I suspect that I have yet again thrown heart and soul into a bucket too small to hold them. That’s my fault; I look at what ought to happen and work towards that. I then meet with what will happen, somewhat less than the lofty goals I set.

There’s only so much you can present to schools in one hour. There is only so much you can explain about visual music, synthesisers, composition… maybe I didn’t really need to use 86 channels of audio in case there was a question about number 37.

But I also suspect that over the last year I was led to think it was going to be a bigger push. Something about plotting being easier than delivery. There was much plotting but when it came to the last moment I seemed to be carrying the explosives.

There’s a bunch of high school students that are now playing with video and music… who knows how many, but they’re there. Something moved a little.

—

The odd thing about Image Line’s Groove Machine is how much it reminds me of Fruity Loops of about 8 years ago. It’s a drum machine and a few synthesisers wired together – which is pretty much what FL Studio used to emulate. When you run it inside FL Studio it’s like a Russian doll set. Will Groove Machine get an even smaller plug in?

As I grew up on an 808 + 202 + 101, it’s familiar (if a bit rusty) territory. Could be a good way for me to go back to my roots and … nah who am I kidding? I’m utterly spoiled.

Admire fake woodgrain.

They’re not actually the same. GM is a tweakable groovebox much like KORG’s Electribe (of which I have the iPad version). ‘Much like’ here meaning Apple VS Samsung ‘much like’. It’s there for repeated phrases and much real time knob twiddling. FL Studio is happy enough with the twiddling but has never been a successful live instrument – believe me I’ve tried. When FLS can’t manage to render in time bbababababbabababad things will happen. GM seems to have well set limits – it won’t do what it can’t do. The version I tried had problems inside another host – in Live it needed latency raised to accommodate what I guess is the added signal chain. An updated version has since been posted which is said to fix that.

It sounds quite good, as in it does what most people would want. My whole time in 808 land was spent trying to get around what most people wanted. I think that’s the advantage here, you would have to return to old methods of thwarting the intentions of the equipment, the way that people managed to turn the 303 into something other than the worst bass accompaniment box of all time. The issue then is whether you can find that hidden versatility. In the case of the MC202, very much so. In the case of the TB303 I never managed to find much inspiration. Fruity Loops suited me because it was that kind of thing taken to a high art. An Akira sized drum machine.

Is this what people want now? It was all you got in the 80s, I can’t see people going to the trouble of fighting the limitations now. The Electribe is hardware, that makes it a different animal straight away. Groove Machine is either a crutch or a challenge depending on how you respond.

—

Not a gift but certainly some kind of bribe is Moog’s new AniMoog. Like RoboCop I’d buy that for a dollar, but that’s faint praise. The “first professional polyphonic synthesizer designed exclusively for the iPad” is just a rompler with 6 zones from a menu of pre-generated wave forms. A little ball thing spins around between these zones and you get wave sequences a la the KORG Wavestation. (Funny how many KORG ideas keep showing up). It sounds good, is pretty, and has fuck all to do with their expensive hardware. I think the authors of Crystal, Alchemy and a few other iPad synthesisers are pretty annoyed right now, or wishing they had that kind of arrogance.

Mind you, compared to the wretched Fairlight App, it’s a harbour cruise in heaven.

OK what have we here. On the left is a new DELL, because the poor old Fujitsu music laptop died in agony trying to hold the entire performance in 2Gb of RAM*. So we have an i7 with 4Gb RAM and Ableton Live. Every single instrument used in the gig has a discrete channel, which makes this into an 86 channel mix. There isn’t a beep that doesn’t have a fader of its own. The channels are grouped by piece so I can hide and reveal the needed columns. I can’t use scenes at the top of the grid because they are shared over pieces, so the first action each time is to go down to the bottom of the screen, launch a scene that sets up the BPM, silences any stray tracks, and sends off a trigger to VDMX. Then I can come back up to steer events from there. Once I’m confident about the workflow I can assign a key command to the setup scenes and not have to jump around.

