Ellard

Deeper into the rabbit hole this week trying to build a connection between Personality (of the artist) and Character (of the artwork). I’ve already discussed some of the points that have to be explained (while acknowledging the explanation is not yet there.) The last question was – by what means is a personality encoded in the work? How do I store my personality in an object?

The ancient Greeks had concepts that still work here. There is a real thing, and then there is the mimema, the thing that represents that real thing. The comparison is given of pressing a seal into hot wax, the wax holds the shape of the seal but none of the matter. The process is called mimesis, from which we have mimetic, mimic and mime. The pressure makes a copy which is a form, of no use unless it calls up a logical association in the recipient. The encoding only works because the sender and the receiver share the same decoding pad. So for example, I paint a picture of a house, you see this and the concept of a house is recalled. If you had only seen igloos, the communication breaks down. At this level the process seems convenient – but no particular art is involved, any picture of a house will do. So why go beyond pictograms?

A comparison with dreams can be made. Natural things can be aisthetic, that is provide material for the senses (in comparison to logic for the intellect). But mimemata are made, they require techne, which is a word that means both art and skill and of course provides technology. Mimemata are dreams that are made by people who are skilled.

This concept fits into Plato’s universal view. The artwork is simply a reminder of a thing that is itself an imperfect copy of the ideal – he talks of an ideal bed, the bed made by a carpenter and a painting of a bed, and sees each as less useful in turn. However, we can try represent the ideal directly – I can paint an image of a dog that is not a reproduction of an existing dog, I can perhaps create a work that portrays the ideal of ‘a dog’.

The Neo-Platonists put it like this: The One (the perfect origin of everything) creates a product which is necessarily inferior. This aspires to be rejoined with The One and so difference is created (less perfect things are multiple). This Ideal produces its own product that is again inferior, The Soul. Art is useful and good in that it seeks to transcend the imperfections of matter. The idea in the artist’s mind is always superior to the form of the work, and making art is an expression of the desire to be elevated above the material world.

In the Christian ages The One became God and the artist sought to elevate themselves by revealing the order and discipline that underlays all of His creation. You can see why a fight broke out over Icons – to the west they were mnemonics of the hidden structure of reality, to the east they were insults to something that describes but cannot be described. Both are true if you think this way. I don’t really want to, but it might help to try it for a moment.

So let’s. Rather than use ‘transcription’, which is an unskilled mechanical process, the character of the artwork could be described as a mimema of personality. I’m then able to build upon the discussion that has surrounded aisthesis for several thousand years – whether that’s a good thing I don’t yet know. Instinctually I think it will be helpful in building a concept that’s sufficient for the work at hand…

Sketch it out: there exists shared data which exists ‘above’ the artist and the viewer. For Plato this is an ideal world in which the default templates of everything is stored, perhaps for me it’s the complexes of the mental apparatus  in both persons. The data is not stored in the object, it is referenced by the object. So (big jump here) is the quality of the artwork no more important than the font in which a library call number is written? No… The ‘font’ is part of the means by which we retrieve the data – an artwork is more ‘beautiful’ when more accurate to the shared mental complex.

Very wobbly … but I think I can move Personality out of the object, place it in a ’shared space’ between the people (a culture?) – idealise it with my chosen metric – and describe Character as a kind of index, the accuracy of which can be tested by how well it retrieves the personality metric – while at the same time relating this to terminology of aesthetics so far as I understand them.

That’ll do for today!

Alas

The birds fall silent and dismayed
The clouds gather dark and listless
The rivers congeal, their sparkle gone
The heavy air will no longer fill our lungs
Men lean haggard, whispering, fumbling their feet
Pro Tools HD has been hardware cracked.

Look upon the ruins of Avid, ye mighty, and despair.

(taken from my Sensible Blog)

Can an artwork have (a) personality? Such a simple question offers such terrible hidden dangers.

There are at least three. Firstly, the definition of ‘artwork’ is very difficult, based upon the definition of art, perhaps fine art. Slightly less problematic is ‘personality’. Attached to that is a third danger; the distinction ‘have personality’ as against ‘have a personality’.

It is fair to warn that some of this has never been satisfactorily solved, and is unlikely to be solved here, above operational definitions. Let’s start as simply as possible and introduce complexity when it cannot be avoided.

