deathtokoalas
well, this starts off a bit more interesting, although it falls into every-other-ambient-song-ever-made a little under halfway through.
see, i wouldn't argue lopatin is without potential. but i find he (and a lot of his contemporaries, as well) release such an incredible bulk of material that it's easy to see why so much of it is so lacklustre. maybe if they spent more time on their work it wouldn't all sound the same?
but, overall, this kind of reminds me of the time that keith emerson decided it was a good idea to redo a bunch of mussorgsky on primitive synths. it really wasn't a very good idea. that was probably prog rock's most openly pompous and pretentious (and least self-conscious) moment. this will have a similar fate in the annals of music history...
the only half decent attempt at reinterpreting classical music for synthesizers that i've heard is william orbit's "pieces in a modern style".
k l
blender rock
deathtokoalas
well, the existing genres are all tainted, and i needed a catch phrase....
it's psych, basically.
wholewurld
Listen to Isao Tomita's Pictures At An Exhibition
deathtokoalas
i really wish people would just listen to mussorgsky's pictures at an exhibition, and tell everybody that's trying to commodify it to fuck off.
VexeonX
... Fuck.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
new category.
so much of what i do is guitar music, it makes sense to pull out the material that is basically an orchestrated guitar solo.
there's a few more hidden away that i may or not pull out, depending on if this generates traffic.
it does seem to be a directory issue after all, and i'm not sure why what i did fixed it anymore. i just tried to move the entire project to a different directory, and the skips came back. undoing the process (through the menu) fixed it, thankfully. i have a hunch just copying it back wouldn't have.
after going through all the checks i did, i have to conclude it's a problem with the cubase software. this is an old version - sx 3, from late 2005. i couldn't imagine it not getting fixed. but i don't really know what it's doing that would cause this.
i've learned the lesson, though - don't change the directory.
of course, that's not at all feasible to actually hold to. i have to copy to create alternate mixes. i'm also going to want to back these files up when i'm done. i'll have to experiment with this to see what happens and ways to fix it other than re-rendering the freeze tracks.
it ended up being the mellotron i spent the night trying to get the right balance on.
i'm going to get something to eat and start the wave edits after.
this isn't final, but i've added a few parts to the track. you probably won't notice most of it, except the descending line in the bridge.
there will be minimal processing on this. this is close to a final mix.
the next section is going to be done mostly in a wave editor, and will explode from the end of this. so this will only be up for a short amount of time.
so, i'm cheating a little, but it sounds better and that's the primary focus. i mean, i'm producing a song, not practicing for the guitar olympics.
i decided it would sound better if i cut the phrases up and panned them a little. the piece is just a little dry that way it's written, with a zillion notes shooting out and no dynamics. i have this sequence doubled on piano, music box and synth guitar - i'm not really adding anything by playing over it, except a twang. but if i splice it, it will allow me to let some of the notes bleed over a little, and just give it a bit more pizazz.
it's cheating because that means i'm only playing in a few notes at a time, which is considerably easier. but, i'm not sacrificing a good sonic idea for some kind of bullshit guitar cred...
it'll be done soon.
what i will say is if i thought it sounded better in one piece, i'd force myself to do it until i got it right. but i don't.
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
gah. silly errors. need sleep....
actually, i take that back. merely hitting the pick harder eliminates the flub. user error.
the
III is still the dominant sound i want, but i'm thinking i'll probably
double track it with the stubby to get a thicker sound underneath...
it's
actually likely to almost create an octaver effect. i mean, it's not an
octaver effect. but the thinner pick seems to pushing higher harmonics
in the distortion, while the thicker one is pushing lower ones, sort of
getting the same thing.
it's going to be very delicate actually properly doubling this, though. well, tripling it. i'm going to leave the sequence in.
nah.
the big stubbies are a nice size, but they're too thick (3.0 mm). even
the 208s, which is what i wanted, are only 2.5 (i think). i normally get
2.0 mm stubbies that are intermediate in size between the jazz IIIs and
the 208s. that extra thickness is fine when i'm moving string to
string, but i hit the same notes in succession here repeatedly and it's
flubbing the string. no good...
i'm also looking for more of a
plucky, twangy, tele sound with this and the thickness of the pick is
kind of dulling it. the jazz III just sounds better...
i'm not
one to throw away a tool, so i'll hang on to these, but they're so thick
that i can't see myself using them for much besides bass.
i can handle this with the jazz IIIs, i'm just going to have to do a few extra takes to get it.
but i'll take another walk down tomorrow, because it is also means i need some normal stubbies.
back.
they
had 3 of the 4 types i use (stubbies, small jazz IIIs and 1.0 mm
tortexes - all dunlops), so i stocked up. but it was the fourth i really
wanted. i think a stubby should work for the piece.
i didn't bring one with me, but i also use dunlop 208s.
i
use the tortexes for general overall use. i think they're generally
thought of as blues picks. they're pretty versatile...good for bending
and tremoloing...
...but they're not good for certain types of
riffing because they're not thick enough. i don't riff like that often,
but when i do i want to use something like those 208s, which i first
started using as bass picks, actually. they're very good for that, too.
i
normally use the small stubbies and the IIIs solely for faster playing
because they're very pointy. i had some good threes, but i needed the
bigger surface area for the song because there's a (very) short
pseudo-sweep picking part and i just wasn't getting good grip. on the
other hand, the smaller size of the threes is sometimes better for scale
work. i jump back and forth, often without any real logic, depending on
availability and what i've convinced myself sounds better. the stubbies
also have better grip, of course.
but what i did here was
accidentally get some big stubbies that are actually closer in size to
(and a bit thicker than) the 208s, which is what i wanted in the first
place.
due to a shift in supply, i may end up replacing the 208s
and the small stubbies with the big ones. we'll see how that works out.
for now, i think i have what i need to finish the song.
i don't have the right kind of pick for this. well, i do, but they're
worn down. i need something very sharp for this, but all the sharp
picks i have are too small...
so i'm off to get picks. but i plan on having the guitar parts recorded by the end of the day, and possibly a mix up.
something else i'm going to want to get around doing soon is buying
something on bandcamp to start following people. i think that's a good
marketing tool that i'm missing out on.
and, hey, i have exquisite taste...that's a list people want in on...
i just can't conceive of buying audio files. whatever it is i buy, it will be physical...
my front page track will switch tonight around midnight. this
one will only be up a week, but it's also the first track from the
second side of the first demo, so time is moving forward.
(of
course, i'm featuring tracks in real time relative to when they were
first written a little less than 19 years ago. so, i'll be continuing to
cycle through these very early cassette demos for about the next year
or so.)
well, sort of. this is the 1998 version, which
i'm subbing in for the 1996 version for a variety of reasons. i'm just
not going to upload the '96 version. that also means that this will
cycle back in about two years from now.
i'll also be redoing this (and a few others) in instrumental form for the vst project in the upcoming weeks.
boogeyman
did well, but is a bit short of what i was hoping for. it seemed a mild
stretch for it to break 1000 hits over the month from the start, but it
seemed like the curve was moving up so i thought "maybe". the curve did
continue moving, but it distributed itself more evenly than i was
expecting. as is, it should hit 900 shortly. it will still probably be
the first to 1000, but that will likely take another month or so. it'll
certainly break 1000 when it gets cycled back again over the 66 days
that existed between the two cassette demos.
====
this
is one of the creepy tracks where i'm exploring mental illness from the
perspective of an isolated 15 year-old; the person in the song is
dealing with satanic voices that are keying on traumatic childhood
taunting and suggesting violent outbursts as a means of self-defense.
this has induced a serious level of agoraphobia.
this
is the second recording of the track (you can get to the first by
clicking through the link). the initial 1996 recording was a big step up
for me in terms of using the recording equipment. in hindsight, this
1998 version has a big upgrade in sound and a big downgrade in vocals.
well, i guess the vocals work on a different level, but, comparing them
back-to-back, what i'd like to have are the demo vocals with the
rerecording's music...
this is the first serious
example of any kind of keyboard sequencing that's more than just
background sound. there's seriously a crude string section in this
track. i hadn't really done that before.
it's funny how, the more a piece is practiced, time begins to slow down. i wonder if anybody's really studied this...
it's just perception, of course. but time is weird. relativity theory suggests (and suggests is the right word. the experiments that supposedly uphold this part of it are kind of weak. for example, they sent a plane around the earth a few times and noticed the clocks came back differently, in a way that sort of verified einstein's predictions. but, in fact, it was in the margin of error. i don't doubt einstein was on to something, and it's not like i found an error in the math or anything, but i'm a little iffy on some of the assumptions. relativity theory is an axiomatic system, built at the precise moment that axiomatic systems were being abandoned as unreliable. so, this is a perilous way to build a theory up. any future corrections to the axioms, and they're perpetually inevitable, may drastically alter the conclusions.) that time is not as constant as we perceive it as, but we're not accelerating to fractions of the speed of light very often, either, so it's not really wrong to think of it as a constant in day-to-day non-experimental life. i mean, playing my guitar isn't anything like synchronizing satellites.
