publishing inrisampled (inri003)

i spent the summer and fall of 1997 programming drum tracks into an ry30, notating them into a tablature program and sequencing them using noteworthy composer. i did not know how i was going to record these tracks. i think i was expecting to use the computer, but that was probably naive; instead, i was gifted a 4-track recording machine. i then spent the next year and a half rearranging and rerecording the songs i programmed over that period. as these tracks were recorded into my pc, they are time stamped...so i have a much clearer understanding of when they were finished.

the jump to incorporating computers into the recording process is something i always wanted to do, it's just that it wasn't really previously feasible. first, there was a learning curve. i was a smart kid, though; the learning curve was just a time concern. the larger problem was simply access to a pc. i did have a pc at my disposal, but it did not have a modem and it was only equipped to run windows 3.1, which basically meant i could run civ 2 and wolfenstein and little else. the windows 95 computer had dial up but it was in a central location for family use.

when we moved across the city, my dad bought a new computer and i happily inherited his old one. this gave me internet access, which allowed me to download some freeware. it also gave me the time i needed to learn how to do certain things.

i'm separating out a handful of my first electronic sound experiments and collecting them together into an ep. what these blasts of noise have in common is that they were constructed on a windows 95 computer out of samples or generated sound and with very primitive software while i was waiting to get some kind of recording equipment. most of it was pasted together meticulously using the windows 95 sound recorder; the rest of it was constructed in cool edit, which i used as a sort of a synthesizer.

for the most part, these weren't really ever meant to be songs. i ended up using them as connectors, introductions, background. "continuity". yet, i find the idea of throwing them together here to be interesting from an autobiographical perspective.

created in mid 1997. sequenced in november, 2013. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - cool edit (wave synthesis, digital wave editing), windows 95 sound recorder (sampling, digital wave editing), yamaha ry30 drum machine (programming)

released dec 1, 1997



1) the beginning is from a disney film or something, i can't recall which one. it's all wiped away by a wash of war drums and civ2 samples. it's more misanthropic than anti-war, really.


2) noises generated with cool edit. it seemed like the coolest thing in the world, at the time.


3) homer, indeed. i think that might be the ry30 with the drums, recording directly into the back of the pc.


4)  i'm using cool edit as a synthesizer and a wave editor, but i think the core of it was done with the sound recorder.


5) some more sound created and manipulated in cool edit.


6) so, there's this dude, and he sounds sort of like one of the monsters from doom II, and he lures a cow with a weird mating call and then attacks it and it's kind of twisted and hilarious. subtle vegan brainwashing? yes, but more on an environmentalist level.


7) the guitar loop is taken from a popular nirvana song, whereas most of the building sound pasted on top is from civ 2. no real message here. just a particularly savvy squirrel that's getting ready for winter by building some kind of fortress.

installation file:
audacity-win-2.0.5.exe

marx & engels - manifesto of the communist party

required reading

so, this is that "bad" little book, huh? while historically important, the text will be unlikely to shock modern youth, except perhaps in it's portrayal of communists as something less than evil, vampiric beings from outer space.

that appears to have been the point as the european media was then launching intense rhetorical attacks upon the communist revolutionaries that, in addition to reasoned debate, also included slur campaigns, personal attacks, police state repression and flat-out lies. hysterical over-reactions to leftist ideas were not isolated to the united states in the 1950s, they go back to well before the era of revolution, back to questionable crusades launched against communal, and conveniently heretic, settlements throughout the mediterranean and still further back to the roman civil wars. they are inarguably still with us today. the text was written just long enough after the french revolution had failed that various tweaked attempts to rekindle the revolution were beginning to pop up in the capitals of europe. the revolts of the mid-nineteenth century had many of the same goals as the revolts of the mid-to-late eighteenth century, most prominently the overthrow of a ruling class (here "bourgeoisie", there "aristocracy"), a revival of democracy and a return to a scientific, rationalist pre-christian greco-roman society. fear of enslavement by industrialization fuses with hope that technology will be able to revolutionize society; the idea was never to destroy production but to ensure that compassionate humans are always in control, never machines that lack the ability for empathy. despite what eventually came of marxism, it's important to understand this manifesto within this historical context; communism was meant as the new rationalism and the new democracy, a democracy of labour, as an attempt to correct the errors that led to the failure of the first revolution.