On the right hand side is my workplace Mac running VDMX. There’s a media grid there with copies of each of the full videos so I can work out (a) the offset for the start, (b) which codec I am going to use (c) how the latest beta of VDMX has changed dammit. Once I get the basics sorted out I can divide up the videos into events so I can retime them, which frankly I don’t really want to do, because of the chance of chasing one’s tail.

The two sync over a Max patch where the PC sends out on a virtual MIDI cable to the Mac. It works over my network, for the gig I’ll set up a direct cable. Probably running on two Macs would be easier, but I doubt I could find an i7 Mac laptop for $700 at JB HiFi.

Codecs: the videos are being pulled off an external FW800 drive. I was making them all Apple Intermediate Codec, but I think I’ll be using Avid codecs instead as I can make them on the rendering PC, and I’m totally sick of Apple’s proprietary codec lock in bullshit. (Avid codecs are available as open source). Motion JPEG also looks pretty good.

Definitely the most complex set up so far. There’s a ridiculous number of synthesizers, samplers and effects all patched up; Reaktor, several copies of Absnyth, Max4Live granulators and plenty of Operators – so quite a lot of stuff to show the kiddies!

Feeling a bit like bloody Tangerine Dream. Stewart will like that.

* The Fujitsu has been a trouper and has been on the road for five years now, always starts up, always glitches without a glitch. Built with love, if you have been to a show in the last few years you’ve seen it working. It’s going to be my study machine now, bought it a copy of Office ($25 for academics) and Opus Creator. Happy retirement!

MOOG BASS 1

That was the thing in 1990 something. Borrow that Moog you could never afford and sample the crap out of it. End up with a floppy full of burps and bleeps with digital aliasing hissing through the fade. Of course you could spend a day making a single waveform loop to get rid of the tail, moving the HEX values 0n the LED display. Which defeated the purpose, seeing as the filter on your sampler was in no way equal to the Moog you couldn’t afford. I don’t even like Moogs.

FAIRLIGHT

Nothing says QUALITY quite like an 8 bit sample of an 8 bit sampler. 40 percent sizzle, 60 percent reverb. I think I found a use for the Fairlight orchestra hit once – in making the joke track Your Kidneys. (Which people still watch on You Tube thinking it’s a documentary).

AKAI CHOIR

Oh boy I can have 1000 identical women go AAAH in the background of my dance tracks. This is cyber.

GRNDPIANO

Actually the piano on the Mirage and the EPS16 was pretty cool. I still have my ESQ-M hardware if I wanted that, or the VSTi is pretty close. But this sample is the time where I tried to get a decent piano sound to fit in the 2MB of RAM of the EPS16 and ended up with honky tonk R2 D2.

EPIANO

I seriously don’t get the fascination with electric pianos. Seems like every software house has to have at least one electric piano VSTi. It just makes me think of SuperTramp and that’s a dark, dark place to be.

909KIT

I didn’t much like the 909 drum machine when it came out. The 808 was defiantly electronique, but the 909 just failed at being a real kit. Those squelchy toms y’know? Anyway, you could be ambivalent by dissing the machine and then secretly sampling it, and I did.

727KIT

Man, that New York Latino Disco boom was short lived. Glad I didn’t end up buying one of those. Have I ever used this sample bank? What is a clave anyway?

SOMETHING.K25

I am glad I have a folder full of Kurzweil samples. Now all I need is a K2500 synthesiser from 1996 and I’m set!

VIOLIN

The violin is an exceptionally expressive instrument which takes years of practice to master. This, on the other hand, is shit. Press key, make violin. Press again, make same violin. Samplers were just the worst idea ever when you think about it.

2VIOLINS

That chorusing effect of two samples at once is simply marvellous! My God, what a living breathing effect that is!

BURPS

I’m keeping this one. It’s ahead of its time.

