this is an augmented experiment with a program called "sounder" that takes advantage of some obscure midi qualities to transport the act of triggering a note into the physical world. imagine a midi tennis ball that triggers at different intensities based on how hard the ball is thrown at a wall. now, imagine a frictionless space where that ball can bounce around indefinitely. sounder virtualizes this reality.
the experiment was augmented with synthesizer and guitar parts, and a sample of garry trudeau posing as a political candidate and being interviewed by larry king. i first interacted with that sample early in the morning in a deeply altered state and came to attach certain feelings to it that are difficult to describe. while it's clearly parody, it hit me as being frighteningly representative of reality. i suppose that all effective parody has this quality. perhaps my reaction speaks more of where i was at this point than anything else. i wasn't reacting well to the return of republicanism; i was very much dreading the future that i had no control in preventing. the absurd truth, here, cut me right down.
i was fucking baked.
eventually, i decided that the sample is just not worth listening to repeatedly and removed it from the track. the initial version, with doonesbury sample, is available here:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/entropy-original-mix
initially recorded in late 1999. reconstructed to remove the sample on sept 17, 2006.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/entropy
Thursday, January 9, 2014
gravity’s rainbow (original album mix)
reading pynchon, smoking pot, listening to floyd, watching star trek re-runs: must be the mid 70s. naw. early 00s....
"the real war is always there. the dying tapers off now and then, but the war is still killing lots of people. only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways, often in ways that are too subtle, even for us, at this level, to trace."
i have very clear memories of tripping out pretty hard into audiomulch programs as the sun appeared through some frosty february mornings. these were fun sounds to program through the bright winter dawn.
the concept came to me while reading the opening sections of the novel of the same title. "gravity's rainbow", itself, is a technical term that refers to the period of time that occurred between a rocket strike and the sound of it coming in. as they were able to move faster than sound, this happened in a way that was non-intuitive: the explosion would happen *first*, and the sound would come after. the inability to hear the rockets come in made life just a wee bit stressful in london during the war.
specifically, the opening scene narrates a movement of people into the london subway system, which was used as a system of bunkers during attacks. we're so far removed from this that it's hard to imagine: sirens going off, perhaps in the middle of the night, followed by waves of working class english scrambling for cover by the trains...
there was a point where it came to me fairly lucidly. i just needed to orchestrate it. it's a famously difficult text, but one can get the idea of the song by merely reading the first chapter.
the star trek sample came later. there were re-runs on around 4:00 in the morning; there probably still are, but i turned the tv off permanently shortly after this song was constructed. we all know what else happens around twenty minutes past 4:00 AM. it was a ritual over that winter. the episode precedes the novel, so it couldn't have been influenced by it, but it is strangely topical in the way that it relates the organians to the pynchonian "counterforce". yet, as mentioned, i was smoking a lot of pot at the time....
musically, the track is dual-layered. i've had it described as "an indescribable mixture of conventional and unconventional music" (paraphrase), which is an exaggeration that i'll take as a compliment. the song itself has a sort of an acoustic prog feel that some may compare to porcupine tree or radiohead but was in truth heavily influenced by john lennon and pink floyd (i like early radiohead, but i think porcupine tree is pretentious garbage). the effects underneath the track were constructed using a number of 16-bit sound design programs and unusual approaches to synthesis.
as mentioned, the memories are with the sun coming up. maybe you can get a bit of a sense of that.
recorded in spring, 2000.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/gravitys-rainbow
"the real war is always there. the dying tapers off now and then, but the war is still killing lots of people. only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways, often in ways that are too subtle, even for us, at this level, to trace."
i have very clear memories of tripping out pretty hard into audiomulch programs as the sun appeared through some frosty february mornings. these were fun sounds to program through the bright winter dawn.
the concept came to me while reading the opening sections of the novel of the same title. "gravity's rainbow", itself, is a technical term that refers to the period of time that occurred between a rocket strike and the sound of it coming in. as they were able to move faster than sound, this happened in a way that was non-intuitive: the explosion would happen *first*, and the sound would come after. the inability to hear the rockets come in made life just a wee bit stressful in london during the war.
specifically, the opening scene narrates a movement of people into the london subway system, which was used as a system of bunkers during attacks. we're so far removed from this that it's hard to imagine: sirens going off, perhaps in the middle of the night, followed by waves of working class english scrambling for cover by the trains...
there was a point where it came to me fairly lucidly. i just needed to orchestrate it. it's a famously difficult text, but one can get the idea of the song by merely reading the first chapter.
the star trek sample came later. there were re-runs on around 4:00 in the morning; there probably still are, but i turned the tv off permanently shortly after this song was constructed. we all know what else happens around twenty minutes past 4:00 AM. it was a ritual over that winter. the episode precedes the novel, so it couldn't have been influenced by it, but it is strangely topical in the way that it relates the organians to the pynchonian "counterforce". yet, as mentioned, i was smoking a lot of pot at the time....
musically, the track is dual-layered. i've had it described as "an indescribable mixture of conventional and unconventional music" (paraphrase), which is an exaggeration that i'll take as a compliment. the song itself has a sort of an acoustic prog feel that some may compare to porcupine tree or radiohead but was in truth heavily influenced by john lennon and pink floyd (i like early radiohead, but i think porcupine tree is pretentious garbage). the effects underneath the track were constructed using a number of 16-bit sound design programs and unusual approaches to synthesis.
as mentioned, the memories are with the sun coming up. maybe you can get a bit of a sense of that.
recorded in spring, 2000.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/gravitys-rainbow
at
23:00
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
actually, i completely disagree. well, let me clarify what i disagree about.
