Hemiolesque

De-Googlizing

2009-12-24T20:55:00.000-08:00

Greets peeps. I’m moving this blog to my home server as part of my general de-Googlization. It’s new and permanent home will be

http://noncombatant.org/blog/

Comments don’t work right now, but maybe they will someday!

Grooveshark

2009-12-23T21:19:00.000-08:00

Grooveshark seems pretty cool. Hopefully the ads, and/or the $3/month fee to get rid of the ads, get them some profit. I still don’t see why we can’t just pay $N per month for unlimited legal downloading in lossless, but hey...

http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/album/Monk+Suite+Kronos+Quartet+Plays+Music+Of+Thelonious+Monk+With+Special+Guest+Artist+Ron+Carter/3092114

Ron Carter valiantly inserts some jazz into the scene, and it’s not as bad as what they did to Hendrix, so that’s something.

Multitouch Display as Music Interface

2009-12-23T19:02:00.000-08:00

This is pretty cool (from Hack A Day): http://hackaday.com/2009/12/22/subcycles-multitouch-music-controller/. He mainly seems to manipulate timbres with it, but not so much melodies. Maybe that can come later? Anything to reduce the laptop staring phenomenon.

T-Bone Burnett Interview

2009-07-05T17:58:00.003-07:00

In this interview, T-Bone talks about his new audio delivery system and music in general. Awesome!

Cancelling My Emusic.com Account; Sound Geekery

2009-07-05T16:54:00.001-07:00

I’ve been a big fan of emusic.com for years, but it’s time to let them go. Not because they recently raised prices (they also expanded their catalog), but because all they offer is shitty MP3s.

Raising prices is fine, and I’m really glad for them that they’ve managed to expand their catalog. That must have involved intense negotiations with the major label goats.

However, even high bit-rate MP3s are noticeably worse than CDs or WAVs — do a back-to-back listening test on decent home stereo gear, it’s pathetic — but emusic sells only 192Kbps (VBR) MP3s. Sorry, guys... CDs really were an improvement over cassette tapes.

A couple years ago I did an MP3 (192Kbps) vs. WAV listening test with some metal (Gojira’s “Ocean Planet”), and had a friend do the same experiment. I didn’t tell him what I heard, but he responded that he heard exactly what I did: the bass frequencies were “richer and fuller” on the WAV (ripped from CD). I also thought the stereo imaging suffered in the MP3. The end result was that the tricky interplay between the drums and the bass guitar was muted in the MP3 — I think the sound difference actually affected the musical content of the song. And that was metal; the problem is worse for more subtle music.

Emusic subscribers are asking about quality, too. They aren’t getting any answers.

Lossy compression is dead. It was a solution to a problem that no longer exists: poor bandwidth and expensive storage. In 2009, we get megabits per second to the home and a GB of storage is $0.10 or less.

Add to this the fact that quality control suffers (almost every audiobook I’ve downloaded form emusic has had at least one terrible error — the emusic commenters complain too) and parts of their catalog have disappeared (I can’t re-download some stuff I got before), and emusic is no longer looking like such a good deal. I’ll spend my $30 per month at Amoeba instead.

In fact, even “CD-quality” sound (44,100 16-bit samples per second) is really not good enough to capture all the sound a human can hear. Producer and musician T-Bone Burnett has started releasing albums on DVDs with 96,000 24-bit samples per second. I hope, although doubt, that it will take off.

According to my handy Computer Music Tutorial, the dynamic range (in decibels) is roughly 6 times the sample width, and to avoid aliasing (high frequencies mangled into lower frequencies) you need to sample at a rate at least twice as high as the highest pitch you’re trying to record. (See here for more nerd details.) Although the theoretical maximum of 16/44.1 recording is pretty damn good, and although the loudness war does more damage than the digitization process does, you never really get the theoretical maximum. Digital recording is done at 24/96 (or even better), and it’s only downsampled and truncated in the last stage to fit the CD format.

16/44.1 can sound very good indeed... but in 2009, that’s the minimum.

Does Twitter Have a Better Business Model Than Warner Music?

2009-07-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

From Techdirt (http://techdirt.com/articles/20090623/2337095343.shtml):

We keep talking about artists who are connecting with fans, and giving them a reason to buy, and it seems like every day we hear of more and more new and creative ways that artists are doing this — even as the naysayers stop by daily to insist it’s impossible for such things to scale. It’s a blast to see it scale more and more every day and prove them wrong. The latest example comes from Amanda Palmer — who we’ve written about a few times before. She's the singer who has been fighting with her major record label (Warner Music’s Roadrunner) for not just being a pain to deal with, but for making it harder for her to both connect with fans and give them reasons to buy. For example, she got caught in Warner's stubborn decision to fight YouTube over payments, and had all her videos taken down from YouTube against her wishes. So, at a concert, she told fans to upload the video to YouTube as she sang a song begging her label to drop her.

[...]

However, now she’s going much further, much of it using Twitter to closely connect with fans. She recently explained three separate experiments, all done on a whim this month, which allowed her to bring in $19,000,

Oops.

In related news, I recently saw Suffocation and Necrophagist (Suffocation is on Roadrunner). Awesome show. I went with Phil, who had a video on YouTube of himself drumming along to a Suffocation song. He got caught in the Warner jihad, and only after contacting Warner, Roadrunner, the founders of YouTube, and Suffocation did he finally get his video back up. More than 3 million views, and Warner wants to shoot themselves in the foot. So Suffocation put him on the guest list and gave him some all-access badges, and they were his biggest fans! It was an adorable love-fest. Fuck you, Warner!

On the other hand, this story on Techdirt leaves a lot of questions unanswered, as the commenters point out.

Cool Blog/Dude

2009-06-19T17:29:00.001-07:00

Check out Omari’s blog.

Music and Learning

2009-02-21T22:07:00.000-08:00

I recently started taking guitar lessons with the patient and wise Luke Westbrook. I’ve probably taken about 8 years of private music lessons, on and off, since I was 12. It’s great to back into it!

My current projects are to (a) transcribe the entirety of Vernon Reid’s tune “Afrerika”, including the guitar solo (I’ve got the tune and the first couple bars of the solo); (b) to try to match some hip new chords to Ornette Coleman’s “Jayne”. (Fsus9, #4 under a G melody? Maybe!); and (c) to learn a chord-melody arragement of “Naima” by Coltrane.

Over the holiday break I took a bass lesson from my friend Al Vorse in Minneapolis, and that was helpful too: a good technique exercise and some tips for walking over changes.

My old friend John was asking why I would take lessons again, after I’ve already taken so many. It’s a reasonable question, because after all you can play lots of good music and have good fun with much less education than I have. Many people do.

But I’m into music for the long haul, and there is always something more to learn. In my case, tons more to learn. My jazz education is pretty incomplete, and there are lots of technique things I’d like to clean up, such as playing everything without a pick.

It’s also important for me to concentrate on something outside of work, because my work is pretty involved and I could easily spend every waking hour doing software security engineering stuff. (Like music, it’s bottomless.) Gotta keep the brain flexible!

Making the Most Out of Simple Gear

2009-02-21T21:22:00.000-08:00

After too long a respite, I’ve been playing music with people again lately. Last weekend I jammed with my co-worker Chris, and I brought almost all of my effects pedals. It was a mess! Too many wires, too much complexity, not enough reliability. Part of the problem was that I had them all loose, not mounted on a pedal board, but the rest of the problem was just the sheer number. Like Floyd Rose wang bars, that kind of setup is for people with roadies!

Then today I was jamming with a new group, and I brought only a fuzz box, my tuner, and the venerable Boss PS-2 Pitch Shifter/Delay. Three pedals feels about right. Then this evening I rolled them all up into a proper pedal board. I was thinking, “Perfect... But a chorus pedal would be nice.”

Then I realized that with the pitch shifter, I can get a chorus effect. I put it into manual pitch shift mode, then dial up the fine-tuner knob to unison harmony. Then, extremely carefully, I dial it ever so slightly flat. It’s easy to dial it a hair too far and get a deep warble swim effect (also cool).

For non-music-nerd readers, you’ll likely recognize the chorus effect as the sound Nirvana used in their song “Come As You Are”. I recorded a snippet of it without chorus, and then chorus kicks in halfway through.

http://www.noncombatant.org/audio/come-as-you-are-excerpt.mp3

Here is another, more complete example (an excerpt from the song “Nouvelle Chanson” by my old band Boshuda), again with chorus off at first and then on:

http://www.noncombatant.org/audio/nouvelle-chanson-excerpt.mp3

So now the Pitch Shifter/Delay is really three effects: echo, harmonizer, and a credible chorus. Three is a good number!

100-year Software: Half-baked musings and some citations

2009-02-02T19:23:00.000-08:00

Imagine a computer program which, when run 100 years from now on whatever computers they have in 100 years, produces the same output (given the same input) as that program does today.

Should the data survive, even if new software is required to interpret it? And/or should the software itself survive, still functional? I think it depends on the nature of the application: whether it is productive (Microsoft Word) or performative (a video game). The real hard problems arise when the data format is so complex and/or incompletely specified as to require an essentially performative application (examples: Microsoft Word, web applications).

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/papers/sfs-longevity.html

With a vast number of resources being committed to reformatting into digital form, we need to begin considering how we can assure that that digital information will continue to be accessible over a prolonged period of time. In this chapter we will first outline the general problem of information in digital form disappearing. We will then look closely at 5 key factors that pose problems for digital longevity. Finally, we will turn our attention to a series of suggestions that are likely to improve the longevity of digital information, focusing primarily on metadata. Though this chapter was written for the digital imaging community, the observations here will be useful for all communities wishing to assure the longevity of any type of digital information.