The literal answer is no, artwork cannot have a personality. For the Oxford English Dictionary defines personality as the ‘quality, character, or fact of being a person as distinct from a thing’. Whatever an artwork is, it is a thing. The history of the term makes it clear that a person is a conscious, thinking being.

However ‘have personality’ is different to ‘have a personality’. A thing cannot have a personality – there is no faculty for it. But it could be that when we define artwork we can see a place where the personality of the maker or viewer could be stored and recalled. It’s a similar point to this: where is the music on a CD? Until the bits are converted into sound via a laser and heard there is only the potential to reproduce music. The artist encodes music as bits. The listener plays the record, hears music. In between we have an artwork. My argument will be that this is true of all artworks and I will need to make the case that all are transcriptions of some kind.

We first need to examine figurative meaning. When I describe a storm as angry or a garden as charming, my listener should know that I do not literally mean the clouds are filled with a human emotion, or that the garden is attempting be alluring. Figurative language is effective shorthand for one person to communicate an idea to another, based upon our common ability to personalize things and ascribe motivations to objects. The idea is not shared systematically but rather as an impression that could be measured differently by each person.

Yet figurative language is used very often and evidently works quite well. Particularly in describing artworks; it is acceptable to talk of a ‘sad film with a happy ending’ without having to systematically go through the script, the acting, cinematography and so on, linking each to the person involved. You may even read that a film ‘could not make up its mind’ or ‘lacked identity’ and not assume that the celluloid was sentient.

Studies by Piaget have found that children in a ‘pre-operational stage’ will ascribe personality to objects up the age where they can be taught otherwise. Even then there remains a temptation to blame something for being in the wrong place or maliciously rolling under furniture. Socks are particularly good at this.

In some cultures the personality of objects has been maintained as natural spirits that animate all things. For example astrology personifies the stars and planets, which are supposed to influence human behavior. We still describe people as ‘jovial’ or ‘mercurial’ and say that mental illness is ‘lunacy’. Many faiths involve a Creator whose handiwork is evidenced in the universe. In this case there is personality expressed in all things as a coherent whole. (The transcription is problematic – bad things are evidence of ‘mysterious ways’).

The attack on animism in western philosophy begins with Thales deterministically predicting an eclipse in 585BC. Even so he found the best explanation for magnetism was that it was directed by a soul. While over time the scientific view has gained the upper hand the mysteries of quantum physics have had a similar effect on Deepak Chopra, Fritjof Capra et al.

Figurative meaning is at the heart of all art, which communicates efficiently via impressions and shared psychology. This is a crux of my argument, that psychology is necessary to understanding the presentation of artworks.

There are many conflicting opinions on the definition of art. Fortunately we don’t have to determine a definition for all art, only that an artwork is something capable of holding the personality of the artist and interacting with that of the viewer.

Rather redundantly, OED defines art as, “Skill; its display and application.” The Cambridge does better with, “the making of objects, images, music, etc. that are beautiful or that express feelings”, although surely they allow both. The phrase ‘express feelings’ is the point that needs to be expanded. Both definitions are limited in that they only deal with the act of creation without mentioning the need for perception. Most sophisticated theories of art require some transaction between artist and audience.

Marcel Duchamp sums it up nicely;

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.

http://www.iaaa.nl/cursusAA&AI/duchamp.html

Duchamp is quite certain that the creator is a medium and does not possess the meaning that the work will take on once seen. The meaning comes from ‘the labyrinth beyond time and space’, which I would more humbly interpret as the depths of personal psychology.

Wollheim examines numerous definitions of art and finds fault with most. He holds two criteria as sufficient when no artistic tradition exists; ‘natural expression’ by the artist, ‘a secretion of an inner state’ met by ‘correspondence’ in the viewer, how it ‘seems to reiterate something in us’ (p47). Where there is a tradition, when we act according to that context we are creating art.

Richard Wollheim, Art and its objects, p.1, 2nd edn, 1980, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521297060

For my purposes the ‘inner state’ and ‘something in us’ he describes I would take as psychological formations or complexes. From what I understand of Wollheim as a pshychoanalytical writer I don’t think he would have disagreed. When we act in the context of existing work I would describe that as part of the transcription process, the use of symbols shared in a culture is involved in the encoding.

