hope some of you drop by to check it out, and stay awhile.

Scene Wanted

So, in case nobody’s noticed, I’m about as excited about music lately as I’ve ever been–;and most especially post-technoish sorts of electronic music. I’m all up for listening to it, and talking about it, and sharing it with people, and making my own, and all of that. Even trying to get a little netaudio label thingo off the ground.

What I miss, though, is the feeling I used to get that taking part in this particular little niche subcultural enthusiasm made me, you know, a part of—;something going on, a group of people that might be too physically remote to be considered actually friends, but at least like-minded individuals. In a word, there was, at one time, a scene having to do with ambient techno and such music, and I felt like I was involved in that scene at least in my own small way and that was cool. I dug all the online conversations and getting email from guys (I must admit it’s always been mostly guys, for some reason) in like Europe and other far-flung locales, and uploading and downloading and collecting and listening to all sorts of interesting audio files. I was like really plugged into all this a few years back, say around 1999 especially, and it was superfun. One of the best parts for me was something that others would often complain about: I liked that most listeners were also producers: that everyone tended to upload around as much as they would download. It was like folk music from the future.

So, various things happen and I get busy with marriage and professional career and cross-country moves and suddenly there’s not so much time for the blips and beats, and I guess I just sort of drifted away. But also, apart from my own preoccupation elsewhere, the scene started looking a lot less compelling, and more than that a lot harder to find a comfortably-fitting spot in. Post-techno electronica has always been severely fragmented into myriad sub-genres–;I don’t have any sort of fundamental problem with that, really. The nerdy trainspotting has always been part of the fun, anybody who’s honest about it would have to admit that. But I seem to have lost the thread at some point. And there’s a lot of music coming out, both on commercial CD and over the web, that I just can’t get that excited about. Well-known big guns like Autechre and Aphex Twin seem to have gotten increasingly caught up in having to top their own reputations for post-digital signal-processed noisy experimentalism, to the pointwhere neither has released anything I can really even stand to listen to in years. Meanwhile, there’s a thousand kids uploading mp3s with very pretty pad washes and very cleverly programmed drum patterns made mostly of little popping and clicking noises and also a lot of them have these little cleanly chopped bits of sampled vocal audio, sliced too thin to make out the words. These are mostly nice and interesting enough in their way, and some of them are quite good indeed, but after awhile they start to all sound the same, and very many of them mysteriously lack any bass or soul whatsoever.

Recently, however, as my regular readers know, I’ve discovered some things like Múm and Four Tet and Mira Calix that keep the dreamy strangeness and sense of adventure going, but also bring some regular pop smarts and musicality to the table. Stuff that has me both scratching my chin AND bobbing my head, that engages head and hips about equally, and that finally finally finally turns me on like this stuff used to, without going back to anything old or retro. So that’s all very good. But what I feel like I’m missing now is the scene part. I want more people to be in on this sound with me, to hear it, and help find more, and make more and send it to each other and talk about it.

The trouble is, despite a well-deserved reputation for being tragically, almost cripplingly verbose, I’m also severely introverted and asocial–;in other words, I’m not the type of guy to effectively get this new electro-organic scene going on my own. I somewhat lamely went and tried to set up a new “tribe” over at tribe.net, which seemed to me to be as good a networking site as any. I decided to call the tribe post-glitch relaxation, a term I borrowed from pulsar astrophysics and which seemed to me as fitting as anything could be. So and but here comes the super lame and retarded and embarrassing catch-22 part: it turns out that to be listed in the tribe.net public directory, my little tribe has to have at least three members. Right now it has precisely one: me, with my pathetic tribe.net profile with zero listed friends.

So, I guess I’m kind of pathetically begging here. If anyone would like to be invited into my tribe, or has any other neat ideas about how to get a serious discussion going about music that’s sort of new and experimental and pretty and ambient and soulful and smart and poppy and brainy and geeky all at once, please let me know. Because I’m keen as anything on the idea, but have no earthly idea how to get started. Thank you for your consideration.

Musique nuveau de moi

Speaking of music, I tossed a couple few things of my own that I’ve been working on lately up over here. These are pretty rough early demo mixes, so keep that in mind. And I’m trying out a number of different dimensions that I haven’t really worked with before, in terms of harmonic as well as dub and hip-hop sorts of elements. So it’s kind of all over the place, in just three songs. But it generally tries to be pretty and hypnotic and hold on to some idea of like organic pop form even happily embracing chilly digital futurism. So do feel free to check some out, if sounds anything like your kind of thing at all. Just, you know, if you hate it, don’t tell me, m’kay? Thanks. I’m all sensitive and respond poorly to criticism.