In particular, this tragedy makes me sick:

Though the advent of electronic storage is fairly new, a substantial amount of information stored in electronic form has deteriorated and disappeared. Archives of videotape and audiotape such as fairly recent interviews designed to capture the last cultural remnants of Navajo tribal elders may not be salvageable (Sanders 1997).

How can we ever hope that the files we create today will be readable in our information environments 100 years from now?
http://constantine-plotnikov.blogspot.com/2007/02/software-system-longevity-paradigms.html

The basic principle is that we ensure that the data survives, and an application is a transient thing anyway. It could die any time. Upon restart it will be able to work with the data again. Some data could be lost, but this is a known risk that should have been calculated.
http://lonesysadmin.net/2008/05/20/java-se-for-business-software-longevity/

Now that virtual machines are killing the hardware replacement cycle I’m left with only my software lifecycles, which really aren’t all that much better than hardware cycles. If those get longer, and I can guarantee an operating environment for 15 years, the amount of staff time and effort it takes to maintain these operating environments will drop rapidly. I’ll be able to upgrade when it makes more business sense for me, like when I’m replacing an application, or I decide it’s too much work to support 7 different versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not just when a vendor decides they’re done with an OS.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel4/52/15098/00687939.pdf?temp=x

Software lives longer than most organizations expect — a mean age of 9.4 years for applications of fundamental importance to the organization, according to one study. And it is living longer than before, up from 4.75 years in 1980. Nonetheless, software should live longer yet. Long-living software has many advantages. First, as a software application survives, it works. It benefits the organization that created it and the users that use it, and it pays back its development cost. Second, as a software application survives, it changes continually, functionality being added and modified to meet changing needs. In this continual evolution or maintenance, software fulfills one of its characterizing functions: its modifiability, its capacity for change, its softness. Functions are embodied in software instead of in hardware expressly because they can be changed. Change, and the resources that go into change, are its mission. Finally, as a software application survives, its quality improves. Errors are encountered or found, and removed. An operational profile emerges, and the software is adapted to it. The users who access it and the applications that connect to it explore, exploit, and optimize its capabilities
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=284308.284365&dl=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=20195306&CFTOKEN=59168537
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~yelick/cs267-sp04/lectures/08/lect08-mpi-intro.pdf

Interesting remarks on slide 1.

Acrassicauda: Iraqi metal band

2009-02-02T19:15:00.000-08:00

The NYT has this fun article about Iraqi metalheads Acrassicauda:

Vice tried to help resettle the members to Canada and Germany, and kept them afloat with cash — as much as $40,000 paid from Vice’s own coffers, sponsors and donations collected online, according to Suroosh Alvi, a founder of the company and one of the directors of the film.

“We had outed them and endangered their lives,” Mr. Alvi said on the way to the Prudential Center, where a small Vice crew was filming every handshake and wide-eyed glimpse of Metallica’s mountains of equipment. “They were receiving threats from Iraq while they were in Syria.” He added, “We had a responsibility.&rdquo

That Just About Sums It Up

2008-12-31T22:58:00.000-08:00

Following the Wikipedia links around intertwingularity, I visited Ted Nelson’s page.

Ted Nelson promotes four maxims: “most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong”.

But, Ted, some things aren’t wrong...

Meshuggah and Cynic (!!!) at Slim's on 4 Feb 2009

2008-12-31T22:45:00.001-08:00

OH HELLZ YES. I just bought my ticket. Actually I bought 3 dinner tickets — the sound is better in the back where the foodz is.

Intent on decimating the boundaries of extreme music with their metric art, Sweden’s Meshuggah will be returning to North America in February on a 17-show headlining tour presented by MySpace Music. Direct support to Meshuggah will be provided by the legendary progressive metal band Cynic. Opening all shows will be technical progressive death metallers The Faceless from LA.

More on Digital Archival Storage

2008-12-31T16:30:00.000-08:00

“Bit Preservation: A Solved Problem?” by David Rosenthal discusses the problems with our current understanding of the reliability of data storage systems. He examines the (comical) claims of storage system vendors and of optimistic researchers, exposes the fact that the claims are meaningless and untestable, and proposes a new metric: “bit half-life”.

The most abstract model of a bit preservation system is as a black box, into which a string of bits S(0) is placed at time T(0) and from which at subsequent times T(i) a string of bits S(i) can be extracted. The system is successful if S(i) = S(0) for all i.

No real-world system can be perfect and eternal, so real systems will fail. The simplest model of these failures is analogous to the decay of radioactive atoms. Each bit in the string independently is subject to a random process that has a constant small probability per unit time of causing its value to flip. The time after which there is a 50% probability that a bit will flip is the “bit half-life”.

[...]

There is no escape from the problem that the size of the data collections to be preserved and the times for which they must be preserved mean that experimental confirmation that the technology chosen is up to the job is not economically feasible. Even if it was the results would not be available soon enough to be useful. What this argument demonstrates is that, far from bit preservation being a solved problem, it is in a very specific sense an unsolvable problem.

Max/MSP Tutorial for Guitarists

2008-12-27T12:11:00.000-08:00

Brian pointed me to Expand Your Guitar, vol. 1, a Max/MSP tutorial for guitarists. Sweet!

Reason to Celebrate

2008-12-27T12:07:00.000-08:00

Olivia Judson in the NYT repeats Dawkins’ suggestion that we celebrate the birth of Isaac Newton rather than that of the other guy.

Works for me.

Captain Beefheart’s Painting

2008-12-25T19:09:00.000-08:00

David pointed me to Captain Beefheart’s painting, available for cheap at ArtNet.

Hardline Hardcore

2008-12-23T12:27:00.000-08:00

The NYT has two stories right now about Muslim and Orthodox Jewish music: “Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book” and “Hanukkah Receives Kosher Pop Welcome”.

“I’m a Muslim and I’m 100-percent American,” Ms. DeWulf said, “so I can criticize my faith and my country. Rebellion? Punk? This is totally American.”

...

The novel’s Muslim characters include Rabeya, a riot girl who plays guitar onstage wearing a burqa and leads a group of men and women in prayer. There is also Fasiq, a pot-smoking skater, and Jehangir, a drunk.

Such acts — playing Western music, women leading prayer, men and women praying together, drinking, smoking — are considered haram, or forbidden, by millions of Muslims.

...

One band, the Kominas, wrote a song called “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” which became Muslim punk rock’s first anthem.

Sure, that makes tons of sense. PS: Grow the fuck up.

Matisyahu, who was born Matthew Miller, sings explicitly devotional songs about God, Moshiach (the Messiah) and Orthodox Jewish identity. By setting them to reggae, rock and hip-hop beats, and after working his way up the jam-band circuit, he also reaches listeners with their minds on more secular pursuits, like dancing and drugs. Simcha Levenberg, the M.C. who introduced him, drew big laughs with jokes about marijuana and LSD, although Matisyahu’s song “King Without a Crown” insisted, “If you’re trying to stay high, then you’re bound to be low.”

Man... kids these days.

Currently listening to: Lady Sovereign’s a free download.

Rip Your CDs... For a Weird Price

2008-12-23T10:54:00.001-08:00

I’m in Minnesota to visit the fam for the holidays, so I get to read the local paper, the StarTribune.

In today’s paper, Randy Salas talks about digitizing his collection of 2,000 CDs. He used a service called iPodMeister, which takes as payment your actual CDs (!). In return, you get MP3s in various media and even a check. I guess they re-sell your CDs or something.

I can’t imagine giving up my original media (a) at all; or (b) for MP3s! A while back I did an A/B test of CDs with 256kiB/s (variable bit-rate) MP3s, and unfortunately, there really is a sound difference. Even the high bit-rate MP3s suffer noticeable sound loss (surprisingly, in at least one case, in the bass). (Gojira has some great bass playing.) I don’t subscribe to audiophile magical thinking, but the difference was really noticeable on good speakers. iPod earbuds won’t reveal the difference, but decent headphones or decent speakers will.

Lossy compression is dead! Storage is cheap. (When will emusic.com get the frickin’ message?)

Currently on newegg.com, 1TB drives are $120. If you figure roughly 10MB per minute of stereo audio in WAV format — we’ll use base 10 since the drive manufacturers do (Note 1 and Note 2) — you can get 80,000 minutes of music on that drive (figure 20% for filesystem overhead to be safe). At that point, even lossless compression seems like overkill. Granted, you'll need to get two drives (preferably from different manufacturers or at least different production batches), but $240 is a small price to pay for that much storage.

And it’s not economical to buy two 500GB disks, in case you were thinking of saving money: 500GB drives are $100. $240 is the current sweet spot for reliable storage. It so happens that that’s 1TB.

And as for the copyright concerns: you bought it, you own it, and can re-sell it. Whether or not you can keep the MP3s after you sell the original media, I don’t know. Ethically, it “feels” wrong to me; legally, I am told that maybe you can.

In any case, copyright law as it currently stands is on the wrong side of physics and economics (we are nowhere near the limits of information density right now!). Reality is going to keep punching copyright maximalists in the guts for a long time.

Gary Brawer and Crew Come Through Again

2008-12-18T22:17:00.000-08:00

These guys continually RULE. A couple years back I had them deck out my black Gibson SG Special with Seymour Duncan pickups (Jazz neck, JB bridge) with push-pull pots to control coil tapping. They did a great job on that and it sounds just like you would hope.

So I brought in my homebrew Frankenstrat. It had a JB in the bridge position, but it was a neck JB, or something — the poles didn't line up with the strings and it sounded like poop. I knew I wanted an active pickup to improve my Vernon Reid/James Hetfield wannabe sound — that “all frequency ranges louder than all the others” EQ — but I didn’t know how to get that. I told them what I wanted, and they came up with the EMG 60. (Gary said, “It came to me in a dream.”)

Despite my constant whining to them “is it ready”, they were cool with me. Allen, who wrangles customers (and who also plays with the Mermen), is a sweet guy and a pro.

