It’s raining synthesisers

Posted on April 15, 2013 by tte

Here in the year of our lord 2013 it’s raining 80s synthesisers. Yes yes I know that the boutique manufacturers have been on the rise for years – but I pay no attention to stuff that costs as much as a small car by the time it hits Australia. I’m sure a Prophet 12 is lovely, along with Porsches and Faberge Eggs, things that exist off in a parallel universe. I am cheap, I have always been cheap and the vast majority of everything I have ever owned was bought in hock shops. Mostly MS20′s.

The majors have joined what the boutiques have started. Bless KORG and all who sail in her for coming up with cheap replicas of the trash I used to use in 1982, and I mean hot damn, REPLICAS – although they have missed out on the Casiotone, something that Casio will no doubt rectify in 2014 with the VLtone 3000. Look at my 1982 studio – there you would have found a SH1, 303, 808, the Casiotone and … something that for a moment questions the whole retro thing. A tape recorder. Because implicit in all this gear is recording it, rewinding, overdubbing, punching in … you know? These devices were designed to go with a tape recorder and without it they make no sense. What we have here is the knife – missing is the fork.

You can’t have all this analogue gadgetry and feed it into Pro Tools. How rude!
I am a reasonable man so how about this compromise:

And it stays on the right side of ‘my fingers don’t fit on that’ – where I win by having world’s smallest fingers.

The KORG Avakados (or whatever they are kalled) don’t sound very interesting. But I detect a faint hint of whoopsy daisy in there – there might be ways to cause trouble. When I bought my 303 (for $400 in 1982 money) I was horribly disappointed just how shit it sounded, because up to that point everything Roland had been versatile and subtle. The fartbox had the expressive range of a jaws harp and it took too much trouble to get something decent out of it - only in retrospect do I realise I should have shown it creative disrespect. I have a lot of creative disrespect these days.

Actually the oddest thing about this line of KORGlets is how they are inching their way towards the RADIAS:

Seriously – look at it. It’s like the emperor Dalek with the new toys as little Daleks around it. They will re-issue it (Wish I could have afforded it when it came out).

KORG are always a source of good times, but I’m sorry Novation is fast becoming my sonic Walmart. That Bass Station 2 looks just the stinky cheese for my next retail therapy. For a start it looks like yet another Novation thing where all kinds of unexpected stuff ups are possible – even CDM figured that out. On my MiniNova I have found you can make the wavetable LFOs fast enough to modulate the oscillators to create horrible EMS AKS style frenzies. Novation gear is like the old playground where you could brain yourself falling off a rocket.

There’s probably still somebody out there butthurt about how I was mean to the MS20 – how can I then say I like the Bass Station? Because I want to find all the cracks in something new, not tick off all the ones I already know from 1983.

Runners up. Waldorf has new thing actually called a Rocket, it doesn’t seem much fun to climb, being what psychiatrists call ‘overdetermined’. There’s a Nord something or other that looks like other Nord something or others. We’re already drifting out of my junk shop aesthetic.

Roland? What ever happened to Roland?

Hooray – we just reached 2000 spam comments!

Edubigots

Posted on April 6, 2013 by tte

Forgive me for being fed up.

The next person that says to me “you don’t need to teach media production, people can find tutorials on the Internet” is getting an earful. Yes there are tutorials online for Photoshop. Great. There are tutorials online about painting. About taxation. About management. Let’s stop running the MBA because you can find tutorials on the bloody internet.

Oh, wait, suddenly there’s a big difference? Thanks, now I have the real point out in the open where we can all see it – there is a demarcation here. When I pick up a pen and I write, the physical skill of writing is not to be taught, only the organisation of thoughts on the page. That is clear. But when I pick up a paintbrush the barrier is murky – the skill of the brush is entwined with the message being created. This may be taught, and it is expected that your whole life may be needed to master this. For some reason the universities seem to have decided that the skills in media production are those of the pen and not of the brush, and they are dead wrong.

It involves an ignorance of the modalities involved. I’ll start with a simple example. I have heard that people ‘use a computer too much’. The user might be researching, designing objects, reading texts, writing a journal, collating data, socialising, politicising, or maybe putting together a presentation for the next university executive meeting – that’s all ‘using a computer’. It’s obviously ignorant to bundle tasks by their machinery.