it's within this historical irony that the manifesto surprises. today, nobody picks up the communist manifesto expecting to read about how democracy is the ideal form of government. nobody expects marx to describe how the "historical struggle" for democracy will end up with communism, and may even think that these concepts are inconsistent with each other. here he argues against the exploitation of children, there for the fair and equal treatment of women and somewhere else for universal education. the communist future will have no state, no laws, no crime, no class and no inequality.

now, it should be noted that all of that sounds a little bit utopian and it's easy to accuse marx of naivety because of it. however, the manifesto was written for an existing audience of communists and authors more than it was written as a sterile delve into academic theory and there are more than a few passages that, in their simplicity, seem designed to convince the irrigorous, not lay out the theory in intricate detail. this text is a political document. it is a propaganda pamphlet designed to organize growing resistance under the control of a director and was used in precisely that way to stir up several revolts.

it should also be pointed out that marx had less than utter disdain for the bourgeoisie, although he certainly exaggerates his outrage throughout the text. marx saw the bourgeoisie itself as characteristic of a sort of failed revolution, the remnants of an upheaval in class and technology that usurped power from the aristocracy during industrialization. he points out some of the positive aspects of this failed revolution, suggesting that it was not a totally lost opportunity to improve living conditions: the collapse of feudalism (even if what replaced it is not much better), urbanization and the rescue of "a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life", unheard of levels of production leading to more and more goods to be used by proles and bourgeois alike, etc. what he attacks is the failure of the bourgeoisie to take these reforms to the next step. he speaks about the failure of the bourgeoisie to bring democracy to europe, indeed of their construction of a new form of "despotism" instead, and the slave-like conditions that exploited workers, viewed as little more than cogs within machines, were forced to endure in order to reap larger and larger profits for the bourgeoisie as they expanded into greater and greater markets. his solution was simple and really quite rational: the only way to ensure that factory workers are not exploited is to allow them to run their own factories. when all of the theory, jargon and rationalizing of thousands of pages of writing by marx and engels is stripped to it's very core, giving workers control of the means of production to ensure that they can never be enslaved by an upper class is really all there is to the central idea of marx' philosophy. it's an idea that actually strikes me as heavily influenced by jefferson's argument for the separation of powers as it is based upon the same simple idea that the only way to avoid despotism is through making it very, very difficult to gather the instruments of control under a single pair of hands.

the value in reading this short text is to strip yourself away from the staggering level of ignorance that exists around marx in the west today. prepare to be surprised as the biases that the media has injected within you for your whole life are disintegrated by the simple task of actually reading the source material. be prepared to recognize that, ultimately, and despite the idiosyncrasies inherent within his writing, marx was merely another left-libertarian in the meta-liberal tradition of jefferson and mills. finally, be prepared to learn why, despite the allure of the status of being labelled that way, you are probably actually not a communist.

of further interest...

- marx presents the argument that only the proletariat has potential as a revolutionary class, but doesn't specify whether he's speaking of workers specifically or what he would call the lumpenproletariat. this is a specific point of contention within socialist thought. do wage labourers really have revolutionary potential or did marx completely goof on this point?

- what we would today call "small business owners" (marx would include the self-employed) are presented as conservative reactionaries with zero revolutionary potential. i think this is a very astute point that is currently lost on a lot of people. supporting small business over large business may be consistent with free market liberalism, but it is not consistent with socialism.

- the communists are more or less defined as the vanguard of the proletariat.

- marx separates between personal and private property, but he does so in a way that upholds the idea of exchanging labour for personal property. this is another issue that would be hotly debated amongst socialists: if the practice of exchanging labour for wages to purchase personal property is maintained, class will persevere and capitalism will not truly be abolished. marx explicitly states that he does not wish to abolish the wage system but only aims to make it more fair. while marx may be enraged by the suggestion, that really reduces his system to a type of reformed capitalism. many socialists and anarchists have pointed this out.

- his definition of the minimum wage as the minimum expenditure required to keep labourers alive (and producing) is very clear-minded in the context of understanding wage labour as a form of slavery. yet, he only suggests a more enlightened form of that slavery, rather than emancipation from it.

- abolishing the family is presented as a necessary task to achieve the full individual freedom of women and children. in this, we see marx' liberal individualism defining his concepts of socialism. marxism is not to be thought of as a type of collectivism, but as a means of rescuing the individual from the collectivization inherent within socialized production.