The guitar sounds perfect (I’ll post some sound files when I get back from The Black Tundra). It’s bright, but not at all thin, with a “quick” response. Perfect clarity for complex chords even with ultra distortion. Yes, Virginia, E major 9 belongs in thrash metal.

Cool New Tech/Prog Metal Band: Terminal Function

2008-12-07T13:54:00.000-08:00

They are Swedish, so I guess it’s okay that they crib from Meshuggah a bit. Who would complain anyway! And check out their hilariously nerdy web site, complete with emulated Unix-like shell prompt!

I got their album Measuring the Abstract from emusic.com. A new favorite! Has elements of Meshuggah, Cynic, and Between the Buried and Me. Vocals are cookie monster, clean, and robot/vocoder (an obvious nod to the unforgettable Cynic).

Currently listening to: “Dissolving Soul Fragments”

And here they are playing mouth-guitar in their car. NERDS:

More Fun With Synthetic Modes

2008-12-06T20:03:00.000-08:00

I really dig the whole-tone scale:

C – D – E – F# – G# – A# – C

I’ve found it’s handy to stick a perfect fifth in, as well:

C – D – E – F# – G – G# – A# – C

Okay, one more

2008-12-01T23:35:00.001-08:00

A beautiful guitar!!

Incredible Freakishness

2008-12-01T23:19:00.000-08:00

I’ve been chewing through Gary Brawer and Co.’s blog, and found this freaky gem.

Allan Holdsworth

2008-11-30T16:50:00.000-08:00

On the 16th (that’s two weeks ago to you and me, Russ), a hearty gang of peeps and I went to Yoshi’s to see Allan Holdsworth with Chad Wackerman and Jimmy Johnson. Obviously it was great of course as you’d expect, but it was also verrah interestoing. Wackerman made what I thought was a strange mistake at the end of his first solo, apparently getting a bar ahead of the rest of the band! He had to do a loud snare count-off to get people back in synch, and then he was visibly upset. Holdsworth just gave him an eyebrow. It was cool, though; everyone was doing very well. On his next solo he was flawless and thus happy again.

Al lent me his Holdsworth instructional DVD which I highly recommend. It's a great in-studio concert with that same band, mixed in which Allan talking about the tunes and about his own personal music theory lessons. (The disc has an iPod-grade movie as a file as well as a PDF of the lesson booklet! Sweet.) Holdsworth claims that it’s best to figure out by yourself how chords and scales work, in your own way, but he also admits that you end up with personal terminology that nobody else understands. So in these lessons he has to translate his terms into standard terms, and it kind of gets in the way. There are two reasons to learn music theory, (1) to understand how stuff works and (2) to communicate your ideas to others, and a homebrew theory does not work for (2). It’s also more effort to achieve (1).

Although I disagree with his approach, I can’t argue with results, and the results are total fusion goodness.

One cool thing from the video is he spends some time on synthetic scales, including this weird one:

E – F# – G – A♭ – B♭ – C – C# – D – E

It’s surprisingly flexible, including a straightforward (ha ha) use as a sort of bi-tonal blues (E and B♭ major blues; C# and G minor blues).

Currently listening to: The grinding of my laptop’s cooling fan

New Toy: DigiTech JamMan

2008-11-30T16:29:00.000-08:00

I finally decided to get a looper, so yesterday I did a little reconnaissance. I went to Rocker Guitars knowing, as always, that I was in for a punch in the gut or two. (The Yelp reviews, both positive and negative, are accurate in my experience: Rocker is goat-asses that sell very nice gear.) All they had for delays/loops was a Visual Sound H20 ($189) and another thingie that I don’t remember but which also cost about 3 times as much as it should. The H20 makes a beautiful thick chorus and the delay is also decent (but short). I tried it out on a nice Strat into, of course, a Matchless. Great pedal, but not what I was looking for.

When I asked the salesdude if he ever gets anything with tap tempo and recording features, he snarled, “NEVAR. You’ll have to go to Guitar Center for that!”

I guess they hate making money. So, today I went to Oud Area and picked up a DigiTech JamMan. The first one was dead on arrival, so I had to drive back and return it. The second one works, nicely! It has all these terrible, non-analog, non-elitist features like a 1GB Compact Flash card, tap tempo, overdubbing, and what-have-you.

Also yesterday, I brought my Frankenstrat into Gary Brawer’s shop (their blog is also awesome) for a setup and a much-needed pickup replacement. (It had a neck Duncan JB in the bridge position, so the 6th and 1st strings sounded like fresh lutefisk.) I’m getting an EMG 85 in there, and it will rule. Gary Brawer always does awesome work. Joe Satriani was there, picking up two guitars, and his cell phone ring tone was the obligatory shred-rock noodle. Awesome!

Deutsche Grammophon Starts Web Store

2007-12-02T11:11:00.000-08:00

Again, better late than never, Deutsche Grammophon starts a web store with a huge catalog of “classical” music. The Boing-Boingies had the usual copyright concerns, but overall this looks like a win for musicians and fans. Unfortunately, “classical” music has chosen to relegate itself to the skinny end of the long tail, but this could be the start of a reawakening of relevance. I hope so.

Currently listening to: Hippocamp Ruins Pet Sounds

Erik Davis on “Heavy Metal Environmentalists”

2007-12-02T10:52:00.000-08:00

Annalee pointed me to this nice piece by Erik Davis on black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room, about a show they did in the forest of Santa Cruz. Apparently the band are radical environmentalists. After all, it’s not that big a leap from one type of anti-human nihilism to another:

“The intersection of dark, spiritual music and radical ecology is quite natural,” explains Aaron, who has not given up on the DIY punk scene’s penchant for packaging radical political platforms with music. In interviews, he’ll make favorable mention of the Earth Liberation Front — some of whose monkey-wrenching adherents have been branded as “terrorists.” He also expresses cautious admiration for Finland’s merciless eco-philosopher Pentti Linkola, who argues that the best way out of the environmental crisis lies in a swift, lethal, and authoritarian process of de-industrialization.

I saw Wolves at the Independent in San Francisco, opening for Earth (awesome!) and Sunn. As a black metal non-fan I can’t really review them properly, but I wasn’t amazed.

Rock Syncopation: Stress Shifts or Polyrhythms?

2007-11-27T20:34:00.000-08:00

Citizen Arnold pointed me to this gem of a post at Mark Liberman’s awesome Language Log: an analysis and discussion of whether or not syncopation as observed in rock and jazz is a matter of shifting stress or an expression of polyrhythm. It hits all the right notes: Latin jazz, linguistics nerdery, and Little Richard (who TF else!):

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
o o
o o o o o o
I been told baby you been bold I won't

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
o o
o o o o
be your fool no more

You could analyze this as a “rock syncopation” in Temperley’s terms — the strongly-accented words “told”, “bold” and “fool” have all shifted from the fifth eighth-note of their bars to the fourth. In the standard, square (4+4) organization of those notes, this is a shift from one of the strongest positions in the meter to one of the weakest. But in the (3+3+2) habanera pattern, the fourth eighth-note is exactly where the ictus belongs.

So was it the “square” setting of the previous line that was actually “syncopated”? Not really — the (4+4) pattern is also simultaneously available. Neither setting really represents a shift away from the strong positions in the musical rhythm. Instead, the setting is shifting between one polyrhythmic definition of metrical strength and another.

Currently listening to: Monolake’s Polygon Cities (Monolake also offers free tracks)

I Think I’m Going to Pee Myself: Somebody Finally Got It Right

2007-11-27T20:19:00.001-08:00

Remember when you first got on the Internet and immediately thought to yourself, “This is the ideal way to distribute information goods!” Me, too. Like, say, music. For me, that was 1994 — better late than never.

Musicians are starting to get it: hooking up with techies, getting sufficiently pissed at the bloated goats running the music industry, and doing something about it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, master songwriter Kristin Hersh is one of them. She’s started the Coalition for Artists and Stakeholders, a web site where artists can release music and music lovers can pay for it, download it, and remix it. And there’s no MAFIAA numbnuts taking a cut, either.

Kristin kicks it off at her CASH Music site with ass-kickin’ style: MP3s in two bitrates, lyric sheets, ProTools stem files! so you can remix the song, and artwork. It’s all Creative Commons-licensed and available via HTTP and BitTorrent downloads. The convenient PayPal form is right there, too.

We could have had this in 1994, but it’s better late than never.

Macrovision “Security” Driver Breaks Windows

2007-11-23T11:27:00.000-08:00

[I had this post in my edit queue for over a year. What the hell! But, I am posting it now. Perhaps I will even keep up with this blog again!]

I meant to post this a while back, but as you know I am the laziest blogger evar. Macrovision, a digital restrictions management vendor, is the source of a vulnerability in Windows. The linked article uses nerd jargon like “Ring 0”, but the gist is that a device driver in the Windows operating system, supplied by Macrovision, fails catastrophically when processing data provided by the user. Because it is a device driver, it runs inside the most sensitive part of Windows. When it fails, it mistakenly starts corrupting its memory in a way that can enable the adversarial user who sent it the data to process to run whatever machine instructions they want. (We call this “arbitrary code execution”.) Because the now-corrupted driver runs in the most privileged mode of the computer, the adversary gains complete control over the computer.

The result is that a software component that was created to provide “security” against the user — i.e., to stop you from copying media — can now be used by mean people to break into your computer. For example, if you download a carefully but maliciously crafted file from the internet, and it is of the type that is processed by SECDRV.SYS driver, the creator of that file could break into your machine. (They’d probably make it part of their botnet.)

On the bright side, perhaps this vulnerability can also be used by nice people to break the “protections” on the DRM'd media.

Neko Case on Poetry

2007-11-17T17:05:00.000-08:00

The great Neko Case has the “featured prose” article in this month’s Poetry magazine: “My Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic About Publicly  Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum”.