FUNKYDRUM

Ah yes here it is, the complete bottom of the 1990′s music catastrophe. No matter what you were doing -  from country to opera, there had to be that fucking horrible Amen Beat shoved through the whole thing. Remember ‘remixed rock’? Every tired old rock cliché with Funky Drummer run underneath it. God what a piss weak decade.

ARP2600

Funny thing that I went to all the trouble of finding and sampling the ARP, when to listen to it now it could have been any generic analogue synthesiser at all for the excitement it brings. With old synthesisers you’re better off taking a photograph to capture the dust and wood grain. The Wikepedia page is just a list of people who used one. Depeche Mode has four. Thrill me.

BELL

Lucky for me I owned a real DX-7 synthesiser or I’d probably have a entire folder full of samples called bell, gong, boing, clang, ping and all the other noises that FM dished out. I think this is a real bell, it’s hard to tell when it’s 8 bit.

SAX

Why in the name of all that is holy did I collect a sample of a saxophone? What was I going to do with it? Something for a soft core sex scene set in 1974? For God’s sake, a sampled saxophone. The thing is wretched anyway, even without the ineffectual 2 second alternating loop. I have never used this on anything.

I should just delete this whole damn folder. Nuke it from orbit.

OK, so where were we? I was going down to inspect a theatre with 3D Steve on Monday, discovered that Monday is public holiday & realised how when you’re running three jobs you don’t know arse from cake hole. Steve was similarly confused as to how many weeks can fit into a second. Academics, huh. They don’t really work.

I found a moment and loaded up the video for Walrus Guitars into VDMX and tried to play it at 720p. While fully aware that Apple computers are the one God and Steve Jobs is the Prophet PBOH, playback still sucked. Oh it’s pretty good but pretty good isn’t what I need. Normally you can allow the frame rate to wobble in VJ sets – dropped frames are just another effect. But what I need is rock solid video which keeps an external sequencer clocked.

(There was also a complete upgrade of VDMX a month ago and I didn’t notice. Arse. Cake hole. They changed the entire interface, as learning curve is the best part of new media am I right? I am always right.)

OK so how about running the video on QuickTime and sending out MIDI Time Code? Doesn’t seem to be an app for that. There’s a QuickTime player that follows MTC, but as it’s Java based the authors have dumped the Mac for dumping Java. PC version is still available and I’ll follow that up.

Here’s a thought: load the video up in Ableton Live. Set that copy of Live to be a MTC master. Now another machine can run the sequencer and receive MTC. OK cool, so I loaded Walrus Guitars into Live. Played it, that’s looking good. Dragged the video over to the external monitor and all hell broke loose. Black lines strobed through the video eventually leading to both screens having seizures and, as Macintoshes never crash, catatonic at the beach if you know what I mean.

I 'gift economied' this image. Because it is art.

Maybe I don’t use the Mac. At least I need to find some other software that plays video on the external screen without done pooh itself. Looks like Soundtrack Pro will take a MTC input.

Maybe I play the video off the DELL laptop instead, 8 cores it should be able to do it.

(Just for shits and giggles I installed OSX 10.6.7 on the DELL, got it it to boot, realised that it was a completely useless achievement and took it off again. I don’t know… Hey – now look – the best selling app on the iPad is something that reproduces your Windows desktop on the iPad screen. If that doesn’t tell you that the rhetoric is indivisible by the reality I dunno what. In the ‘post PC’ era what do people most want? – to use their PC. Case closed.)

OK so, when the temperature next goes above freezing, to do:

• See if Soundtrack Pro can play a video and send MTC at once. Answer – no, but it will ‘chase’ MTC. What about Logic?
• Try out the DELL as a MTC slave. But I don’t want to be transporting the DELL. The DELL is too nice.
• Chip icicles off my bed cover while fighting a sense of impending doom.

UPDATE

Daniel says try Reaper. Will do!

Looks like playback is choppy no matter what I use – except QuickTime player itself. I have a suspicion. Maybe the drive is fragmented? NO! Macintosh Drives are NEVER fragmented. You don’t have to defrag an OSX disc because oh shut up and lets have a look.

