Basslines to Baselines

After a Sunday afternoon shower I am refreshed, a little groggy, but peaceful and self satisfied in my sense of acomplishment, until the work that I have spent the better part of my morning and afternoon on slowly tempts me back to my computer desk. My effort to reign in the ephemera of my life has one main prize: my digital audio library.

My growing problem is that my voracious appetite for music and tendency for intensity, I have grown a massive and messy mp3 collection. In the early days of 2001–’02 I would download and organize music in a real haphazard way. Once I discovered that I liked using iTunes in late 2004 I went through a minor personal revolution. iTunes enables such an intuitive, precise, and dynamic control of parsing and viewing music it was mind expanding. The sort of double edged sword of this control is the need for good metadata, as in each mp3 should have (at least) Artist, Album, Track Name, Track Number, Year, Genre, and of course - Album Art. Suffice to say that most of the stuff I download nowadays is more and more purchased and already really well tagged (at a later date I will discus my ethics about downloading mp3s).

This is the first part of a longer piece that I will be publishing on Gather. It is a work in progress that I’m taking my time with. Comments apprecaited.
Throughout my life my music collection has been a slowly evolving project, a kind of on going dialogue between my recorded-sound media and my desires, aspirations, and personal experiences. Possessions may not fully define us, but they certainly say something about us, and how one decides to situate their recordings with regard to one another, says even more. Not only which recordings, but which media they are contained on. The type of media in turn determines how one can organize and provides the ways in which we can view this collection. My collection of sound media breaks down – ordered roughly by quantity – as follows: mp3, vinyl, cd, cassette, and maybe even the one or two 8 tracks. Each media has it’s own physical characteristics which provide certain opportunities and prohibitions in management and influence how I experience the music for personal enjoyment and DJing.

Vinyl

The size and tactility of vinyl make it an extremely desirable object. The size of the package means that the album art is often more striking, more memorable, more connected to the sound. Playing a record demands your attention, especially for singles which contain as little as five–seven minutes of audio per side. While full length albums can have as much as something like 20 minutes this is still a pretty brief period of time: a 60 minute album will require five separate trips to the turntable (without an automatic mechanism, three). This high level of attention creates a strong connection to the object and the music on it and as a playback medium there is a sculptural quality to a turntable that no other mechanism has, deepening the ritual of returning to the device. The surface of vinyl can be slightly precious, but it’s no summer peach, it has utility and is resilient to pretty much everything but direct sunlight and sharp edges (especially the diamond tip of the stylus). The surface is also unique in that it’s physicality is a sound encoding verging between micro and macro: with a careful attention hints to the nature of this near micro world are revealed. A fascinating caveat in watching a record play is understanding time in a medium that has a self evident clock whose proportion is not distributed evenly: time compresses closer to the center of the disc. Learning the ability to figure for this compression is just one of the many factors that deepens the sense of connoisseurship for this dying medium.

The experience of using the record influences how to organize.

Rick and I went out to see Dieselboy and it was the best show I’ve seen at Foundation in it’s first year. I was impressed with the diversity of styles by DSL playing quite a few more of the upbeat type anthems and less super-rough stuff that I’ve been hearing on some of his recent sets available on the net. A notable exception is when he dropped Ewuns - Screwup VIP which just hits so hard.

The night was sponsored by Sound.In.Motion and per JT’s love of mixing it up a hard-techno DJ went on right before DSL (and after a female D&B DJ that I believe was Jen Symmetery but I’m not entirely sure). Regardless it was comfortably packed and totally on point crowd. Fun bass pressure.

See the video on YouTube.

Of the various attendants present at the special Making Music conversation, as part of the 2007 Spark Festival, I’m unsure how many were already aware of Morton Subotnick and his work. The Spark Festival is an annual convergence of contemporary electronic music culture hosted at the University of Minnesota. It’s a festival with over seven years under it’s belt, infusing academic flavor with undertones of bedroom experimentalism and general electronic music enthusiasm. The group gathered that night seemed to embody the range of professional to curious, trained to self-taught, no doubt many from the University’s School of Music, but also a definite fanboy constituency carried over from the initially scheduled Richard Devine (who cancelled due to illness). This was my first year attending a Spark festival event, and a prosperous entry point. For everyone present an illuminating conversation took place between – I believe his name is – JG Everest and one of the earliest living electronic music composers I will ever have the chance to see in person: Morton Subotnick. There is a fascinating quality about watching a man some 70 years of age, who participated in some of the earliest experiments of synthesized sound, talk lucidly about his experiences growing up a child prodigy clarinet player. My perceived barrier between electronic music and the older generations was completely punctured in a delightful way. Subtonick was completely self-assured of his impact on music, without an air of self-importance or snobbery. The man’s work and opinions are very intellectual but expressed in a very accessible way – the casual listener may not understand all of the names or places he references but it doesn’t make one feel stupid for not knowing either. His most well known work, Silver Apples of the Moon, is described as “[a commission] by Nonesuch Records, marking the first time an original large-scale composition had been created specifically for the disc medium”. Throughout the night Subtonick underlined this idea that there is a difference – in his mind a moral imperative – between music designed for live performance and music for the disc medium. This concept was one that I strongly resonated with. During the course of his talk I realized how Subtonik was practicing sound synthesis, filtering, and sampling at least 15–20 years before hip hop, electro and disco would take it to a mass audience. Even though I was well aware of some basic history about early electronic music, hearing a person relive it with their own story caused a new kind of understanding of these facts. The adoption of the avant garde tendencies espoused by Subtonick and his like minded contemporaries into mainstream culture were delayed (and consequently mutated by) technological access. In the pioneering days the equipment needed for electronic music cost tens of thousands of dollars (not adjusted for 45 some years of inflation) and sat in isolated University research labs for special practitioners use. It’s interesting to consider that the explosion of electronic music in wider music really happened when average (even poor) people (like the guys in Detroit, Chicago and the infamous Boroughs) had access to drum machines and samplers through in second-hand shops via well-paid label producers found no use for the novelty technology. It highlights — what I currently understand to be — an initial division between two separated but intellectually harmonious worlds of electronic music. In the past decade this gap between the two worlds of dance orientated music and the avant garde have kind of closed in a single loop, even more heightened by common tools which are widely available to anyone and highlighted by things like the Spark Festival (just look at their sponsors list) which clearly have an academic bent but also share the fringes with more experimental forms of dance music.