The same ignorance applies when people talk about say photoshopping. Everything you do in television, in print, in object design, across photography, forensics, data visualisation and so on it’s apparently all just a single skill that can be completed before university. Again and again I hear that because PhotoShop is now taught in high school, we can safely assume that there’s no need to continue it any further. The proponents forget that we also teach painting in high school. Does that get dropped as well?

If painting is just putting paint on a canvas and writing is just making marks with a pen then sure, anyone with a mobile phone can make a movie. Sound recording is just pointing a microphone at something. Somehow the first two are ridiculous and the latter two not. Why?

Part of the distaste for media production comes from industry standards – do we really have to teach Pro Tools? Surely Audacity is enough to get the idea, and the idea is what matters? I’m no more in love with Pro Tools than PhotoShop but I am far more interested in my students having employable skills than the tastes of the didacts. Especially as they will go out for industry experience and be found unable to complete simple tasks. What do we want for students? Can they all be researchers – every one of them? Do we impose some political ideal about open source and creative economies on them all?

Universities then end up with postgraduate students who are illiterate in the tools needed to complete a production thesis. I personally have had to assist MFA and PhD students with the kind of tasks that are, apparently, taught by internet tutorials.

My major point here is about literacy. The people that are keen on these restrictions have an extremely narrow idea of what literacy is in 2013. They use words and numbers, they understand that a rubric on a page builds clarity that leads to better management. But a page is not the only place where a recording inspires thought. Let me teach the tools that make these recordings and I will make sure that the concepts will be covered as well. That’s my job.

I have to bring up another ugly subject. I didn’t learn any of my skills at a university and I think that’s common. People work in industry and then come to teach. Hell, I learned how to lecture by doing gigs. Students often report that they too only really start to learn once they found a position. Shouldn’t we be worried about that, study what happens after people leave, and make that the issue? Instead we keep pumping more research into the mix, as if that’s all we have left to offer.

I’m going to make a bunch of YouTube tutorials about research practices. Then we’ll all have nothing left to teach.

David Bowie

Posted on March 21, 2013 by tte

Every time I glance at the cover of The Next Day, a sense of relief and happiness descends on me. I am found, and set square on the earth. I know where I am, where we all are.

Always ready to be wrong, always uncertain and apologetic for my stupidity and then – proof falls out of the sky unasked. You believe in UFOs – a UFO lands in New York. You believe in Reptilian Overlords and the Queen’s mask falls off. Or like me you suspect that insipid nostalgia has become pandemic and a Bowie record comes out with artwork from THIRTY SIX YEARS AGO with a stupid white box slapped over it.

Why didn’t they use Comic Sans? If you are going to announce that you have truly given up and have absolutely nothing left to offer, at least give it that friendly, happy look. A clip art of a puppy and some balloons maybe? Because at the moment there’s a slight protest that the white box is in some way stylish, that it aspires to some artistry. The sad ass who ‘designed’ this has landed on something as default as Myriad Fucking Pro. Ineffectually ‘professional’. Gutless. A tepid little mnemonic of risk. Give me HOBO or death.

Look at the font on the original sleeve. It’s ugly, gloriously, proudly fuck you seventies ugly. They have crossed it out, but even then in a timid little scratch.

Where is the humour, the ribaldry? It’s a twee little titter of a thing that dares not rise above a ‘reference’ to become a fully grown mock.

I love this album art as an honest appraisal of our artistic landscape in 2013. A time where so many touch screens, tweets, arduino boards and clouds all conspire to squeeze out a mealy little fart. A time when we desperately cling to the old revolutionaries even when they became reactionary swine. When Bowie and Kraftwerk and Joy Division are the names we have to work with – long after they were left out of the fridge.

I was apologetic for continuing to exist, but I realise that what we need is so much of this limp filth that that the audience rises up and strangles us. Bring it on.

Vivid and Kraftwerk deserve each other.

Posted on February 21, 2013 by tte

I saw Kraftwerk play live in 1981. It was wonderful. They brought their whole opera stage with them; all those green/yellow Wagnerian boxes and knobs and neon tubes. They seemed to enjoy their show as much as their personas allowed (even daring to tap their toes) and were just then at the peak of their musical importance. It was so vital in the early 80′s Australia to have this approval from on high for music that was from a different planet to AC/DC. We were empowered by it.