Fuck. My test file is in 231 fragments. In fact the whole hard drive looks like Swiss cheese. Bought a copy of iDefrag (which makes OSX cost another 30 bucks people, but hey you do get GarageBand) and I’ll start doing the hard drive version of Aliens 2.

Meanwhile, yeah, I’ll probably need a Firewire 800 external. Or maybe USB3 or whatever stuff the computer people have come up with in the last few weeks. Sigh.

- Can’t just play a ‘set’, with ‘tracks’ – I guess you COULD but that’s not the rules of the game here, you have to figure out an emotional flow that takes the whole duration. I have only ever written stuff that intends to be a ‘song’ and so this is puzzling.

- Do NOT want it to end up like the Low Symphony. That is an entirely gruesome bloaterfish of a thing and a clear warning about the perils involved.

- I guess that the more conservative members of the community aren’t going to come but still I would like to make something they WOULD enjoy if they did

- which kind of throws out any ‘beat’, well not rhythm that’s OK, but just not ‘beat’. This is not a bad thing, because everybody has to try throw away the security blanket at some point in their life.

- I just wish it wasn’t right now, when I have to learn how to curate an art exhibition as well. Anyway.

Part of the problem comes from creating music without a score. Most of the things I’ve done over the years were documented by the recording. For example Pour Chiens Moyens was created in FL Studio, but only as a sequence that powered various random things, of which I only have the faintest idea how they worked. And so the tracks have to be reverse engineered…

Chiens first practice version

Oh I mean I know how they worked in theory, but not the tiny tweaks that happened at the point they were recorded. Often I destroyed the mechanism to prevent exact replicas of that singular event – that sounds odd but I wanted there to be a unique piece. Congratulations, big success.

I think segued in there will be: Chiens, Walrus Guitars, Ken Burns Effect, Ghosts of Lunches (the video for this has turned out great), December 13, Nigella, probably Gates from Aerodrom, Starts with K, I dunno, still fussing over some others, like things from Barbara Island, but how without a beat?

Anyway it’s coming together, Ableton Live is looking like a good choice. Much as I love Fruity, it has a spasm when loading big slabs of audio and just isn’t reliable enough. Might need two copies of Live to avoid pauses and gaps. I’ve tested MIDI time code running between the music PC and a Mac Laptop running VDMX, don’t quite know how that’s going to work for a whole concert yet. The video will have to respond to the music (and so all key frames) and has to be 720p and no delays and God help me…

Reliable sources report that the name “Severed Heads” may have been traded for a largish basket of hand dipped chocolates. There has been no official confirmation of the report and the band are tight lipped, but if the reports are to be believed the Severed Heads name could be winging its way back to the UK next week, a trophy for the mother country.

Security cameras caught the trio entering the Hilton Hotel late on Monday night after their final Australian performance carrying what appears to be something wrapped in cellophane. A document is said to have changed hands. And some fans took photographs of the ex band with a basket of chocolate similar to the one described.

The band have been part of a tour led by Gary Numan, entertaining middle aged business women and their husbands around Australia. Theirs was the job of warming up (and in some cases resuscitating) the silver haired fans for their date with the Numan wall of fog. Their success was such that the tour management may have decided to bribe them them to stop and go home – a win for Australian music!

Update

Previous ‘Severed Heads’ lead guitarist Tom Ellard has issued this statement:

I would like to thank everybody who came to the shows and it was a great pleasure to be able to say hello and goodbye to more of our local friends. I would especially like to thank Red Ant Touring for booking us and the Gary Numan team for making room for us in the luggage. By the time we reached our last show we’d managed to get quite decent! I should also mention that the group this time was Stewart and Tom on stage with Ant doing all the tecchy.

Bands will retire and then be tempted to return just one more time. We did – we owed some more shows. But we now have made a solemn chocolate fuelled promise that Severed Heads will not perform in Australia again. We have a secret document which, if transgressed, will unleash an ancient curse of robot pilots. So please do not ask this of us. Pilots are scary.