but, there's no question that an ant or a fly must perceive of time as faster than we do. i mean, flies wouldn't be so hard to catch, otherwise. i guess it's just simple physics if you think about it: shorter paths for the electricity to follow. and it's true that insects are roughly comparable to primitive robots in terms of consciousness, it's just action/reaction, so that's not a totally useful comparison. but, if we could somehow be the proverbial fly on the wall, we would probably have difficulty understanding what was being said, because the waveforms would come in to us as slowed down, elongated messes. i don't even know if flies can "hear" or not...well, i guess they get vibrations of some sort but i don't know if that's actually sound or just noise.
something like that seems to happen when getting locked into the groove of an instrument. after a while, playing at 360 seems like playing at 250. it's not just a question of getting the mechanics right, it's the entire computation process. at first, the notes are blurry and it's difficult to think and play at the same time, but eventually the separation of the notes is as clear as it is at slower tempos and the ability to process the whole thing - finger movements, next notes, etc - slows down as well.
and i'm wondering if it might have something to do with higher aptitude to do various mental tasks amongst musicians. i mean, i'm not actually modifying time. my guitar is not a frame of reference. i'm not increasing my velocity. it must be that i'm thinking faster, getting my brain to work at a faster speed. physically, that would have to be synapses being built - that's what it *means* to think faster, right? to have more synapses, shorter paths, faster electrical responses. maybe the brain reuses those for math problems...
i'm rambling, just thinking out loud. but it really is remarkable how we're able to lock in and change that perception of time, whether it's the result of increasing transmission speed or something else.
there's this unfortunate tendency recently to think of intelligence as something genetic, but the brain is a highly plastic organ that is constantly changing with experience.
your current brain is not the brain you were born with. it's a highly individualized culture of cells that was built solely for you as a reaction to the experiences you've had in your life.
and it will continue changing for as long as you live.
deathtokoalas
none of you could tell the difference in a double blind test. and, let's be honest - it's not hard to figure out that what roland did was more or less repackage the juno several times. it wasn't going to remodel everything, that costs money. it just made a few minor tweaks and sold 4x as many by changing the label four times. there's all kinds of psychological reasons people pick one brand name over the other, but it's not going to hold up to rigorous testing.
they all sound the same.
i've had a jx-8p for around 15 years, without the pg, which i'm never going to use. don't do the knob twiddling thing....think it sounds cheesy in the style i write in....just program a patch and let it sit for the track. but it's central to the synth work i've done (i'm more of a guitarist).
scroll the screen down so you can't see his fingers and tell me you can hear a difference.
you can't.
there isn't one.
thomashenrydavies
You could say the same thing about most analog synths playing similar basic patches on a Youtube demo.
deathtokoalas
to an extent, i think that's true, but it doesn't really negate the observation that junos, 3ps and 8ps are really the same synth.
if the "string patch" on two different synths follows precisely the same logic, they're going to sound almost identical, regardless of what the brand name is. and, for all we know, they may have been made with exactly the same parts - kind of like how dells and macs nowadays are actually made in the same factory, and only really differ by the cosmetic difference on the outside of the box.
but that's a big if. i mean, it's one thing to say two patches on two different synths sound almost identical, it's another to say that two synths are identical.
thomashenrydavies
I don't think it's true at all to say that the Junos/JX3P/JX8P are the same synths.
Firstly, the Junos only have one OSC per voice (plus a sub). The JX synths have 2, with cross modulation capability (hard sync, soft sync, FM). This gives them a much broader sonic palette.
The JX3P and JX8P are similar, but the 3P only has one envelope, and is not velocity sensitive. Plus, the filter is different.
deathtokoalas
relative to the complexity of the device, those are remarkably minor differences, none of which justify rebranding in and of itself. basically, it means the jxs are going to be a little thicker sounding for pads, but who hasn't pointed out that the juno sounds thin? that's just fixing a minor design flaw.
it's almost like roland sat down and tried to figure out what the bare minimum mod they could make to justify a different brand name was, then did nothing else besides change the design on the front. nowadays, that's really something like a minor firmware update to fix a product that was rushed to market before final testing.
in that sense? sure, the 8p is the final product. you can expect it'll sound best. but it's virtually imperceptible.
judging from how similar they sound, i'd guess the presets on the final models are really legitimately identical to the presets on the original models...
thomashenrydavies
I really have to disagree with you on that. In the realm of analog synthesizers, a 2 OSC synth with sync and cross mod is a big, big difference from a 1 OSC synth. Opens up whole new avenues of sound design.
deathtokoalas
it could, if you use it in a specific way, but this is an obscure issue that's really only meaningful in ambient music. anything else is just going to cut your carefully synthesized patch out of the mix. i'm not being cold, but it's the truth.
if you want to make the argument that the 8p can do everything the juno can plus a bit of extra sound synthesis? sure.
but on an a/b test of the patch across the two different synths, you won't hear a difference, because they're otherwise the same synth.
thomashenrydavies
As I said, if you set any two analog synths up with identical settings, they are going to sounds pretty much the same, especially on a youtube video. I've done it with a Moog Prodigy and a JX10 - are you telling me they are the same synth? If you want to make synths sound the same, you generally can.
A 2 OSC architecture with FM and cross mod allows you to create all sorts of metallic, bell and atonal sounds tthat are simply not possible with a 1 OSC synth.
deathtokoalas
no, i'm not disagreeing with you, so much as i'm pointing out that you're suggesting a comparison the video isn't making. technically, my statement is an oversimplification - what i should have said is there's no difference between the presets because they're identical across the different synths. and, to be complete what that means is that you can create any sound on a jx that you could create on a juno, but there are sounds you can create on a jx that you can't create on a juno.
that's outside of the realm of what's being compared, though. the video is comparing identical patches and then trying to determine if they sound differently, and you've got all kinds of people saying they can hear the difference. "the juno sounds better", etc. but, there isn't a difference because the presets are using identical logic. that would never pass a double blind, because there isn't actually a difference in sound because there isn't actually a difference in logic.
and, sure you could do that with other synths, too, but it's not what the video is attempting to determine. the video is attempting to determine if identical patches sound differently across the different synths. of course they don't...
but i wouldn't dispute that you can do more with a jx than a juno. whether you can really hear the extra oscillation or cross modulation in a mix that's saturated with guitars or horns in the same range is a more subtle question, but the different sounds are no doubt available, should they be utilized purposefully.
and of course you could always multitrack the juno, right...
but, sure: the jx-8p is the superior synth. that's why i bought one instead of a juno :).
you're just not going to hear the difference across identically programmed presets that don't utilize the extra functionality and claims that you can are purely psychological.
it's pretty common for people to claim the "pure analog" synth sounds better, due to various conditioning about the superior quality of analog synths. and there's certainly some truth to it. but comparing presets on a juno to presets on a jx isn't going to demonstrate that difference, no matter how much some people want to claim the pure analog technology is superior.
if you see what i was originally getting at....
i mean, head out to the idm mailing list or something and have this discussion. you'll get an overwhelming response that the less digital a synth is, the better it sounds, without much logic put into analyzing what the synth actually does. and you'll see that kind of mindset in the comments. it's undoubtedly the actual (psychological) reason people are pulling out the juno as sounding better.
thomashenrydavies
Even with identical settings, the sound is not going to be exactly the same: the filter in a JX8P is different to that in the Juno series. Ok, it's not going to be sufficiently different as to be discernible in a youtube video, but it won't be identical. I think the Juno series, the JX3P and JX8P are different enough to warrant existence :)
deathtokoalas
i think it's a semantic question as to whether the filter is a part of the synthesizer. i'd consider it more of an effect. i mean, most people are going to equalize the synth at some point between the time the notes get pressed and the time the song gets mastered, so it's going to come out in the wash. regardless, iirc, the filters are programmable. so, if there's a difference it'd have to be on the envelope or something. and, youtube compression or not, you'd really have to have remarkable ears to the tell the difference between a 30% fade and a 35% fade, or whatever it actually is, on what is otherwise exactly the same synth patch.
thomashenrydavies
To me, the filter in a subtractive synth is possibly THE most integral and important thing. It's the primary way you shape the timbre.
deathtokoalas
just to clarify: yes, subtractive synthesis is technically synthesis. but the filters in these devices are not those kinds of filters. they're high pass and low pass filters, and are essentially eqs.
