Ralph Balson? Damn! Here was a painter that (and OK painting isn’t my big thing) I knew nothing about and yet it was immediately obvious that this was exactly the mind I was seeking. It’s a bridge over to the theosophists and their colour music, the video synthesists of the late 20th Century, maybe even The New Aesthetic if I’m really lucky.

Here’s someone that lived in the same place as I did and overlapped with the people I learned from. He died 2 years after I was born otherwise I’d be around to his place with a case of VB and a lot of questions.

Socially, Balson was shy and reticent. Between 1949 and 1959 he taught part time at East Sydney Technical College. Students respected this near-sighted, suburban painter, with his tradesman’s clothes, who made no display of ego. – Aus Dict. of Biography

(East Sydney Tech College is now the National Art School, it’s where I did the Barbara Island show, which I hope Balson would have liked.) I’m not sure what I’d ask him. Probably, “Oh adopted Wise Master can you see what’s burning a hole in my head trying to figure out what this MUSIC thing is?” “Oh ascendant house painter, why am I concerned with shit that was last important in 1915?” The answer would vary on the amount of VB.

Maybe you’re looking at this stuff and thinking you saw a rug at the local shopping centre that looks a bit like this. It’s true that Balson and his crew inspired more design than fine arts. That’s OK, film is still an artform despite BATTLESHIP. Also it must be said that he moved on to other more complicated work that I am still coming to terms with, and I may be a clifford. For reasons of research I am tweaked on this constructed art at the moment and probably the little things are overly big in my mind. Still, it’s a part of the painterly arts that needs connection to those that are trending at the moment.

I am glad to hear he had a friend. I don’t know why I am less religiously transformed by Grace Crowley’s work – I like it but for some reason Balson is doing some trick with my brain. Perhaps she is less ‘musical’.

At home with Ralph and Grace (click to big)

She certainly deserved more respect. “It was not until the 1950s, when Crowley was in her sixties, that a public gallery exhibited her abstract works.” And you complain.

Roy de Maistre is worth a mention, but then he never really dedicated himself to the ideal the way this pair did. In quickly and out the door fast. I’ll stick with Ralph.

When I was growing up I knew about Sukarno and Suharto because the latter was purging the former by organizing mass executions of communists. One bedtime story was that the Balinese leaders invited all the PKI to dinner, (which they attended as it would be impolite to refuse) and killed them all for dessert. I vaguely remember when my old man wore his uniform again in the 60′s because apparently Sukarno was taking pot shots at QANTAS flights and the RAAF was thinking about heaving a few missiles back. It stopped when the Yanks made a deal that Australia join in the Vietnam war and told Indonesia to pull their heads in or get sent back to the stone age. We always had a lot of rice hoarded in the cupboards around that time. Not sure what was going to trigger our living off all that rice. Indonesian zombie invasion?

Hello Australian children, I am Rangda and you look delicious.

In ’71 I went to Indonesia as my first overseas trip, I was 9. As far as I was concerned Indonesia was filled with bug eyed things that had enormous teeth. In fact that was early days in Suharto’s ‘new order’ period. So long as he kept purging communists, the USA kept sending him aid and weapons and the corporations flooded in with work and bribes. Much like Russia post Glasnost, but without Boris Yeltsin as drunken dancing bear. In 1975 Indonesia annexed East Timor, bringing about a period 75-80 which probably inches up towards the Pol Pot Days in Cambodia. Australia did exactly jack shit, because 400,000 troops with American made weapons are hard to argue with. My family stopped visiting for a while.

Nowadays if you’re making TV commercials it’s in the ‘big smoke’ up north. I really should lecture in Bahasa.

So – the language. Bahasa Indonesia is a relative of Bahasa Malay, with a fair bit of Dutch shoved into it (because a fair bit of Dutch was shoved into Indonesia at gun point). Over 200 million people can speak it, although more than 75 million people prefer Bahasa Jawa or Javanese. When they do speak Bahasa Indonesia they tend to mangle it into local dialects that the government tries hopelessly to weed out. One reason Australians are more likely to learn Mandarin is that the Chinese government has enforced it – learning Bahasa is a bit fake, like Esperanto. No idea why people keep learning French.

