Basslines to Baselines

This amazing series of videos feature musician/dj/visionary Theo Parrish. The Red Bull Academy has lots of great videos but this man’s talk struck me as particularly relevant to my situation as an artist/dj and just generally. In a word: raw-wisdom (it’s a contraction, dig-it).

I have a hard time following day-to-day politics as most of the available information is pointlessly superifical (CNN) incredibly partisan (MoveOn) or usually a bit over my head because the stories can often be incredibly complex.
Thank God for friends who keep up on these things and help me fill in the blanks. That’s what Steve Abraham did for me in a recent Myspace message exchange. After I finished my ungrad degree in 2004 I had time to attend some Anti-war rallys, which was great. However once Saddam had been toppeled things became a little hazy for me: while I was firmly against going to Iraq in the first place I also believe that the U.S. has an obligation to repair the damage it had done. (Hey no doubt Saddam was a tyrant, but spreading Democracatic values is not as easy as killing one tyrant, the U.S. has a pretty dilltued view of it’s ability to spread Democracy). Suffice to say the issue seemed much more complicated than exit-ASAP or the alternative stay-the-course-(indefintiely).

FINALLY, thanks to Steve, I have found a plan I can get behind:

HR 1234 The Plan to End the Iraq War
BUT WAIT… hours after publishing this post I found a counterpoint from one of my favorite authors: Howard Bloom, check his blog entry Backbone! for more about the necessity of continued U.S. presence.

In either case I’m torn between the Machievellian neccessity and a moral desire to reform our presence — what can be done that is both practical and moral?

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.

This previwe for Joel Surnow’s “The 1/2 Hour News Hour” looks hysterically weak.

The “conservative” answer to the Daily Show spirals into unintentional self parody so quickly I feel like I’m watching something created by - not in response to - Jon Stewart.

Before they take this crap live let’s hope they’ll figure out that satire is about exploiting current events, not about trying desperately to cut-down Barack Obama. What makes the Daily Show work is the format is mocking the news first, and – since Stewart took over for Kilborn – politics and everything else second. Wait, I take that back, let’s hope they don’t forget it out and get canned after four episodes.

Since my friend Carl lent me Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion my mind has been primed for delving deeper into evolutionary theory. Last week I had the good fortune of finding myself at the Bell Museum’s Café Scientifique lecture/discussion series (held at the immaculate Varsity Theatre); the topic: Evolutionary Biology. The idea behind these events is to engage the public with scientific researchers in an informal way. A superb idea.
For a full report on the event I suggest Greg Laden’s blogpost. Suffice to say I had a blast. After the event Carl (who invited me in the first place) and I ran into the panelists and organizers at the Kitty Kat Club, which offered another layer of interaction to understand this volatile topic. I enjoyed it most when the discussion looked at the historical, social, political, and - to a lesser extent - philosophical, aspects of the topic. While I did learn new stuff about evolution, it was thankfully a discussion that did not get too technical.
To boil it down, the reoccurring theme was the evident divide between public understanding and scientific understanding. The mere fact that something in the vicinity of over 50% of the American population believes that the earth is a mere 6,000 years old (in accordance to a literal reading of the Bible) is somewhat of a shock. Of course put in perspective this is understandable, and needs to be understood or we’re kind of fucked.
A tangential Google search lead me to – of all people – Scott Adam’s blogpost about the subject of Intelligent Design and he offers a smart(-light-on-the-)ass point of view about why the public is not convinced by evolution. It’s a little more than coincidental that Adam’s post is in response to a blogpost by PZ Myers (I apologize for initially misspelling it: Meyers), one of the more outspoken panelists at the Café.
Myer’s could be the poster-child for scientists who should be shoed away whenever a layperson wants to know something about science. Don’t get me wrong, what little I know about the man I can say he’s well intentioned and is – above all else – intellectually genuine. But he’s got no tact, absolutely none for the uninitiated. To put it another way, scientists seem to lack the kind of communication skills needed to present science to the public – and who can blame them they probably should be doing other things. And yet we need this now more than ever.

How can we bridge this gap? Dilbert might be a good start.

It’s hard to find a hint of anger in Sam Harris’ voice when he and Reza Aslan debate ‘Religion and Reason’ as broadcast on CSPAN’s BookTV. ( web / real video )

Whereas some of Harris’ debate partners can get a little sandpapery, puffing-out-their-chests trying and insulating their battered agurments with poor logic and weak statements propped up with self-important attitude. At least that’s what happened with Dennis Prager and Harris did a four-round exchange about faith for Jewcy.com.

To be fair, Sam Harris is not a gentle human being, but he’s not cruel either; at least not outside of the bounds of a healthy intellectual debate. He has the simple advantage of having impeccable rhetoric and reasoning.

Which leads to the question, does faith stand a chance against reason in any debate? Keep in mind that I don’t think that intellectual debates are the be-all-end-all of truth, just one useful tool for exploring an issue.