general

Contemporary Art Daily's semi-official documentation of Michelle Grabner's show at MOCA Cleveland [hat tip schwarz] has, among other items of interest, a streaming version of her video as a member of CAR, Dale Chihuly Glass Camp for Boys (scroll about halfway down), 2002, which I saw in her then-gallery in NYC and had been looking for reappearances of.

One of the highlights of the Joanne McNeill editorial era at Rhizome.org was this Jack Womack interview.
Have been reading Womack's books and highly recommend them. Most were written in the late '80s/early '90s, when parts of Manhattan were still grungy, so by the dot com era the books' visions of militarily cordoned-off neighborhoods seemed somewhat off the mark. Manhattan has only gotten more fabulous, and Womack didn't foresee the Internet as mass soporific keeping the plebes down, but the books' essential truths about who is really running things have only grown more stark in our present era of "inverted totalitarianism," as political philosopher Sheldon Wolin terms it. Every day in every way, to paraphrase a fellow Womack reader, it's becoming a Dryco world.

Belated thanks to Paddy Johnson for her plug of my LP release on Bandcamp. She calls it micro-fundraising but my cleverly-worded announcement actually said "If you've been a reader/RSS follower this is a way to support the blog without me having to do annoying fundraisers." Maybe that was disingenuous, but I would love for you to buy the LP so that you can have, as one listener said, "something in heavy rotation on my home server," not because my blog needs financial support. I have no staff (despite occasional use of the editorial we) and hosting fees are cheep. When it's time for this thing to die it will just stop one day.
A curator once told me "your blog is your art." This was irksome because he was making a studio visit and pointedly ignoring the artwork on the walls he'd asked to come look at. (This was before I showed the blog as art, but that was a performance, not a Mary Kelly-style life work.)

All that said, I greatly appreciate everyone who bought the LP (including Paddy) or even tossed in a little extra, whatever the reason.
I'm proud of the music and felt like it kicked up a notch at the end of 2013. I wanted to show my own commitment to it by making it non-free.
Am pretty much ready to go with release #2 but have been debating whether to restrict it to tunes I consider catchy or whether to include some of the art shit.
I kind of feel like if I'm asking you to pay you should have 10 tunes that are somewhat fun to listen to, in the post-8 bit, not quite PC Music mold (more great tunes over there by the way, and free d/ls).
This means either saving up the "art" tunes for a later "difficult" omnibus or continuing to release them piecemeal on the blog, with production notes as I've been doing.

Unlike yours truly, Paddy is having a fundraiser (or just concluded one, with a benefit upcoming) and I recommend you kick in. I wish she hadn't used a quote from Holland Cotter saying that magazine-style online efforts were an improvement over (by implication) those nasty unidimensional (ick) solo blogs. His exact words: "a feisty mix of voices [that is] a welcome alternative to the one-personality blog of yore." Of course he'd say that, as a New York Times journalist who lost much Godlike power in the last decade to those pajama wearing goofballs who can incidentally write circles around boring mainstream journos.

OK, that's a gross exaggeration, but I keep coming across demonstration music and videos that possibly intrigue more than the products they're designed for, or at least, function quite well as aesthetic entities outside their educational frame. Case in point, tybamm's super-miniwave generator software [YouTube demo], intended for creating 8-bit wavetable waves for the Doepfer A-112 sampler module (Eurorack format). I tried using the software but it's only vouched for as a W7/32-bit tool and I'm W7/64 (one reason I don't hold myself out as an 8-bit artiste -- too many bits). REBOL and the software are above my skill level anyway so for the moment I'm resigned to being a voyeur. What's happening in the demo is tybamm is creating sound waves for eventual transport via MIDI dump to the A-112. Once they're loaded, the module (first and foremost a sampler) is played like a wavetable oscillator with sound output that can be filtered, enveloped, etc in the modular hardware.
On a pure design level you gotta love the Russian constructivist-style graphics being created out of blue lines before your eyes. And unlike, say, Soundcloud waves that resemble long turds, there is a compelling relationship here between the sculptural shapes of the waveforms and the music they produce (which you can hear in real time as the wavetables are being prepared).

Last March, following a Simon Reynolds recommendation, I discussed a popculturecrit blog by Carl Neville called "Holding Out for a Hero." It appears Neville took it down but have not seen this before: when you go to a dead Blogspot link you are prompted to sign into Google, and if it IP-recognizes you, it pre-inserts your login name and offers a box for a password.
(I've bailed on most Google products but they seem eager to have me back.)
The login screen makes it look like the content is still there but "private" -- it doesn't say yea or nay about what you'll see when you (re-)enter the bosom of the Google Family of Fine Products.
I don't particularly want to find out. Of course, as the purchaser of Blogger many years ago, Google has a right to exploit dead links as a snare for new customers but still, it looks Dark Pattern-like to me.

Hard at work on my second Bandcamp LP. Thanks again to the people who bought the first one and for the intrepid "first followers" who gave shoutouts on Twitster.
Right now I have eighteen potential candidate songs, some published, some not, and some getting makeovers. Ones with "actual '70s breakbeats" are acquiring reconstituted, holistically related grooves with no deadly litigation bait. This is a fun but time-consuming project of replacing beats with "legal" drum hits, and in the process altering the rhythm beyond even a computer's recognition. Am learning what goes on in the mind of a '70s drummer but also thinking what a modern, relevant version of that beat would be.
Am continuing to have some fruitful back channel discussions with fellow musicians in the micro-genre of whatever-our-genre-is. For me it's defined in part as "visual artists invading music" and not having the usual biases about performer hand skill genius, the naming of chords, or the sentimentalizing of keys (e.g., "A Minor is suitable for expressing 'the sad effect' -- what rubbish). A piece of music is an artificial construct like a painting, where time-based authorship is sidelined and conventional emotional states are thought of as cliche.
My interest in samplers is not so much for quotation as for harvesting waveforms. Simple waveforms intrigue on their own, without connections to '80s music.

Am reading Curtis Roads' Microsounds, a book about granular synthesis. That reminded me about Xenakis' "Concret PH," a pre-digital granular work made with short tape snippets of the sounds of smoldering charcoal, arranged in clouds that moved around the inside of a World's Fair pavilion.

Update: Minor edit for tone.