April 2013

jaron lanier on the internet U curve

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I recommend listening to this Jaron Lanier interview (hat tip Travis), with the video part turned off -- you don't really need to see him waving his arms and talking to the camera to get the gist.
He makes a good point that "the internet" in the Apple-Google-Facebook era is creating U shaped wealth (an inverse of the Bell Curve), with people getting rich by controlling hardware and/or data at one end of the U, bottom feeders preying on the poor with insurance and pharma scams at the other end of the U, and the vast majority of the public in the unpaid middle.
He posits Walmart as an example of where this is headed. That company got rich being the first to accumulate the data for a global distribution system, but then their chokehold on the economy became so strong that customers couldn't afford to shop there because they didn't have jobs.
(He doesn't mention Amazon but that's even more Walmart-y than Apple.)

Update: Whoops, just noticed I wrote Jared, not Jaron. Post title corrected.

"Limelite Coin Op Remix"

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"Limelite Coin Op Remix" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]

On the triphop tip, baby. (Whatever that means.) Limelite is a Reaktor virtual groovebox and most of this is straight-up from one of the presets, called "Coin Op." There are two keyboard riffs here (or rather, modulated and effected samples of keyboard sounds) - I wrote the first one and the second is by __________ (Native Instruments contractor - a genius). I also added the bass line and some percussion. I can justify making "music by kit" as, well, it's my ear and my final say, and this is giving me something I enjoy listening to, certainly more than if I just recorded twelve bars or so of Limelite playing. More of these are coming, I think.

domestic animal vortex phone painting

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manning_phone_dog

by Michael Manning, untitled post from Phone Arts
He didn't actually call it "domestic animal vortex phone painting" but Word Press software pretty much demands that every post have a caption so that's mine.
Don't want to dignify this with too much art historical blather but in lieu of "rad!" let's say it's an effective disposable image that delivers a surreal jolt while combining painting and photography in a demystified way. The painting dissolves the dog's head into a tornado of smeary color, slowing down the recognition factor and causing us to ponder the rather strange foreshortening of its limbs and the surrounding environment of what appears to be a tastefully appointed bedroom. The paint is not exactly given old master consideration but it does intelligently converse with the dog's head (turning it into a primitive mask before it explodes) and the sensuous crinkling of the bedsheets.

"Soul Fusion Disassembly"

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"Soul Fusion Disassembly" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]

This sort of resembles "Fusion Disassembly" -- some of the same instruments and ideas were used -- but this has wah-wah guitar sounds made with the modular synth running throughout.
I had done the thing on the Octatrack groovebox but thought it needed a fuller sound so I retrofit the bass and e-piano around the existing 2.5 minute file. This got tricky at the end with the piano "call and response" parts so I kind of made a joke out of it with some bad (overdramatic) comping in the chords.