We played live, knowing that we were a small part of a global musical change. At one of these gigs the sound guy told me he’d done the stage sound for the Kraftwerk show. It was all on an open reel tape he said. But what about the screw up about 3/4 of the way through the set? Same screw up every show. On tape.

That didn’t matter too much to me. When later on the boxes and knobs were revealed to be flat packed sets it seemed clever not have to carry your real studio around the world with you. Besides – it’s Kraftwerk. They get a pass.

The 90′s were not kind to them. At one stage they were releasing through Cleopatra Records in LA, a boutique label for Hawkwind fans. At least they had a label, we didn’t. And they could pull bigger festivals than we could dream of. Good luck to them, earned it.

In 2003 I was asked if we would like to play a support spot for Kraftwerk’s return to Australia. That was great! I’d been working on some new videos and a set and it would be a perfect match, little and big. I said yes. Word came back from Germany – Nein – no videos allowed. That was a bit rough for a video band. The promoter tried a compromise. What if we used our own projector? Nein – no light touching the screens. And no instruments allowed. You will only play a tape. And you must be a specified number of metres away from the main stage.

By this point the promoter said he hoped I was understanding. I was understanding. We had played under bands that only allowed us a single blue light. We had played under bands that restricted our volume level to 75%, 8 faders, no fold back … every Australian band was used to this kind of musical colonial pith helmet bullshit and knew what it meant. They were pack of gutless cowards who could get fucked. Which is what I said.

We were offered free entry to the show. Sure, OK. In the line up outside the venue John Jacobs had installed a PA in a wheelie bin. He was playing Kraftwerk mashups through this diabolical noise unit on wheels, rolling up and down the line and it was wonderful. Particularly compared to Kraftwerk themselves.

I had seen a video of their return to service in the 90′s – the videos made from Atari graphics and their funny new suits. This was 2003 and I was sure that having been so picky about this show that they had made some new and wonderful set with old and new stuff and some cool video to fill those three giant screens. As the set rolled along it was horrible to realise that they hadn’t advanced in over a decade. The symbol of musical progress, of futurism, were lazily stuck in the past. They were boring. They were pretentious. And I knew that for my faults and weaknesses this bunch had nothing better to offer. And I laughed and started to heckle. Bradbury was delighted to join in. People around us were HORRIFIED that we were HECKLING KRAFTWERK. We left before a brawl started – my fight wasn’t with the audience.

Down the road there was a surprisingly large number of other escapees drinking beer at the pub and having a great night out sans the Teutonic Nits. Apparently the promoter was running around trying to find me, I’m not sure whether he wanted to kill me or take me backstage for a meeting. Best to hide anyway.

The next show at the Boiler Room their backing tape got stuck on the intro to Autobahn. And the raver kids, who cared nothing for ‘legendary’, apparently pelted them with plastic beer glasses. A bit cruel. Just a bit. I was outside in the cool night thinking about how the Boiler Room once meant our own bands.

Vivid has announced Kraftwerk for 2013, using up half a page of newsprint in colour. As if the gods have descended. Vivid itself being less about a festival of ideas and more about a source of tourist income every year. This is the same show as they have just done at the Tate which I must note has been reviewed very favourably without ever seeming to mention the actual performance or anything they have done since 1981. One look at the pictures and it seems that they might have got a few new Tron suits to wear. Whoever ‘they’ might be these days.

Everyone is open to laughter, to being critiqued and goaded into putting some effort into their work. When somebody says that Kraftwerk are not to be mocked, that makes it twice as important that puffed up frogs are deflated. And given that they were once the champions of the future of music, that laughter may be a little bitter.

KORG KORG KORG OMG KORG KORG

Posted on January 30, 2013 by tte

COMMENTS ARE GETTING BORING AND ARE CLOSED. DO WHAT THOU WILLST,

There was a time slightly after the dinosaurs that I owned a small wall of KORG. There was two MS20′s, an MS50, a SQ10 and a billion of those short patch cables. And you know, it was pretty grand for 1980 something. For 2013, it’s… well… gee what a nice watch, does it tell the time?

BLOODY patch cables and GARFIELD is the producer – “needs more obesity”.

