A scenario Brian Eno has no doubt lived often
Found on Tumblr:
brian eno in 1974: well being a beautiful feathery androgynous alien sure was fun
brian eno in 1974: now to spend the rest of my life looking like a substitute maths teacher
A scenario Brian Eno has no doubt lived often
Found on Tumblr:
brian eno in 1974: well being a beautiful feathery androgynous alien sure was fun
brian eno in 1974: now to spend the rest of my life looking like a substitute maths teacher
Apple’s gone digital with their headphone outputs, but they have an analogue adapter for the expensive cans you already own. Pity it’s not powerful enough to drive them, per c’t in Germany. There’s significant and variable signal loss through the adapter — telltales of a pissweak amplifier — and their tests left them wondering if it wasn’t in fact an analogue signal going through the Lightning connector, rather than a digital one.
Also, the Lightning connector digital output is always downsampled to 16-bit at 44.1 kHz — though Rocknerd readers know that even the advocates of higher resolutions can’t hear the difference in A/B/X tests. However, the pro-audio market, who generally live on Macs (increasingly regretting it as they are) and work in 32/96 so they have room to process stuff, are not entirely pleased. (Mind you, I’m now wondering what the digital-analogue converter for the previous headphone plug actually did, and it’s not like pro audio is free of magical thinking.)
Also, for some reason, Apple’s efforts to improve Bluetooth linking only work on their own mediocre headphones! What are the chances.
Good thing the market will save us, since the Lightning connector is a widely-accepted standard with plenty of alternate vendors. Oh wait, it’s nothing of the sort. Oh well, never mind.
Today at work I’ve been busy discussing the horror of Blockchain. So have some interesting webpages that are completely not about that in any manner.
A quick link pile today, I’ve been working on a short book on Bitcoin and Blockchain hype. A thousand reasonable-quality words towards the first draft. Writing properly turns out to be mentally exhausting. I blame Sandifer, of course.
“Culture is not about aesthetics. Punk rock is now enforced by law.” is the most popular thing I have ever written, anywhere, of any sort. On a music blog that nobody reads, this thing got 80,000 hits. A one-hit wonder I failed to cash in on in any manner.
The piece won’t tell you anything that wasn’t already obvious to any reasonably informed pixel-stained technopeasant — but this stuff was actual news to musicians I knew personally, who had been musicians since the ‘70s and ‘80s and were going “what the hell happened?”
Best bit: the comments on it were really good and apposite, with meaningful discussion. I was most pleased.
Part of the problem that I didn’t really hammer on is the Great Cultural Fragmentation. Given the choice, people want what they want, not what you want them to want. Mass movements are nothing like so massive now that listeners have options. The mass media hegemony broke absolutely the moment we could escape them.
Even pop music isn’t actually popular any more — you can have a mainstream number one “hit” in the UK with less than 10,000 sales, which thirty years ago would have had you topping the indie charts. Mainstream pop used to be a serious cultural force, and now it just … isn’t. You haven’t heard of most of these people because they aren’t actually famous.
The gigantist twentieth-century record industry is decreasingly viable simply because they no longer control the means of either production or distribution. And are jawdroppingly inept in any case. Hail Mary passes and wishing for magic aren’t going to make it rain. They’re doing a pretty good job of dying in a fire, but they need to hurry it up please.
And this is despite there being more music than anyone could ever keep up with.
Bob Stanley in Yeah Yeah Yeah offers a useful distinction: music can become “pop” when there’s intermediation between you and the performer. Forms in which you know the performer are not “pop”:
What exactly is pop? For me, it includes rock, R&B, soul, hip hop, house, techno, metal and country. If you make records, singles and albums, and if you go on TV or on tour to promote them, you’re in the pop business. If you sing a cappella folk songs in a pub in Whitby, you’re not. Pop needs an audience that the artist doesn’t know personally – it has to be transferable.
(He didn’t mention drum machine goth songs in a pub in Whitby, but that’s pretty clearly folk too.)