I think Duchamp is more succinct. “… the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History.”

At a simple level the artwork must hold personality because it is formed by someone, and seen by another. Whether the artwork is made or identified or appropriated a mind has been involved in forming it. Attempts to remove personality from the work, for example John Cage’s use of chance, only leads to that being made part of the work. And until the work is communicated it is like the bits of a CD – potential.

What form does the transcribed personality take in artwork? That brings the concept of a personality codec, and that’s a whole new essay.

Interesting update to the post below: negotiations continue. The time limit has been dropped and they are going to talk to EMI about licensing. On the positive side, that shows they are aware that the agreement needs some fixing, which is commendable. On the negative side, I wonder what would be the case if I didn’t have a publisher? I can’t help but cartoon the upcoming discussion: North West USA Clothing Corporation VS Ye Olde English Publishing Company.

Yesterday I was sent a Licensing Agreement in the mail. Depending on what mood you are in, the whole thing is hilarious or a good reason to punch the next CEO you meet in the face. Probably they would chuck a tantrum if I just reproduced what they laughingly describe as an offer but they can’t stop me discussing the general ideas. Keep in mind I AM NOT EXAGGERATING only simplifying the gobbledegook. If this is the kind of shit that kids are signing, then it’s evil.

• We are a large company that sells ‘clothing items’.
• You are somebody that owns the entire rights in every respect of a piece of music (note the assumption that musicians don’t have a publishing deal in place. As much as I hate being tied to EMI, every time I get one of these ‘offers’ speaking their name causes amusing consternation – what, your music is worth something?)
• We are making some kind of online advertising campaign where we pretend to be cool and hip.
• We might also reproduce this in other ways, don’t know yet (‘any manner or medium now known or later developed’)
• In consideration of the publicity that you might get out of this (‘the potential promotional benefits’)
• You grant us the worldwide right to do with your track anything we can think of – transmit, exhibit, synchronize, sub-license, mix up with other people’s artworks … and things we haven’t even thought of just yet. (yep – sub-license, as in they can contract out your assigned rights to anyone)
• You represent that there is no sampling. Not one sample. No infringements of any kind. Pure as the driven snow. Or we dump your ass immediately. (Lots of luck with this guys)
• You are not a member of any music rights organization, or union that might fight for your rights.
• We have the right to use your likeness and bio. You will not complain about invasion of privacy.
• You don’t get the master back.
• You indemnify us against any claims that might be launched because of the track (fair enough)
• The term is one year.
• Any disputes have to be settled in our home state.
• We need you to sign and return this TODAY because we are behind schedule. Just do it.

I want to reiterate – I am not exaggerating this pathetic offer. For no payment, they get worldwide rights to use a track in an advertising campaign for a year. They probably don’t intend for it to be the highlight of the campaign and in this particular instance the target region is South America, but if it did become an important piece, you just gave it to them for free. To put that in context I would not ask much for a South American synch license, but I would also limit the use region by region. A worldwide buyout license I would expect to be paid up to $5000 per region.

So in this liberated age where kids are being protected by pirates from having a recording and publishing contract, it’s possible for a deal like this to get waved in front of a young band who have no other venue for their music. They are used to YouTube & MySpace – no money, only potential promotion, and the whole thing seems normal. Maybe they can get their track published on the basis of the publicity generated. It’s non-exclusive, so you could try that. If of course the publishers stay open in the face of so much openness. This is an example of how the YouTube model leads to evil.

My refusal is immediate, the music is encumbered and that’s it. But really, anyone who is asked to sign a contract THE SAME DAY should laugh at them. In this state of Australia that’s pretty much illegal, I expect that is true in many places. No solicitor is going to be able to examine it in that time. Seriously – when people complain about record companies, don’t they realise that just plays in the hands of even bigger corporations?

FIRST OF ALL – HAVE A GIFT! THE SECOND HALF OF OVER BARBARA ISLAND IS NOW AVAILABLE! READ THE FOLLOWING GARBAGE WHILE IT DOWNLOADS.