But here we go again with a reissue of Old and Safe for the New Conservatives. Already been asked if I am going to buy a new midget MS20. I bought a MiniNova instead – maybe I made the wrong choice. Let’s be scientific about this:

Patch Management
MiniNova: there’s four banks of 256 patches which can be sorted into categories and saved back to a patch librarian over a USB connection.
KORG MS20: photocopy pages from the manual and draw the approximate positions of the knobs with a pencil.
Advantage: KORG for being legendary and analogue.

Voicing
MiniNova: three oscillators per voice with a variety of traditional, digital and wave table forms. Each oscillator can detune with itself for ‘supersaw’ effects and has a self-sync to create harmonics. 18 voices available.
KORG MS20: two oscillators, mono.
Advantage: KORG for being even more legendary and analogue.

Filters
MiniNova: two filters 12/24 hi/low/peak which can be combined with control of peak and resonance width.
KORG MS20: hi/low.
Advantage: KORG for being surrounded by candles and photographed in the dark.

Effects
MiniNova: five effect units patchable in a variety of configurations.
KORG MS20: falls out of tune as it warms up.
Advantage: KORG because – man, the late seventies are funky know what I mean.

No candles supplied.

Signal Processing
MiniNova: Balanced microphone and line inputs with vocoding, pitch effects and flow through the synthesis and effect chain.
KORG MS20: line input that feeds into a pitch detection thing that kind of sounds like an alien mouth organ.
Advantage: do you have to ask?

Arp and Sequencing
MiniNova: Arp and rhythmic ‘gator’ with selection buttons on the front panel.
KORG MS20: nothing. Buy the mini SQ-10 someday.
Advantage: simplicity at its finest.

Patching
MiniNova: 20 internal modulation paths each with two sources. Six ADSR generators, three LFOs with multiple waveforms including tempo locked patterns.
KORG MS20: three (*@&$(*$&@ patch cables.
Advantage: haptic physical interface with gravity assisted orientation DIY logistics.

Well the science is in but I don’t know. I keep reading the articles and hearing the talk and wondering if people use this stuff for making music. Or does it go next to the “Christmas Tree”? You know, that elaborate, expensive modular system that people build to look fantastic but sounds like a Roland preset that goes bwooooouuuw?

By any reasonable measure, this is a stupid way to make a bloooop noise.

No, I am not buying an MS20.

STOP PRESS — OUR CORRESPONDENT IN BIRMINGHAM HAS SENT THIS UPDATE

NOW BACK TO OUR NORMAL PROGRAMMING

Overground

Posted on January 14, 2013 by tte

I’m allowed some time out from the game. Hell, it’s midnight.

So I keep thinking about a conversation I had with Sanjay Fernandes from Resident Advisor about this strange resurgence in cassettes. He was saying that they allow for an underground, a creative activity which is unseen by the mainstream. I wasn’t sure why putting music on BandCamp isn’t just as obscure, seeing as some titles get zero hits. But he was sure that the intention and potential to find this music is enough to exclude it from a true underground – it’s still part of the network even when that branch is not being travelled. Whereas a cassette may never be connected with anything or anyone.

My take is that an object that is stored but cannot be located is equivalent to an object lost. There is music on the internet that will never be heard – is this not an underground? There are 100,000 bands online (let’s say). Is number 12,752 part of the music ecology? If a tree falls in a forest …

What the hell is the underground? Particularly when it’s the place where most attention seems to be directed these days. His questions to me were often about the underground of my own time, as if there was some experience I could offer that was relevant to now. Of course there isn’t – the choices people have now were not there. You had vinyl or cassette, and vinyl meant EMI. The exact same object is transformed by being a choice.

As I was thinking about this, I was told that some old cassette I had swapped with some English people had turned up on EBay for 75 pounds. And somebody had bought it for that price. Should I just upload the same material to BandCamp, even though it’s clumsy horrible bollocks? No, not the same – we’re in the realm of the Art Object now, quality be damned so long as no one else can have it. All frame, no painting. When I have gone to the trouble to make some old thing available again no one actually bothers to download it. But if I delete it the complaints start up again. It’s a case of only wanting those things that you can’t have.

