general

You're angry. You've been out of work for months, your retirement savings are dwindling, and the water in your town is polluted. So you decide to organize resistance... by clicking on stuff.

iCitizen is not a bad joke -- it's a real iPhone app designed to siphon political rage into meaningless screen-touching, or rather, "tak[ing] part in polls to let your representative know where you stand on hot-button topics." Here are a couple of the "revolutionaries" responsible (they actually call themselves that):

hat tip sm

Lawrence Lessig is walking across New Hampshire because of corruption, or something, in Aaron Swartz's memory, he says. I don't particularly want to sign up for HuffPo just to comment on this article, so here's my comment:

The US attorney and prosecutor who hounded Swartz still have jobs and are pretty smug about it. Lessig works at Harvard, a cushy job. Swartz, however, is dead. Not sure if walking across New Hampshire helps that situation.

earlier lessig-doubts

Realized I was undercutting my sales strategy by having mp3s up of the songs available for streaming or purchase (!) on Bandcamp. So I changed all those links.
Thanks to the people who supported the blog and phattened their playlists by ponying up for the LP, called Silent and Spectral.
Limited thanks to the individual who showed his support by screenshotting this boilerplate from the Bandcamp page:

This person does actually listen to the tunes -- this may stop now that I've gone commercial.

Starting the new year with some music recommendations. It's kind of superfluous in an age when so many sites tabulate user preferences and then eagerly wait to see what you click on. All this blog can offer is the promise that (i) this will be fairly abstract and below-the-radar and (ii) not to check whether you actually follow the links.

Unicorn Hard-on has evolved quite a bit since her Myspace days. Her new LP Weird Universe comes digitally and on vinyl. (Am thinking that a label's willingness to make a record for you signifies that you've made it, whatever its ultimate value as a commodity.) I actually purchased the vinyl but you can sample the work YouTubically: check out "Rock Salt" and "Mysterious Prism."
My impression on hearing this music was that she has been performing live steadily the last few years and that has honed her sound. Working solely with Electribe grooveboxes and FX challenges you to stay out of the rut of repetition the sequencer keeps dragging you into. Normally piling one track on top of another over the course of a six minute song doesn't work too well compositionally but UH-O pulls it off here. The tracks add depth and texture instead of just getting louder. Am guessing this has something to do with having a live audience, or a long succession of live audiences, and determining ways to keep their interest with limited means. Weird Universe may be classified as noise or industrial but it hews closer to early '90s techno-trance with its clap delays and 303-ish fillips. There's some pitch-bending and stretching of samples in there too. A solid effort, well-nigh mythological boner inducing.

Found Groenland Orchester in the late '90s but hadn't heard their LP Nurobic before yesterday. This YouTube has bouncy geometric graphics to go with bouncy geometric music. Not all of their work sounds that pop. There's some genre-bending, even though it's essentially sampler-based or synth-based electronics, but what it mainly is, is restless, changing meters and melodies several times within a song, or even within a passage. Much appreciated for the lush ear candy throughout: this is art music to be enjoyed rather than endured.

Am coming very belatedly to Mapstation, which is one-third of To Rococo Rot (i.e., Stefan Schneider). Am recommending on the strength of one cut ("When You Collide") from a Staubgold label compilation and listening to some teaser clips from the LP it's from (A Way to Find the Day, 2002).

Happy new year, all.

from Business Insider:

As part of a European Union-funded study on social media, we are running nine simultaneous 15-month ethnographic studies in eight countries. What we’ve learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried. Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives. Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected. In response, the young are moving on to cooler things.

Twitter is "cooler"? Well, maybe five years ago. Soon the only people left on Facebook will be grandparents and the net art community. The latter joined in droves from 2008-2012 and got some crazy ideas about the significance of the move. The Brad Troemel "like economy" of cultural determination will continue to thrive in his mind, where it always resided. Ryder Ripps will hold art fairs elsewhere (or booths, whatever he did down in Miami). Hrag Vartanian might reconsider the relevance of an exhibition called #TheSocialGraph. No teens, no scene.