morning web browse running over (as usual), need to get to work. will have to check these out later…
NEW N.A.S.A. (FEAT. DAVID BYRNE) VIDEO - “THE PEOPLE TREE”
NEW N.A.S.A. (FEAT. M.I.A., SANTOGOLD, SPANK ROCK & NICK ZINNER) - “WHACHADOIN”
NEW N.A.S.A. (FEAT. KANYE WEST, SANTOGOLD & LYKKE LI) - “GIFTED”
WHITE STRIPES GENTLY ROCK CONAN’S FINAL LATE NIGHT
Tim Hecker: An Imaginary Country
VNC | Venice Neighborhood Council (VNC)
Don’t really update this thing much anymore. What with twitter, facebook, and blip.fm, my limited publishing desires are pretty much met. So i’m going to use this as a log for my daily bike rides. Today is day 2; i’ve set a goal to go for a ride of 30 minutes or more for 30 days in a row, at least. Call it the Bike Ridin 30/30.
Today got out at around 11am and was back by 11:45. I pretty much always bring my hand-me-down Zune along for the ride and today my favorite track was:
I hope that plays the right track, but I have a feeling its just gonna play my latest blip. ah well.
today was hazy, but sunny enough that i could feel the warmth of the sun on my face and there were bright sparkles bouncing off the ripples in the Ballona Creek culvert.
I rode out to the little turnaround next to the local vegetation information sign just passed Centinela. Just as I turned around for the ride back, Ricardo Villalobos’s “Enfants (chants)” came on and was my soundtrack for pretty much the entire ride back. Its a repetitive, minimal house track with some piano and the sound of kids doing a kind of chant-singing. was very meditative and calming. rode by the school and saw kids running around the track for gym class. pined for the innocence and freedom of youth. then remembered how trapped by school I felt as a kid and got over it and just enjoyed the moment as it was.
watched my shadow for much of the ride back since it was now a bit in front of me. obedient shadow, it does pretty much whatever i’m doing, just flattened and at a different angle.
near the end of my route along the Ballona Creek bike path i heard the sound of heavy machinery over the music in my ear buds. my eyes darted up to the Duquesne Ave bridge looking for a truck, but there were only cars going by. then i noticed something under the bridge. it was a big rig! driving in reverse through the water towards me. it was pushing (since it was going backwards) a really long trailer with a really long steel beam on it. i was trying to figure out how long it must be when i noticed 107′ 9″ spray painted on the corner. So I guess it was over 107 feet long. wow. never know what you’re gonna see down at the creek.
I can’t believe how excited I am to be turning 30. Its not anything like i’d thought it would be, but then again I don’t think about stuff like that much anyways.
Its all so gradual, how are you really supposed to know your getting older anyways? I guess thats one of the things birthdays are for, but with the Renegade Karaoke on Wheels party tonight to celebrate, I feel like more of a kid than ever. Maybe not more than ever, but as much as always.
Today, while drivin around blastin all the great new tunez i’ve just gotten, I played Hurricane over and over cause it just feels so good. God Bless that Jamie Lidell. Especially for the breakdown. I can listen to it over and over. Who can hear it and not feel the celebration?? Its time to Celebrate!!
The breakdown of Joy!
the whole track:
A little while back I went for a drive where I was able to give myself over to the moment pretty effectively. Every light, every sound, every driver seemed more there. More a part of the whole. Every sensory input and every one of my movements a delicate piece of the great dance of life. During this time my mp3 player was on random and Radiohead’s Videotape came on. Up until that moment, it was probably my least favorite track on the amazing In Rainbows. It sounded to me too much like some sad dude leavin a somewhat lame suicide video to someone he loves. Too depressing and bleak. But I head read in a Rolling Stone article that Thom and producer Nigel Godrich considered it their favorite track on the album. This gave me pause and made me think I should probably give it another chance. A closer listen.
Now I think it may be my favorite track on the album. I get it now. There’s a part around the 1:30 minute mark where Thom’s voice starts echoing around itself and begins to sound like so many ghosts. It was then that the song hit me on another, deeper level. Not as some sad guy’s final goodbye video, but as a song awake to our entire world culture’s final goodbye, happening now. Our artifact to leave behind when we’re here no longer to tell our story.
I recently read an article in the LA Times reporting that Youtube had recently hit the 75 million video mark. And is growing by 200,000 videos a day. So much media. So many moments. So many lives. A videotape of humanity. Our desperate attempt to say to someone, anyone, this is who we are. And this is how we’re saying goodbye, not in monuments, but in media. We are our media. Someday perhaps, our media will be all thats left of us. All our hopes, all our dreams, all our triumphs, all our tragedies, all our love, entombed in red blue green. red blue green. One long day on Videotape.