Of course there is a Tom Ellard concert in October. That is not Severed Heads. There is the ‘overlord’ event. That is not Australia. But once ‘overlord’ is completed there will be NO MORE of this Severed Heads kind of thing.

Will they keep their promise? Will the name ‘Severed Heads’ be for ever lost in some foreign clime? Or is this just some vague in joke that only makes sense to the people on the tour? Are chocolates yummy?

Oh, let’s just have a photo.

Sydney - The Enmore - click for big

On Friday I waddled into the Mac store on UNSW campus, plunked down money and waddled out with toy. If one other person in the whole shop buying some headphones is a queue then I guess the demand is insatiable. Note I said TOY. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by claiming some academic or artistic hoo hah. Yes, it’s going to used in classes and live shows but c’mon people – you can employ a rice shaker for kindy – it doesn’t make it a research investment.

If you’ve been using an iPhone you’ll find that most of the software you already own is wasted on the pad – it sits limply in the middle, or can be blurred up to fit, neither particularly magical. There’s considerably less so called HD titles – obviously the phone is far more popular. Not a great evil but something that will force you back to the shop to find replacements.

My first stop was GarageBand as Stewart is using it and we need to share some notes for upcoming gigs. OSX GarageBand is already a cut down version of a real tool, and the Pad version is the emasculated remnant of that. You can open up a sampled piano and plink away at it. The samples become obviously strained at the edges of each sample zone and it’s kind of 1988 AKAI, but good enough. Record your tinkles as best you can on a plane of glass and find that you can’t go back and clean up the effort. So you decide to add some drums. There’s a cute drum kit on screen – the kick is loud, the snare is soft, how can we adjust the difference? Within minutes of trying out GarageBand I was at a dead end – things I needed to do were just not available. It’s a toy, a great toy, and reasonably priced. But it’s going to end up in the cupboard.

Let’s go professional! One of the things that iPad has that seems ultra-cool is Reactable. Originally $20K and yours for only $10 (or $13 in Australia even though our dollar is worth more. Apple Australia – home of petty penny pinching). OK so you drag blocks on the screen and rotate them to make little webs of interconnected noise. This takes a bit of trial and error. Right, I’ve added a couple of oscillators, let’s get another… what? Two oscillators, one filter – no, it can’t be, but it is – the most elaborate 2 Osc through one filter synthesiser on the market. What is the DAMN POINT of all that modularity when the configuration simply come down to playing some loops and 2 oscillators through a filter? Why in God’s name do you even NEED to have this metaphor when all you can do is a small set of variations on a patch that could be put together in SynthEdit? It even sounds like SynthEdit. No, SynthEdit sounds better. When reading reviews of Reactable you get three facts over and over – it’s expensive – it looks cool – and Bjerk used it on a live show. FUCK Reactable.

Avoid that and get Jasuto Pro instead. Jasuto is much more complex, much more difficult and rewarding, and if it comes across as borrowing Reactable’s mode of operation, it goes on to actually USE it with grown up modular components and screen geography. You can get PC and Mac versions of it as well, so you can run your patches on real machines.

And that’s a fundamental problem. Take the iMS20. It’s a MS20 emulation – but on a computer you could have more than one running, each polyphonic. Here KORG have done the best possible cut down – you get one monophonic MS20 and a 6 part ‘drum machine’. The drums are all custom samples of the MS20, and all channels are driven by hyped up versions of the analogue SQ10 sequencer. So think about it – there’s 7 possible MS20′s running off 7 SQ10′s and while six of them can’t be modulated or evolving you can still make up quite an orchestra. As somebody who once owned 3 real MS20′s and a SQ10 I was able to get some good shit happening pretty quickly and this is not a bad replica of the good old days of cable madness.

KORG!