Glasnost spills across the virtual western world – open letters are opening up openly each opening yet another 1000 flowers of open-mindedness about … well … openness! Yes, we all opine on open source, open standards and opening doors. Open your mind and your mouth! Join in! Blog and Twit and let everyone know what you think about openness!

It makes me cry to think how lucky I am to be here – right now – in the moment when the whole world is opening. Best that I right away open up and show up how more open I am than anyone!

Of course if you want to keep your opinion to yourself … well nothing wrong with that I suppose. Don’t have to blog or twit every day. Mind you it’s kind of odd. You must have something to hide right? Scared that you might get found out. We know about people like you. Perverts.

Quick. Some technology talk. The police are watching.

Delightful toys descend upon me this week, as we gear up for second session. Kunst Kamp has been choosing new cameras and what a dizzy business it is. There used to be just two kinds of video camera = good but expensive, near misses and cheap shit. You ask for the expensive ones and get the near misses. Easy. But this year the range of cameras has become like the Addams family.

Lurch – There’s great big ones like the RED that shoots video George Lucas could re-edit. It also costs the entire school budget. Even the cut down versions, the SCARLET and the SLIGHTLY TEPID PINK are too much for undergraduate movies.

Morticia – Then you have the SLR cameras, the Canon 5,7,9 and a half – these are still cameras but they shoot video too. Advantage is they have nice lenses. Disadvantage is the lenses cost more than the actual camera and a student will eat it in the first day. Other disadvantage is that all the fancy features turn off when you shoot video, which you can’t do for more than 12 minutes or the camera catches fire. But still you can do shallow focus and this is now synonymous with ‘good film making’. We bought a bunch of these and teaching is now solved.

Fester – Then the domestic AVCHD cameras. They don’t cost much, they record full HD and they are light and easy to use. You point on the touch screen at the thing you want in focus and it turns the focus knob for you. They’d be really sweet except we’re cursed with Apple computers so it’ll take twice as long for Final Cut to import the footage. We bought a bunch of these too.

Pugsley – The one I bought myself … was the cheapest and shittiest one. Hey look, I don’t have a whole lot of money to splash around. But this is actually a great thing. The SONY Bloggie costs about 250 bucks and it’s about as big as a phone. Shoots full HD so long as you don’t wave it around in which case it gets seasick. Hang it around your neck, point it out a car window, throw it, tie it to a cat. The small size and price encourages the kind of silly buggers that bigger cameras don’t tolerate. I had penis envy for a while then realised how liberating it is to have a video camera you don’t feel precious about. Got a few videos up on YouTube, more coming.

The other toy is the new Adobe CS5 which I am going to be teaching next session. When you look at the new features, it’s like a poem celebrating life:

• Remove people from photos easily in Photoshop. Now you can be Stalin at home.
• Produce music without any talent in Soundbooth.
• New Flash Catalyst provides the ease and features that you used to enjoy in Flash. Flash itself is now so complex that it has become sentient and plans Armageddon.
• No one gives a shit about Première. It could buy you a necklace and you’d still sneer.
• Ah After Effects. My baby. Now with even more features taken from Nuke. Why don’t Adobe just go and buy Nuke if they like it THAT MUCH. I mean really. So the new feature is that you keep the person and lose the photograph. It’s like the anti-Photoshop. Heavy concept.
• Indesign now makes Flash. I told you Flash was planning something.
• Illustrator probably does something but that’s for School of Design, they can worry about that.
• Dreamweaver does some stuff that makes even more obscure complex HTML.
• All the other crap you never use.

The future!

Jed worked at Landis Music back in the early 80s. He sold pianos, and increasingly synthesisers. Jed was the man who found me a whole KORG MS modular system for $250. That immediately places him in Master of the Universe status.

Up on the wall was a picture of Jed in white tuxedo with a white bow tie, sitting at a piano. I seem to remember there were balloons in the background but that might be confabulation from the grog. The photo was from when he played the piano on cruise ships. I like to think that many pretty ladies swooned to hear him play and would drift to his cabin after all night tinkling. But then I know a guy that DJ’ed on a cruise ship years later and he said that most of the ladies tended to be rolled up and down the decks in wheelbarrows by their husbands.