this article has been written a thousand times over the last ten years. it's not that the ideas haven't been tried, it's that they haven't worked. i like naomi klein on an idealistic level, but she's hopelessly wrong on this point. well, except that if you read between the lines you see quickly that she's being sarcastic, ironic and more or less just putting workers on. what naomi klein is really saying is that the union movement is a horrendous failure, in a way that allows the listener/reader to construct it themselves.
we need to realize that malatesta was right: unions are and forever will be horrifically co-opted by capital. the climate crisis isn't just an indictment of capitalism, it ought to also be the last nail in the coffin for centralized labour.
i agree that the nature of production needs to change. this is obvious. i don't agree that there's any hope at all that workers will stimulate that change, and think the left should stop wasting it's time with fantasies that they will.
meaning, naomi klein is right - once you cut through her haze of sardonic cheekiness and get to what she's actually saying.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/toward-cyborg-socialism/
dave
Lol, everytime I follow one of those Jacobin links, it leaves me shaking my head. Fortunately, I would never be alive to live under their ideas.
dgkfgkdjdgkhyffa
generally, i find them sort of refreshing, especially regarding their perception of work (and i do agree with the general crux of the article that ecology + technology is where to place effort for the future of urban civilization) but they share a general problem on the left of being far too attached to theory. it's a fairly quick process to realize that marx actually doesn't make any sense, except under conditions where capitalism is basically reduced to feudalism. you can apply marx reasonably to current conditions in bangladesh or china, for example - it's not "like" slavery, it *is* slavery and there's consequently a breaking point of revolt. but as soon as you get the slightest veneer of comfort, the whole thing falls apart. to think that the luxury of advanced capitalism will lead to increasing levels of revolt is just incoherent. and all the anarchists, from bakunin on, all realized how blatantly obvious that is, to the point of realizing that not realizing it is just really sort of stupid. why there are so many marxists, today, 150 years later, i don't understand.
when bakunin was like "ok, but it's going to be the starving unemployed that are going to organize, not the well-fed employed" that was a correction that should have been made central to all further socialist thought. and to the early socialists' credit, they did try. but then this cult of personality developed, and his writings became canonized and blah blah.....
on some level, it's easy to understand. if you realize the obvious truth that workers must behave in the interests of capital, rather than work against it, it makes sense to think that they'd collaborate with their bosses in order to keep wages high for themselves. and fuck everybody else.
but i don't understand why the academics, with no motives to not be objective, haven't understood this. i know there's a tradition towards turning every canonical text into a new bible, but that's a weak explanation to me. it just leaves me scratching my head.
this article has been written a thousand times over the last ten years. it's not that the ideas haven't been tried, it's that they haven't worked. i like naomi klein on an idealistic level, but she's hopelessly wrong on this point. well, except that if you read between the lines you see quickly that she's being sarcastic, ironic and more or less just putting workers on. what naomi klein is really saying is that the union movement is a horrendous failure, in a way that allows the listener/reader to construct it themselves.
we need to realize that malatesta was right: unions are and forever will be horrifically co-opted by capital. the climate crisis isn't just an indictment of capitalism, it ought to also be the last nail in the coffin for centralized labour.
i agree that the nature of production needs to change. this is obvious. i don't agree that there's any hope at all that workers will stimulate that change, and think the left should stop wasting it's time with fantasies that they will.
meaning, naomi klein is right - once you cut through her haze of sardonic cheekiness and get to what she's actually saying.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/toward-cyborg-socialism/
dave
Lol, everytime I follow one of those Jacobin links, it leaves me shaking my head. Fortunately, I would never be alive to live under their ideas.
dgkfgkdjdgkhyffa
generally, i find them sort of refreshing, especially regarding their perception of work (and i do agree with the general crux of the article that ecology + technology is where to place effort for the future of urban civilization) but they share a general problem on the left of being far too attached to theory. it's a fairly quick process to realize that marx actually doesn't make any sense, except under conditions where capitalism is basically reduced to feudalism. you can apply marx reasonably to current conditions in bangladesh or china, for example - it's not "like" slavery, it *is* slavery and there's consequently a breaking point of revolt. but as soon as you get the slightest veneer of comfort, the whole thing falls apart. to think that the luxury of advanced capitalism will lead to increasing levels of revolt is just incoherent. and all the anarchists, from bakunin on, all realized how blatantly obvious that is, to the point of realizing that not realizing it is just really sort of stupid. why there are so many marxists, today, 150 years later, i don't understand.
when bakunin was like "ok, but it's going to be the starving unemployed that are going to organize, not the well-fed employed" that was a correction that should have been made central to all further socialist thought. and to the early socialists' credit, they did try. but then this cult of personality developed, and his writings became canonized and blah blah.....
on some level, it's easy to understand. if you realize the obvious truth that workers must behave in the interests of capital, rather than work against it, it makes sense to think that they'd collaborate with their bosses in order to keep wages high for themselves. and fuck everybody else.
but i don't understand why the academics, with no motives to not be objective, haven't understood this. i know there's a tradition towards turning every canonical text into a new bible, but that's a weak explanation to me. it just leaves me scratching my head.
at
03:14
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
classic essay. if you never read it, you should.
as an aside, it's really disturbing how bad salon has gotten. this used to be one of the better sites on the internet. now, it's basically cosmopolitan for iphones.
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
as an aside, it's really disturbing how bad salon has gotten. this used to be one of the better sites on the internet. now, it's basically cosmopolitan for iphones.
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
at
02:12
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
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