- marx' attack on proudhon is a little bit weird, but not really wrong. he calls him a bourgeois socialist and accuses him of wanting a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. proudhon's ideas strike me more as a type of gestating anarcho-capitalism, a classical liberalism, than a type of socialism. where marx is right is that it isn't revolutionary in thought (society would remain ordered by markets) and will not lead to an emancipation of the proletariat. but, what he seems to miss is that his own system shares the same point of failure.

full text here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/books/congress/HX/39.5.A5213/index.html

daily smoothie

Re: Fw: Neue Anfrage aus dem Sennheiser Kontaktcenter vom 2013-11-03 [##SVS-Web-SK]

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remastered inri001 re-release completed

my second demo, recorded over the second half of the tenth grade, is a considerably more polished recording. by this time, i had learned a lot about how to record things and had improved my drumming and keyboard playing. while the vocals remain highly erratic, ranging from precociously insightful to devastatingly stupid, the music here is actually not far from a professional recording.

recorded in spring 1997, remastered in fall 2013. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, drums, keyboards, tapes, vocals, sounds, metronomes, production

released june 1, 1997

demo #27: nothing to say

this is really the only thing that's quite like this in my discography, partly because the synthesizer is a tool that wasn't fully available to me at the age that i would have written more upbeat psychedelic pop songs like this (15-17). by the time i had really secured access to a synth i could use on my own terms, i had defaulted fairly heavily to a type of structured synth pop - and i then grew out of pop altogether rather quickly.

this is also the absolutely last thing that i recorded before i lost my studio for the first time due to moving across the city. specifically, the drums were sold (i was given a drum machine as a replacement, which worked out just fine) and the 4-track i was using went back to my dad's friend, who owned it. i ended up getting a 4-track for christmas, and a synth for my birthday. i spent the next six months refocusing in various ways, and honing in on a more electronic sound.

i think i needed that time, and this song (along with the few before it) are evidence of that. the music was tightening up, but i was getting a little bored with the topics i was exploring.

so, this closes this introductory experimental/learning phase of my musical career.

the explanation of this functions on two levels. i knew this was the end (for the foreseeable future) as i was recording it, so it's written as a reflection. maybe it's true that i didn't really have anything worthwhile to say...

however, the lyrics are all restatements of things that i heard other people around me say at school. i'm reflecting equally on the irrelevance of daily conversation, and suggesting that if this is what we're wasting our time doing then maybe we should all just give up and go home. so, it's a little tongue-in-cheek at the same time as it's not. as always...

musically, this is one of the more developed pieces in the early demos - it's the second keyboard driven vocal track i did, and required sneaking into my sister's room to record the parts. i think there's something forward-thinking about it as it kind of foreshadows a strain of indie/psych/punk/pop that was popular in the mid 00s. but, i'm honestly not sure what i was drawing on. like i say, it sort of stands out...

recorded in may, 1997. remastered on nov 8, 2013.

demo #26: stupid

i was violently anti-tobacco in my teens. to an extent, i still am.

i like the music here. something i'm realizing going through these old songs is how much they shadow the creation of post-rock, which was beginning to happen right at about the same time but that i had no realization of. i was in tune with something without realizing it.

lyrically, again, i wish i had articulated myself just a bit better. i wouldn't present the health care argument at this point; i guess my thinking has evolved away from that kind of base liberalism and to something a bit more universal in scope. well, i reject the entire concept of currency at this point, so it doesn't make a lot of sense. nor do i think we'd have to make resource-based decisions if it weren't for the limits provided by currency. so, i'm retracting that statement.

i think the general theme remains valid, though. smoking tobacco is hard to describe without using the word 'stupid'.

recorded in april, 1997. remastered on nov 8, 2013.

demo #25: sick

ok, so this. i forgot about this. umm...

i think i was trolling, but i think i was also applying the disturbed pathologies i was exploring in these songs to people around me and realizing that maybe we're all fucked up inside in our own different ways. there's actually somewhat of a message of egalitarian social reform buried in this. are any of us really 'better' than any of the rest of us, or are we all guided by the same contemptible, morbid fantasies? a little cliched, but...

....i think i was mostly just trolling.

i was also coming to the point where i had finished exploring what i wanted to explore and wanted to shift directions, thematically. the song is meant to be a sort of a summary of what i'd written previously, offering a conclusion.

i should also trigger this. the attempt was to be shocking on a dark humour level rather than seriously disturbing, but it's at least somewhere near that line that separates out good taste.

recorded in april, 1997. remastered on nov 8, 2013.