But Bahasa is the closest thing to Orwell’s NewSpeak or Burgess’ Nadsat I’ve found in reality. The history of the country is filled with  imposing portmanteau terms. Sukarno ruled by manifesto politik or Manipol. His synthesis of nasionalisme, agama (religion) and komunisme was Nasakom, which eventually came unstuck in an aborted coup by “The Thirtieth of September Movement” or Gerakan 30 September, which became G30S/PKI – conveniently pronounced like Gestapu. Sukarno’s loss of power came with a document Surat Perintah Sebelas Maret, simply ‘the orders for March 11th’. Indonesia is never satisfied with a name that long and it became Supersemar, a term which involves several levels of word play.

During Suharto’s ‘New Order’, many communists become political prisoners: tahanan politik or in iconic erasure of humanity, just tapol. Suharto himself was finally brought down by his own KKN (korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme). By then Supersemar applied to Suharto’s ‘charitable organisation’ for embezzling millions of dollars.

These days you’ll still be dealing with Minipax and Minitrue … actually the Depdiknas (Departemen Pendidikan Nasional Republik Indonesia), or the Deplu (Departemen Luar Negeri).

If Bahasa can telescope a phrase it will, and unlike German it’ll drop anything it can to go for the snappiest, most sonogenic form. This is the language of science fiction films. If Indonesia gets any bigger, maybe just films.

Fuck you Scorsese for allowing the life of Melies to be drowned in infantile revisionism. You should know better. You took a children’s book, lit it orange on one side and blue on the other and threw some Film 101 into the pot. A lot of what you concealed is the dirty history of film. We have our own trains pulling into our own stations: we don’t need your old magic tricks, we have too many of those. What we need is the grey reality of greed and folly that you want to gloss over. Film is not a family. Film is a pack of hyena.

Show us Melies signing the deal with Pathe that lost him his house. Show us his brother churning out shitty westerns for that brute Edison. Show us how film society dribbled money to him when he was running the toy store. Show us the reality. SHOW THE TRUTH. Then talk to us about ‘your love of film’.

Hugo is just another shiny robot movie. The recreations of the early cinema are wonderful, but then, shiny robot.

That over too many pages.

I have finally released the 25th Anniversary remaster of Come Visit The Big Bigot on BandCamp. I had been holding off for a release on CD – 25 years was 2011, but I think that release may now not happen. If you’ve been following you know why. It’s free to listen and Strange Brew is free to download.

Related – I am nearly all gone from YouTube. You will find me at Vimeo. Just use the ‘Videos’ menu at the top of the page to see what’s there. YouTube is really not the place for me – when 100,000 people watch my video by accident, do you call that a successful communication?

The Lytro camera is on sale in the United States, at this stage only a toy and expensive for that. But the Lytro is an equivalent of the old Diamond MP3 player, also an expensive toy that presaged the end of the music industry once the big players woke up, bought up, and mercilessly expanded over the entire landscape. I experienced that, from buying a Diamond when it first appeared, telling everyone what it meant (being laughed at) and watching Apple’s rise. I am here again with exactly the same confidence:

Cameras, and eventually video cameras, as you have known them are dead.

It will be dismissed. You will be told that it is not a serious tool. Then one of the smaller players, say Olympus (who could really do with an advantage right now) will pick up the technology. There will be a better looking, more professional version. A well known photographer will endorse it. Soon there will be a rush of photography made with light field technology.

Recognizing the profit, I would guess that SONY will be a few months ahead of Canon in releasing a fully robust light field camera. SONY will add their panorama sweep. You will be able to sweep across 180 degrees. Then 360.

In one corner a startup will announce that they have achieved 15 frames per second. Then 25, and slowly make their way up to 60. Their recording process will join into the main flow.