I love meta-data. I love mp3s. I love iTunes.

But I really don’t like not being able to natively edit the elusive “Podcast Tag” they’ve implemented in iTunes 7.

What ends up happening is that when you download any audio file from an RSS feed, iTunes tags the file as a podcast (Apple’s own extended id3 attribute) and keeps it in a seperate part of iTunes interface. For most users this is a great solution, and I apprecaite this UI-design for most podcasts I listen to. But there are definite times when I want these podcasted files to mingle with my music instead of podcasts. Months ago, the first week version 7 was available, I spent a night downloading some mp3 meta-data editors and got no where, other than being reaffirmed in my respect for iTunes overall design…

… but damn Apple’s occasionally overdistilled simplicity!
However tonight the mood was right, and knowing if I gave it a few months someone else in the wide web world would figure out a solution, gold has been struck. At least I think — I should to actually verify this process published on macoshints before endorsing it, but in the least here is a starting place.

New Drum & Bass tunes that I had to have physical copies of arrived at the office today:

Back to Your Roots, No Escape, Warehouse / Destroyed, No Soul, Reservoir / The Feed, Midnight Special, Jump / Flatline, Ni Ten Ichi Ryu (Teebee Remix) / Sidewinder (Infiltrata & Hochi Remix), Be There 4 U, Falling / Out of Time (Calyx Remix), Dance All Night (Calyx Remix) / Freak Seen (not audio links you mp3 hungry fools!).

Their arrival prompted a discussion on the desirability to add a turntable to the office, which was mostly suggested to up the Lounge atmosphere. We’re talking retro here. Though I have low expectations of this transpiring I think it’d be pretty fantastic to listen to my collection at work.
With the the package sitting open on my desk it was a hard last three hours of the workday.

When I got home I rolled Back to Your Roots over Jump and felt a bit like a DJ Friction biter, only because he introduced and basically got me hooked on Back to Your Roots via his essential mix *. Additionally he starts Next Level 2 with Jump and I played around with a non-disruptive looping effect (called ‘roll’) on my DJM-800, which I suspect Friction also used on Next Level 2, but damn that songs lends itself to mashing & looping… soo good.
* also see - and a much better mix - Madd’s set with a fucking brilliant mashup of this song.

Recently I upgraded from iTunes 6 to 7 – with some subversions in between – and man, I’m loving it. Whenever someone is dominating, people got hate. Sometimes for real and sometimes to front. All the iTunes 7 haters need to step off. While the initial bugs are not fun, most of them are just quirks resulting from the changes in 7. In the cases of real bugs, they get fixed pretty darn quick. Is itunes 7 a flop? Fuck no! People are pitching a fit over what is a pretty standard process - not everything works perfect the first time. Most of the reports of bugs seems over-inflated, in part caused just by the fact that it’s ‘visually’ so different. It’s that whole psychology of having breaking the familiar and creating a sense of anxiety which creates the perception of problems real and imagined.”If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the common invocation, but while I wouldn’t called iTunes 6 broke, iTunes 7 sure doesn’t need to be fixed anytime soon. Four & a half reasons to love #7: * Seamless playback between files (a.k.a. “Part of a Gapless Album” checkbox under file info) : finaly, I can play DJ mixes broken into multiple tracks without the painful stab of silence inbetween tracks. * Creating two new views - one that incorporates Coverflow and one that groups albums with artwork thumbnails : this could be two points but in short, both views are incredibly useful; “Cover Browser” (as they call it) is a great way to browse your collection with the Coverflow interface, now, without having an external application; “grouped with artwork” is great for me as I like to hunt down files that aren’t in albums and this makes my hours long works sessions of sifting through my music hunting stray songs that much more visually pleasant and slightly more efficient. * The interface change - while initially jarring - is that much better : not merely a superficial refresher, but it is easier to comprehend in the left bar area, plus the brushed metal was maybe becoming overdone, so the more subtle texture works; even shifting the logo and the file icons associated with iTunes from green to blue makes sense… that is after the feeling of betrayal washes away (similarities to Windows blue were confirmed with another Mac head). * The new “Album Artist” tag : another really useful feature for DJ mix albums broken into multiple files; it’s hard to explain this if you’re not anal about tagging, and a collector of DJ mixes as well, but imagine any compilation that is handpicked by a cool, notable person and you want to somehow retain this information with the compilation album, and the title itself doesn’t naturally include their name… what do you do? do you replace each tracks artist tag with the compiler/DJ’s name ? no, bad form - you like your information and you don’t want to pollute your files with confusing tag style. what if you added the compiler/DJ’s name as the ‘composer’? well no again, composer is for the person who wrote the song (which is not always the same as the performer), relevant for classical songs, cover songs, or standards. Album Artist to the rescue! I’m told that it also solves the problem where two or more artists have the same album title (e.g. the ubiquotous ‘Greatest Hits’). For these reasons I don’t even mind the slight speed hit (perceptible only on my 120+ gig music collection, my laptops 10 gigs has no noticeable lag). Big ups the iTunes team at Apple. Boh code selektahs!