What we’re seeing now is all music increasingly being forced by the laws of the market to work like folk.
So how do subcultures work now? In the ’80s, a whole city’s indie rock scene could subtly change sound because one guy’s Flying Nun albums just arrived from New Zealand and he played them for his mates. Now it’s picking a genre to mine. The meaning of “subculture” changes when they’re self-organising groups on the Internet.
I didn’t manage at the time to come up with a programme of action less broad than the downfall of neoliberal late capitalism in its entirety. (Though at the least, you’d need people to feel secure enough in their lives to spend money in the first place.) Thinking further on it, there are approaches such as finding a niche and owning as best you can — a given small cultural area, in which context aesthetics can then hold — while working on your general game. Base yourself in a scene to learn your chops.
I have no idea if this would work, by the way. It would certainly be a tough row to hoe if your intent was to make a living. Music’s a rough game. Also, you have to transmute into a sort of entrepreneurial marketing obsessive — the approximate opposite of art, certainly as far as artists I know are concerned.
(e.g. the one I’m married to. Buy a bloody T-shirt, will ya. They’re really good!)
All of this is what life looks like when the means of production have been seized. Everyone with a computer has the tools to be an artist, and the distribution channels. You are an artist. I am an artist. (I literally can’t play an instrument or sing, but here’s my SoundCloud.) Anyone can sell their music easily, cheaply and in the same outlets as the hugely popular people. Or just give it away.
For professional artists, it’s a bit of a problem — but the problem is not internet piracy, but competition:
Steve Albini says life is incomparably better now, and the Internet has solved the problem with music, but you gotta hit the road, Jack. This is a limited approach that not everyone has time for, but I suppose someone has to stay home and foment revolution.
Culture is not about aesthetics. The laws of microeconomics means everything collapses into a folk-based singularity. (Not punk rock, I was wrong.) Cottage industry for all! Scented candles at a county fair in a human face, forever.
(Arkady concurs on flautists, having married one previously. “The person to trust even less is a male violinist,” says the David Garrett obsessive. Fortunately, it appears superannuated rock critics are just fine.)
The Mitt is a synthesizer with a hand-shaped controller pattern. It’s not actually a glove, but it’s shaped for a hand: one finger on each of five joysticks,
PushPull is a squeezebox with LED lighting, capacitive touch sensors and motion sensing that you can 3D-print most of, program yourself and use as a controller. It was designed by Amelie Hinrichsen, Till Bovermann, and Dominik Hildebrand Marques Lopes of 3DMIN in Berlin.
Printone is a resonance simulator allowing the creators (from Autodesk and Dartmouth College) to design wind instruments in any stupid shape they can think of and predict what they’ll sound like. The software’s not available yet, but they have the paper with their maths up.
Niland are an “AI startup” working on machine learning. They sell a search and recommendation engine for music companies. And there’s a demo for you to play with: paste in a track from SoundCloud and see what it makes of it.
I fed it one of mine. Its “top predicted tags”:
… those last two being oddly specific. It also recommended some “similar tracks,” of which “Blind Mice” by Figure of 8 and “Kiss The Screen” by Nite Jewel fit surprisingly well. Try your own and see what it makes of you.
reach out and punch face
No posts for a few days, I am sufficiently ill that I literally can’t listen to music. More Rocknerd maybe later. Buh.
top photo: Ian Rilen at the Annandale 1990 by Mat Rawnsley, from ianrilen.com.
Those are 5-string bass strings each a string down.
“New Order Tribute” by the Durutti Column, from the album Sporadic Three, is hilarious and yet still lovely.
For his 2014 EP Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2, Aphex Twin wanted the dream of musicians for decades: a drummer you only had to punch the information into once. So he got the Logos Foundation to make him a mechanised snare drum: Snar 2.
Here’s what it sounds like.
Aphex Twin got them for the job because of their 2012 robot drummer Snar.
