tom moody

digital abstraction from the depthcore website; detail of a larger image

Belatedly found that Adrien75 had posted a new track, "MellonBallBounce," on his mp3 page. Worth a listen as always.

Update: He also has a MySpace page.

Spent some time yesterday getting my animation log up to date. It's not really a blog, more an archive in blog form. All of the content appeared at my Digital Media Tree blog at one time or another (from late 2003 to the present).

I posted a comment to Digby's blog questioning the "Bush blowing up frogs" story, told by an ostensible childhood friend of Bush's and frequently cited by the Democratically inclined as evidence of Bush's early sadism. My comment appears to have been deleted (maybe I should have announced my left wing bona fides first).
I grew up in Midland, TX where springtime frogs were an interesting desert anomaly and someone was always telling stories about someone they knew blowing them up with firecrackers.
I'm not saying Bush isn't sadistic but this is weak anecdotal evidence--there are better examples.
Update: Digby kindly responded to my email and thought my comment's disappearance might have been a Haloscan error.

What would happen to the Earth if every human suddenly disappeared?
Alan Weisman has written a book about it, which I can't wait to read.
One of the things I often envision is the animals we've moved all over the world regenerating in new environments. Like the Japanese snow monkeys thriving in South Texas. All the inhabitants of zoos could potentially proliferate and create completely new ecosystems.
Weisman concludes that the planet will survive even if we annihilate ourselves but suggests we can make that demise less inevitable by having one child per family, to get the population back to 19th Century levels. Good luck! Human nature is going to interfere there, and we already know fundies kill for babies (and to keep women birthin' them).

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These HTML drawings were changed by the RSS reader Bloglines--the mistranslations are annoying but kind of nice.
Update: Added links back to the originals.

I have been accused of "baiting" people into arguments about Apple* but I'm posting this because my Quicktime updater--installed for security reasons after QT developed some virus vulnerability--just prompted me again, with an invasive pop-up, asking me did I really, really, really, not want to install iTunes?
Microsoft at its worst was never this aggressive about using the customer's own computer to market a product.
Hey, Jobs, stick iTunes up your 10th summer home!

*Like I really want to discuss it, and it's a moot point since this blog has comments turned off.

"Strangely Massive" [3.4 MB .mp3]

Another piece using the samples from the Massive groovebox (a Reaktor instrument, not the synth).
They were supposed to be raw material for glitchy granular deformation but I exported them to a straight sampler. I like them unprocessed--they have an archaic club feel.
In this song I mapped the samples to an entire virtual (8 octave) keyboard, with percussive hits as single notes at the high end and other sounds playable as tuned single octaves.
Some of the better tunelets came from doing AbEx on the sequencer's piano roll. Not to make dissonance--those bits I discarded. The song has a "heavy" ravy sound--almost a parody.

Update: This font--I don't know. Windows IE can barely render it. It's more elegant on Firefox but on some sizes the kerning is such that lower case CLUB looks like DUB. This is the Word Press "original" skin and you can't get much more default-y, but I can't bear any lack of clarity, or DARITY, in the text. So far, I haven't found any WP themes I like better.

Update: I changed the title to "Strangely Massive" from what it was previously.

Bad

Worse

A remark below implying that keyboard players might be wasting the Receptor multi-plug in module was inspired by one of the demos on the Receptor site, a video of a professional "keyboard whiz" playing different patches and mostly showing off his fast, Rick Wakeman-esque fingering techniques. He says "here's an organ" or "here's a glitchy electronica sound" and proceeds to play the same type of riff, each with a different state of the art timbre.

In the movie Moog Herb Deutsch recalls that, in the early stages of designing a portable music synthesizer, Vladimir Ussachevsky recommended that Robert Moog not add a keyboard, because he felt that would encourage playing the instrument in a traditional way, as opposed to discovering new sounds it was capable of. That observation was prescient since most players went on to use the Moog as a kind of spacy organ. And they still are: the fellow in the demo has this powerful box packed with elaborate soundware (including Reaktor and all its DIY instruments) and he's using it to play prog licks.

I wonder if Duchamp's phrase "stupid as a painter" might also apply to musicians who think mainly with their hands.