We all have the right to poetry! How could I still think it’s for other people? Smarter people. What’s doubly confusing is I don’t have the same reservations when poetry is accompanied by music. Perhaps I feel that way because there is music all around us — it’s the wallpaper of our lives. It’s not considered precious in American culture unless a symphony is performing it.

The Precise Trajectory of the Meteor

2007-11-11T14:14:00.001-08:00

Ian Rogers at Fistfulayen gave this wonderfully clear presentation to some music industry dinosaurs on why “convenience wins, hubris loses”.

Instead they commenced suing Napster. We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity. [...] Make it easy, I wrote, and convenience will beat free.

Here’s a somewhat more wonky take on the same topic from Stephen Dubner.

Currently listening to: Prince kick a ton of ass in another of Ian’s posts

Henry Kaiser at the Exploratorium in December

2007-11-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

On 9 December, you can see “Under the Sea With Henry Kaiser” at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Some friends and I recently saw Kaiser (and a cool found-instrument percussionist whose name I unfortunately forget) at the Luggage Store Gallery (presented by Outsound) and it was hyperfun. He told a wacky story about how not everyone can handle life in the Antarctic and then went nuts on his acoustic guitar...

Turn an Analog Synth Into a Drum Machine

2007-11-05T20:03:00.000-08:00

David pointed me to this gem!

Creating Music on the Nintendo DS

2007-10-27T13:34:00.000-07:00

Nice.

Most Elaborate Homebrew MIDI Controller EVAR

2007-10-27T12:19:00.000-07:00

David pointed me to this sheer awesomeness, a DIY MIDI controller by and for electronic musician Monolake. There’s a gallery of images and a video clip, too.

“I’ll work me some jazz riffage around this punk shit”

2007-09-25T23:02:00.000-07:00

I saw the reunited Bad Brains last night at Slim’s. Not bad, but not as good as they used to be (HR was just plain goofing around). But here’s a great interview with bassist Darryl Jenifer.

Well to me, when I first heard punk rock, being a dude that was open-minded and into Return to Forever, the first thing I thought was, “If the Ramones think they’re playing fast, and if they think that they’re playing some hot shit, watch this shit that I'm going to rip, listen to this riff that I’m going to make and how fast I play this shit ’cause I got Return to Forever that I’ve been feeling that’s really technical,” and I thought, “I’ll work me some jazz riffage around this punk shit.”

William Gibson’s Wonderful Writing on Music

2007-09-23T18:19:00.000-07:00

William Gibson’s new book, Spook Country, which is excellent, has perspicuous writing about music (“the most purely atemporal of media”, p. 102). In fact the heroine, Hollis Henry, was the singer in a seminal (fictional) band called The Curfew. Here are some snippets that I just love.

And it hadn’t hurt that Bobby was himself a musician, though not in the old plays-a-physical-instrument-and/or-sings modality. He took things apart, sampled them, mashed them up. This was fine with her, though like General Bosquet watching the charge of the Light Brigade, she was inclined to think it wasn’t war. Inchmale understood it, though, and indeed had championed it, as soon as it was digitally possible pulling guitar lines out of obscure garage chestnuts and stretching them, like a mad jeweler elongating sturdy Victorian tableware into something insectile, post-functionally fragile, and neurologically dangerous.

“In the early 1920s,” Bigend said, “there were still some people in this country who hadn’t yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That’s less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a ‘recording artist’ ” — making the quotes with his hands — “took place toward the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing that which they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn’t reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star, as we knew her” — and here he bowed slightly, in her direction — “was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media.”

“Of — ?”

“Of a state in which ‘mass’ media existed, if you will, within the world.”

“As opposed to?”

“Comprising it.”

Kai Ryssdal/Bob Moon Story on 4 Years of RIAA Lawsuits

2007-09-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

The old goats at the RIAA have now been suing file-sharers — and innocent people, including grandmothers and small children — for four years now. Kai Ryssdal on public radio has a three-part story on the absurdity and cruelty of the RIAA. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

In Part 1 we learn that the RIAA harrasses a single mother and her 7-year-old girl. They refuse to look at the woman’s computer, presumably because forensic examination might show that she is innocent (a key part of the RIAA’s strategy is to maximize pain while minimizing due process). The kid is deposed, and the RIAA accuses her of illegally distributing gangsta rap.

EFF’s Fred von Lohmann sums up the RIAA’s “legal” strategy:

VON LOHMANN: One of their spokespersons once said, “Sometimes when you go fishing with a driftnet, you catch a few dolphins.” And that, I think, really is their attitude about that.

Meanwhile, wonderful music is available legally and for a decent price (DRM-free high-ish bitrate MP3s, playable on any platform) from emusic.com. Some of my favorite, non-RIAA-affiliated artists:

Neko Case (label: ANTI)

Nels Cline Singers (label: Cryptogramophone)

Isis (label: Ipecac)

Matmos (label: Matador)

The RIAA has made a helpful page so we can check the consumer abuse factor before we buy: RIAA Members.

Ultimately, the solution to this whole mess will be something like collective licensing.

The Mysterious lx on Drinks With Tony: Black Metal Special

2007-08-18T14:10:00.001-07:00

Drinks With Tony, a show on Pirate Cat Radio, will feature the all black-clad lx playing black metal for us on August 23rd (4 – 6 PM Pacific). Will it be grimly humorous, or humorously grim? You’ll have to tune in to find out...

Max Roach Dies at 83

2007-08-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

Here is NPR’s coverage of Max Roach.

“Max doesn’t play fundamental drumbeats behind you just to keep the time going,” [Cecil] Bridgewater says. “He’s making musical statements at all times.”

Steampunk Stratocaster

2007-07-21T22:23:00.000-07:00

Nice.

David Fiuczynski Demonstrating His Microtonal Guitars

2007-07-14T16:30:00.000-07:00

This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time: David Fiuczynski shows off his fretless and microtonal guitars. Whatever amp he’s using sounds great, too.

Birotronics, Or: The Lesser-known Mellotron

2007-06-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

Sacha sent me this link to an article in The Believer, a magazine to which I should have a subscription anyway. It’s about Dave Biro and the homebrew 8-track-based analog sampling keyboards he built for Rick Wakeman of Yes.

[The magical sound] was coming from Rick Wakeman, prog rock’s wizard — the guy even wore a glittering silver cape onstage — and the keyboard Wakeman was playing cost thirty-five hundred dollars new. Biro didn’t have anything near that, and his unemployment checks weren’t going to last forever.

But he could get nineteen automotive 8-track decks from the junkyard for twenty dollars each — and an old piano from a friend, pulling the keys out one by one — and he could stay up thirty-six hours at a time in his father’s garage, working and working — recording, splicing, wiring, cross-fading, figuring out the action of the board, grinding the ivory off the keys to glue in electrical contacts...

Also, don’t miss the sound samples of the Birotron and other wacky devices.

Zappa Gets the ‘Classic Albums’ Treatment

2007-06-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

Hi all. Sorry I haven’t posted in forevs — work has been particularly busy lately, and also I am a lazy blob.

Brian pointed me at this fun-sounding goodie:

There is lots of footage of the band performing parts of several different songs live, as well as a generous amount of vintage interview material of the bright and talkative Zappa expounding upon his approach to music. Further, Dweezil demonstrates some particulars of Frank’s style on guitar, and Ruth Underwood gives a fascinating marimba demonstration to explain an aspect of Zappa’s compositional technique. Among the songs that get partially dissected are “I’m the Slime,” “Dinah-Moe Hum,” “Montana,” “Stink-Foot,” “St. Alfonzo’s Pankcake Breakfast” and “Cosmik Debris.” Did you know that Tina Turner and two other members of the Ikettes sang on “Zombie Woof”? I didn’t, but Dweezil isolates their track for us and then shows us how it fits into the whole of what is a very weird song. On another tune he shows us how Frank multed a horn and violin part on a single track to make a singular sound.

Currently listening to: “Dick Suffers is Furious With You” by Don Caballero

For Audiophiles

2007-05-12T10:42:00.000-07:00

Here’ a handy form you can fill out when dealing with magically-thinking audiophiles:

All these questions about the possibility of interference to the SB3 from stoves, microwave ovens, cell phones, vibrating toys, etc., has me wondering if it is possible for the titanium implant and porcelain crown in my skull to cause interference that would affect the sound of my SB3. I mean, maybe the saliva in my mouth, the electrolyte that is my blood, and the titanium metal and mercury-amalgam fillings could set up a sort of battery and the current could generate a magnetic field.

Any ideas if this is something I should worry about?
You claim that an

( ) audible
( ) measurable
(X) hypothetical

improvement in sound quality can be attained by:

( ) upsampling
( ) increasing word size
( ) vibration dampening
( ) bi-wiring
( ) replacing the external power supply
( ) using a different lossless format
( ) decompressing on the server
(X) removing bits of metal from skull
( ) using ethernet instead of wireless

Vernon Reid Eases the Pain

2007-05-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

Here are some videos of a jam with Vernon Reid, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and Calvin Weston on drums. Thanks Al!

Part 2:

Evil Music Influencing our Children!

2007-05-06T21:32:00.000-07:00

A child stabs a duck with a pencil

Was it... The Residents?!

Build Your Own Classic Synth

2007-04-21T10:47:00.000-07:00

The x0xb0x is a homebrew synth/sequencer kit from Limor, an engineer from the MIT Media Lab. (Fun fact: The design of the front page of her site is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.)

Photos of the x0xb0x on Flickr

Currently listening to: Headhunters, Survival of the Fittest (with Blackbird McKnight!)

God Hates the Guitar

2007-04-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the Pope’s aesthetic sensibilities are just as medieval as his politics and beliefs:

ROME - Pope Benedict XVI has called for an end to electric guitars and modern music being played in church and demanded a return to traditional choirs and Gregorian chants.