Of course, others have done this trick. Polyend sell the Perc Pro MIDI-controlled drumkit, a snip at £999 (you supply the drumkit):
The rest of the day’s been the blockchain book. Here’s how come the Bitcoin price hit $1900: because you can’t get ActualMoney out of Bitfinex and several other exchanges, so there’s nothing to spend it on but more bitcoins. And of course seeing the 100% predictable and predicted effects of a proprietary software monoculture that people like me have only been warning about for a couple of decades. But with Bitcoin.
Yesterday was Brian Eno’s 69th birthday. Lester Bangs interviews Brian Eno, apparently an unpublished interview. Mr Eno is a thoroughly delightful fellow.
I found this from looking at the Dangerous Minds article for Eno’s birthday and trying to track down the record sleeve at the top. A Google Image search on it and going to All Sizes turned up this blog post linking to it. The page has long since come down. A find, lurking in the Internet Archive, unindexed, waiting for a determined reader. Tracking down useful stuff lurking in the IA will be the future of humanities scholarship.
Here’s the documentary Dangerous Minds posted. It says 1994, they think it’s 1992. There’s a bit of German at the beginning and the rest is in English.
Bonus: how Brian Eno managed to pee in Marcel Duchamp’s urinal “Fountain”. Allegedly.
It appears to be a bootleg of a Peel Session of “Baby’s On Fire”. But surely a sleeve this obviously good must have been used elsewhere.
It turns out that SoundCloud can’t just continue stumbling forth with no clear direction or business plan and losing twice as much money in a year as they take in revenue. After firing a pile of people with no warning last week, it came out yesterday that they have money “until Q4”, which is 80 days away. (SoundCloud denies the TechCrunch report, but TechCrunch calls BS and stands by their story.)
Everything about SoundCloud seems to have been a mess. The Hacker News thread after the layoffs has a pile of stories like this one:
Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying even. Taking that in mind, SoundCloud’s downfall was to be expected. Because of caustic environment even before the financial crunch, they couldn’t execute.
The Internet Archive is the obvious new home for the content, but that won’t come for free. Jason Scott from IA asked his boss Brewster Kahle about it, and tweeted:
Had a quick chat with @brewster_kahle about the Soundcloud thing. To host a Petabyte of data for forseable future would be ~ $1.5/2mil.
The Archive Team estimates SoundCloud as about 2.5 petabytes, and is working out how to selectively save what it reasonably can without accusations of copyright infringement.
Chance The Rapper, who credits his SoundCloud with starting his career, tweeted yesterday “I’m working on the SoundCloud thing” and posted on his Facebook today “Just had a very fruitful call with Alex Ljung. SoundCloud is here to stay.” Ljung has posted positively as well. We’ll see if they’ve pulled a rabbit out of the hat … but in the meantime, it’s worth remembering that the other term for “the cloud” is “other people’s computers,” and get downloading and preserving. As you should be anyway.
Oh, and play all ours while you can!
parp parp parp
Could not have predicted 20 years ago that browsing in a bookstore in 2017, I’d see a vinyl LP soundtrack to a TV show about cassette tapes you can only watch using the internet. pic.twitter.com/jWiidLuOHe
— Michael Newman (@mznewman) November 11, 2017
#OnThisDayInNTK:2002 https://t.co/FxCXq7IgEZ
Edinburgh AI dept on fire@iamclintmansell (née Poppie) scores Lord Of The Rings 2 trailer
unusual https://t.co/MEgQf84IXy T&Cs pic.twitter.com/AJsQdZYHO2— Modern Day NTK (@ModernDayNTK) December 15, 2017
Picked up the Rocky soundtrack on vinyl for a buck. I believe the record sleeve is worth more than that pic.twitter.com/NDDuIvmggF
— Shawnlicious (@shawnaldridge) December 15, 2017
My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims! :) pic.twitter.com/dX9PCM1qGx
— Sebastian Tomczak (@littlescale) January 4, 2018
I’ve recently learned Salman Rushdie wrote a 70s disco song about the joy of saving money with the Burnley Building Society. And I still can’t believe that sentence is factually correct. https://t.co/YsJBnkrBFx
— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) March 24, 2018
ACE OF SPADES on an ACTUAL FUCKING SPADE!!!! ?? pic.twitter.com/JaXyyBsnAD
— Vintage Heavy Metal (@HeavyFknMetal) March 22, 2018
When Suicide started playing gigs again in the late 90s, a bit of the old magic had departed. pic.twitter.com/hOTM5qKLP3
— frozen reeds (@frozenreeds) March 20, 2018
“Twenty Deadly Diseases,” Lausanne, 7 November 1986
FYI: pic.twitter.com/eN3TihhqMn
— Nathaniel Rivers (@sophist_monster) September 11, 2018
NERO BELLUM: NFRN° (Metropolis) — This album exists for Nero Bellum to show off his actually-analogue modular synth collection, and build all the sounds from the ground up — “each piece in this collection is an exploration of synthesis in the modular domain. Each piece was improvised, with no overdubs, & without the use of computers in the creative process.” So it’s full of crunchy and obnoxious noises you haven’t quite heard before. Non-minimal synth. Some tracks get a bit much like equipment demos, and if you’ve heard a minute of the sound, you don’t really need the other five. But it’s an interesting listen. Musicians especially should check this one out. Needs to come with a technical manual.
