tom moody

Recommended: earcon's Party Lion CD, available at CD Baby. Tuneful electro with just the right balance of refinement and raunch. Yours truly did the (8 Bit) cover drawing. Also at the link is an interview I did with earcon (aka John Parker) a few years ago, which describes his music and working methods. I'm slightly less ignorant now than when I wrote those questions but the answers are as good a blueprint for a sound artist/musician as ever.

Update: more info about the CD on Parker's site.

These photos aren't from the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), where I saw the Mary Heilmann show last week; they are from the Secession in Vienna. The CAM exhibit looked somewhat like this, but the paintings enjoyed less wall space, the walls met at angles, not perpendiculars, the floor wasn't glossy, and there were no domineering overhead light panels. I liked the crowding and the cockeyed space--you could see more at a glance and note the all-important subtle differences in these thinly painted, deceptively simple canvases. The boxy seats with lawn chair webbing were a nice touch--I didn't ask if you could sit in them, fearing the answer would be no. Heilmann is the best of the smart dumb painters (abstract variety) and could teach the young'uns cluttering the galleries with their graduate thesis shows a thing or two about restraint, that is, knowing when a piece is done, but also how not to quit a work too soon. Her intelligently worked out pseudo-geometry, clunkiness of paint application, and exquisite eye for color make an unbeatable combo.

Here's my post from a few years ago on The Last Man on Earth, the definitive movie so far based on Richard Matheson's novella I Am Legend.
Don't bother with that Will Smith timewaster--it's a dumbed-down, Hollywoodized version of the story. Some of the early atmosphere is poignant and makes you think it's going to be a credible update of Matheson's tale of unrequited grief and political obliviousness but then it turns to ultra-fast CGI zombies hurling themselves at the camera.
The zombies change from smart to dumb and back again with the scenery.
It's another case of coked-up tinseltown screenwriters not telling a coherent story and wrapping it up with feelgood cliches (Akiva Goldsman may not actually be coked up but certainly writes like he is, having previously jabbered out the empty voids Lost in Space, Batman & Robin, and I, Robot).
Why can't the current adapters trust Matheson? Just go on autopilot and let him tell the story. He's a whiz at spinning yarns--he wouldn't end the story with "the hero sacrificing himself so that a theretofore unknown colony of survivors could go on."
He'd have a gut-wrenching sociopolitical twist, or something.

see below. after exhausting the photos I could take from one sitting position I pulled out the ballpoints and tried to depict what the airport and American Airlines were doing to my brain.

Thanks to American Airlines I was 3 hours late getting home to NY, despite the perfection of the weather in Houston, where I sat on the ground for two hours, waiting to travel to Dallas for my connecting flight to La Guardia. The weather was also perfect in Dallas. Why the delay? We don't know--something to do with "maintenance." These are photos from Houston Intercontinental, which we should all be uncomfortable calling by the name of the President's dad. The top image is a puffy, lenticular poster; when you move your head from side to side, the lynx's head bobs up and down.

Even bloggers must take vacations and I am on one.
I felt that I attempted the impossible interviewing Paul Slocum last month about his sample remixer without actually having used it: the Q&A went on and on but it was like the proverbial sight-impaired men describing the elephant.
So I traveled to Texas to get a demo (and visit family members).
In the interview I asked Slocum how his software differed from Cubase or similar music production programs.
The differences are described below.
Like the sample remixer, Cubase allows you to load a long (song length) sample, cut it up into any number of clips of varying lengths, place those snippets on tracks so they play simultaneously or staggered, with on-off commands triggered by a vertical cursor passing through all the tracks. You can also copy and paste any number of sub-sequences of clips to other points on the editing grid.
Where the Slocum sample remixer differs:
1. The random loop point finder is a quick way to generate interesting-sounding clips and add them to the grid.
2. The interface is very fast because it is text-based. In other words, instead of wasting CPU resources drawing graphics of clips (with little pictures of the waveforms), the Slocum device simply shows an asterisk against a colored background.*
3. The point is not to make conventional music with a common tempo and key--the goal is abstract or semi-abstract music that is polyrhythmic, a-harmonic, and glitchy sounding, yet obeys a set structure. One could do most of this is in Cubase or Sonar but not as quickly or with the same sense of liberating experimentation this device gives you of creating random loops on the fly. (I don't know how close it is to Ableton live in terms of speed.)
4. The interface is elegant and "lo-fi"--like an ASCII version of Cubase.

*Afterthought question for Paul: how long is an "asterisk"'s worth of music? Is it the entire length of the sample, or does the on-off grid cut it off at the note length? (I assume it's the latter.)

Update from Paul: "The asterisk is a half measure of music. So a half-note at whatever you have the tempo set to. "

artist unknown

"Dark Materials" [2.3 MB .mp3]

More "grain cloud" percussion and electro blorts with a prog-influenced melody line.

Named in honor of the Philip Pullman movie that is tanking at the box office as we speak. All the sh*t news sources like the Comcast homepage refer to it as "Nicole Kidman's anti-Church movie." Pullman wrote the books for smart kids, though.

"Salsa Science" [4.1 MB .mp3]

Slow latin-like tune for digital mallet instruments and "grain cloud" percussion.
Also, note orchestral triangle with LFO-controlled panning.