Eman Mann
You can use filters in a fixed (EQ) sense or dynamic (sweeping) synthesizer way - but there's no rule that says the static 'eq' filter is not 'synthesizer'. The old Korg synths had a filter cutoff slider, where it was up to you to manually sweep, so even a 'fixed' filter can be manipulated to act in a more 'synth-like' fashion.
deathtokoalas
synthesis is about adding and subtracting waveforms, not about running sweep filters as oscillators.
Eman Mann
Additive/Subtractive...No point in arguing semantics - don't recall mentioning self oscillation. Synth's use both types of filters, fixed (formant type) and dynamic cutoff, is all I wanted to say and of course you don't need a filter to make a synthesizer, of course the JX's use both...
deathtokoalas
but, what i'm pointing out is that this is not actually synthesis and so it's a semantic point as to whether it's a part of the synthesizer or a part of a built-in effects unit.
synthesis happens when you do one of two things, perhaps repeatedly in a complex sequence:
1) you add two waveforms together.
2) you subtract one waveform from another.
this filtering is often called "subtractive synthesis" because you're "subtracting" through the hpf or lpf, but it's really a pretty egregious use of language.
sure: it can have a dramatic effect on the sound. but, it's an eq effect; sweeping or not, it's not synthesis.
i've never played with one, but it is possible to find synths on the market that will actually subtract out a generated waveform - a sine wave, or a sawtooth wave, for example.
sorry, just to be clear on how actual subtractive synthesis would work: what you would do is invert the additional waveform and then add it to the base waveform. this would have the effect of "subtracting" the forward phase of the additional waveform from the base waveform.
an example: suppose that i have a tone that i built on a sample of a church bell and then added an inverse sine wave to it. that would remove a sine wave from the sample and would be subtractive synthesis.
running the tone through an equalizer - whether it's an hpf or an lpf or connected to an oscillator or attached to an envelope - is important when it comes to shaping sounds, and does in some way remove information, and has even been referred to as "subtractive synthesis" by most synthesizer manufacturers for a very long time, but isn't technically synthesis. and, so it's a semantic point as to whether it's a part of the synthesizer or a part of the effects unit.
Eman Mann
Though I do appreciate what you are saying, I'm stuck in the more mundane conventions that 90% of us follow. Until something comes along to make the more technically 'correct' model/approach convenient and practical to the masses, we're going to continue to be talking about VCO/VCF/VCA as being the standard building blocks of synthesis, for sometime to come. Kawai gave it a big effort with their Additive synthesis, but even after many hardware releases, it never caught enough of attention as it was too complex - FM (& Casio Phase Distortion) didn't do much to crack the related barrier of VCO/VCF/VCA, though it did convince a fair number of people to cast away their Analog machines at the time. Now we all want them back, which brings us back to the related topic - which is better, the JX3P or 8P and why? ; )
deathtokoalas
well, i'm telling you that you can't hear the difference on a double blind :)
this comment was quite a while ago, but i can tell by what i wrote that i wasn't trying to make a big deal out of this point; i said it was semantic because i didn't want to get into the debate - it was a way to brush the question aside. i then didn't respond to the last point, and i only came back to it months later when i got a notification on it, and decided it was worth clarifying for people stumbling on the discussion. i suppose, at the time, i assumed what i meant would be quickly understood and it would just be glossed over.
Eman Mann
Couldn't agree more about the 'double blind' comment, they are so much alike that people are trying to leverage their opinion based on loudness etc. Tausend Augen certainly knows how to instigate a debate. ; ) (P.S. read my Venn Diagram comment above)
i guess there's a mild similarity in the opening synth part, but the songs are not remotely similar in form or structure.
the
actual dominant influence on the opening synth (originally, piano) line
of "stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides" is the
ending piano section of "a perfect drug".
i should post links.
my song:
actual inspiration, being the piano part starting about 4:40:
my
version is far superior due to the syncopation, which i suspect most
people would miss due to the lack of percussion (besides the piano), but
the notes are coming down off the beats in shifting ways; it's like
64th and 32nd note pauses off the count. you probably wouldn't know that
without me telling you, but you might get the unsettling creepiness
that it invokes.
like, if i put a big techno beat down over that it would sound really messy because it would be all out of sync with itself.
somebody tried to suggest one of my older tunes had a similarity to a pokemon song, which i can state with a high degree of certainty that i've never heard before.
you know, i don't even know what a pokemon is. is it similar to a pog? was it like dungeons and dragons, or something? some kind of card game?
i suspect my track is older, but i don't really know because i don't know what year pokemon came out around. i wrote the track in late 2000, early 2001.
and i suspect i'm a little too old for pokemon, but i wouldn't really know, either, because i wasn't into that kind of thing when i was the right age for it.
i preferred stuff like the smurfs and care bears that had a more positive message over violent video games and boring geek shit.
but i mostly stopped watching cartoons when i was something like six years old.
and i never had advanced cable....
...so i mostly had absolutely no idea what the other kids were talking about. it's actually probably had a substantial influence on my social skills. i mean, the only thing that existed in their brains was cartoons that i had no interest in or understanding of, so there was a difficulty in communicating and interacting. the window, or the wall (or sometimes a book) generally seemed more interesting to me than repeating quotes from episodes of shows i wasn't able to watch and probably wouldn't have liked if i was able to watch them......
but i still don't know if pokemon was or wasn't one of those shows. i don't remember when or where i first heard of it. at all. and i don't care enough to look it up....
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
a very odd structure has appeared on my front lawn.
it
appears to be an electronic, flashing traffic sign asking drivers to
slow down because it's a residential area. but, i've never seen anybody
speeding through there. in fact, i'd say i see a car drive up marion and
through that intersection about once a week. the cross street at
cataraqui gets much more traffic, but there's basically nowhere to go
down marion unless you live there, and there's actually only one house
facing that way (marion is just full of a lot of large backyards that
are parallel to it) so nobody even lives there. it's like placing a stop
sign in a dead-end.
i suspect it's a camera. but, i'm not sure why they're being so low tech about it.
maybe they're frustrated by my rejection of mobile devices.
the reality is that they're not going to pick up anything interesting.
i seem to have cut my finger without noticing, and now there's blood
everywhere. i don't think i've ever done that before. like, i spent five
minutes trying to figure out where the blood was coming from, and it
just kept coming. i thought it was my nose. i thought i was going crazy,
or having some kind of stigmata event or something.
i
must have cut it when i was making lunch. i washed some strawberries and
let them dry in the sink. then i made a smoothie and a tomato sandwich,
and went and watched the beginning of greenwald v. dershowitz while i
was eating. i then put the dishes in the other side of the sink and
picked up the paper towels from the top of the fridge to rip two sheets
off to dry the strawberries. i find they keep best if you get the excess
moisture off of them and then transfer them to tupperware, so i lightly
dry them in the paper towel. i then did the dishes, and went back to
get another paper towel sheet to wipe a sneeze off the floor and noticed
the roll was full of blood. it looked downright grizzly, soaked in
through a few sheets. i thought it must be something other than blood,
but hadn't yet decided on if it was most likely to be tomato juice or
hot sauce or strawberry juice...i mean, i *knew* it was blood, but it
didn't make sense that it was blood, so it must have been something
else, and it would be determined in time.
so, i went
into the bathroom to get some toilet paper to blow my nose and there's
blood on the toilet paper roll, too. now, i'm freaking out. checked my
nose. no. was there somebody in here? is it just spontaneously
appearing? did i get bit by something? am i seriously hurt, but in shock
and can't tell? getting paranoid...
....but then i realized it was my finger, after checking over my hand several times.
i couldn't feel it at all. bizarre.