...

“It is possible to modernize holy music,” he said at a concert conducted by the director of music at the Sistine Chapel, Domenico Bartolucci. “But it should not happen outside the traditional path of Gregorian chants or sacred polyphonic choral music.”

“Benedict XVI’s supporters argue that the music played during Mass is a vital part of the communion between worshippers and God” — which is, of course, precisely why the music should respond to and interact with modern culture in an other than dictatorial way. Imagine if a religious leader suggested taking gospel music out of African-American churches: unthinkable, absurd, and offensive.

Bunnie on Digital (and Analog) Technology

2007-04-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

Electrical (and software) engineering is the platform on which modern music stands: electronic instruments, audio software, computer hardware, radio, and computer networks are all applications of electrical engineering and digital signal processing. Therefore, I think it’s handy for music makers and listeners to know a few things about it.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang is just the person to help us out. He’s got a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, is a technical advisor for Make magazine, created the Chumby hackable digital toy, and cracks computer hardware security for fun on weekends.

He has a pair of blog posts about how you can build your own analog-to-digital converter out of cheap, general-purpose parts. (Note: an FPGA is a “field-programmable gate array”, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s a chip you can redesign on the fly. You can feed it a new design specification, and it will change its behavior from a USB controller to a digital radio receiver to whatever you want. As such, it’s perfect for making an A/D converter. Another cool use of FPGAs is the Universal Software Radio Peripheral, which you can use with GNU Radio, a free software-based radio system.)

One interesting thing from the theory part of the article is that, as bunnie says, “digital technology is on the verge of coming out of the analog closet” (emphasis added):

At very high signal speeds or densities, there is an important energy-time trade-off that digital signal designers must consider. The faster/denser you send/store bits, the less energy and time are available to interpret the information. In fact, the term Bit Error Rate (BER) is starting to appear more and more in product literature. BERs are typically specified in terms of expected failures per bits transmitted. For example, a brand-name hard drive today has a non-recoverable error rate of 1 per 1014 bits—in other words, once every 12,500 Gbytes transferred. This state of the art hard drive today stores 500 Gbytes of data. Chew on this: if you were to read data off of this drive continuously, you should expect an unrecoverable bit error just once every 25 times through the entire drive’s contents. Another way of looking at this is one in 25 hard drives performing this experiment should expect a bit error after one complete beginning to end read pass. Feel worried about the integrity of your data yet? Don’t look now. Hard drives encode data so densely that quite often there is insufficient energy stored in a bit to detect the bit on its own, so hard drives use Partial Response, Maximum Likelihood (PRML) techniques to recover your data. In other words, the hard drive controller looks at a sequence of sampled data points and tries to guess at what set of intended bits might have generated a particular response signature. This technique is combined with others, such as error correction techniques (in itself a fascinating subject), to achieve the intended theoretical bit error rates. Have valuable data? Become a believer in back-ups. Our robust digital complacency is starting to ooze back into the analog days of pops, clicks and hiss. Bit errors are not confined to storage, either. Many high-speed serial links are specified to perform at BER’s as low as one error per 1012 bits. While error-free enough for a single user to tolerate, these error rates stack on top of each other as you build more complex systems with more links in them, to the point where managing error rates and component failures is one of the biggest headaches facing server and supercomputer makers today.

Kinky!

Currently listening to: Leg End by Henry Cow

Outsound Presents Jim Ryan, 7 and 8 April

2007-04-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

The folks at Outsound are holding two shows of Jim Ryan’s Forward Energy Trio, a new/free/out jazz group, in Oakland on Saturday the 7th and in San Francisco on Sunday the 8th.

MP3 samples of the Oakland version of the trio and of the Portland version are available.

Here’s the info:

Saturday April 7th, 2007
Jim Ryan’s FE3 Oakland Performance
With Scott R Looney, piano & Stephen Flinn, drums
1510 Performance Space
1510 8th St. Oakland CA
8pm
Also performing Dave Sewelson and Friends Jam [bring your axe and participate in a free jazz jam session]

Sunday, April 8th, 2007
Jim Ryan’s FE3 Portland performance
With Bob Jones, double bass & Andrew Wilshusen, drums (OR)
SIMM Music Series
116 9th St. @ Mission, San Francisco, CA
7:30pm $10, $8, $5
AND SBTG-Quartet David Sewelson sax (NY) / Carolyn Torrente sax/ Antony Bichon bass / Nicolai Gvatua drums

Steve Albini, Propellerhead

2007-04-05T21:09:00.000-07:00

Rattlin' around in there like dried beans!

Sage Advice From Dick Dale: Run Screaming From Record Companies

2007-04-04T21:09:00.000-07:00

In this interview, the legendary Dick Dale tells it like it is, Steve Albini-style.

Don’t sign with a label, don’t sign with a record company; because the minute you sign you will lose all the rights to your music. And you will never see a dime. Build up your following by continuously playing; save up your money and record your own stuff on your own CDs, and learn to market yourself.

He goes on to explain the Ani Difranco business plan quite persuasively. “And that’s the reason why the system hates Dick Dale.”

Currently listening to: “Ouch” from Meg Nem Sa by Hilmar Jensson

Math Metal: Textures

2007-03-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

I found this cool math metal band, Textures. Elements of Meshuggah, Dream Theater, Pantera, Converge.

Formed in 2001, TEXTURES – Jacobs, guitarist Bart Hennephof, drummer Stef Broks, bassist Dennis Aarts, synth maestro Richard Rietdijk and then vocalist Pieter Verpaalen – decided that the only way to truly capture their musical manifesto was to tackle every element of creating an album themselves – from production through to artwork.

Kill the Pimps

2007-03-20T18:56:00.000-07:00

Here's a great summary of why the current middlemen between musicians and listeners are deservedly doomed: "How I Became a Music Pirate".

As dubious as it is to denigrate music sharers as "pirates", it's just as goofy to adopt it as a term of pride (ironic or otherwise). Technology, ethics, law, and business models are crazy unaligned right now, but "pirate", even as a denial, allows the moribund middlemen the rhetorical floor. There's nothing wrong with trying before you buy or sharing with friends. Like it? Be honest and buy the t-shirt, go to the show, subscribe to eMusic and (re-)download it, give the musician free advertising on your blog. But whatever you do, kill the pimps!

Currently listening to: "Tabula Rasa: Silentium" and "Collage über Bach: Toccata" by Arvo Pärt. The "Sarabande" is heavy as hell!@$#

Kris Delmhorst Live in San Francisco, 24 March

2007-03-20T18:49:00.000-07:00

I met the very cool Kris Delmhorst the other day when I sold her one of my guitar amplifiers. She's playing at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco this Saturday, 24 March, with Ana Egge.

Kris Delmhorst at eMusic, and sample song "Weathervane".

Cory Doctorow on the Affordances of Networked Computers

2007-03-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

Cory has a new article explaining that it's not the low resolution of screens that keep us from reading e-books, rather it's the nature of the computer (and its applications) that the screen is hooked up to:

A super-sharp, super-portable screen would be used to read all day long, but most of us won't spend most of our time reading anything recognizable as a book on them.

Take the record album. Everything about it is technologically pre-determined. The technology of the LP demanded artwork to differentiate one package from the next. The length was set by the groove density of the pressing plants and playback apparatus. The dynamic range likewise. These factors gave us the idea of the 40-to-60-minute package, split into two acts, with accompanying artwork. Musicians were encouraged to create works that would be enjoyed as a unitary whole for a protracted period — think of Dark Side of the Moon, or Sgt. Pepper's.

No one thinks about albums today. Music is now divisible to the single, as represented by an individual MP3, and then subdivisible into snippets like ringtones and samples. When recording artists demand that their works be considered as a whole — like when Radiohead insisted that the iTunes Music Store sell their whole album as a single, indivisible file that you would have to listen to all the way through — they sound like cranky throwbacks.

...

The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.

I'd try to rebut Cory, because I do think he's wrong, but I wrote this post halfway through reading his article and edited it while watching a movie.

Sun Ra on David Sanborn's TV show in 1990

2007-03-12T21:42:00.000-07:00

Al Vorse sends us this delightful morsel: "A defining moment for me as a kid."

Top 10 Corporate Moments in Rock

2007-03-12T21:23:00.000-07:00

It's hard to order these by importance or egregiousness or flabbergastage or whatev, because they are all so brutally heinous. For me, the John Fogerty and DJ Dangermouse episodes are particularly septic. Since I used to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you might expect me to be the most pissed about the Sony rootkit fiasco. But that was really just a particularly naked example of the sloth and contempt for fans the record companies are founded on -- and as such, mostly just funny.

Latest RIAA Perversion

2007-02-18T12:26:00.000-08:00

From today's New York Times Magazine: DJs Drama and Don Cannon were arrested last month not for actual crimes, but for making mix tapes.

But Drama and Cannon's studio was not a bootlegging plant; it was a place where successful new hip-hop CDs were regularly produced and distributed. Drama and Cannon are part of a well-regarded D.J. collective called the Aphilliates. Although their business almost certainly violated federal copyright law, as well as a Georgia state law that requires CDs to be labeled with the name and address of the producers, they were not simply stealing from the major labels; they were part of an alternative distribution system that the mainstream record industry uses to promote and market hip-hop artists. Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them.

[...]

Although their business almost certainly violated federal copyright law, as well as a Georgia state law that requires CDs to be labeled with the name and address of the producers, they were not simply stealing from the major labels; they were part of an alternative distribution system that the mainstream record industry uses to promote and market hip-hop artists. Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them.

Scott Ian (Anthrax) on Playing With Stryper

2007-02-10T12:09:00.000-08:00

Scott Ian talks about Anthrax' first show in LA. Stryper: "We prayed to God and he answered our prayers and he got us a limo." Ian: "Well, can't you just get one for 50 bucks an hour?"

