“Defining the fine line between catchy commercial jingles and mental paralysis.”
This is my kind of fucked-up.
Call and Response from wreckandsalvage on Vimeo.
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Aborted Autechre Amazon Review
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.
Ying Yang World
“Losing the lighter-toned water ice leaves Iapetus’ dark side even darker, creating a yin-yang world where there is no grey.”
i think, for me, the wonder of the heavens derives from the idea that everything we’ve ever thought of, or ever will think of, is already out there, hurtling through that ever-expanding darkness.
are we dreaming it or is it dreaming us?
“A Scanner Darkly” On My Wall In 720p
I just finished watching “A Scanner Darkly” for the first time. I downloaded the hi-def 720p HD-DVD rip off of bittorrent and enjoyed the amazing clarity and detail that only animation can provide through my Infocus projector projecting onto the living room wall of my apartment at 1024×768. I find it a bit ironic … A Scanner Darkly is a very paranoid movie, pretty much a rumination on the mental and emotional state of paranoia throughout. The main character is paranoid of every entity he interacts with, his friends, his girlfriend, his boss, himself, and most of all the very high-tech 3-D surveillance police state that he works for. In some ways it is true, we live in a police state. More than ever, surveillance cameras, federal wiretapping and internet snooping programs and efforts are moving forward and coming online. But back to the irony, here I am, publicly blogging about a movie I watched that was downloaded off of bittorrent. Perhaps this is folly (though, who’s to say I haven’t already bought the HD-DVD of Scanner Darkly and just downloaded a version because I don’t have an HD-DVD player to actually play the disc), but I think it says a lot about the state of law enforcement and its attempts at “total information awareness.”
William Gibson Talks About His New Book, “Spook Country”
When I discovered my dad’s William Gibson books as a teenager, my view of reality and the possibilities to come in our technology-infused culture was forever changed. His vision of a net-connected world and the information black market it thus created spoke to me on a deep level. It has been interesting to see current culture catch up with his prophetic visions, while at the same time his books have moved backwards in time to the point where he now writes about the present. It seems a telling characteristic of our time that science fiction, once the harbinger of things to come, has now reached a point where it can only struggle to explain the character of the present, accelerating so rapidly that only the eyes of prescient futurists can make any attempt to take true stock of the changing world we now move through so rapidly. Such is the case with Gibson’s latest, “Spook Country,” an examination of America post-911 as only William Gibson could tell it.
A statement Gibson makes in the video below again reminds me that as unnatural and destructive a force humanity can appear to be, there is no escaping the fact that we are still, in fact, a force of nature. Or even, humanity is nothing more than another aspect of the force that is nature. From the viewpoint of an animal species moving through evolution, perhaps this point in human history is really not so strange. Read the rest of this entry »
The Power of Meditation - A Reminder
As indicated by the lack of updates, I have been really busy with work the last few weeks. Busy as in working 1-2 jobs every day for the last 12 days. It’s gotten me a bit tired and stressed and lowered my overall outlook on life to be honest. It can be tough to look above the grind when descending too deep within it.
Exacerbating things has been the fact that I’ve been slacking on the meditation as a result. I’ve gotten in the habit of allowing myself to think there simply isn’t enough time in the day. Since meditation can be done in pretty much any interval of time, this is of course a falsehood I’ve been allowing myself to carry on.
Tonight I have a brief window of time between jobs and despite the fact that I was beginning to feel overwhelmed, I decided on the ride home that my top priority for that window of time was to get in some quality meditation time. I managed 30 minutes, and it was the best sitting I’ve had in a while. My mind was pretty busy the whole time, turning over the multitudes of tasks and responsibilities and events that must be prioritized, but I didn’t allow any of them to occupy my attention and allowed them to come without judgment. I let myself see the swirling mass of thoughts as a reflection of the swirling mass of madness and activity that I am engulfed in living in the city of Los Angeles. I accepted the unending shifting and unpredictable nature of my thoughts and the world and focused on myself as an unchanging calm within the swirling eddies and waves. This is the way of things and this is what I am allowing myself to accept and be through meditation.