BUT
that also means my guitar calluses are back where they belong. which is good news.
i
don't think it was deep. it only took a minute to clot with pressure
applied, and there isn't even a scab. but, that was an unsettling
experience, to say the least.
i must have been bleeding for a good ten-twenty minutes, but i can't find a trail, either, oddly.
so, the landlord is putting a furnace in here. apparently, the electric coils are expensive, and he's concerned electricity is going to go through the roof. which it no doubt will. we made a huge error in privatizing the grid to market rates, and it's leading to this sort of backwardsness.
i mean, i guess natural gas isn't as bad as oil, but a smart green policy would be encouraging people to move away from fossil fuels, not towards them as a less expensive option. from an environmental standpoint, hydro powered coils ought to be what's being strived for. and, there's not any good reason for these electricity spikes other than greed resulting from private ownership. hydro isn't expensive to operate, it just runs. it should be way cheaper than gas.
so, this is a step backwards, and is the direct result of state policy. whether we're talking of renationalizing the grid, or putting caps on prices, or whatever else, the guy *at the least* shouldn't be being pushed in the wrong direction due to costs. the state *should* be incentivizing him towards the greener choice, but at the least shouldn't be pushing him towards the less green option.
see, i can't and won't argue with the guy. i know the price difference. he's not running this for profit, he's just trying to take care of his family. he's doing what he's got to do. i blame the state for forcing him to do it to break even.
it's almost like the market has set itself up to provide cleaner, hydro energy as a higher end option. if you want to be responsible and reduce emissions, you'll have to pay for it! they've turned it into a fucking product; it's a price pyramid, instead of a social policy. but how could we expect different? and how can we expect a different future without addressing the economic screw-up?
i have a nexus interview scheduled on july 17, and i've been having a hard time contacting somebody to ask for pedestrian directions over the ambassador bridge. i have never crossed the bridge before, but i'm aware that they do not allow people to cross by foot. the only information available in the directions is by car, so i don't know how i'm going to get across to the enrolment centre.
i do not own a vehicle, or even have a driver's license.
is there a place on the canadian side i can meet somebody at? if so, where? will i be allowed to cross under the tunnel (which is where i would normally cross, via shuttle) and walk along the river to the enrollment centre?
will i be forced to take a taxi? will i even be allowed to take a taxi?
j
Monday, July 7, 2014
deathtokoalas
you know, it's not like i have anything particularly bad to say about grimes. her music might mostly leave me bored, but she seems to have good taste, and the masses really need some decent filters, so, hey, why not?
i had a few chances to see her in small bars in ottawa around the time this record was released and decided against it every time, because it was a bit too poppy for me and i had limited funds that i wanted to spend on other concerts. i mean, i like the general style, and i like getting smashed and dancing at shows. i saw austra a few times. but, it was just too poppy. i remember reviewing this disc when it first came out and thinking it had some potential for real success, but it's not like there was any indication she was going to blow up the way she did. it did seem really different than her earlier stuff, which just struck me as an amateur take on the cocteau twins or dead can dance sound. but, that was pretty easy to find at the time, too. no indication, really...
i guess i'll say it was a bit confusing to me the way that she was trying to market herself as something outside of the mainstream, given that she sounded so much like madonna. it didn't really make sense to me. why wasn't she trying to market herself to a pop audience? i certainly wasn't going to get into borderline, done over for the zillionth time thirty years later. so, why was i getting this disc marketed to me? it just seemed pointless. but, i guess she found an audience in the end, didn't she? lol....
Snootches Bootches
I seriously doubt she was thinking about Marketing herself like that , shes just a down to earth girl that loves to make music .. Shes just being herself and expressing herself through these videos and her music. I suppose if you really care about music you just realease music and hope ppl like it.. If your good you wont need marketing ppl will like you.. anyways she has her own audience for this anyway
CGPig
why would she "market" herself as a pop star if that's not what she wants? I think people just get too restrained trying to categorize and sort everything with genres and stuff. it's just what it is.
Snootches Bootches
thats what im saying. shes just a chick making music
deathtokoalas
well, it's obvious that that is what she wants, which is why it was confusing. only fans of pop music could possibly find anything of interest in this...
maybe the situation isn't clear. she was trying to generate an audience in the local industrial/cyberpunk community. this does not fit in well with that culture, which is all about agitprop and the destruction of musical conventions.
i mean, one of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn't belong...
skinny puppy
collide
grimes
jarboe
see what i'm saying?
it created this sort of awkward moment, when whomever was pushing this somehow expected this group of anti-everything rivetheads (and, personally, i like the music on the fringes of this but wouldn't be caught dead looking like that) to get into the fluffiest mainstream pop music that anyone's heard in like fifteen years.
i mean, it's not that i have any particular interest in how she markets herself or who buys her records, but it was just weird that it was thought this was gonna fly with that audience, because it was so blatantly obvious that it wasn't going to. so, i, for one, was left scratching my head about it.
the young, teen pop audience is the rational one. but, you don't expect every 20 year-old kid with pop music fantasies to break out like this, y'know?
apple butter
You're confused because nothing is more pop than trying to be edgy. It's over. Outside of the mainstream IS the mainstream now. I commend you for striving for individuality, but it's a lost cause.
deathtokoalas
that's nonsense. this is just the current version of "hot topic mall goth", which was mainstream 90s culture and rather despised by people into real art. it's just another "walk to the mall and buy your identity" type of thing. there were corporatized 80s and 70s equivalents, running through cyndi lauper and t. rex and blah blah blah. and all that shit just ultimately came from andy warhol's pathetic and cynical concept of what art is.
don't trick yourself into thinking anything has changed. every generation does that, and then realizes they were wrong. nothing has changed, because the conditions for things to change have not arisen. the mass production and extreme commodification of art remains the status quo. andy warhol is not dead. to push through that change, he must be brutally murdered; his corpse must be paraded for all to see, desecrated, humiliated...
it's one thing to talk about commodification, and recognize it's endemic, it's another to give up. the entire period of commodifed art has had an underground, and it's no different today.
it's just not this. or close to this.
the confusion was grimes trying to exist in the wrong world, not that world not existing. i mean, you see this fairly frequently, actually, if you hang out with gen y kids. a lot of them just don't get that there's a cultural difference between skinny puppy and c&c music factory, because nobody's ever explained it to them and they grew up in a reality where the lines are blurred. it's in the same torrent. "80s/90s dance music" or whatever. but that doesn't mean there aren't kids that do get it, and are working on the actual fringes.
Jeremy Seip
I can't imagine how hard it must be to be an artist in this day and age. Getting shit on constantly thru social media. No wonder why there is no creativity and honesty. You'd have to be a masochist to put yourself out there and have the kids take a swing at u one after another. Even if u knew that most of the critics were coming from a place of envy or insecurity. These things weaken our psyche. As much as I might agree with some of the negative comments I don't think it adds anything constructive to the mix. We need an environment where free thought can blossom. I don't know how to fix this but it's truly the worst environment for creativity. Back when I was teen (with a gazillion opinions that I forced upon people) an artist only had to endure a few album reviews and random write ups. Thankfully billy corgan didn't have to hear my every critique. I have immense empathy for people that put themselves out there in an effort to better themselves even it's done on false pretences. Old man rant over.
deathtokoalas
i don't think we're getting to a better art scene by being filthy hippies about it. conversely, it's not like i have a lot of faith in the market to pull the best stuff out, either. but, trying your best isn't necessarily good enough. criticism is far more important than encouragement; it's part of the artist's responsibility to learn to understand what is valid criticism and what is stupidity.
so, don't coddle. it doesn't help.
to go back to my original point, grimes' fame will hopefully help others by association if she keeps name dropping. that's the actual point i was trying to get across.
corgan, particularly. he released a few pretty good records a long time ago. but he really deserves 90% of the shit that he gets...
Jeremy Seip
It's like an onslaught of voices both negative and positive silently eroding ur own sense of self which erodes the art. Obviously there are people so strong that can't be influenced but I want the shy guys and girls art too. I want it all. Take care.
U have a band or project by chance? Wouldn't mind hearing it.
deathtokoalas
click my name...youtube has highlights of the full bandcamp archive.
spankthewan
Your "music" inspired me to remove my ears.
deathtokoalas
it's probably for the best. you don't seem to have been doing anything useful with them...
i'd like to further inspire you to donate them to somebody that could make better use of them.
and instant blocks to anybody that says anything about van gogh.
polishfish
MAYBE it is possible that
you are thinking too much...
eh?
deathtokoalas
i don't know where this "too much" part comes in, or how it gets measured.
it's a persistent accusation, but i've never really been able to make sense of it. and, i'm not likely to lobotomize myself, either, so it sort of seems like there's not a resolution, if it is somehow actually accurate.
maybe it'll rain gumdrops outside tomorrow, too. who knows...
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
i really wasn't attempting to place a value on this, though, i was just pointing out that those few months when this very pop record was being marketed as darkwave were very strange to watch from a close distance.
(deleted post)
you know, i specifically said i didn't have anything bad to say, and i still get called a hater....
polishfish
not a hater, but your comment made you sound like a wine snob who dismisses a red because you "didn't detect enough oak in the bouquet"
I just meant that what you said sounded like a hasty high-brow dismissal, and I pictured someone saying it with a glass of wine, lol. You should watch her awesome 30ish minute set for a radio station- not sure which station it was...also its cool that you like dead can dance...
deathtokoalas
i think all art requires a certain level of elitism to keep it real, but it's an abstract elitism rather than the bourgeois elitism you're misinterpreting my comments as - and actually works against the bourgeois elitism. it declares stockhausen more interesting than stravinsky, beethoven more valuable than rossini, etc.
the idea of applying elitism to keep it real may seem like a contradiction, but we live in this contradictory market reality where all art is reduced to a commodity, which in turn reduces it's value to the demand it can generate. that is the actual contradiction of art in a market society, as meaningful art must move against market rules in order to be meaningful. in that context, this abstract elitism to keep art pure is actually entirely rational. you could maybe consider it a sort of punk elitism.
but i've met people that are far more elitist in this sense than i am. i can dig a madonna record if i'm in the right mood for it. it just didn't make any sense to market this to me or other people with similar tastes as me, is all i'm saying.