Morrissey Ruined My Life; Is Deemed "?questionable?"

2007-01-28T12:16:00.000-08:00

The Institute for Unpopular Culture is showing the work of abstract painter Sean Starr in an exhibit called "Morrissey Ruined My Life". It's this coming Saturday, 3 Feb, at Workspace Limited, 2150 Folsom Street in San Francisco.

On February 3rd, 2007 Sean will demonstrate the effect of Morrissey on his life by painting a massive canvas on a stage in the gallery, recreating his private studio atmosphere. A selection of Sean's favorite Smiths and Morrissey songs will be playing while he paints. Dozens of other paintings will be on display throughout the gallery, most titled after Smiths and Morrissey songs.

Starr considers Morrissey "the world's greatest living poet"...

Al notes this paranoid Christian web site which has a list of must-hear musicians, including "Morrissey (?questionable)", "Merzbau" (sic) and "Ted Nugent (loincloth)".

Drugs are bad, mmkay...

Videos of 20 "Greatest" Guitar Solos

2007-01-24T21:52:00.000-08:00

Shamelessly swiped from Boing Boing: YouTubes of the 20 greatest lute soliloquies (soliloquae... soliloquata...). The usual "Top N Ms of All Time" disclaimers apply. But seriously, where's the goddamn Living Colour.

Living Colour, "Broken Hearts"

Living Colour, "Information Overload" intro

"Information Overload" guitar solo

Living Colour, "Flying"

Extra bonus stony-faced funky bass shredding (check out the tape on the high strings! hahaha!):

Fredrik Thordendal and Morgan Ågren, Sol Niger Within medley

Kristin Hersh/Throwing Muses in Minneapolis and SF

2007-01-24T20:41:00.000-08:00

Kristin Hersh will be zooming around promoting her new record Learn to Sing Like a Star. She'll be in Minneapolis at the Electric Fetus record store on 8 Feb, and at Amoeba in San Francisco on the 18th.

Robotspeak Sessions 3.4

2007-01-24T20:35:00.000-08:00

Robotspeak Sessions 3.4 is coming up next Wednesday the 31st at Robotspeak in San Francisco, with Puzzle, Snareface, and 0mins0und:

Robotspeak sessions is our every-other-monthly electronic + computer [electronic] music event. Our goal with sessions is to create a comfortable venue for the performers and audience to interact, ask questions, trade ideas and techniques-you name it. Hosted here in our semi-underground shop in SF's lower Haight, each sessions features three 30 - 40 minute performances followed by an open forum and very informal "question-and-answer" session.

Unfortunately I'll be out of town this time.

It Was Probably Inevitable

2007-01-24T20:18:00.000-08:00

What the fuck is this?

Beverage Concepts Chief Executive Josh Glass said his company would honor Hendrix's memory by donating some of the profit from the Liquid Experience to an unidentified music education foundation.

Uhh, yeah...

30 Pounds of Maple?!

2007-01-15T18:36:00.000-08:00

After watching the Mahavishnu video, I started surfing around for John McLaughlin stuff (see his wacky website). I found this description of one of his famous doubleneck guitars, the "Double Rainbow". Thirty frakkin' pounds. In general, the 1970s were an experimental period for guitar design, and the preference was for density (it was believed that hunks of brass improved sustain) and wacky electronics. Stanley Clarke and Jerry Garcia also had hi- and/or sci-fi instruments in that era, for example.

Weirdly, it's hard to find pictures of the Double Rainbow (or maybe my Google-fu is weak this night), but there is this one:

Video of Mahavishnu Orchestra from 1972

2007-01-15T15:22:00.000-08:00

My other jazz-loving friend named Al pointed me to this video of Mahavishnu Orchestra starting off with "Meeting of the Spirits" in 1972. As a guitar player I'm obviously a McLaughlin fan, but I especially love drummer Billy Cobham's performance here.

Flaming Horse @ Luggage Store Gallery 18 Jan

2007-01-15T15:09:00.000-08:00

My friend and former bandmate Al's band Flaming Horse ("yes, it's really called that") will be playing at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco (1007 Market St. @ 6th St.) on the 18th. Flaming Horse does free improvisation, so it'll be a bit different from Boshuda, our old band.

Good Thing It Wasn't "Cattle Decapitation"

2006-12-20T23:40:00.000-08:00

Random Boing Boing amusement!

More Algorithmic Music, Now With Spiffy Visuals

2006-12-16T20:54:00.000-08:00

These things are just stunning. My favorite is variation 6, microtones.

I Love Me Some Low-Wattage Guitar Amps

2006-12-16T20:47:00.000-08:00

Brian from Birthing of Millions recently heard an Atomic Space Tone amplifier in action. I love low-watt amps because you can turn them up and get some naturalistic, touch-sensitive overdrive without having to go up to 200 decibels. Low-power amps just plain sound better, and according to Brian, this one is a real winner. Here's one of the sound samples.

I'm Selling a Ton of Guitar Gear

2006-12-16T20:32:00.000-08:00

American Standard Telecaster

Fender Pro Junior amp

MXR Doubleshot Distortion pedal

Boss DS-1 Distortion pedal

DOD Grunge distortion pedal

More Illegal Music

2006-12-10T14:01:00.000-08:00

Some very cool music is illegal. The stories of some of these songs are rage-inspiring:

Yes, the song the entire Western world sings at birthday parties is actually owned by a large corporation, and every time someone sings it in public without permission, it is an infringement of copyright. The song’s tune was published by schoolteachers Mildred and Patty Hill in 1893 as "Good Morning to All" in their book Song Stories for the Kindergarten. Children began singing it at birthday parties but with words they came up with themselves, which is how folk music typically develops. Nevertheless, the song–lyrics and all–is now owned by AOL Time Warner, the largest entertainment company on earth, and the corporation aggressively defends its property.

As you might imagine, hip-hop and rap have it especially hard:

The Piklz are a special sort of band composed of a rotating lineup of hip-hop DJs, including Q-bert, Mixmaster Mike, and Shortcut. These highly skilled turntablists scratch out songs together live, each using a record and a record player as an instrument, each contributing, in real time, a different part (like drums, bass line, or horn stabs) to the music. This track comes from a 12-inch record pressed and circulated in 1996 with no information (a "white label"). Hip-hop and dance records often appear in this limited, underground manner and then vanish forever, never to be officially released due to copyright issues.

Banned Music

2006-12-02T18:54:00.000-08:00

Downhill Battle has a project called BannedMusic.org to make available music that has been "banned" due to alleged copyright infringement. There's more here than just Dangermouse's Grey Album, including Hippocamp Ruins Pet Sounds. Get your BitTorrent on...

Bannedmusic.org is a peer-to-peer collaboration that makes it impossible for the major record labels to ban or censor musical works. When record labels send legal threats to musicians, record stores, or websites, we will post the music here for download and publicize the censorship attempt. There is a clear fair use right to distribute this music, and for the public to decide whether current copyright law is serving musicians and the public, they need to be able to hear what's being suppressed.

Algorithmic Music in Real Time

2006-11-29T20:11:00.000-08:00

Using the Haskell programming language, Alex McLean has developed a new system for "livecoding", the practice of writing software programs to generate music live, in real time.

What I'm intending to try though is making a language built around the kind of music I want to make, able to cope with programming under tight time constraints, allowing vague specification of sound events but well specified enough to allow other bits of software to reason within the language as well as myself.

Julie Steinberg Plays John Cage in San Francisco

2006-11-29T20:03:00.000-08:00

At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, this coming Monday (4 Dec):

Fresh from her guest appearance at Tanglewood, pianist Julie Steinberg takes on John Cage's complete Sonatas and Interludes. In this masterpiece, Cage transformed the piano into a percussion orchestra by inserting carefully chosen objects between the strings. The concert provides a rare opportunity to hear Steinberg, a leading interpreter of Cage's music, performing one of his most engrossing pieces. In sonic contrast, Chaya Czernowin fashions, in her Winter Songs, an arresting, low-voiced plaint for winds, brass, strings and percussion. David Milnes, Music Director.

Test Your Pitch Perception and Musical Memory

2006-11-29T19:46:00.000-08:00

This online test of pitch perception and musical memory is totally cool.

Throwing Muses and 50FootWave in San Francisco on 16 Dec

2006-11-26T11:34:00.000-08:00

Among other cool items from ThrowingMusic News:

Throwing Muses will be playing one more show this year. It's on December 16, 2006 at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, CA. Tickets are available at Virtuous <http://virtuous.com/events/v/181536628/2006-12-16.html>. 50FootWave will be opening the show and we're happy to have Kristin's newest favorite band, The Moore Brothers <http://www.themoorebros.com/> playing in the middle slot.

The Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Songs

2006-11-25T17:40:00.000-08:00

While ripping a bunch of CDs, I hit upon The People's Choice Music by Dave Soldier and Komar & Melamid. Komar & Melamid performed web surveys to determine what instruments, vocal styles, lyrical content and emotional content people want in music, and then had Dave Soldier compose songs that would maximally satisfy (and maximally dissatisfy!) the "average" listener. I actually bought it as part of my project to acquire Vernon Reid's complete discography (he plays the guitar solo in the most wanted song -- the sarcastic final note kills me every time).

According to the CD jacket, "fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population will enjoy" the most unwanted song, while the most wanted song is "a musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably 'liked' by 72 +/- 12% of listeners". Apparently people really like the super cheesy type of R&B.

You can grab MP3s of the songs on Dave Soldier's web site. Nice!