Never had an Electribe but the same goes for this 90′s KORG drum machine. It’s for fiddling little loopy bits of analogue sounding drums while drug whacked and while you are never going to use it for symphonic rock it’s pretty good value. Mind you so is Soundrop for much the same reason.

I’m tempted to get Fairlight CMI, for the same reason that people paid to go see Charlie Sheen live. It’s going to be a huge disappointment, you know it will, but somehow that makes it all the more intriguing. Will I be like Kate Bush? Actually I’d rather have a CVI. Fairlight? Actually where are the VJ tools on this thing? It’s so obviously the point of a lightweight video player with touch controls.

Maybe I should have waited for the EEE Tablet, which will run full applications – Pro Tools, Live etc. But I guess there’s the possibility of a musical style here, maybe some more minimal composition, some of the kicking against the pricks that happened back when musical instruments were very limited. I made music on much less than this, perhaps better music. Let’s hope so, before the credit card bill comes in…

Recently I become annoyed at people on You Tube that had my music up as soundtracks to a still image. There’s plenty of reasons to despise this:

* If they had made a video to go with the music, they would have added some small thing to the store of art. They didn’t and haven’t.

* They often see themselves as providing something that otherwise would not be heard. 10 seconds with Google would have told them otherwise. Their self promotion allows no such deviation.

* They often describe themselves as some sort of collector. A collector, the way that somebody picks up my garbage. Again they have not actually researched anything, have no idea of what it means and have no inkling that the year 1990 passed some time ago. It’s 2011. You are old and fat and so are The Bangles.

* Like all good Fascists they pretend to speak ‘on my behalf’. Particularly distressing are those academics that promote their redistribution of other people’s work as ‘a gift economy’ – the same that would condemn anyone that spoke on behalf of another person with less power – but then academia and hypocrisy are siblings.

I could go on. But let’s get to the meat.

I was told by one that he was a connoisseur of vinyl and that he wanted people to hear what the music sounded like on that format. Now, the idea that by streaming audio over the incredibly low bandwidth of YouTube Flash format you were demonstrating the quality of analogue audio is so UTTERLY FUCKING STUPID that I regret my membership of the human race.

Perhaps it’s not clear – let me put it this way – if you said that an original oil painting was better than a print and you prove this by providing a black and white photocopy of the painting then you are as thick as two short planks. No one would for a moment believe a word you said. And yet somehow there are people out there who are commenting on the superior sound they are streaming down from YouTube.

One particular serial retard based an entire critique of my later music on what they had downloaded from YouTube. Well yes, everything I have done recently has a bandwidth of 12KHz. You’re so perceptive.

It’s worth repeating (how many more times?) that everything we recorded since 1985 was recorded digitally. The record labels would make a tape from that and press vinyl and leave me to cry at just how BAD these unnecessary modifications have made the sound. Then when some oaf tells me that the vinyl sounds superior it broadcasts their ignorance. Let alone over YouTube. Ye Gods!

I have the original recordings. Telling me what it is supposed to sound like makes you a fool. Get it?

Now I am getting some people who complain about how loud CDs can be. It’s on the level of ‘Why is this loud-over-the-top-noise-music loud-and-over-the-top? Why are you making this thumping sound like thumping and this screeching sound like screeching? This is not how it sounds on the vinyl I bought 25 years ago!’ Well no shit Sherlock. When you cut vinyl you have to turn it down. You have remove bass. You have to compress the stereo image. You have to run it through limiters. You end up with something which is called ‘warm’, like a pie that’s been too long on a heating tray. Vinyl sucks and the really loud and crunchy CDs are free of these compromises that I have hated.

Bottom line – if you want to live in the past go ahead. But to try drag it all back to your youth is desperate. Let the rest of us go on ahead, we don’t need you.

BONUS BEATS!

And here it comes … the hate mail!

A depressing number of people of course didn’t actually read what I said and started another chorus of that tired old song about analogue, unicorns and rainbows. Good for you.