Paul Doe
All art is completely subjective. Rating it is subjective. Retire your thesaurus - I'm having a hard time taking your thoughts seriously because they are riddled with forced vocabulary. Get to the point 80% faster. But seriously though, fuck koalas.
deathtokoalas
art is not entirely subjective. that is precisely the market ideology that requires a level of elitism to defend against. to use an absurd example, a professional recording of beethoven's fifth would be objectively superior to a junior high school marching band practicing out of key. but, the latter could conceivably out sell the former if it had justin bieber playing oboe, therefore making it the more valuable commodity. this is the confused reality that markets produce.
it's not entirely objective, though, either. this is where critics are valuable - they are able to point out what parts of something have a higher objective value than other parts of something else. you're of course free to choose the inferior music, should you decide to. but choosing the inferior option over the superior one is not the same thing as delusionally deciding that the two things are of equivalent value.
as an aside, you are not the first person that has accused me of using a thesaurus. i suppose it's sort of comical, as my posts to youtube are mostly stream-of-consciousness and produced with essentially no effort on my behalf. i'm not even conscious of the way in which my vocabulary is (supposedly) too abstract, so i wouldn't even know where to begin in dumbing myself down, supposing i would want to - which of course is something i wouldn't even consider. maybe the problem isn't my wide vocabulary, but your narrow one?
EternalDiarrhea
Honestly, she lost me when she claimed that God was writing his music through her. Or something. Seriously.
ブロンディブラック（東京外人)
I've tried getting into her on Spotify time and time again but it's just not caught on (yet). Same with Die Antwoord.
jessica
you know, that maybe says something. i don't see any point in paying for a service that only houses 30% of what i listen to (the other 70% is self-released), but it's a little intriguing that she can get 100 million youtube hits and can't get a following on a subscription music site, where people actually shell out the cash.
anarhy09
New and interesting music? Lol. Sounds an awful lot like 90's music. Reminds me a bit of erasure-always and some other songs that can't recall by name right now. I bet that in 10 years from now on, nobody will ever remember this song or this band.
deathtokoalas
nothing i've heard from grimes has been remotely as pompous as erasure.
if you want to be really base about it, the reality is that this particular tune could pass perfectly well as a radiohead song - and once you realize this, there's not really much to say about it as innovative. it's pop music. and pop music really hasn't changed much since new wave hit in the early 80s.
kittyand fox
I enjoyed reading your diatribe and think your points were valid indeed and have no problem. I do however, like some commodified art as much as the niche, anti commercial and this song falls into a like. Arguably, all art becomes a commodity when under the only reality of capitalist success. However, where art is concerned there is always opportunities to infiltrate through this very process and I would finish off comparing this with Andy Warhol, my only gripe with your comments, which is that through and in spite of his exceptional popularity he was able to introduce some fairly radical artists and ideas well outside of the typical pop art for which he is normally associated. I would argue against him being cynical, although I can only go by secondary sources. I would also add, although not in defence of his pop art, but as a point to throw into the mix, that at the time this form of art was ironically a challenge to the status quo in its own elitist and underground way. This is not an effort to be relativist about it, not at all, just that I don't believe it's as simple to contrast the desire for popularity in this way. In conclusion I would say that debating against branded music is almost a lost cause, especially on platforms like this, which perhaps gives evidence to that fact, but nonetheless it is a worthy one.
deathtokoalas
" Arguably, all art becomes a commodity when under the only reality of capitalist success."
if you define the terms carefully, you'll see that art can never be a commodity, and a commodity can never be art. i've run through this over and over again, so excuse me for being brief.
a commodity is specifically a good produced to meet demand. that is, it's purpose in being produced is to meet the demands of the population. this is the part that you can't debate, because it's a technical term.
art is a little harder to define, but a really big part of it is working against demand. difficulties defining art aside, there is no difficulty assigning aesthetic or personal motives. that is, art is never produced to meet demand on a market. it is always produced for some other reason: personal expression, to spread social ideas, etc.
so, when you see a product in front of you, you need to ask yourself: was this designed to meet the demands of the market? if it was, it isn't art. it may be a picasso print, or a bach ringtone but don't let that confuse you. if it wasn't, then it is.
ok, so what about the grey area, which is what you were really getting at. well, a grey area may seem to exist - music that was created as art in the past, but now meets a demand because it's value has been recognized. so, art becomes a commodity. but, this is missing the point about why the art was created. the corporate logo on the beethoven cd doesn't alter the music. nor does the 4ad label on the grimes cd. creating a new market for new art is not the same thing as creating a product to meet a demand. it follows, that success does not convert the art into a commodity, although it may convert the medium into one. that is, your beethoven cd is a commodity, but the music it plays isn't.
kittyand fox
But there is art which can meet the demands of the masses, from socialist realism propoganda to book art and social land art. In fact if commodity is only in meeting a demand then art too is often a commodity because it has been used to meet the demands for e.g city renewal, selling a product, designing a product, selling an ideology etc. Debating a technical term is still do-able as this then becomes a concept creating of philosophy. So not to nit pick against u or create an argument, only a discussion, but surely a commodity is not about demand at all. In fact it could almost be the very opposite most of the time. The things we do not need, certain material possessions are not demanded but become demanded. Utilitarian items i.e a toilet or table can be art and/or commodity, depending on the different values ascribed to them, like who made it and where is it place. So context is one field of play. I think your definition of art is more idealistic, which is fine and valid but to me art such as I dunno Wolchenklauser, or Bauhaus would play with this definition of demand. Rather than playing against demand art plays with demand and the language of commodity. At best and in a modernist sense it opens up and questions values. Whereas commodity might latch onto values without really understanding them. It does in similar ways as commodity in creating new audience and demand. If an art work exists in a gallery then there is a demand for that art work, or for a particular art for particular audience for a particular desire. Anyway I feel i am diverging, so back to an example you used; A Picasso print is just as much as a commodity as a Picasso original, in fact when Picasso reached the height of his fame he was producing more selling more and even used his very signature to pay for things! Was he still making art, was the works he made still valued as art? Yes. What seems to be the issue you are making is that when one of his works is made more available to the mass, like being made into a print and in doing so its quality from a unique large scale painting into a small kitchen display print is lost. This is true, i agree and that’s what i mean by this capitalist success in a way, this fake democratisation, which art exposes and strives to challenge. If it were in a key ring form then this would be a more extreme version of commodity. But what about when no one buys these key rings anymore? Is it a commodity no one wants (paradox to the definition) or can it become art? As we know artists have used objects no longer in demand to create new art and so the cycle begins again. These are overlaps and loop holes. Your final point, is a good one, but isn't quite related to the point I was trying to make. However, the beethoven example leaves me confused as it takes a different point to where i think i am going and may actually hit the main point too. So here goes; a Beethoven cd produced by a corporate company merely reflects its safe sales popularity. But I disagree that the company does not make the music a commodity only in the sense that certain companies will do all they can to sell. In doing so they may pick music which they think will sell, which is probably something you agree with. So they see the potential for demand and commodity opportunities. If the music is good artistically or put another way, made not with the intention of making money, then is it not a commodity, no of course not, i agree, we’re on the same page still... But was Beethoven not privileged and began his life imitating from established others before actively seeking and capitalising on the bourgeois? This is why we have more accounts of classical music than folk of that time. And now his music is often more remembered with film scenes and adverts. I agree, that this should not make the music less an art, but unfortunately art is also created through cultural references and so, it must pass through different stages of commodity and art. How it overcomes these hurdles is perhaps another even more difficult art form. I agree with the notion that when music is made purely to satisfy and leach off an existing or monetary market for monetary reasons then this is commodity. But sometimes, just sometimes you get cross over or just simply music that seems a commodity because it’s just really stupid even though the artist was full of intent.
deathtokoalas
"But there is art which can meet the demands of the masses, from socialist realism propoganda to book art and social land art."
that doesn't fit the definition of a commodity.
"In fact if commodity is only in meeting a demand then art too is often a commodity because it has been used to meet the demands for e.g city renewal, selling a product, designing a product, selling an ideology etc.""
that's not art.
and the idea that it is is precisely why andy warhol needs to be destroyed.