Currently listening to: "Floating Seeds" by Ozric Tentacles and "Mass Hypnosis" by Sepultura

A Feast of Corpses

2006-11-20T21:20:00.000-08:00

Metal Show: Special Report

Who: Necrophagist
When: ~6:30 pm, Wednesday, November 19
Where: Station 4, St. Paul, MN, USA

Like those Tasmanian Devils Psycroptic, German gore-noodlers Necrophagist are forced to tour with such wholy unworthy acts as Unmerciful and Cannibal Corpse. It was in this situation that I saw them at a dingy little metal club in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Station 4 is about as metal as a metal club can get, too. It's dark (the walls seemingly painted black), it smells of thousands of sweaty shows, and there are 10-inch diameter steel posts in the middle of the moshfloor, holding up the roof and just waiting to break faces. The building the club is in is nearly as bleak -- a nondescript 3-story warehouse with those windows made up of 12x12 panes, each blackened with years of grime. As I walked by one side of the building on my way to the end of the block-long line snaking out of the door, I heard blast beats and some gritty riffing coming out of the second story, probably from the practice space used by local legends Anal Blast. They're what I like to call sick-core (my term, though they're probably classified in some semi-official metal pseudo-genre I've just never heard of), playing nothing but songs about vomiting, defecation, menstruation, sex and small woodland creatures... sometimes songs involving all of the above, and other times songs about eating all of the above... 'nuff said.

Standing outside the club, the crowd seemed to be really pumped for the show.. but not for the headliners Cannibal Corpse. In fact, I didn't hear anyone yell, "CANNIBAL COOOORRRRPSE" in a bad attempt at a yelling growl. Instead, most people were there to see Necrophagist and the alright-but-not-my-favorite (though Chris P. has confessed to liking them) band Dying Fetus, while there were a few people pissed that we were still trying to get into the club when Unmerciful started their set. Honestly, I'm not sure what they were in such a hurry for.

By the time I got in the club, Unmerciful (so unmerciful were they that they made us suffer their noise) were three songs in to their six-song set. Compared to Necrophagist, Unmerciful were like 5-year olds beating on plastic buckets with sticks and blaring their Speak & Spells. When they announced they were playing their last song, some guys in front of me cheered that our misery would end.

Unmerciful (mercifully) hauled their junk off the stage and some house crew started moving around monitors, setting up a new drum set and running some cables. The guy sitting at the drum set started out the sound check and seemed to be a wizard in his own right, double-pedalling and blasting away. Then some other guy comes out to sound check a guitar... and immediately busts into Necrophagist's latest title track "Epitaph". Whoa! As it turns out, Necrophagist didn't really have any roadies and they were sound checking all their own instruments - not a common sight for a show of this caliber, even in a relative backwater like MN. So over the course of the next five minutes, we were treated to solos by everyone in the band, a really nice bonus!

Like a lot of European bands I've seen, these guys were relatively clean looking - they even had cut hair! No offense, America, but most of our death metal bands look like they live in the gutter. Necrophagist were really professional. Their playing so technical and so well-conducted, they didn't even have time to run around the stage jumping off of monitors like Angus Young. They were stony-faced and on a brutal mission to make us trip over our own feet while we feebly tried to keep time. At a few points during the show, some huge guy tried to get a mosh pit going, but then Necrophagist would shift gears and start spraying speghetti into the air while everyone in the pit lost the beat, or just stood in awe at the insane skills they were witnessing. Between the fifth and sixth songs, some guy turned to me and asked, "Who are these guys?!"

I don't remember the exact order of the set list, what with being in a complete fan-boy trance, but I believe they played the first seven songs from their latest release Epitaph, followed by a long-ish (6-8 minutes, so long for Necrophagist) song I'd never heard before. It's possible it was an unreleased song, or it possibly could have been something from their debut album that I just didn't recognize live (I'm not quite as familiar with that album).

During the last tune, I made my way over to the swag counter. Once there, I was informed that I couldn't buy a t-shirt yet because the band insists on selling all their own merchandise. After about 10 minutes, with a long line queued up behind me, Necrophagist's bass player finally makes it over to start selling stuff and I walk away with the first t-shirt of the night. In a bit of a divergence from the norm, their t-shirts don't have the name or cover of an album on them, but instead are adorned with some jagged, Giger-esque artwork and the name of a song. Mine was "Only Ash Remains". I was a bit disappointed at the lack of a tour t-shirt, as I consider those more valuable, but I was happy just to be able to see these guys play!

Just after picking up the t-shirt, Dying Fetus started to play. I hung around for one song, but my ears were shot, I was full from eating so much dead flesh, and I wanted to prolong my Necrophagist afterglow, so I head out to my car and fired up Epitaph for the drive home.

For those of you out in Blue-Skies-and-Puffy-Clouds country, there's still time to see Necrophagist. They'll be playing at 7 pm on Sunday, November 26 at Slim's in San Francisco.

Corpse meat + Jagged Noodles = Aphrodisiac

Next show: Leaves' Eyes opening for Blind Guardian.

Octochordal Electro-lutes

2006-11-12T13:06:00.000-08:00

Speaking of double-quaternary catgut hypermandolins, last weekend I picked up the reissue version of Meshuggah's album Nothing. It's mostly the same as the original, except that the guitars were re-recorded with 8-string guitars instead of down-tuned 7-strings. The songs were written for the 8-string tuning (F B♭ E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ B♭ E♭), but in order to finish the album in time for the Ozzfest tour, they recorded it with the 7-strings they had, because the custom 8-strings were not done yet.

Overall the album sounds much better with the improved clarity and responsiveness of the 8-string guitars. Because they have the longer scale lengths required for such low pitches (these are bass guitars with some bonus treble strings), they sound much more natural and clear. The difference makes a musical difference; for example, "Glints Collide" sounds much funkier and crisper since the strings aren't so flabby and unresponsive. Similarly, the annoying "flam-like" effect between the guitars, bass, and kick drum (most obvious in the original on "Rational Gaze") is gone. That's good, although you now sort of miss the audibility of the bass and kick drum.

The Nothing reissue comes as a set with the CD and a DVD of some videos (the "New Millennium Cyanide Christ" video is the same as the one on Rare Trax) and live clips. The live clips are good, but overall the DVD feels like an add-on thrown in to entice chumps like me into buying another copy of an album they already had.

Only rabid fans like me really need both versions; normal people only need the reissue. The reissue also has lyrics printed in the CD insert, for the people that care about that sort of thing...

(If the flat signs show up as question marks or squares and you are using Firefox on Windows, set the page character encoding to Windows Western. View -> Character Encoding -> Western (Windows-1252).)

Currently listening to: A discussion of how Richard Dawkins and the extropians are religious zealots

8-string Guitars

2006-11-12T12:51:00.000-08:00

I hadn't heard of the Black Machine before. They look great. There are Black Machines in both the Charlie Hunter/Robert Novak style (different scale lengths for each string) and in the "normal" style. And check out the beautiful wood.

Splice: Online Music Collaboration

2006-11-08T19:33:00.000-08:00

I am at the 10th Creative Commons Salon, where Wendell Davis, the founder of Splice, just gave a little chat about his online collaborative music composition/editing application. Using a Flash-based web application, you can trade and tweak tracks and combine them into a new tune. Sweet!

From YouTube... To Sirius

2006-11-06T19:16:00.000-08:00

Chris's post about Voivod and their harmonically-gifted guitarist tickled a synapse. One of the most interesting bands to recently emerge from the French metal underground (yes, there is one!) is Gojira. I really like their guitar work, and their tunes are just all-around awesome. To quote my girlfriend after the first 10 seconds of Gojira she'd ever heard, "I like the way this guitarist thinks."

Their most recent album is called "From Mars to Sirius", and as far as I can tell, it's about the threats to Earth's ecosystems (a rather high-brow topic for a metal band). I like to think it's about Star Trek IV, due to the flying whale on the album cover and the whale song woven into some of the tracks, not to mention the first line of "Global Warming": Four-hundred thousand years ago/They came from outer space. Though, now that I think about it, they could be Scientologists.

Take a listensee for yourself, though. Full tracks are available on their site (Medias -> Audios) and here's a YouTube of a surprisingly-good video. Sadly, the song in the video is not nearly the best on the album. My favorites are "From The Sky", "Unicorn" (which seems to me to reveal a very heavy Morbid Angel influence) and "Global Warming" (sweet opening/closing guitar work - carpal-tunnel city!)

The Devil Went Down to Tasmania

2006-11-05T18:50:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, in the economically successful and otherwise-peaceful 1990's, the Devil decided to "get away from it all." His vacation spot of choice? The former penal settlement of Tasmania. Although not home to penal 'colonists' for many decades, he felt Tasmania still had that "unspoiled penal vibe", and thus made a prime location for all manner of nerve-soothing debauchery.

While strolling through the Tasmanian country side, the Devil happened upon a group of young men, ripe specimens perfect for his latest experiment. Convincing them that they were filled with untapped potential, he put wicked steel in their hands, imbued them with the knowledge of strange time signatures and a taste for erratic music, injected them with psychotropic substances, and ordered them to their basements. To one of these new minions, he gifted the gift of scary, croaky spewing, reminiscent of a tasmanian devil eating a bullfrog. Into another, the Devil injected Essence of Blastbeat and Eye of Doppelbass.

During the following few months, these new demonically-infused virtuosos riffed their fingers to bloody stumps while weaving jagged, sonic scarves for their family and neighbors. To top it off, their wailer croaked up box after box of bloody cupcakes, enjoyed by children all over the remote island. The Devil, satisfied with his pupils, returned to the comforts of his hellish depths... but not before giving them a sufficiently evil, yet delightfully cryptic label:

Psycroptic...

Soon, Psycroptic yearned to spread their filthy, squeaky hypnotic sounds to their northern neighbors. On a misty evening they set out northward, thrashing, horking and blasting themselves a bridge to the Australian mainland. During the turns of many moons, Psycroptic shred a capricious path over Oz, touring with such unworthy acts as Behemoth, Cannibal Corpse, and Incantation, while releasing three must-have albums.

