"Downsampled Rave Stomp"

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"Downsampled Rave Stomp" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

This tune uses a couple of hardware sampler modules. Many of the sounds are reduced from a CD-quality 16 bit depth/44.100 sample rate to 8 bits and/or a 22.050 Khz sample rate, in order to be playable in the modules. When the samples are triggered at different pitches they lose some further sound quality. But then they are recorded and mixed with other sounds in Ableton at "32 bit float" (that is, high quality). Ableton changes the speeds again so they conform with the pitch and bpm of the project. Then the samples are saved back down to mp3. Small wonder some of these "stabs" are the audio equivalent of passed-around, screenshotted Instagrams (note topical reference).

social media detoxing with Travis Hallenbeck

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Travis Hallenbeck just concluded a web residency [link may hang but it will load] where he spent a month away from social media and tried to reconnect with the old world of just following links around the web and finding stuff. The concepts are discussed in an interview titled A Disillusioned Netizen. Worth a read.

Hallenbeck said that when you stop posting on Facebook they hit you with emails saying "we love you, come back and visit [names of your friends]." Not an exact quote, but yuck.

The Art Guys, Situation Sculpture #4: Designated Natural Area

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More wonderfully deadpan quasi-Earth Art [Internet Archive] from Houston's Art Guys. An ordinary median strip is designated as a "natural area," with documentation photos of flora (patches of dead grass), fauna (bird feathers), artifacts (discarded candy wrappers), and "wayfinding" (spraypainted utility markings).

artguys_situationsculpture4

A previous Situation Sculpture was The Flying Stump (no longer flying).

unpublished link to Paul Slocum's surf club history

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Paul Slocum compiled an internet surf club history, where he explains the "clubs" as the product of a particular technological moment, specifically, the use of PHP and MYSQL in the late '90s/early '00s to make dynamic websites, a practiced that flourished in the mid-'00s. His listing of the main group blogs employing these techniques for "art," including sites that preceded and followed them (for context), is thorough, if lacking in value judgments. All these sites can't be good, in fact many of them weren't.
Slocum's original, clean HTML design for the history can be found on this archive page at Rhizome.org.
Rhizome posted the history on its blog, where it added a second side scroll, made navigation more awkward, and kiboshed the "retro" effect of the HTML page. Their blog, you may recall, is the result of a recent redesign by Coca Cola's ad agency, which added zany upside down fonts and rendered past content on the site invisible. The blog is also now published separately from the Rhizome front page, for some reason.
There was back channel discussion of the possibility that Slocum's survey would coincide with the "official" archiving of the surf club Nasty Nets. Rhizome saved all the posts from that site and published them on their back pages but never finished the conservation. Curiously, the far more art-world-friendly (some might say conservative) site Vvork was lovingly preserved for future generations (or until the next site redesign).

"Blooming Union (Wavetable Variations)"

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"Blooming Union (Wavetable Variations)" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

Speaking of the A-112, it was used throughout this tune; specifically, the sound source is the "Wiard waves," which I was finally able to transfer to the module.
The beginning section is in a non-4/4 time signature; I used an Ableton "groove map" to keep the beats in some semblance of sync with the A-112.
Some bass and synth lines were recycled from "Blooming Union" because I wasn't tired of them yet and that piece is only two minutes long.

Update, June 7, 2016: Revised and reposted. Sped up the tempo (after the intro), added bass lines, and made the beats more 4/4-ish.