I would buy just about anything Jed pointed at. I bought a whole host of Electroharmonix drum pads – Crash Pads, Syndrums and a thing called a Clockworks which was the ‘brain’ of the pads, if by brain you mean something that could count to 12. I still have that. The rest of it I hit too hard and broke. Jed said it was as if somebody had dropped bricks on them.

I was looking at synthesisers one time and it was a big decision between this and that – back then you’d get a new synthesiser maybe once a year, not like virtual instruments. I asked Jed about it and he said – people spend their life learning how to play the piano.

And as always if Jed said it, it is best to think hard upon it.

The day I walked into a room of my house and saw all the synthesisers I owned piled up in a circle like an electronic Stonehenge – it was Jed’s axiom that came to mind. I got rid of almost all of them, sold them, gave them away, passed them on at cost*. Over the years however, Stonehenge just moved from reality onto the hard drive. Around the beginning of this year it was ImageLine’s Harmless virtual synthesiser. I didn’t want another, but it was on special… and… it sounded nice and…

The first synthesiser I bought, I knew every tiny tweak and turn, every minor movement that would get the thing to do exactly what I wanted. Same for the MS20, I can still work that thing with my eyes closed, get everything from a woman’s voice to a planet dissolving. But let’s be honest: I have much less command over Absynth or Reaktor, MaxMSP or even Harmless. Just don’t have the patience or the time to sit and learn every control. I don’t really need Pro Tools plus Ableton Live plus FL Studio plus Soundtrack Pro. No one does. Anyone who has a passion for music struggles to focus their libido on composing and not on shopping. Like Stewart says, by the time you get electronic music gear set up you’ve forgotten the inspiration that led you there. He’s gone back to the bassoon.

This is a wider issue. Imagine a pack of baying hounds, running here and there chasing whatever fox or rumour of fox is current. The hounds at front are lost but they bark the loudest. Right now they are barking about one thing, tomorrow it’ll be something else; anything will do so long as it allows the chase to keep going. The running about never touches on the heart of the matter – it’s all about chasing ‘solutions’ to things we didn’t need solved.

Some are barking about HTML5 which apparently will bring a revolutionary change to the workings of the Internet – I guess the same change that VRML was going to bring back in ‘94, or perhaps DHTML or what about SVG; there’s been yapping going back a long way. They woof: HTML5 will free the slaves forced to use Adobe Flash (quite happily up to this point) – although how a banner advertisement will be any less annoying when open source remains mysterious.

Very few things made in Flash have so far been beautiful.
Maybe we should concentrate on that rather than learn another way to do the same thing.

There’s one hound up front with a turtle neck sweater and little round glasses – his yapping is all about how a particularly virginal mobile phone will not have any Flash derived software – it would defile the purity. The howling and baying strikes up across the pack: the phone won’t run Flash… but then it doesn’t run HTML5 either. In fact it won’t properly display many web pages, and the whole browsing experience is like knitting a sweater for ants.

Maybe the entire idea of reading on a telephone needs questioning.

There’s another pack of dogs who are howling for more touch screens, more knobs and ribbons and heart rate monitors and Wiimotes and anything else that could possibly modulate a sound or an image. They’ve forgotten that they were once seeking these things to make better music. The audience finds them irrelevant and are increasingly happy with Led Zeppelin. I can’t tease them enough but it’s hopeless, they can’t hear above the noise.

The endless hunt is empty and pointless but the hounds rush on to the next great idea for delivering nothing, faster. Will it be a cloud or pad or a thrown stick? Who knows, they don’t. Their baying deafens our ears.

I am not about to trash my laptop and go live in a tree. That’s pointless. Jed’s advice was to stop and use what you have – REALLY use it – in the service of inspiration. Hold the upgrades: I want to learn how to play an instrument, not buy ‘solutions’. I want to clear my mind of all the shit that pundits and marketers, CEOs and fan boys keep trying to wedge in there. I think we should tell them to get out of our face and we’ll be far better artists for it.

BTW don’t wait for the academics to lead the changes. I just got this in an email:

“This concept will need to incorporate a vibrant materialism of the image’s sensory and cognitive strata and an evanescent immaterialism of its affective qualities. Rather than locate our conference in the space of negotiation between disciplines or media (the “inter-“), we propose the opposition, transit and surpassing of the interdisciplinary by a “transdisciplinary aesthetics”, and its conceptual and physical practice of a “transdisciplinary imaging.”

