tom moody

A fine post by British actor/comedian Stephen Fry on "going off the grid" in the Facebook era deserves a moment of your time. This is a man who has paid some dues to say "get off my lawn" -- he has a million Twitter ex-followers. He also uses Linux Ubuntu as his desktop OS, per Wikipedia, so he's taking some steps towards that unwired wired state he is describing. His intended audience is "young people" but everyone should be thinking about this.

But first, what would motivate any young person today to pull the plug?

Well maybe they should consider this for a moment. Who most wants you to stay on the grid? The advertisers. Your boss. Human Resources. The advertisers. Your parents (irony of ironies – once they distrusted it, now they need to tag you electronically, share your Facebook photos and message you to death). The advertisers. The government. Your local authority. Your school. Advertisers.

Well, if you’re young and have an ounce of pride, doesn’t that list say it all? So fuck you, I’m Going Off The Grid.

More stating the obvious but fun to read:

I and millions of other early ‘netizens’ as we embarrassingly called ourselves, joined an online world that seemed to offer an alternative human space, to welcome in a friendly way (the word netiquette was used) all kinds of people with all kinds of views. We were outside the world of power and control. Politicians, advertisers, broadcasters, media moguls, corporates and journalists had absolutely zero understanding of the net and zero belief that it mattered. So we felt like an alternative culture; we were outsiders.

Those very politicians, advertisers, media moguls, corporates and journalists who thought the internet a passing fad have moved in and grabbed the land. They have all the reach, scope, power and ‘social bandwidth’ there is. Everyone else is squeezed out — given little hutches, plastic megaphones and a pretence of autonomy and connectivity. No wonder so many have become so rude, resentful, threatening and unkind.

"Toy Piano" [4.5 MB .mp3]

See notes to "Cumulative Beats," below. Other ingredients used here are some riffs composed in Mulab, a sequencer program I've been enjoying (while I still have Windows).

Am thinking of this song is an unofficial tribute to Charles Ives -- no, really.

"Cumulative Beats" [4.8 MB .mp3]

The white noise leaking all over this is a feature. Lo-fi beats are triggered in Eurorack digital modules (e.g., ADDAC 111 wav player, Qu-Bit Nebulae), then assembled in Ableton. In this tune and "Toy Piano," am using Ableton's audio-clip-to-MIDI conversion programs to play around with tunes that are already recorded (and the hardware settings would be a pain to duplicate). Ultimately MIDI is used twice, once to trigger the hardware, once to edit notes in the resulting recording. Fun!

The new, alien-spaceship transit hub at the World Trade Center is called "the Oculus." The classical oculus dome is rounded in shape and has a human-like "pupil" opening at the top to admit light. The WTC's oculus has a long, narrow slit opening, kind of like a crocodile's eye. Given all the suppositions about 9/11, conspiracies, and possible reptilian influence, this is a bit spooky. Is the starchitect Santiago Calatrava ... one of them?

images from the internet

"Anemone Would" [6.1 MB .mp3]

A melange of modular synth (1/200th of the size of Venetian Snares'), Ableton presets, and, cough, archival sampling. At approximately :16, tunes emerge.

Update: Shortened, tweaked, reposted.

drawn with Linux MyPaint and Krita
from my Gazell.io residency last month

In response to Venetian Snares showing off his exorbitant modular synth setup for a live demo [YouTube], commenter lukas vojir asks:

Did your fruityloops trial period run out?

[rimshot]

Another excerpt from Curtis Roads' recently-published book, Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic (Oxford, 2015):

[Gérard] Grisey based his rhythmic theory on perception, rejecting approaches based purely on simple mathematical abstractions such as prime numbers, Fibonacci series, and so on. He did not reject mathematics, but he felt that algorithms needed to take perception into account. As he pointed out, in Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1957) for three orchestras, the work’s rhythmic structure is highly organized in terms of tempi but unfathomable to the listener:

The tempi have great structural importance. Who perceives them?
—GRISEY (1987)

Grisey took issue with rhythmic abstractions promoted by the integral serialists, who were strongly influenced by Messiaen’s book Technique de mon langage musicale (1944). One of the techniques described by Messiaen was non-retrogradable rhythm, or rhythmic palindrome (figure 6.4). He defined these as follows:

Whether one reads them from right to left or from left to right, the order of their values remains the same.

[illustration omitted]

Messiaen’s student Pierre Boulez experimented with related methods of generating symmetric and asymmetric rhythmic figures by transformation of rhythmic cells. For example, he created figures that were the rhythmic inverse of another figure (i.e., notes replaced by rests and vice-versa).
As Grisey (1987) pointed out, these kinds of rhythmic abstractions (i.e., permutational and symmetrical note relations) make absurd assumptions about perception:

Such a distinction, whatever its operational value, has no perceptible value. . . . What a utopia this spatial and static [notion] of time was, a veritable straight line at the center of which the listener sits implicitly, possessing not only a memory but also a prescience that allows him to apprehend the symmetrical moment at the time it occurs! Unless, of course, our superman were gifted with a memory that enabled him to reconstruct the entirety of the durations so that he could, a posteriori, classify them as symmetrical or not!

From Edroso's Village Voice column on "rightbloggers":

It is something to consider how completely [Andrew] Sullivan flipped on Bush; in 2003 he was comparing him to Winston Churchill, and by 2007 he was comparing him to Neville Chamberlain. In the interval Bush himself hadn’t changed in any appreciable way, but a stink of failure did come upon him, which would be anathema to any careerist in his vicinity.

[rimshot]

Plug: three of my drawings can be purchased in the Gazelli Art House online shop. Am very pleased to be rubbing retail shoulders with Archigram, Laura Brothers, and others.