A video made with light field technology will allow the viewer to examine the recorded footage with their own attention, their own gaze. It will not be stereo or ’3D’, but something much better. It will not be a barrage that stresses your perceptive apparatus, but a mental reduction; the way we actually look at a scene in real life. As the characters on screen perform, your attention might wander to a leaf on a plant nearby until you’re caught by their conversation and you can look at each of the faces in turn. As you would in real life.

This destroys everything we teach about camerawork right now. This makes me insanely happy, like a good book burning and a game of paint the academic with a clown face. Things are on a roll again and I get to see it.

Every hour.

Sometimes I avoid work by wondering what takes about 7 minutes there and back and has to be done every hour. By the time he’s locked his fine vehicle and made his way back up to his fine apartment, surely there’s only enough time for a quality cigarette and a snifter of brandy before it’s time to go get the car keys. Hell, can’t he use the phone?

Now you’ll be all eager to tell me something sensible like the man has to pick up the takings from a local bar every hour so that it’s safe from villains. So why not do what they do at most family restaurants and get a night safe? Maybe he has to put money back in the tills? It just seems too much trouble for something so banal.

More likely:

• He is the victim of a time loop and I am seeing the same journey every hour. That doesn’t explain Sundays, more on that in a moment.
• Every hour he has to type a code into an Apple 2 to stop an island from exploding. Hell, get the bouncer to do it.
• Has to turn over the C120 cassette that has the background music. Plausible.
• Extremely precisely timed domestic arguments.
• Something to do with MegaUpload.

I’m not opposed to this phenomena, because on Sundays something far worse happens. On that day Ferrari Neighbour (or somebody in his household – let blame not be ill assigned) takes out his favourite DVD: Bruce Springsteen Live Somewhere Or Other. And on the finest plasma display (I guess) and the highest quality surround speakers (I can hear) The Boss pumps his fist in the air for a multitude of proud Americans, bellowing all his hits and yelling DIDJA LIKE DAT? WUN TOO FREE FUH with 100 Percent Patriotic Fervor and a singalong.

Every. Fucking. Sunday. Loud. I mean PA loud.

WUN TOO FREE FUH!

I can’t be down on Ferrari Neighbour for playing the same piece of music over and over because most people seem to do that. On the other side of my house is The Bag Of Britons. You know the sort, come to Australia to get away from the dreary situation at home and then only ever talk to other Britons, usually about how Australia ‘just isn’t the same y’know?’

(Something which could easily be remedied y’know – two flights on BA every day back to mother country.)

The Bag have I think two CDs total in their collection, because there’s two possible programmes for each evening. God knows what they are called but I guess one is NOW THAT’S WOT I CALL MUSIC VOLUME 13 and the other is JIGGY BOOTY 18 INCHES. The former gets most of the play. I know it so well, having heard it some nights starting at 6pm and still rotating at about 3am. JIGGY BOOTY gets an airing when the wifey is off at the pub and has some bitchin’ gangsta action for the lads yo.

Some songs on WOT I CALL MUSIC are exceptionally deep and meaningful for the Bag and have to be played a few times until everyone tires of howling along including myself. These people are happy, they have good times, and they love music more than most people who chin scratch at sound art festivals so good on them. If it sounds like I am annoyed it’s only a little. I save that for Soggy The Sailor who seems to be having a ‘Enya at 3AM’ phase. Fuck him.

While I was writing this LinkedIn sent me FIVE MORE STUPID ARTICLES FOR THIS WEEK. Here’s the Chronic Of Higher ED with yet another whoa man the kids are using iPads article. Look, we’ve had quite a few of these thank you, and if anyone else claims that we have to move education onto FaceBook I’m going to double the bet and say NO let’s move onto SECOND LIFE. Remember when journalists treated Second Life like Twitter? I do. They pretend they don’t.