One guy decided that I was in no position to call the Bangles (and presumably him) fat. Actually that’s the point dear chap, I’m not the one injecting sonic Botox. The sweet bird of youth is dead on the bottom of the cage, so let’s all be grown ups now. Look in the mirror. I’m near 50 years old, it’s 2011, and 1982 may as well be 1882 for what it matters any more.

I particularly liked an impassioned plea that I respect ‘fans’. You have to ask what a ‘fan’ means? Let’s see:- no idea about what’s been happening for the last 20 years, never buys anything, steals my shit, never contacts me. Oh yeah, right that’s a FAN. With fans like that who needs indifference? Or maybe it’s a case of be kind to these people because they are particular delicate flower who ‘mean well’?

I have a community of people who I DO respect, and they in turn respect me and this is far healthier than the notion of a ‘fan’ – a kind of hostile dependency that should have been taken out back and shot a few decades ago.

The rant is valid, the rant calls out bullshit. I will denounce things that suck.

My Christmas … let’s just mention one thing. On Christmas eve at around 9pm I turned off a kitchen tap. The tap would not turn off. I turned harder. The tap would not turn off. I hit the tap with some vehemence. The tap would not turn off.

I had to turn off our water supply for Christmas.

Currently, the tap is ‘turned off’ with a mechanism built out of a house brick and a monkey wrench. We can now shower. Sometime when the shops reopen I will order a whole new sink unit, seeing as they don’t make parts for sinks from the 1970′s anymore.

Now the great thing is, this was not the worst thing that happened to me this Christmas. It’s not even the second worst thing that happened this evil season. But I am not here to whine about my karma. No, this is a happy story. I think.

www.lassie.net

I mentioned a few whines ago that it’s becoming easier to find the origin of sound samples. So instead of everything being from Lassie Come Home I can now find the exact phrase I am looking for, who sang it or what movie it was from and so on. The problem is that once I know where a sound came from I just can’t use it ever again. Which is a problem if you need to rerecord something, and that’s exactly what I want to do for an upcoming concert.

I have a track (and I would like to keep this vague because who knows if echelon is monitoring this blog) which features a sample that was playing on the easy listening station that time (God bless 2CH and all who sail in her). I named the song after the phrase being sung and no one has complained in 18 years.

But so help me, I bit into that apple of knowledge and there it was – the song, the singer, the composer. The people are dead, maybe I could fudge it again but a lot has changed in sample land. I’d have to find a singer that would sing that one phrase and record that and y’know it could be done but it’d be kind of half assed. Just add that to the joys of the goddamn season.

But JUST THEN it occurred to me – homeopathy. Go back online and do what caused the problem until it fixes the problem. And a thousand flowers blossomed. This is not one person’s song – every single crooner, wannabe, opera singer on a bad day or trained seal with horns has a version of this one song. It’s a goddamn standard. There are 278 different people singing this song on YouTube alone. I can have 20 people sing this one phrase, mix them up, splice them, layer them, I can create a UBER CROONER that is all guys in suits as one.

This is the best gift. And it’s like  the TV alien talking scene up the end of Zack Parson’s Insidious Beast. The signs are good, the birds fly the right direction, the entrails are sweet. This will work.

Update: The composers are well and truly dead and although I will triple check it, dead so long that copyright has expired. The sound bite I used in 1992 was in copyright, won’t be much longer but anyway I have found a version that will do just as well, it’s 78 years old!

Each year the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre (the Joan) features an Australian Composer in Focus. This gives high school students a chance to study a work by attending a performance and then workshopping with the composer and a short text. This year it was Ross Edwards, a wise choice. Next year it’s me. Not so wise.

It’s not fake shyness. It’s more that I am (a) really fired up about some aspects of music and (b) very muddle headed about how on earth to convey it in the clear and useful manner that the situation demands. I’m overwhelmed with the trust of the panel, and need to support the spirit of music teaching that seems much more common in the past than now.

Fundamental to my argument is that ‘music’ is debased by ever being described as ‘organised sound’ – that the notion of ‘sound art’ is a foolish concession to the forces that would turn every art into a pseudoscience, all the better to get research funding.