It’s a little depressing to think that I’m working up to 12 hours a day on a project that will be mostly ignored – I’m not being petulant, I’m just used to how things work – ignored because it’s here and now and no-one cares for either of those things. In ten years perhaps somebody will be furiously searching for it to complete their early 21st Century artefacts. Obscure!

Bumped into Adrian Bertram today and we decided that cassettes suck. Why not minidiscs? They sound much better and are fiendishly … underground. Or, if you want to offer some small chance that they have the player – Hi Fi VHS. It’s a lot better than bloody cassettes.

Either way, my failure to sell 2 copies will be a master stroke rather than a humiliation.
Or I could just keep using BandCamp.

Following on from the rant about Peter Jackson – now you can make your own high speed television! Go Pro Hero 3 came out last year but sold out straight away. They emailed me to advertise more in stock, but when I looked locally they were all sold again. The camera does 120fps 720p as well as other odd combinations of size and speed – for example 4K* at 15fps which is stupid seeing as it can shoot larger 12Mb stills at 30fps. For around 500 bucks, it’s an interesting tool for slow motion and tying to cats, although I am more interested in how quickly real video cameras will add these speeds because the Hero has one fixed fish eye lens and that’s going to get dull very fast.

*Note a cheat – 720p and 1080p are measured vertically. 4K doesn’t mean 4096p – it means 2160p. And 2K means 2048×1080p.

20X CS3 Professional

Posted on December 28, 2012 by tte

Marketing have announced a rebadge for 2013. They’re going to launch the year as 20X CS3 Professional. The problem is the whole ’6 month in advance’ planning cycle has made next year part of this year, and no one is inspired to pay for the upgrade. It’s at the point where the end of the world is one of the few things that gets us to look at the calendar and even that is tiring out. Compare the hysteria for the Mayan Apocalypse to the Y2K bug – no contest.

This is dangerous. Remember the 2000 Election in the USA? No one gave a shit between the candidates, where in fact one of them rose to great challenges in less than a year with all the sense and dignity of Bubbles The Chimp. By 2008 the good news was that the White House had not yet burned to the ground. The bad news was that few people still had a house to burn down apart from the directors of Halliburton. Oh and there were lots of dead people.

So I’ve got a slogan for the coming year that will hopefully get you thinking hard about the possibilities: 20X CS3 Professional: Giant Demons Are Tearing My Face Off which I think is kind of catchy, if a tiny bit hyperbolic. I can’t promise giant demons but if there was the slightest chance of them coming and doing you know what, would you be prepared?

Here’s a nightmare scenario: by the end of 20X CS3, Psy has 6 billion views on YouTube and now more than half of Google’s income comes from advertising on that one page. But an automated copyright claim blocks the video, leading to Google not paying rent on 200 of its data centres. Searching for cat macros becomes catastrophically cut back leading to a collapse of the world economy. And then demons tear your face off.

Or on a more personal level, image if my Ferrari neighbour plays that same Bruce Springsteen DVD 3 times every weekend for the next 52 weekends and I finally crack and go around with the ICS-190 GLM grenade launcher (that I rightfully have only for self defence in case a gunman attacks my teaching labs) and shove it up his Born In The USA? That could impact on my employment. And then demons etc.

Order one now for the festive season. The kids will love it.
The ones that survive.

Neither of these things may happen – but that’s the point. You don’t know what might happen but that sense of dread will keep you up and sprightly all the coming year.

So how was your Christmas break? I had a (what remains of) family get together for the first time in years which ended up with too many tequila shots and a massive headache. I even got a gift!

Apparently you can use it as a remote control for the TV. I intend to use it as a remote control for the Ferrari neighbour’s sound system. Either that or make it control some piece of sound gear which will get a breathless write up in Create Digital Music.

But like everyone I have to buy my special own gift, and seeing as I haven’t bought a synthesiser in over 20 years I thought I maybe could have one.

It’s a MiniNova and it’s top-tastic. I’m amazed at what you get for less than 500 bucks these days. I’m not going to do the specs you can do that anywhere. But I must say it is loads of fun to actually use a physical piece of equipment after so many years – even if you do tend to use the computer to edit patches. More on this later!

It is the ruin of all that is good and fair in this world.

Posted on December 17, 2012 by tte

Not [H.H]. That’s not causing anyone any trouble, except me.

