Day: August 5, 2007

"Drum Thing 2"

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"Drum Thing 2" [mp3 removed]

This is a short, straight up drum and bass tune. It's what they would have called a "dark roller" at Breakbeat Science (back when I used to hang out there and shop for vinyl--I kind of miss the drill), but the synth bass is a bit geeky for that. It's almost all commercial samples, I just wanted to see if I could do this, all the retriggering of amen breaks, etc. I am now closer to understanding the music I collected in some depth about 7 years ago. In a future post I'll show how all this works.

2006 performance vid

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2006 Performance Screenshot

excerpt from Suite 6 (Live): [29 MB .mp4]

My first and only public appearance to date performing my own tunes, at artMovingProjects on May 19, 2006. It was billed as a lecture/performance because I expounded on the gear between songs. Thanks to Aron Namenwirth for the videography and Justin Strawhand for digitizing the video. Neither of them is to blame for the compression artifacts from shrinking the files for the Web--that was my doing.

Robot warfare in Iraq: a bad joke

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iraq robot 2

iraq robot 1

...literally at our expense. Can't solve a problem? There must be some gear we can throw at it. American knowhow and all that. The top photo came from antiwar.com--not sure where they got it. It almost looks like the soldier is a quadraplegic riding the robot but he appears to be squatting behind it, possibly adjusting it so it doesn't spray wild bullets at American soldiers. The bottom photo is from Wired, putting the "all tech is good tech" spin on things as usual.

The military fascination with robotics is mirrored in the art world: from VVork comes a link to this Dutch psych-test-cum-conceptual-art project where viewers mull over whether to stick their hands inside a device mimicking the scene in Aliens where the android stabs a knife between a man's fingers at lightning speed. People are afraid to put their palms down on the template and don't entirely trust the device. Well, duh.

To quote Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories, "the perfect marriage of technology and the human form is death."