“No matter what happens now. Shouldn’t be afraid. Because I know today has been the most perfect day I have ever seen.”
Oink’s Pink Palace, my favorite site on the entire internet was shut down this week. October 23, 2007 - a sad day indeed.
I don’t think I could give a better epitaph than DJ Rupture did on his blog. A musician aware enough to actually be encouraged when he found his music available on the revolutionary sharing site.
“Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7? on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12?, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…”
http://www.negrophonic.com/2007/defending-the-pig-oink-croaks/
Getting invited to Oink was one of the most exciting and vindicating experiences of my internet life. The black market community of music distribution through file sharing has always been intensely interesting to me; it was at the heart of my initial romance with the internet. In the beginning, there were simply websites with mp3s for download and lists of ftp sites that were traded around on IRC. Then came Napster, which brought the masses into the game, and then came Soulseek, which shared Napster’s user-friendliness and simplicity of use, but managed to stay underground for reasons i don’t really understand to this day.
But Oink was a revelation. It was truly a music lover’s paradise. It was a community based on love of music, sharing, cuteness (avatars were required to be cute in an endearing attempt to foster kind communication), quality, and organization. It remains the benchmark for what a music service can and should be. I guess stuff like that is always destined to come up against the harsh reality of “too good to be true.” Oink, you will be missed.
Last week I was browsing around Amazon.com and stumbled upon what may be the greatest treasure trove of customer reviews on the entire site. Autechre album reviews. Autechre (there are a variety of ways to pronounce it, and the duo, Sean Booth and Rob Brown, have said the name can be pronounced any way one sees fit) is an experimental electronic music act whose compositions tend to defy description. There’s is the sound of machines lumbering towards expression. It is music that has been called unique, difficult, complex, repetitive, alien, abstract, robotic, inhuman, minimalist, dark, strange, mathematical, architectural, atmospheric, frightening, structured noise, austere, intellectual, emotional, cold, beautiful, harsh, etc. Lots of words trying to express some kind of analog to an experience that is completely lacking in words.
As one reviewer so well summed up, just go with beauty, stop trying to describe it and just experience it for yourself. Which is probably the best course of action with Autechre, but that doesn’t mean many have put forth some incredible attempts at the art of describing Autechre. Some particularly inspired samples:
“Here, we’re no longer looking at landscapes/listening to soundscapes. Instead, Ae bring us inside the mind of the machine. It is a claustrophobic, disorienting, but totally fascinating experience. The machines we inhabit are definitely mortal, perhaps mortally wounded. They spit out strange pattering rhythms, and quirky, touching melodies. They suffer from Tourettes and Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. They undergo life-cycles from birth to death before our eyes/ears.
When I listen to a great soul singer like Marvin Gaye or Sam Cooke, I feel a surge of emotion that comes from a sense that they are singing about my life and my experiences, more eloquently than I ever could. I feel like I share a special human bond with them. Ae have managed a more daunting task; they’ve brought me as close as is humanly possible to feeling a special bond with machines. Amazing.” link
“Through digitally construed mediums, we’ve been allowed to taste something that our parents and their parents never imaged, actually allowing us to ride on the shaped experimental surf of some unnamed audio sea for the very first time. Its uttering amazing in that respect alone, with foreign worlds never before experienced finding themselves sonically cultivated in man’s existence.” link
“Autechre sounds like the the noises of the inner cortex of a robot, while Aphex Twin sounds like a kid playing in a robot factory.” link
“Someone once compared the music on Tri Repetae as the sound of machines chattering away to each other in the dark. If so, then this record is the sound of those machines trying to drag themselves out of a dark tarpit under the glare of acetylene lights on some forgotten evil robot construction site. link
“It depicts an alien, mechanical, vaguely threatening but overall unclear form that seems to be wriggling into existence spontaneously (i.e., constructing itself rather than being birthed). link
“It’s weird. It’s repetitive. It’s difficult. And yet, there’s something there. Something fascinating. Something alive. I have to learn it’s secrets. I have to listen again. Marge! Prepare my headphones! Open the listening room doors! Hold all my calls! I’m going back!!” link
“picture crystalline structures of great complexity slowly growing, but incorporating organic fragments in a way that seems random and orchestrated at once. Now translate that to sound.” link
“damn brahmin… this is inaa fine style. jagged beats spin and contort, go out of focus, come back together. sounds like milford grave ripping apart acid house and early hip hop and putting it all back together as cubist dub drug cult funk.” link
After being inspired by the multitude of astounding reviews, I attempted my own review of the Untilted album. However, I found myself drifting towards trying to describe Autechre in general, instead of the album in question. It got me thinking about the music though, and ever since, I haven’t been able to stop listening. Maybe once I can decide on a favorite album I’ll be able to craft a proper review. My aborted attempt, after the break.