The cone of silence

Oh yeah and Apple released an AMAZING and MAGICAL APP that lets anyone make a textbook! It’s revolutionary! It is also a hack of the EPUB format, a simple case of embrace, expand and extinguish. Go and look at an ibook file on a PC. It’s just a zip, with modified EPUB components set up to add stuff that works on an iPad. Like all previous E.E.E. cases it does add quality; Microsoft’s changes to HTML added quality too …  similarly it locks you into the ecosystem of World #2 Multinational. And requires ‘upgrading’ to Lion which is otherwise a complete pain in the arse.

It sickens me that so many ‘technology writers’ haven’t stated the obvious: you could have already written a textbook that could be read on any device, could have done it for years running, nothing has changed. If you really really had to have movies and 3D spinning then there’s been Acrobat, which is really the whole point of this charade – to attack the success of Adobe Editi0ns in textbook distribution.

But I notice that these journalists seem to think words are sufficient in their own damn articles.

There goes the Ferrari again.

I think he deserves a refund.

I’m thinking that we are becoming rare, and we’re only middle aged.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/obituaries/bridging-disability-and-music-for-a-busy-life-20111201-1o918.html

So, absolutely final?

Yes it is. When you promise Gary Numan that you’re winding it down then you WIND IT DOWN.

And besides, right here is the dilemma writ large – the demand for PLAY ONLY YOUR MOST ANCIENT MUSIC. Scene: Belgium. Tom bangs two rocks together while Stewart plays on his bladder

Actually, being in art administrator mode I have whipped up a spreadsheet. Column One, name of track. Column Two, duration in metric minutes. Column Three, Cliffordicity – high, medium or low. High means that people around the age of 50 will bump their walking frames along with the beat. That’s Friday night. Column Four – video, good/medium/poor condition. Playing live with Gazza means that there’s quite a lot in good nick. Last Column – rehearsal. As in what was the last time anyone actually rehearsed this.

Looks like there’s about 2.5 hours of stuff in decent condition but a lot of that is recent, serious music which ain’t gonna get granny into pink leg warmers. I think Friday is worked out, Saturday is a bit more tricky not for lack of material but just how to make it a club set. Take Pour Chiens Moyens for example, it’s 7 minutes long. I’ve got a version from the Big Day Out of 2005 which has a bit of a beat to it but… well… maybe not.

Actually they want stuff so old that there simply isn’t the parts to do it. Let me put this in perspective. I was talking to Pauline recently about how somebody wants him to remake I Don’t Like It. He’s found some MIDI files and a Roland Sampler that was once used to make the track. The sampler turned on … but the hard drive didn’t at first … the display is scrambled… the mouse is a SCSI mouse… this thing is a quizzical artefact of great antiquity. He found some files that we THINK might work with Opcode Vision. Good luck with that.

OK so go fifteen years earlier. I am the king of backing shit up, but do you really think I can raise the dead? Take a track like Twenty Deadly Diseases. This exists as some vinyl which has the original recording which I have at various times tried to work out, except the whole track is so out of tune it sits between two real notes. I can make something that sounds a bit like it, but not really, then what? I remake it as an updated version and everybody frowns, as they did when I updated the other stuff. Let them frown at some of my stuff that’s only ten years old.

More hopeful – got a possible gig for 2013 (yes I know that seems a long way off but that’s how art goes these days) which involves what I do now rather than when half my current age. Can’t jinx it by talking too much but it could actually wrap up all the work on aerodrom and link into the cymaticsouth stuff I’ve been assembling in the background. The thought of wrapping all these loose ends into one project that will be properly exhibited is too good… surely that rogue planet will wipe us out first.

Schneiderton

This plug in sends a MIDI sequence according to your distance to Florian Schneider. When Florian is asleep it plays only black notes. Requires GPSnatch.

OldSchoolTie

This object provides secret handshake access to government contracts over OSC.

BennyVel

Plays the Benny Hill theme music at a tempo = velocity/128 * 500BPM. (requires sax sample).

jit.Primer

Captures video from a QT compatible camera several weeks ahead of now. (NB. I already have reports that the Windows version is capturing an alternate universe where people are screaming burning skulls. Just mute the audio for now).

ClthuFlxMm

Man shall not know of this.