AM I DEAD YET?: Am I Dead Yet? (Wire-sound) — Mary Byker and Noko from Apollo 440 doing aspiring movie themes. Every song is presented — produced within an inch of its life, both in sound and songwriting. None of the parts are new — there’s cliches by the truckload — but they know how to get precisely as overwrought as is reasonable with the materials to hand. “Joe Meek Shall Inherit the Earth” (above) is where it all comes together. This is precisely the right amount of too clever for its own good.
O.R.k.: Ramagehead (Kscope) — Prog supergroup. Heavy on the noodling, twiddliness and hard rock histrionics, but saved by lots of grungy and metal bits. First track (above) “Kneel To Nothing”‘s grungy guitar intro starts the album off great, even as it goes twiddly after that. Third track “Beyond Sight” is not twiddly and holds things up well. “Strangled Words” has good bits in between the twiddling — though it comes across like the supergroup all wanted to chuck something in. It’s prog, but I do like those first and third tracks. Full points for keeping nine tracks of prog down to 39 minutes.
Blake Troise is the chiptuner known as Protodome. He’s spent the past four years doing a Ph.D., in the course of which he’s recorded 4000AD — “a tiny, 4-track, 1-bit, progressive jazz album. Each track is synthesised using a C script (which converts a custom MML dialect to WAV by running microcontroller code and recording the output) and is a fun exercise in both low-memory programming and 1-bit music.”
The 1-bit is somewhat faster than 44.1kHz — “I’m using a technique called the pulse interleaving method, which basically rapidly arpeggiates at speeds faster than than human hearing. When this is downsampled (to sensible sample rates), it becomes a true change in voltage.”
(Really, that’s just pulse-width modulation, which you can encode any arbitrary waveform with. But synthesising music with PWM is a bit more work.)
The music is pleasant — didn’t grab me, but didn’t offend — but the album is worth at least one listen, just to see how much you can achieve with one bit.
Blake also has an article in the Journal of Sound and Music in Games on how he did it — “The 1-Bit Instrument: The Fundamentals of 1-Bit Synthesis, Their Implementational Implications, and Instrumental Possibilities”.
Musicians who have a casual attitude to the continued use of their eyes may want to look over this advertising image and see if they can spot a single thing right about it:
The photo is of Taiwanese jeweller and musician Bella Chen, who wanted to advertise her new ring collection a couple of years ago. Chen can apparently play an oboe perfectly well, but this was a pose to advertise the rings.
That is her right hand, and the perspective makes more sense — the hands, at least — when it’s not a photograph of a photograph at that angle.
Chen paid for the image to go up as an advertisement at Tianmu Baseball Stadium for three days. Here’s the original:
When Classic FM went “what on earth,” Chen put the Classic FM article on the home page for her shop, Bella Couture. There’s no such thing as bad publicity!