But the VERY IDEA that you shoot a film at 48 frames per second! Peter Jackson shoots a film at double speed, film critics outdo themselves in hysterical stupid.

After a while my eyes adjusted, as to a new pair of glasses, but it was still like watching a very expensively mounted live TV show on the world’s largest home TV screen.

Says it all really. Making a film twice as clear turns it into … television.

The unintended side effect is that the extra visual detail gives the entire film a sickly sheen of fakeness… I was reminded of the BBC’s 1988 production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and not in a good way.

Television!! How lower class!!

For people shots and pans, the smoother motion of 50 fps looks more like … newer TVs to us, although we find it to be less noticeable on action shots.

… but when actors, costumes and sets appeared the clarity made every pore and flaw visible, breaking the spell of the film

OMG Television!!! Even worse it’s like one of those horrible Computer Games that young people seem to like!

It’s not … FILMIC!

One day I hope to take ‘filmic’ and bury it alive under a slab of concrete, along with its addiction to blur as the answer every problem. Blur is the Valium of ‘film’, the scratchy grain, the losses of optical printing, the blur of shallow focus, the juddering pans that 24fps has offered for the last 100 or so years. All of this keeps the image soft, and politely out of our personal space.

Of course when you run out of Valium or Heroin or whatever your fancy, the world is harsh and bright and terribly in focus. Horrible nasty real world, not abstracted by analogue media – the rumble of the turntable, the hiss of tape – ready to provide a meta level where the story can be kept at a distance.

In 2012 there are still people who want to keep it blurry and grainy so that they aren’t confronted by pores and hairs and all that nasty reality. The Dogme movement was one attempt at blowing that out of the water – too rough and ready and Jackson is better equipped to strip off the bunny rug.

Of course this is also political. Never mind that television has been for quite some time the equal and in some cases the better of the cinema. That video cameras have been used for ‘film’ for about a decade. ‘Film’ is pulling rank, which is all it has left really. The smart directors like Jackson are crossing boundaries and forging a hybrid where the size of screen will no longer be compartmentalised.

All the hits of the 80′s, 90′s … and now!

Posted on December 4, 2012 by tte

On the Jolly Bus going over to the exhibition site, the radio was on, and the Deep Radio Voice promised hits. The 80′s, the 90′s, and NOW! Hah I thought. You left out the wrong decade. But then I wondered which decade really was the abyss. Maybe I’d mellowed on the 90′s. Maybe it was more than the period in which Depeche Mode discovered chin fluff.

I should first declare the 2012 exhibition opened, run and closed without any death or injury. I made the usual video.

The last two years I liked paintings so don’t beat on me for liking the First Person Shouter. We had four computer games on show this year, pretty good for a university that has no games design. Hmmm.

Right, the 90′s. I could hate the 90′s for entirely personal reasons – I did go from the top 20 to 50 bucks in less than a year. But that was ’95 and I was already fed up with The Mod Revival, Brit Pop, Bands That Sound Like Nirvana, the throwback rockist/stubble culture and fucking ‘Big Beat’ way before Fat Boy Slim, which was the anal hair of that whole era. By the end I was being suitably punished by working on major label compilations of ‘Indie’ ‘Alternative’ ‘Big Fat Beats’. The explorers of sound were selling their equipment to people that wanted to make Hammond organ riffs. It felt like the base was falling out of everything, but in hindsight I read the situation a little more kindly.

In 93 I was jumping over to so called ‘new media’ – something which seemed esoteric in Sydney. In reality most progressive bands were investing in interactive works around that time. Like any real underground you heard nothing until it was nearly over.

CD-ROM format came and went so quickly that the WIRED articles lasted longer than the play testing. While you can find albums from 1996 without any trouble the ROMs are dead and buried on abandonware sites. Even if you can find them you’ll have to have a computer from the era running OS9 or Windows 95. New Media diverted the old progressive electronic music scene of energy and gave very little back. It allowed people (including myself) to tread water by switching old artwork to new packaging.

There were a lot of bad ROMs but many good titles that don’t deserve their current obscurity. Take for example the ROMs published by Inscape which are all interesting in their own way. It strikes me that DEVO, The Residents and William Burroughs are all old school, as are the other CD-ROM makers – Bowie, Prince, Gabriel … it could be a money thing, but perhaps CD-ROM was just a 1980′s idea that fell past its use by date.