Monolake

Every Monolake album with one finger, or Duolake albums with two fingers. Three fingers is too many.

BJMax

This Max4Live patch was adapted from a Reaktor patch that was previously a Synthedit patch that has two oscillators through a low pass filter. As used by Bjork on tour.

HipAss

High pitched squeal like a pig through multiple speakers. Worse when binaural.

DopVmit

Constant nauseating Doppler effect.

Wggywggysplkbinkclnkity

Instant post graduate sound performance. Will fool most academics/get PhD. Takes seconds to set up. NB you must still come up with your own pack of lies/paper.

SteveJobs

One more thing through a distortion.

—

I once peeked at Max4Live and ran away. A year or so later it’s on my hard drive. But I would be lying if I said I’d done anything worthwhile with it.

Most of the people making Max4Live patches are the same that made Reaktor patches. It takes a special mind to carve your own nails to hang a painting. Each time a new construction tool pops up they decamp en masse to build a better granular mousetrap. How on earth do they ever get around to music? If I call them Gnomes I mean it in a kindly Tolkien sense – the technologically advanced underground.

Making this image was an excellent way to avoid Jitter for at least 5 minutes.

Apart from Gnomes I don’t know why there’s a market for software construction sets. Over 11,000 people are registered for Max4Live of which .5% actually build anything. Like me the other 99.5% sluggards go dumpster diving. I can knock together a Jitter patch to solve a particular problem and I’m pretty good at Live these days but I am buggered if I see the point to building my own LFOs.

(The other branch of this crazy are game engines. There’s about one squillion game engines each with a tribe of people who are dragging and dropping a godsquiddlion lame platformers with stolen Mario sprites. Each time you open GameSalad it announces all the games that everyone has managed to start and never finish. I guess that’s the Internet, clouding all the dilettantes into a worldwide lack-of-movement.)

Something doesn’t add up and I guess that’s why Ableton have been giving M4L away for the whole of April.

I took advantage of the severe discount and added it to my Live rig where it sits confusingly muddled with ClyphX. The potential to feed all of North Korea with Sugar Frosties might be hidden in there but in the meanwhile there’s Pluggo. You remember Pluggo? Back when Cycling 74 allowed you to make VST effects from Max. The sales pitch for Pluggo was that you got a lot of them, kind of like those old 101 GAMES IN ONE cartridges that were all Mario in different colours. You get UGLY GRANULAR 1, UGLY GRANULAR 2 etc.

Galaxy of Granules 201

Given that it started in 2009 the M4L library has not burst asunder with activity. Some Gnomes have been busy: Zeal and Fabriziopoce have video plugins that look useful and perhaps can be encompassed by the mind of man. Generally the audio tools are less interesting and in most cases just things that Live should do anyway. Like LFOs. It’s not too different to FL Studio which includes Synthmaker; very few people have got anywhere with the damn thing.

I’ve decided to try move from FL Studio to Live because it will change the way that I go about writing music. FLS is too close to how I have always worked by plugging lots of cheap boxes together and twiddling – observe:

Terse Tapes 1981ish - click to big

My studio in 1981-2 is a set of dark boxes with cabling running about. It even had Gol on top of the tape recorder. I feel comfortable with this system – too comfortable, and stuck in 1990′s music making. Live is 2000′s style music making. I wonder what is 2010′s music making?

Stewart: I wanted to say re the new post that i think we’re actually in transition phase – away from doing it all on a computer, back to having a bunch of interconnected devices. Once they sort out midi comms between iOS apps and others .. OSC support replaces cv/gate cables? Something like that. I was at the pub earlier trying to explain to a guy why I’m starting to get interested in electronic music making again and I think that’s the essence of it anyway..

Sent from my iPad=

Click to make more spooky!

Lady Hehir was photographed while taking her wolfhound Tara for a walk in 1926. When she saw the photograph, Lady Hehir saw that Tara appeared to have the head of another dog on her rear end and …

Do I really need to go on?

(New Guinea 1964. Photos by my old man)