"surely a commodity is not about demand at all."
i've provided a technical definition of a commodity. it's in any economics 101 textbook. it's not open for debate.
"If an art work exists in a gallery then there is a demand for that art work, or for a particular art for particular audience for a particular desire."
the difference comes in whether the piece was produced to meet a demand or has created a demand in itself. it is a very important distinction. large amounts of what you see in galleries are not art, but commodities. they exist purely to generate profit by meeting a demand.
i stopped reading at that point. you didn't understand anything i typed.
roxane
Your reasoning is quite interresting but there is a massive hole in it. You're thinking in terms of American definitions of "mainstream" and those are not valid in other areas of the world to some extent.
deathtokoalas
right. because grimes was hoping to make it huge in saudi arabia....
these sorts of observations may make some people feel good about themselves, but they're almost always entirely irrelevant.
roxane
I'm not talking about saudi arabia necessarily but yeah, with internet any artist can be heard on the other side of the planet. I'm actually talking about Europe because I notice quite often that people take it for granted that Western culture is generally the same but it isn't. What you guys call "hipster" for instance might just be the standard French style so it doesn't make much sense here. The way Grimes might be percieved here is different from the way you guys percieve it. I also think about Asia where Grimes is also popular to some extend. I think that there indeed she might fit the popular culture quite well. I think you need to broaden your vision of art and culture and take the rest of the world in account too, America is not the main standard.
deathtokoalas
in the past, popular culture tended to flow in a one-way direction out of the anglosphere, which to an extent includes germany and japan (but has not really included france in the post-war period). when influences from india or asia or latin america worked their way into the anglosphere, it was usually through an english intermediary. an example would be george harrison's use of the sitar. i think that's slowly changing and that media from outside the anglosphere will become more and more important within it over the course of the next few decades.
but i really don't think how grimes might be perceived in asia ever really crossed her mind as important to her as she was writing, nor does it have any meaning in the context of how she is perceived in the anglosphere.
if you want to have a conversation about globalization or multicultural inclusion within a classroom or something, that's your prerogative. but i really don't see the relevance of any of that within this conversation.
i mean, the basics of what i'm saying about commodities apply regardless of whether you're talking about domestic or foreign markets. i'm not trying to write off grimes as a hipster in the first place, i'm just pointing out that it didn't make sense for her to market her peppy, super mainstream pop music to dour, nihilist rivetheads. if there's an implication there, it's that she isn't much of a hipster, but was misunderstanding her potential to appeal to hipster audiences.
i'm not one myself, but i like abstract music, so i've associated with quite a few hipsters and i can't imagine any of them enjoying this at all. what defines a hipster, to me, is the tendency to fall for musical hacks that somehow get promoted as groundbreaking or brilliant: it's an inability to see through the hype. sometimes, it's just a level of ignorance regarding the history. you'll see hipsters loving something that's a rip of something twenty years before it. other times, it's a lack of musical training: you'll see hipsters misinterpreting half-assed improvisation or random note bashing as brilliant composing. what i tend to do is walk into that space and try and explain to the hipsters why something isn't actually as good as they think it is. so, i get a natural overlap with the hipsters, in that we both like the actually interesting and groundbreaking music. but i'm really the anti-hipster in the sense that i'll smash through that hype and very loudly reject it.
this doesn't really have the level of nuance necessary to create the confusion. it's just pop music.
roxane
My point is that "pop" music depends on what is popular within a country's culture. You should come one time in Europe and see the differences among the different cultures and sub-cultures. I'm currently living in the Netherlands and there mainstream is EDM and a lot of American pop music whereas in France we have our own pop music because the state is funding French musicians and there is a mandatory rate of French music that has to be broadcast (I think it's 20% or something). I don't think Grimes made any speculations or market strategies to get popular according to some standards, maybe she wanted to attract hipsters because, after all, that seems to be her culture, but here in Europe it doesn't make any sense to talk about it. Maybe it's pop music, maybe it's not, maybe nobody cares it depends on your standards anyway. I personally don't think much about "pop music" especially coming from America, what I listen is mostly British or French and I'm just glad when they make it big.
deathtokoalas
canada has similar cultural requirements, and it's produced a successful local industry. but, here, it functions more as a launching pad. a lot of successful canadian artists going back to bryan adams owe their success to those requirements. that may have actually helped grimes; i don't know, i don't listen to the radio anymore. but back in the 90s there were a number of canadian rock bands like i mother earth, the tea party and our lady peace that really built their career on those requirements, as they applied to radio and muchmusic (the canadian version of mtv). it's also the reason rush continues to get such heavy airplay.
there's a concept of global pop music that is more or less identical to "english pop music". i'm not going to go back and rewrite any posts or ask any other commenters to do so because it is clear from the context, but you can make that mental adjustment if you'd like.
s65s85dfyfjh
"this doesn't really have the level of nuance necessary... it's just pop music." Yes. This. It feels like a whimsical, pseudo-inspired riff on pop culture, without saying much more. Which isn't even necessarily a bad thing; it's just pleasant background music and flashy visuals without too much deep thought.
Byu Bianca
like honestly, honestly my opinion is that you kind of DO actually think too much. No one (well, except you) cares THAT much about who listens to her or about which kind of "culture" she fits in. Her music sounds good, at least to me (and no, I do not listen to pop. I prefer rock, metal, punk, indie and almost anything that are a part of them). By saying to the person that didn't like your music that their ears weren't any good in the first place was extremely stupid of you. Why? BECAUSE PEOPLE USE THEIR EARS TO LISTEN, TO HEAR. That person listened your music and said it wasn't good. Be over with it. Let it be. It's probably not the first time it happens and it sure won't be the last. MUSIC IS SUBJECTIVE. ART IS SUBJECTIVE. Just let it be. Also no, koalas shouldn't die just because you want to. You are entitled to your opinion and I get that but I see no reason why koalas should die.
deathtokoalas
well, i think you're over-estimating how much i have invested into thoughts i post to youtube. on grimes videos. and in general.
also, i'd like to inspire you to remove the right ventromedial area of your prefrontal cortex.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
none of the above, i was just trying to be specific. i mean, i could have suggested planting a pen in her noggin', but it wouldn't have really gotten the point across - which is that i was being sardonic. nor was it even meant as an insult.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
such an operation would not lead to death, it would merely render one unable to understand sarcasm.
Sérgio Ferreira
hey, +deathtokoalas, I understand your point but I think you're misleading what Grimes is herself and what those big fat and mean corporations try to make out of her. I can only give you my point of view on her as a fan and I have quite tried to understand why I liked her. When she blew out back in 2012, I remember I hated those hip-hop 90s goth clothes and also thought she was this "new thing" coming out and trying to be created by nowadays mass-crafters like Pitchfork and those NY niche critiques. I mean, she was not the average indie rock or electronic singer we could find revisiting 80's and 90's dream pop around that time. She had something in common, but with a different mix to be understood. Around that time I was learning more about those old 4AD bands and also about industrial pioneers (I mean the true ones, like Cabaret Voltaire, Einstürzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle). So Grimes, picked me up with this song right on time. She sounded like Elizabeth Frazer at some points, had tracks sounding pretty much like distorted beaten up Japanese Nine Inch Nails, with this eerie feeling. I still had itches with her sayings about Mariah Carey, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and how did she mixed up all of those influences. She has referenced those I quoted, and among others, Nine Inch Nails, Dolly Parton, j-pop, and so on.
I made out all of this just to explain my point clearly that I don't really think she can't simply be put in the same bag as other pop singers (like Azaelia Banks, Charli XCX, and so on, and so on), even if you didn't bring those to the discussion. She may indeed have a simple and catchy sound, but that doesn't mean the more carefully listeners can't consider her as artistical, nor I think she brings Andy Warhol pop art theories in consideration for her music and videos. She just came from this underground music circuit that apparently went in Vancouver and released a few albums while crafting and perfecting this anime, internet-inspired, maybe a little innocent and young style. I don't think it came to her mind she was trying to fill the needs of some y-gen pop, darkwave, hipster or other fan boy, I think she just happened to fit in.
MR B
Y U HATE KOALAS U EVIL BEEEOTCH!!!!!
deathtokoalas
koalas need to be destroyed due to their horrific levels of cuteness. it's not something vindictive, it's just an unavoidable conclusion.
MR B
its a very avoidable situation! why dont you target possums are something!
deathtokoalas
possums aren't cute, they're kind of gross. but, the level of cuteness demonstrated by koalas can just simply not be allowed, under any circumstances.