Trans – the upgrade to Inter.

—

* Recently a ‘lifestyle’ magazine contacted me for an interview. Everything seemed to be in place until I mentioned I didn’t have any ‘old gear’. That killed it; I mean who wants to talk about music when you can stand in front of old gear.

Attention Cyber Digital Artists!
You are invited to CONTROL 2010: an exclusive symposium to be held Friday – Sunday in NYC next week.

Courtesy of Apple we’ll be touting the new iPad.
But there’ll be plenty of other REAL  KNOB ACTION.

Some of the talks on offer over the first day:

• DJ Skewl will patch the iPad to send a control over OSC to MaxMSP controlling Reaktor modulated by a Wiimote under the robotic control of a homebrew Arduino driven LEGO vacuuming robot.
• Kurt M will demonstrate touching a Lemur to generate a sound tone converted to a control voltage that modulates a light source picked up by a photocell wired to inputs in Processing that operate a PD patch over MIDI to pan a 440Hz test tone through a 6 speaker array.
• I’ll be there controlling an iPad with another iPad.
• David Pseudonym will be sending wireless signals to an Netbook running Javascript that shows pictures of mice to a homebrew cat that will then drag an iPad off a table onto a Whoopee Cushion.
• Nancy Spudgen will present her now legendary demo of beaming microwave signals under the control of an iPad at high intensity to pop a whole bunch of toads in a bucket in time with a Foreigner track.
• MC Lollipop will use a prototype iPad GSM as a support mechanism to snort some fine ass cocaine.
• Micheal Dorkmeister will show his 1024 button monome and world’s largest ball of MIDI cables.
• VJ Hu Pop will be sharing a way to embed Quartz Composer patches inside Jitter inside Quartz Composer inside Jitter to make a 3D rotating doughnut.

The latest iPad applications will be on show including Fart Piano Professional sending out wireless OSC to a homebrew hydrophonic speaker array in the ladies toilets. See the SQL pipe organ! Thrill to the Fastest knob twiddler in the East! Blog booths and Cloud Rooms and NYC’s biggest Twitting Twister!

We also have expert debates on Saturday:

• “Open source: mainstream in 2011 .. maybe 2012″.
• “The future: 8 bit chip sound on 64 bit recording or 64 bit chip sound on 8 bit recording”
• “Closest approximation to a human relationship: Touch VS Tactile devices”

Sunday Night – a special concert presentation: Taking the chance out of John Cage.

For all his supposed success Cage was notoriously lacking in control. He allowed chance and circumstance to determine his musical outcome. But what if Cage had an iPad? We think he’d think different! Hear your favourite Cages placed in a cloud controller context!

TICKETS ONLY $250 for all three big nights!

Gosh gee willikers! How time flies when you’re servicing high interest debt! The Big Bigot album was released 24 years ago, and the last time it was remastered is now 11 years ago! Now it’s time for Bigot to leave sevcom and join its friends over in the UK on the LTM ‘more memories than hits’ label.

Bigot has left the shop.

In 1999 I made a pretty good effort at scrubbing it up given the tools I had. Mostly a treble boost and a bit of bass to try get the ass moving. Back then the music style was pumping and I was drawn to make it sound more like the music that was coming out on 12 inch – oh the 90s!  That was OK but I think it’s time to rethink the sound given the freedom (abdication of defined taste) that we have today. I dug out the original master tape from 1986 for a new listen.

Let’s look at the problems. Bigot was recorded on a Fostek 16 track open reel with Dolby C. Like most things I have ever owned the machine was second hand and a bit dodgy – the speed wobbled for a start. It probably reached 18KHz on the day it was made, by the time I got it, maybe 16KHz. Dolby C was really for domestic use, in guarding against hiss it rolled a lot of high end off the top. Not that my synthesisers had much high end. Down the bottom there’s the usual 50Hz hum of domestic power outlets, plus the burble of the tape.

When the music was transferred to Betamax PCM the old ADC added some funny business at the very bottom and an effect called ‘distant sirens’ up top, because it sounds a bit like police cars. Can’t do much about the latter, but the first thing we do is remove everything below about 30Hz. Nothing really useful there (the Fostek did not known this realm) and it instantly removes some bilge. That leaves  the 50Hz hum but I have never managed to remove this without damaging the kick. Leave it be and gate it.