There’s another thing I missed about the 90′s: my generation were breeding. Breeding means a real job and no nights out. Breeding means transferring libido into the offspring. I see this from the 40+ year olds now spilling back into circulation, paying for Gary Numan / Severed Heads shows and buying downloads of the CDs they owned before the childopalypse.

The important admission – the old guard was seriously out of ideas by this stage. No wonder that the next wave looked at us with contempt and jumped back on the ‘authentic’ stubble wagon. Not that the Mod Revival was particularly authentic – but it was better that than old fat 808 State.

The rescue myth I took up near the 00′s was that the music underground started to grow back in the German club scene – the post-digital glitch and minimal movement. It seemed that electronic music was reclaiming lost ground one hard panned sine wave at a time. But is that really true?

Like punk, the glitch scene started something important it couldn’t finish.The style declared a year zero, popped out quite a few manifestos and then ran screaming back to the past in the form of 70′s dub and disco. I like these styles so I was cool with ‘post glitch’ music but it’s no more credible to make ‘blip dub’ or ‘click hop’ than ‘remixed rock’. If you really want to to be mean – just another white style that needed a black butt.

The majority of ‘glitch’ was only ever listenable on the basis of it being a reaction, correction, the clearing of the stables, an insult to ‘authenticity’. Revolutions have a short shelf life. Long before Clicks and Cuts Volume Five stumbled out in 2010 the whole thing stank as high as every other musical movement. Some existing outfits like Oval were swept up, celebrated and spat out. The survivors were on the outside as always – e.g. Mouse On Mars simply orbited around it all paying small heed to any of it.

The Deep Radio Voice is more accurate than it seems. ‘Now’ is not a decade as such, it’s the time after which we lost faith in these movements, in cycles and some kind of dialectic of knobs versus wires. ‘Now’ is the 00′s, the 10′s and probably until the death of pop music. And that’s a real revolution.

Big Science

Posted on October 8, 2012 by tte

Is this guy talking a bunch of horse shit? It sure sounds like it.

He is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the world and was named by Forbes as one of the world’s seven most powerful data scientists.

Well hush my puppies. A bad smell emanates when he says this:

The data is so big that any question you ask about it will usually have a statistically significant answer. This means, strangely, that the scientific method as we normally use it no longer works, because almost everything is significant!

Actually, wait… no, increasing the amount of data doesn’t do that. Statistical significance doesn’t have an upper threshold. What does he mean by ‘big’ here? The data is so ‘big’… that word is doing some sleight of hand. Does it mean amount or complexity or … magic.

This is the first time in human history that we have the ability to see enough about ourselves that we can hope to actually build social systems that work qualitatively better than the systems we’ve always had.

That’s a Big Science claim that goes all the way back to the 17th century. {Recent technology paradigm} will scientise society and we will all be perfected! The guy that punched the first card was there, along with Better Living Through Chemistry and Communism Is Electricity.

Bullwinkle the Moose has found a new hat!

The fact that we can now begin to actually look at the dynamics of social interactions and how they play out…

Ah here we go. Always look for the assertion of ‘Truth’ or ‘Fact’. So what I see is the Dynamics of Social Interactions being defined to fit the ruler we have to ~~look at~~ measure it. Five units of Dynamics of Social Interactions please. Or let’s just say DSI units with Tweets as the coinage. That’s one way to take a complex reality and by careful slicing of the difficult bits turn it into something that makes an elegant formula. Like the pseudoscience of Jaques Lacan, there is an appeal here to the magic of complexity with an promise that it can be tamed into epicycles.

OK so it takes a few reads to get the swing of it but I think I have Mr. MIT Centre for Connection Science pinned on my butterfly chart.

We’re going to reinvent what it means to have a human society.

Human society is not something that will engineered by this guy any more than the engineers that came before. To a man carrying a hammer every problem looks like a nail. For Freud the human mind was a steam engine, and for this guy society is a giddy number of microtransactions. Always, always remember the World’s Fair (Orphic) rule – Eros and Thanatos, wine and music.

Still searching for a place where expansive thought can float my mind. edge.org doesn’t look like it’s going to be it.

Ellard

more bloody ellard

Category Archives: Ranting