My calmness has returned and my stress level has decreased. I have nothing to prove and nothing that I must be at this moment but relaxed and accepting of the beautiful change all around me. I need to remember the consistent value that meditation brings and not let false ideas about my ability to use it invade my thoughts and actions. This post is a reminder of this need.
The Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi
My friend A over at Rainbow Ruminations recently introduced me to the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi through this post. It has already inspired me in my daily life, and is very much in line with the Buddhist teachings of compassion that Vipassana has awakened in me. It is so easy to use the difficult situations and/or bad moods of the environment and people around you as an excuse to have a bad attitude yourself. It is perhaps more difficult, yet so simple to take the opposite tack and see every one of these external situations or moods as an opportunity to exemplify one’s saintly nature. This is the true meaning of our lives on this planet. Continuing the trend of words through pictures, I am posting my desktop background with the newly added text of The Prayer of Saint Francis.
link to desktop background version
(photo courtesy of Giant Ginkgo)
Fridge Haiku
Not a real haiku, but fridge haiku just sounds so much better than fridge poetry. This message from who knows where caught my attention from the bottom of the fridge just now. I have no recollection of how it got there.
We Are the Code Writers, Testers, and Players of this Program Called Universe
I just read an interview with theoretical physicist Paul Davies about his new book, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life.
His thoughts on the nature of the universe in just this interview are the closest explanations to my own intuitive view that I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering. I’m pretty excited right now. I can’t wait to read this book. Two points he makes that really resonate with me:
1. The very nature of the universe, the laws of physics, are directly related to the the observer as creator and our current mind/brain phenomenon of consciousness is an inevitable aspect of the universe.
It is the structure of this relationship between the mind and the brain and its relationship to reality through observation that is the key that actually constructs not just the universe, but the very laws of physics. Personally, my biggest disconnect with the above scenario actually being possible is the fact that we can indirectly observe a time in history before the human brain. How can human consciousness have affected events going all the way back to the big bang? Now Davies addresses that question with plausible explanations from quantum mechanics:
Robo-Personalities For Your Inbox?
So the human personality construct is a pretty multi-plicitous beasts, no doubt about that. Especially in this newly fractured world of social media and friends networks and avatars, the net-connected human has many opportunities to present different faces to the world as different situations and contexts present themselves. Despite this, the fact remains that contending with the many traits and habits that people bring to a situation requires a certain level of predictability and stability, or else we are left without the all important middle ground where conversation may reliably take seed and blossom.
Consider email and the habits of interaction in that well-trod, though still very new communication space. Some people rely on the caps lock key to indicate excitement or exasperation. Others rely on the aptly-named emoticon, an attempt to parse the emotion of facial expressions with the tools of text. Some emailers have a repeating set of anecdotes they employ to illuminate a variety of situations and events. If you run with the truly geeky side of the net, you may even encounter the world of 1337sp34k (leetspeak), gamely replacing normal letters with number and symbol stand-ins.
We all learn to identify and predict these styles of email communication and respond at the very least coherently, and at our best, even reflect these styles back to the sender in our responses. So while the human’s opportunities to mix up one’s personality to the nth degree has increased, i believe our personalities in context, the personalities we present in specific situations and modes of communication, are actually becoming easier to codify and predict. Email is again a good example of why. First of all, unlike many other mediums of communication, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that one’s entire history of email communication could be stored and accessed in one archive. As the medium matures and services like gmail and hotmail have the opportunity to become a kind of “life-partner tool” establishing relationships with customers that last a lifetime, the opportunity to process the whole of one’s communication styles and habits within a certain frame becomes possible. User A starts off a conversation about Subject A with communication construct style G 95% of the time on weekdays. User B responds to Question B with Communication Construct Style G6 86% of the time after a workout.