Bigot was recorded over more than a year and there’s no two songs the same. Last time I took what I thought was the most unique and distinctive mix (Phantasised Persecutory Breast) and matched to it. While PPB does sound great, I now see it’s a very special kind of ‘great’ that I was approaching from a political point. This time I have so far ignored that track, and have taken each song as an isolated event.

Some issues are common. The voice is coming through the shittiest microphone known to man and back in 86 I blasted 1KHz to try cut through the mix. Now, I don’t want to remove that decision, but I have to try detail around it – add some high end without touching that region. The microphone is crackling and that adds bursts of high frequencies. These will have to be, although limiting the very highest does help. Then there are the kick drums made on the SH101. They are cute, but occasionally obese, filling up all the bass space and not allowing any counter rhythm. The usual trick works here, strong compression with slow attack around 80Hz or so to tighten the boom, and then raise the bass level to compensate. On Propeller that has worked a treat – you can actually feel the bass riff now. While the SH101 and MC202 didn’t make frequencies above a certain limit I have enhanced their ’snap’ with a little high boost above 8-10KHz to make them more effective. Really, it’s just fixing bass and treble… very delicately.

I’m going to try the most radical work on the bonus tracks (where fanatics will be least incensed) that are mostly half demos. Son Of needed a couple of hours to try coax a bit of life out of it, the bass is supposed to be, well, funky. It was instead wimpy and seeing there was nothing there I’ve added some harmonics below. The vocals needed a bit of room, oh just the faintest, teeny bit. It helps.

At this rate it’ll be a few more months before I can get around to the artwork. LTM like this to be as close to the original as we can get – I’ve found the original slides from the 86 Australian cover and will scan those. The other thing is LTM don’t like the CDs to be too long, they apparently get complaints from people with old steam driven CD players (seems that most of their sales are war time sing a longs). That could mean something gets cut. We’ll see.

The past!

Yooooooohooooooooo!

Whale ahoy!

Remember me? Don’t pretend! That’s right – I’m your BODY and you can think all you like but you aren’t going ANYWHERE without me. I’m with you your whole life, cradle to grave – and you can PRAY TO GOD about not needing me afterwards – but that’s not likely now is it?

No, you and me are deep in it together and you had better get used to it.

So you didn’t mind me when you were younger did you? Caught you looking  in the mirror a few times and it was ME that you were admiring. And you liked the feel of things – don’t need to remind you. Now you’re all pissed off that I keep getting older and your ‘mind’ stays young. I’ve gone flabby, my face is sagging and my hair is retreating faster than the Iraqi army. WELL TOUGH SHIT BUDDY. Take a good look in the mirror now because it’s just going to get worse and one day you’ll be howling to look as good as this again.

I'm feeling a bit better honest.

It’s all your fault – that flab is all the good times you had pouring crap down my throat, lolling around in front of a computer when you should have been doing laps. A nice sculpture of all the times you had ‘one more’. Then there’s the lines that come from all the bad times – all the times you screwed up and had to start all over again from the bottom. Shake it with genetics and serve on ice. We’re a real work of art and the best bit is way we’ve started stooping, a little now and then, getting ready to be a wizened old hunchback.

Pain is nature's way of saying hahahahaahahahah

Are you frightened? You better be. This is MY time. I already sent you a present with that pain in your joints. Enjoy that little tweak in your morning hobble? That’s just the first SOLO, you wait for the full ORCHESTRA. And you have to admit this week’s toothache was a real show – a lecturer that has 5 hours of continuous talking and a screaming pain in their gob. All those teeth got to go one day, may as well sound the first bugle!

Yep, by the time I’m finished with you, you’ll be looking at all the young people around you with a burning jealousy that’ll have you alienated and lonely in no time. But don’t be too jealous – for all their current youth they’re right behind you. Everyone has a body and they’re all dying.

Keep busy writing and recording and all that crap you think is going to ‘transcend’ me. We’re best buddies, and as I rot so will you. When you can’t even sign your own name – we’ll finally be equal, and maybe then you’ll just have to accept who was the REAL master here.