What does the future hold? You. Yes, you... listening to Psycroptic until your eyes bleed out your nose... and perhaps even a North American tour, if we could be so hell-blessed.

Ahh, Cyberpunk

2006-11-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

My fellow linguist and metalhead Sacha pointed me at these Youtubes of the late, great 80s thrash/prog/cybernoodle band Voivod. I actually hadn't ever heard their music before; I had only been assured that as a prog-rock and metal fan I would dig them. And indeed. Piggy is easily the most harmonically intriguing heavy-music guitarist this side of Vernon Reid and The Fripp. Some of this stuff is just plain out.

"Inner Combustion" + "Nothingface"

"Psychic Vacuum"

"Tribal Convictions"

Yay, I Have a Co-editor Now; Vedic Metal

2006-11-02T21:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks Gabe!

Actually, I probably don't agree that college-educated, white-collar peeps are a minority, or a majority, of metalheads. I haven't taken any polls or anything, but there are so many different types of metal, and so many different types of fan, that it's not easy to make any but the most broad generalizations. Who cares, anyway.

Case in point, found in a clicktrail started from the Wikipedia links in Dopp's previous post: Vedic metal! I had never heard of it until now, but in retrospect it should have been obvious. It's cool how adaptable metal is. Check out Singaporean Vedic metal band Rudra, and their sample MP3s.

Headbangs from the Frozen North

2006-11-01T16:51:00.000-08:00

Greasings, Hemioleans! In what could have only been a bout of noodle-induced insanity, Chris P. invited me over to give my internationally-struggling two cents on various noodle-slinging bands, tracks, people and events. I prefer my noodles a bit on the bloody side...

Like Chris, I'm part of the minority (but growing!) population of college-educated, white-collar metal heads (thank you, IT industry, for paying me to play with computers). We tend toward technical and melodic (wha?) metal, preferably that which defies categorization. The more noodles, wonky time signatures, and incomprehensible riffage, the better. However, as a fish-loving lefse eater, I also have a an ever-growing fondness for folk music, particularly that from Scandanavian climes. Come back for blatherings about metal, folk, and sometimes a frightening yet strangely tingly combination of the two!

My next segment: The Devil Went Down to Tasmania

Currently listening to: "There's Something Rotten" by Illdisposed (groovy, somewhat-noodly Corrosion of Conformity vs. Life of Agony vs. Gorefest cagematch-like stuff from Denmark) and "Tales Along This Road" by Korpiklaani (Sami-influenced Finnish oompa metal, complete with accordians, mandolins, bagpipes and yoiking)!

Fandalism: YouTube for Musicians

2006-10-30T21:00:00.000-08:00

Phil set up this new site for uploading and sharing your tunes, Fandalism. Cool! With luck, Google will buy it from him for $1.666 billion. Phil is mainly a drummer, but if you dig you can find tunes of him singing and playing guitar, too. It's true, his milkshake is better than yours. He could teach you, but he'd have to charge.

Worse is Better; Getting it Out There

2006-10-29T16:09:00.000-08:00

While Brian was in the throes of a compose-o-rama, I mentioned to him the concept of "Worse is Better". Here's a little musing on what the idea, borrowed from Software Town, might mean to the gentle peoples of Musicville.

I am a software hacker (in the original, unperverted sense) and a musician, and I find there are some similarities between the two disciplines. The most important similarity is the necessity of integrating taste and intuition with rigor in order to produce something beautiful -- and usable.

Usability, by normal people, is crucial. Milton Babbit's argument to the contrary is interesting and even tempting, but just plain wrong; for music and software are primarily means of communication and tools of culture.

Availability is the first necessary condition for usability (you can't use it if you can't get it!), and this belated realization is known in the software world as "worse is better" (also at hacker and music lover Jamie Zawinksi's site). Richard Gabriel described two schools of thought in software development:

"The Right Thing", which called for completeness and correctness; and

"Worse is Better", which called for simplicity above all, even at the cost of completeness and correctness.

It might seem that The Right Thing is obviously the right thing, but unfortunately -- and inevitably -- it entailed (a) extreme difficulty in implementation, (b) unusably poor performance, (c) inflexibility, and (d) great expense. By contrast, the Worse is Better school compromised on completeness and correctness, but produced fast, usable, tweakable, cheap software that ran well on cheap computers.

The core text of Lisp, the preferred programming language of the Right Thing crowd, is Common Lisp: The Language by Guy L. Steele Jr. It is 1029 pages, including all indices. The core text of C, the preferred language of the Worse is Better crew, is The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie: 272 pages all told. The former is a comedy of committee design and obsessive-compulsive disorder, while the latter is a model of simplicity and concision both in English usage and software design.

Gabriel's article was part of a lament and a lesson on understanding why the Right Thing had failed commercially. Lisp Machines were beautiful in concept: the hardware was purpose-built for the Lisp programming language, and they ran all Lisp code, from the operating system to the applications and the user interface. They were expensive and slow, of necessity. Nobody wanted them; Unix machines (the product of the Worse is Better school) were cheap, fast, and flexible -- and ideologically supple, supporting a polyglot user who just wanted to get some work done. You could take any old piece of crap hardware, no matter its architecture, and get Unix working on it pretty quickly.

Like Babbitt, the Right Thing school produced some very beautiful work. One of the finest examples of this is a program called TeX, a text processing system by computing science giant Donald Knuth. Knuth invented TeX in a ten-year (!) side-project (!) while trying to figure out a good way to correctly and beautifully typeset all the mathematical formulae in his magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming (which itself started as an interdepartmental memo but which grew to a five-volume set which Knuth will probably not finish before he dies). (Volume 4 is on the way! Yay!)

TeX is the beautiful product of a powerful mind. It goes to extreme efforts to typeset text with amazing precision and grace. It is also slow and difficult to use, which is why it is not the language of the Web, although it would have made a superior choice. Instead, the grossly substandard text-description language HTML is used because it is easier to learn and use, and because it can be processed relatively much more quickly. Even a very fast computer like an Intel Core Duo can handle a volume of HTML probably hundreds of times faster than it can an equal volume of TeX -- and the disparity was much worse when the Web was born, in the era of computers than ran at speeds of only tens of megahertz.

It's very sad that The Right Thing is impractical. But the song you can listen to and understand is better than the impenetrable and/or nonexistent song that is perfect. The idea is simply to get something out there. Once you've put something in front of the public, you may even find out that you were mistaken about what perfection is!

Of course, accepting that Worse is Better does not mean that we accept that Total Insanity is Totally Awesome. Knowing the difference requires taste, intuition, and rigor.

Currently listening to: "Terraplane Blues" by Robert Johnson, "Gut Pageant" by Kristin Hersh, and "Pharaoh's Dance" by Miles Davis.

Hemiola?

2006-10-29T15:51:00.000-08:00

What does "hemiola" really mean? Apparently it once referred to a perfect fifth interval in just intonation, as well as meaning a particular rhythmic pattern -- and not the one you might have thought it did. :)

In modern musical parlance, a hemiola is a metrical pattern in which two bars in triple time (3/2 or 3/4 for example) are articulated as if they were three bars in duple time (2/2 or 2/4).

The word hemiola derives from the Greek hemiolios, meaning "one and a half". (The term hemiola or "one and a half" was also used by the Greeks to refer to a galley powered by one and a half banks of oars). It was originally used in music to refer to the frequency ratio 3:2; that is, the interval of a justly tuned perfect fifth.

Later, from around the 15th century, the word came to mean the use of three breves in a bar when the prevailing metrical scheme had two dotted breves in each bar. This usage was later extended to its modern sense of two bars in triple time articulated or phrased as if they were three bars in duple time.

Currently listening to: "Bloodletting upon the Cloven Hoof" by Goatwhore (surely a contender for the most autofarcical song name EVAR)

Dragonfarce

2006-10-29T15:40:00.000-08:00

Sweet, I just found another Dragonforce solo video, this one with Herman Li in the studio control room. When Phil and Al and I saw them live, he accidentally pulled the whammy bar right out of the bridge, shrugged, and kept wanking. It was rad.

Metal by Numbers

2006-10-29T15:22:00.000-08:00

"Honey, you're an idiot; why don't you do it?" It's true, the only thing worse than emo is screamo. (Well, that and Blogger's WYSIWYG editing widget.) Is that Scott Ian on guitar? Plus check out the Dragonforce solo parody, with the close-ups on the guitarists' hands.

Look out for the white trash guy!

Blevin Blectum and Blectum From Blechdom in Paris, Lisbon, and the San Francisco Bay Area

2006-10-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

Blevin Blectum (she and the fine folks of Sagan also have a page on SkankySpace) will be playing all around the planet in October and December, but most importantly to me, in San Francisco and Oakland! Yay. She's at the Hemlock Tavern on Halloween and at the 21 Grand Art Space in Oakland on 10 December (for Women Take Back the Noise).

Many moons ago I interviewed Sagan for other magazine, and they were as nice as their music is exquisite.

"Trans-conceptual clownbeat"

2006-10-23T21:22:00.000-07:00

Dig this random genre naming program! "Random biblestep" sounds really dubious though.

I Am a Bad Person and Must Be Spanked

2006-10-22T18:16:00.000-07:00

Instead of going to see Susana Baca tonight, I am going to practice with my band. And all because I didn't read Brian's email in time. That's the second time I've missed her in the space of like two months! What the frak is wrong with me? I think it's these damn pants.

Susana Baca's voice and especially her language are beautiful. I don't have Espíritu Vivo yet, but I have her first album and Eco de Sombras. Listen to them and you will be happy, but not without difficulty.

But that's normal.

Your CDs Sound Like Shittles

2006-10-22T18:11:00.000-07:00

What is "the loudness war"? Record executive idiocy, probably. (Why are those guys still around?)