MR B
so you just say fuck it, kill all the pretty, cute, innocent animals? I bet you hate kangaroo's too dont u
deathtokoalas
no. koalas are singularly condemned.
it took me a bit longer to get into this than the last two (which are sort of a double record in my mind), but it finally kind of clicked this afternoon when walking down the street on my way home from doing groceries. tragically unknown....
current mp3 player list.
fwiw, the device has a 2 gb maximum. i prefer the smaller space, as i listen exclusively to records.
so, my nightly roach sightings have recently been replaced by nightly centipede sightings. i haven't seen a roach in almost a month. together, this suggests that i'm winning, but i know this species is seasonal and i can't really make any conclusions until i haven't seen one an entire year. i don't know if there are any eggs anywhere, or what's going to happen when they hatch if there are. you can't really spray the eggs, you have to actually go find them, and i simply can't get in under the pipes or kitchen counter to do that. so, it's a waiting, reacting game...
see, the centipedes (i've identified at least two separate ones) are out looking for food, and it seems like they're having a hard time finding any. i haven't seen any spiders around, either - i suspect the centipedes ate them all. the centipedes have been spotted in unusual places, where they're not likely to find much to eat. what this tells me is that there isn't any food left in the more likely places, so they're getting desperate and scouring areas they wouldn't otherwise bother with. i guess they'll have to leave or die, and at that point the process of getting the insects out of here will be finished. as centipedes eat all the other bugs, it's a good idea to keep them around until it's clear the other bugs are gone, then get rid of them - or keep a few around to prevent the others from coming back.
the thing i'm concerned about is that they might leave or starve before the eggs hatch, i.e. that the eggs might outlast the centipedes. so, i'm toying with the idea of bringing them some dead spiders.
but, i'm worried that if i start feeding them they'll become reliant on it. "don't feed the animals". well, yeah, don't. it would also sort of suck if they started getting a little too friendly and decided they want to snuggle or something. they *do* bite, when they're big, and i don't really want them hanging out around my pillow. i need them to hunt for me, and i'd rather if they kept a mild fear of me.
my sun room has some spiders in it, but the webs are full of termite-like things, so i don't really want to let them loose in there, either. i'll be cleaning the room up when i get a chair in there, probably in august. for now, i have a towel under the door to keep the area separate...
so, i dunno what the better thing to do is. i don't want them to die until i'm sure the roaches are out for good, but i don't want them to get too friendly or stop hunting, either.
although i should point out that the centipedes may actually eat the eggs. all i've found are anecdotes, though, nothing solid.
i think i'm going to hope this is true. i can't get in under those spots, but they can.
hopefully, they're out looking around for something else because they ate all the eggs already. meaning, the best thing to do is let them die off on their own....
yeah. decided.
so, i'm thinking i should apply for some kind of artist's grant. i just want to go down to odsp first and determine if i'm allowed to do that or not. it could conceivably provide me with another year or two, if the odsp gets cancelled. and, if i'm able to make enough progress, i could conceivably see myself putting the music aside within a year or two and focusing solely on writing and organizing. i've been preparing myself for this for some time now. the goal is to finish all the things i've left unfinished, and then make a decision about whether i want to carry on or not after that. i mean....yes, it's what i'd rather be doing. at the same time, i need to face reality that i'm not going to be able to find ways to allow myself to do this forever.
i've mentioned before that this is part of the reason i moved down here, to the center of canada's collapsing industrial base. it's a matter of time before the area has some serious homeless issues, brought on by mass joblessness. if i'm going to be organizing, i want to be organizing within this "lumpenproletariat", rather than within organized labour, who i've come to see as an obstacle in revolutionizing distribution to a more communistic approach. i really do not believe that organized labour has any revolutionary potential beyond increasing their own salaries, and i'm rather convinced that the corporate state has effectively derived ways to co-opt workers and keep them in line. i'm following the early anarchist thinkers in declaring organized labour a dead-end.
the only reason i need an odsp check instead of a welfare check is to house that studio. if i were to give up on this, i could see myself being relatively content bouncing around libraries with a laptop, sleeping in squats and spending all my time reading while i'm waiting for the shit to hit the fan. but, i know better than to plan beyond the immediate future, because that shit just never works out.
so, for now, i just need to focus on ways to pay the rent for another year or two. if odsp doesn't think i'm qualified, maybe the council for the arts might. and i'll go from there....
this is the last time i'll point out how pointless "subscribers" are on youtube.
112 subscribers. as far as i can tell, a total of zero of them bothered to watch the video i uploaded a few days ago. which isn't just a low conversion rate. it's entirely useless.
the conclusion one should draw is that going to a youtube profile and trying to deduce anything at all from the subscriber count is a waste of time. whatever the reasons for subscribing are, actually viewing the videos in the feed doesn't seem to be one of them....
i mean, one would think that subscribing to a feed means you're interested in watching the videos posted to the feed.
apparently not.
i do have a hypothesis that people are enjoying my banter, and thinking that they'll receive that banter in their google feed if they subscribe on youtube. which is just not how things work.
the bulk of those subscribers probably meant to follow me on google+, but couldn't figure out how to do it and subscribed to me on youtube instead.
which i guess is sort of funny. but i wish they'd have done what they meant to, so i'd have a better way to understand who is interested in the commentary and who is interested in the music.
like, i grasp that i can't expect all 112 people to watch the video. but i think it's reasonable to expect at least a 25% conversion rate, rather than the 0% i'm actually getting.
then again, i posted on the morning of july 5, when most people were probably hungover. it may have just been a bad day.
we'll see what happens when i post the completed, longer version.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
i'm practicing a four bar piece. it's simple enough, should be in quick. but these are the timings on the four bars, in succession:
15/16
16/16
20/16
13/16
it might seem hard to count, but, see, the things is that you'll note it adds to 64/16, which equals four "regular" bars of 16/16. i was thinking consciously in those terms at the time, trying to find ways to make the signatures unusual without breaking the four. and it's why it works as a techno tune, despite being all over the place in terms of timings.
i could conceivably re-bar it to 16/16, but it would make the emphasis on the bass notes make no sense. bars aren't really about time signatures (i don't actually ever notate time signatures), they're about splitting up phrases...
so, if you tried to dance to this, you'd be confused, but you wouldn't get lost - you wouldn't know why you're confused.
well, unless you're a musician, then you'd get it.
i posted this to the wrong profile. whatever. not like anybody in my facebook list really cares...
but
the truth is, while i'd like to say i've entirely given up on trying to
sell anything directly, the actual truth is that i never really made a
serious effort to market any of it. i've played something like four open
mic nights over almost twenty years. i've never even asked anybody for a
show, because i know better than to think i have enough friends to fill
up a bar, so why bother playing in an empty room? meanwhile, those bars
get filled by social groups producing music that i consider to be
nowhere near as interesting, which keeps me out of the social scenes i'd
need to interact with.
and i realize i'm too old for that, now.
maybe
i should take a marketing class, but what i've instead always been
interested in focusing on is ways to take myself out of the game and
just create, under some kind of fatalist conception that it will find an
audience after i'm gone. i used to think i could find a day job and
just create in my spare time, but i learned that's not really feasible -
and i've since lost the ability to gain a day job, anyways, making it
unrealistic to think in those terms.
a self-fulfilling
prophecy, i suppose, brought on by an unshakable (if naive) belief that
it will all work out. all i can do now is continue creating, and hope
somebody finds some parts of it that they connect to in some way.
i just woke up, and i have to keep going back to the same point.
i've tried to avoid friendships with market advocates over the last few years by reducing them solely to intellectual opponents, but i've heard a lot of those arguments and they're hard to shake if you're insecure, as all artists have to be. they're also a part of day-to-day life, whether we choose to reject markets or not....
in the end, after all the arguments, the only important conclusion is this: how am i supposed to know what kind of reaction my larger, serious pieces are going to get in society at large when they've been heard by around 100 people, on average? and, that 100 number is relative to recent attempts to promote better through social media. for a long time, it was more like twenty people, most of them friends and relatives.
it just doesn't provide for a large enough sample. and, i know that's my fault (i guess) for not having the slightest idea of how to sell a product. but there's just simply no logical connection between being a good salesperson and being an interesting musician, despite requiring both skills to be a *successful* one.
i've been through this so many times. there's no use going through it again. i just wish my brain would fucking drop it already.