More about yesterday’s mixage

So, after spending some time with the mix I made and posted about yesterday, one thing is especially clear: the segue between “Blueprint” and “Stolen Car” is inspired, man. Every time it turns the corner, it just plain sounds amazing, and then there’s the this neat kind of philosophico-aesthetic aspect where Beth Orton’s maturely complex attitudes about moral ambiguities in emotional relationships nicely offset Fugazi’s postadolencent self-righteous (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) posturing.

So. It’s just so beautiful, I had to share, out of my willingness to test the boundries of fair use and my abundance of bandwidth. Have at, at least for a limited time: blueprint.mp3 | stolen_car.mp3

I hope at least one of you likes the effect as much as I do.

Tunage for today

OK, so here’s the rockage that I’ve found it necessary to burn to a CD and loop through the better part of my day today. And no, this time I’m not going to be uploading them all to my webserver this time. And yes, I realize that the presense of some of these tunes in the same room with each other, let alone the same mix, would piss off my punk purist friends (the back of my brainpan still stings a bit from the scowl Colin gave me when he noticed I put Fugazi and R.E.M. on opposite sides of the same cassette tape). But you know, I like tweaking purist sensibilities. So, without further ado, the list:

• These Days - Joy Division
• The Suit - Public Image, Ltd.
• Heroes - David Bowie
• Sound and Vision(Bowie Cover) - The Sea and Cake
• NYC - Interpol
• Slow Jam - New Order
• Airbag - Radiohead
• Hammering So Hard - Squirrel Bait
• Blueprint - Fugazi
• Stolen Car - Beth Orthon
• Hendrix With KO - Manitoba
• We Will Become Silhouettes - The Postal Service
• True Faith - New Order
• Sound and Vision(Bowie Cover) - The Sea and Cake(Reprise)

Okay, so the “reprise” of Sound and Vision at the end there was actually me being a dorkbutt. Figures my cranky melancholy mix CD would end up burned with a big fat mistake right in it. That’s OK though, it’s an outstanding version of an excellent song, and I get to hear it in two not unthoughtful placements: after the actual Bowie song, and as the closer. Kind of neat, I suppose. If you want to be like me and make this mix for yourself, remember to play it through headphones, and LOUD!

Feeling the Love Some More

Following up on yesterday’s posts about “I Feel Love”, I was just remembering something from John Savage’s England’s Dreaming (required reading, btw). I seem to recall that when the Donna Summer single came out in ‘79, all the Brit post-punks, from Gang of Four, to PiL, to New Order (they were New Order by then, weren’t they?) to Wire, were all way, WAY into it. In any case, it’s certain nobody in the art the art school set on the far side of the pond got over that snare drum sound for YEARS. To this very day, even, come to think of it. Though, to be fair, I suppose it must be admitted that Summer’s producers stole that from Bowie and Eno in the first place.

And yes, I am just that teensiest bit obsessed with this song, now that you mention it. Why do you ask?

Upsetting LTE

A disturbing note in a Letter to the Editor of this morning’s WSJ, which I’ll go ahead and quote at some length, because there’s nothing I can link to that doesn’t require a (pricey) paid subsciption. I only came across this because someone left a copy behind on my seat on the train commuting to work this morning. The author is Paul Quinnett, Ph.D. of Spokane, WA–;the CEO of QPR Institute, a suicide prevention organization:

Most people who complete suicide had contact with a health professional within a year of death, and 40% of these were within one one month of their deaths. Many people die by overdose on the prescription medications provided them at these visits. —; Screening for depression, substance abuse and suicide potential is not routine in primary care, even though primary care providers are often the “first and only medical contact” suicidal patients have with the health-care system. As a result, suicide risk is not detected. Primary care physicians lack training and evidence-based screening, assessment, and referral practices for suicidality.

This makes me angry and sad.

Feeling the Love

OK, I can’t leave these on the server indefinitely. And, yes, one of them is disco, while the other is by trendoids of the moment and was recently featured in a monster.com commercial, of all things. But trust me, this is the mix CD you want. You want to download all nearly 15 meg of this from me and burn it, ideally with the original Donna Summer 12-inch first, and with no pause between the two, and then you want to listen to it, loud, on repeat, for a long time.

• I Feel Love (Original 12 Inch) - Donna Summer
• I Feel Love - Blue Man Group & Venus Hum

You’ll thank me.

Early Results of Feeling the Love

After trying the experiment noted below for just the commute and the first part of my day one thing is abundantly clear: Donna Summer could crush the Blue Man Group like so many puny grapes. Where Ms. Summer has plainly been able to come into some sort of direct contact with the Divine Presence through the physical act of love, and is able to communicate something of this experience with little more than her voice and a few analog synthesizers, the BMG are just a bunch of nerds with hard-ons for electric guitars, technology, and showgirls. Big deal.