Wanna start a band?

I can’t believe I got a couple of thousand words into an analysis of Something Awful dot com. I was trying to account for why I became interested in the site’s continuing success (100,000 members, around 4,000 online at once) and it was kind of interesting but, damn, that’s not really what I’m supposed to be writing about. Computers – they just eat everything and spit out little pellets of virtual life. Cyberpoop in the brain..

To hell with web culture.

There’s only two things really important about Something Awful and that’s when Zack Parsons writes insane multi-part science fiction and when ‘livestock’ writes about dogs. The rest of it is a pastime, and if you have pastimes then you are too young or have forgotten that death is hurtling towards you. Neither applies to me.

I should instead write about Soggy The Sailor who, having taken on the guise of his previous idol, has returned after a long absence (off sailing with Sinbad or Popeye?) and has a new CD that he plays at around 1am every day. This adds insult to injury – it’s a compilation of songs by Paddy Roberts who as a child I liked very much. He sings about the Old Ladies Stuck In The Lavatory – it’s sophisticated stuff. Now one Paddy Roberts song is funny. 75 minutes of them is tedious. The same 75 minutes repeated at 1am every day is pathological. I think Soggy considers himself an Irish balladeer. He’s also a hipster douche who thinks that old comedy records make great random party music. As I live up the road from *the* hipster douche pub (rows of bicycles lined up outside each with the obligatory little wicker carrying basket, playlist of ironic 70’s and 80’s hits, goofy facial hair and so on) I bet some considerable fish that Soggy is playing his wretched music after a night on the flannelette microbrew. Not cool.

I should write about the VJ set I am struggling to create in the hours after making CDs in the hours after study that come after the hours of the day job. The original Over Barbara Island set was performed in 2006. The set was a disaster (was supposed to be outside with Tiki lamps – was inside in horrible white echoing room because of rain) but the music is pretty much my favourite of the late Sevs recordings. When asked to do a benefit set for Rainforest Rescue, Barbara was the obvious choice. The promoter has asked for a more up tempo set and so it seems time to add a few new tracks. Barbara was supposed to be exotica – cocktail music, slightly cheesy and slightly spooky and it did that well. Return to Barbara Island picks up on some of the ideas gridlocked in the Aerodrom project: aircraft graveyards, cargo cults, jungle. And monkeys, as this is my particular interest in the charity.

It’s not a matter of finding resonances, more of avoiding the common ones that have grown up around shows like Lost, which doesn’t interest me but will come to mind for most of the audience. It gets harder to exhibit a personal view when every possible preoccupation has been monetised at some point. You either wallow in it (hello Lady Gaga) which is cowardly, or strive for difference. I am not sure I can make that difference this deadline, I’ll certainly try. Erred a bit far in in using black box recordings which created intensity but was morally bankrupt and obvious. Now all have been replaced with hand made replicas of mysterious radio chatter. Also leaning a little on Prelinger but not in a lazy ass way (hello People Like Us). I think it’ll be OK.

I should write about Comics. I know very little about comics, apart from RAW back in the 80’s. Comics were art for a few years =everybody was into RAW (MAUS, Jack Survives etc). Now I find comics from the very early 90’s that I actually want to know more about. This shit looks like maybe there’s something there that will finally cause a WTF moment – which is a bit rare these days.

Comics?

Sean says:

“Hi Tom,

Funny about the comic thing, I was a comics geek in middle school, then lost interest in nearly all of it by high school, except for the Doom Patrol. So your blog took me back to the good old days circa
‘90-’92, re-reading those things dozens of times over, finding some weird new thing every time, whilst fluctuating in and out of Severed Heads and early PiL obsessions. Almost makes me look back fondly on being a weird high schooler, but not really.
Best thing Morrison ever did, before he got into that snobbish-heroes-makes-for-cool-comics schtick. I don’t know how well they hold up over time – I seem to recall the early issues were a bit emo for my taste, but he hit his stride by the time they find themselves fighting the men from nowhere, those alien catholics and protestants, et al. The Flex Mentallo origin issue is a gem, especially for those of us familiar with old 60s comics with those Charles Atlas you-don’t-have-to-be-a-skinny-loser-anymore ads. Good times.

Cheers,

Sean