Music is not ‘sound art’, as if one drawer in a dresser called Art. That’s an insult to the muse. Art is simply the skill, as in possessing an art, whereas Music is the environment in which these skills have any sense. When I hear visual artists describe music as an optional extra to their flat surface coating it seems that the philosophical work of years have been lost. I would like to regain that work.

(I’d also like to quickly debunk Goethe’s quip about architecture being frozen music. He said this as part of the set up to joke about needlessly baroque living spaces. There’s no evidence that he took the idea any further than that. The actual quote comes from Schelling, who first described the unconscious and I’ll come back to that if there’s time.)

The ancients saw music as the principle on which the universe is ordered, and it pleases me no end to see that the Big Bang exploded with a musical note, the overtones of which are still visible in background radiation.

Also from the ancients I take the idea of knowing not only from calm logic, but also the divine Orphic madness. You need to think and also dance. I think this work will only be valid if half the time I am studious and the other half drunk as a judge. I knew that when I made the Gehennaland exhibit in 2007 about the dark and light of world fairs, but it was a failure because I didn’t connect emotionally with the work.

I would like to present music as much more than just sound. I need advice.

One source is the painter Kandinsky, or should I more properly describe him as a musician? Writing in 1910 he sums up the problem of funding quite elegantly:

In place of an intensive cooperation among artists, there is a battle for goods. Hatred, partisanship, cliques, jealousy, and intrigues are the natural consequences of an aimless, materialist art.

The aimless materialist art is at odds with an internal necessity.

All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.

And the necessity he describes in terms of music.

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.

I feel he goes to far when wants the colours to be a rigorous score. That kind of one on one mapping needlessly restricts the wide varieties of musicality. But still, you can sense his desire for all to be drawn together into a synthesis.

A parallel between color and music can only be relative – just as a violin can give warm shades of tone, so yellow has shades, which can be expressed by various instruments… The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble…

Unfortunately in 2010 it’s not possible to share Kandinsky’s belief in some Theosophical spiritual zone. I don’t have to. There’s enough evidence of a shared musical context, with no need for a neo-platonic wonderland. Enough writers have examined this, and I tend to side with Marcel Duchamp among others that there exists an overarching context that is common ground for creator and consumer. This lies outside of the artist – an external necessity? Or at least a compulsion internalised by both.

Then there’s Ruttmann, a ‘filmmaker’ but really again a musician.

(I am ashamed to think I was impressed by the film Koyaanisqatsi when it came out, correctly understanding that it was one of series of ‘city symphonies’ but taking too long to go back to the original Berlin by Ruttmann. I made Kato Gets The Girl in the spirit of something I hadn’t properly researched. Mind you I don’t recall Reggio ever mentioning Ruttmann)

Everything Ruttmann makes is music. Even Deutsche Panzer, a propaganda film about tanks. I saw that and thought it must be him without knowing. I also wonder how much input he really had into Triumph of the Will. He’s not a theorist, he simply has the music in his being.

This is already fast returning to the dread 1200 words, so let’s just set out a few principles and deal with them later.

1. World’s Fair. I must work on this half student and half drug fiend. Do what I have understood but not practiced.

2. Music – everything begins with a dot. Rhythm = Pitch = Timbre. Tear it apart and rebuild it, not to return to 1910 but to regain the momentum of that era. Modernism is the energy needed.

3. Every good idea I have ever had was put there by birds. Just because I am being called a composer doesn’t mean I start pretending to be one. As Duchamp says – it comes from outer space.

4. Everything I do must be something I can explain to a high school student in plain words. And no hiding behind obscurity as I have in the past. Unless obscurity is the power of it?

5. Research, worse than the grog. But there is just so much in this project that connects up with my Doctoral work (in terms of psychology in abstraction etc.) that it indicates a strong principle that needs careful documentation.

6. Forgot. Add it again later.