Saturday, July 5, 2014
cool.
i'm going to ask an obscure favour, and actually throw it right out there for general request. i'm used to writing drum patterns in general midi over track ten using a staff and actual music notation. the reason i like to do it that way is that it provides absolute freedom in terms of time signatures, note lengths, etc. i mean, i may want to drum from 5 to 7 to 13 to 17 and back around to 8 in the space of a few bars, and have 64th note crashes (which may not be possible in reality, but reality isn't important when you're programming drums). vst drum machines generally just cannot provide that kind of flexibility, because they carry the interface forward. i get why they do it - it's what everybody wants - but it would be immensely useful if they'd take on track 10 compatibility so they can read a "regular" midi file, instead of forcing users to reduce themselves to their limitations and quarter note, bar-based interfaces.
that leaves me stuck more or less with using a soundcard emulator (like bandstand) for drums, which gets the job done but kind of takes me out of the drum machine universe, as well.
could you program this thing to read a standard midi file?
why are all the linn demos on youtube trying to make it sound like an 808? these were high end machines, put to good use mostly in art rock by the likes of peter gabriel and laurie anderson, not low end club devices that djs could afford.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. this render was initially created on june 28, 2014 and updated on july 5, 2014 to fix a minor error in transcription.
this is the vst mix, which hooks up the constructed score to a series of
vst instruments through the magic of midi sequencing and outputs the
notes through various effects processors to create something approaching
the sound of a live band.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. this render
was initially created on june 28, 2014 and updated on july 5, 2014 to
fix a minor error in transcription.
well, silly me. it seemed to be a latency issue, but this is weird and maybe something to take note of if you do these things.
with a bit more experimenting, it didn't seem to be any specific plugin. if i unfroze 2 or 3 of about ten running simultaneously, it would run fine. so, i'm back to cpu or ram. except that doesn't make sense because one freezes to open up cpu and ram.
i noticed that some of the frozen tracks were frozen at different latencies. the drums were frozen at 256, but i had to increase the latency in the process of finishing the thing, so i froze the bass at 736.
what i did to fix it was to go back and make sure everything was frozen at 256. then, when i played back at 736 it was smooth.
i'm not sure how that makes sense. maybe what was happening was that i was getting some kind of wave interference on the playback, due to the sample rate.
whatever it was, it's working now and i hope to get some work done today.
what i mean is that the files may have been out of phase, and what seemed like a stutter was actually a cancellation.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. this render was initially created on june 28, 2014 and updated on july 4, 2014 to fix a minor error in transcription.
this is a primitive mix, built up in noteworthy, that suffers from a
slightly blurry drum sound due to everything being run through channel
10 in the soundcard synthesizer. specifically, i'd like to turn the
snare down (because it blurs the toms) but it doesn't seem to be
possible to do this. obviously, i've fixed this as i built more
sophisticated mixes of the track. however, this is what the track
sounded like on playback as i was actually arranging it....
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in mid june, 2014. this
render was initially created on june 23, 2014 and updated on july 4,
2014 to fix a minor error in transcription.
formatting
this thing is really just a guess, but i can't figure out why else the
corruption would be so random. the way i figure it is that either:
1) it goes looking for file blah.wav and finds a half dozen entries, then spits back something mangled.
2)
that part of the drive is really badly fragmented, and it's not able to
put the files together in real time without stuttering.
either way, i figure it can't hurt, but i'm going to need to copy the files off, format, scan, copy back and then defragment.
that'll likely take me to the end of the day. argh. but i don't want to lose the vst mix when i start redoing the new one.
i think something i can check is to see if it's doing the same thing from the other drive or not.
the files are updated, btw.
i'm actually going to right up and format the thing to clean out the partition table...
nope. now it's screwing up with other plugins, too.
i'm
going to try a scandisk/defrag. this drive gets massive amounts of data
copied to and from it. it almost sounds like it's getting confused with
pointers. and, i keep creating and deleting files with the same name,
so it's not off the wall.
i'm just going to back up
first, though, because i already lost one drive of this type. the four
drives are of the same type and age.
on second thought, it only happens when i copy the directory.
which is necessary.
it's
gotta be some kind of screw up in memory management or something. i'm
still blaming bandstand, but i don't think reinstalling will fix it. i'm
going to try to copy first, then freeze. i suspect that will work.
.....aaaaaand, it turns out it was a plugin after all. the same skips were coming back, but turning off bandstand did it.
it's
too bad this is the only general track 10 plugin i'm aware of because
it's not the bestest. it was working before, so i see no reason to think
a reinstall won't work.
but, fuck.
i actually have another hypothesis.
cubase
seems to want to keep track of files when they're copied out of the
directories. it may have gotten confused when i copied it over to the
external drive. that would explain why they were both acting funny, and
refreezing worked to get around it.
anyways, i'll be reuploading as soon as the a/b test has convinced me the files are the same, except for the Gb.
hrmmn.
turns out the file was corrupt, after all. the chopping went away by unfreezing and refreezing.
weird. wondering if it's the hard drive, now...
it's resolvable, no use in worrying about it.
i
just want to clarify because people are going to say that doesn't make
any sense, but it does. we're taught that ram disappears on a reboot,
but it doesn't actually. it's just discarded and written over. reusing
the information in ram just means going back to where it was and finding
it.
so, all the os has to do to reuse the boot
information in ram is make sure it never writes in the sector that it
assigns for boot.
but, again, it's the cpu cache i'm hypothesizing about...
lol. this is actually a debate all over the internet.
from
what i remember from vista support, modern versions of windows actually
don't clear anything on a restart unless you force it to. i mean, it's
not like it ever really *cleared* it anyways, it just deallocated it.
there's a switch of some sort that can actually set everything to all
0s, and it can add several minutes to the rebooting time.
but,
if you think about it for a minute, it's just a waste of cycles to
rewrite everything on every boot. this is actually the reason that
windows is faster on startup than it used to be - it actually doesn't
push everything into ram on every boot-up like they teach you in your
hardware class, it cuts out a space of ram and leaves it there for
future use.
but i'm not sure if that applies to the
last versions of xp or not. i'm running xp on modern hardware, so it's
very fast on bootup and hard to really tell.
but, this is more to do with ram than cpu cache, and i don't think i'm having a ram issue.
well, the notes are fixed but now the output is stuttering.
it
doesn't seem to be drivers, because it stutters at the same spots
through multiple sound cards. and, the last track i was working on is
also stuttering, so it doesn't seem to be the file, either. i
reinstalled cubase to no avail. it might be a plugin, but it actually
renders fine in quick mode so that doesn't really make sense. i think
i've unfortunately actually reduced it to a processor issue, which is
going to be very bad news if it becomes a serious problem.
for
now, i'm going to leave the machine off for a bit, eat breakfast and
try it again. i don't turn the machine off very often. it doesn't seem
like it's overheating, but maybe it just needs a rest.
sending it out through a canned out isn't really a solution. i can hear the difference.
the
thing is that this shouldn't really be a load issue. everything's
frozen, and it was working fine before. i haven't touched anything. if
it's overheating, it would have to be environmental. but it's not warm
in here.
unfortunately, fighting with computers is part of being an electronic musician....
i
don't really want to reinstall. i couldn't imagine what could have
broken besides maybe a soundcard conflict. but i can't see how/why.
the
one thing i can say i did was copy a large file over to an external
drive, and that xp update has made the process slow. maybe the cache was
jumbled up or something. i think that requires a hard rather than soft
reset?
whatever. eat, then worry about it.
and it actually turns out it's *only* that Gb, across two staves. nobody would even tell the difference...
d'oh.
i don't use key signatures. i just use bars to reset. that means i need to be extra careful when i'm splitting up tracks into bass and treble parts, and i wasn't. that means i'm going to have to fix a few things and reupload the mixes....
i just find that key signatures don't really matter. i mean, i don't use them when i'm writing. most of the time something is there, i just can't be bothered to work it out.
what i had, for example, was a written out Gb on the bass note that told the computer that the G in the melody for the bar is flat, but i ended up getting G natural on the render because when i took the bass out the computer lost the instruction.
it may clarify a few things, but the notes are so fast it's hard to tell...
i'm glad i caught it though. it won't take long to fix.
Thursday, July 3, 2014
i take a few days at the beginning of the month to catch up on various things. that's done now for the month.
i hope to have the complete mix done in a day or two.
Monday, June 30, 2014
gah. and now my fingers are sore again. well, that's how this works until i get the calluses back up.
the
library is, in fact, open today, so i'll have those scores printed, and
i'll be focusing on the full version. that's pick work, mostly - quick
to finish. i'm not going to hold my life up on this. i'll keep working
at it sporadically.
it's not the speed that i keep
fucking up, it's the dynamics. put bluntly, i need to practice this
before i can produce a version i can upload. a lot.
then again, maybe getting some sleep would help.
today was a wash. i made it to the library for some printing, but it was closed. i'm not sure if it's because it's sunday (things still close on sunday? why?) or because it's holiday season here, but it was a piss off.
i lost most of the day to running around, and then got sucked into youtube. but i've got a few hours now and will hopefully have something up before the sun reappears.
