This Friday, I wear a new hat?

My experience in the working world thus far, post-grad school, has been a lot like I feared it would be and a lot like it was before. I've been sitting without much of anything to do in any kind of sequence. I've been left to my own devices but regarded questioningly, as those powers who are wonder if they needed to hire me. Today I move to the other side of the office to do some other task I may or may not be required to produce proof of labor on. Money trickles in, money trickles out. It's getting cooler. My joints ache, especially on my typing hands, and I feel the grasshopper of the mind has foolishly used up all his serotonin during endlessly sunny summer days in the voluptuary. A love of sorts perches near my window and watches me lose my taste for excess. The seasons are changing within and without me, and I wonder if I'll ever get to Europe. The days are deceptively endless, and the retarder is heavy with an antenna finger in my third eye. These are the things that humans do, but I have so many questions.

Two Sentence Record Reviews:

Goldfrapp: Supernature.
T. Rex meets Olivia Newton John and Prince (and Eartha Kitt?). Good.










Boards of Canada: The Campfire Headphase

Bibio and Matmos meet BoC. It is clearly wonderful that Varispeed and delay squirts warble their way into this fuzz-trip, deceptively simple sound.










Ladytron: The Witching Hour

My Bloody Valentine and Roxy Music team up with the "If you're 21, you're no fun" krew. Pop a boner in the echoing vocals and pump away with the addition of the rock chug.

Technorati Tags: electronica, record reviews

I want to read this book.

Deciphering a brave new world:


Legendary inventor Ray Kurzweil considers how artificial intelligence might reshape society.

The arrangement of horns and the subject matter on the fall and rise... On this album makes it a volcanic stand-out.

Blackalicious: The Craft- I Have Ten Minutes

Blackalicious' new project, The Craft, has dropped.
I first heard the Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel on their 2002 outing, Blazing Arrow, and ultra-dense masterwork of collaboration technical layering of tracks, and mixing of soul sensibilities with J5/funk-driven non-syncopated hip-hop. My mind was blown. It was one of the best albums to come out of a summer that gave us Schneider TM's "Zoomer" and Interpol's "Turn On the Bright Lights." The ensuing years haven't, unfortunately, shown us such a glut of quality, powerfully new sounds (I maintain that The National's Alligator remains one of the only albums of the past two years).
This is an album that two prolific and talented genii doted on. It's obvious. Think Funk + Soul + Hip Hop meets 5th dimension and Star Trek. This is an album that will not turn you off, but it is an album that on this second listen, has to be committed to. Xcel's production is tweaked, to say the least- each moment of music contains so much microinformation packed into a reassuring and familiar hip-hop beat that the ear is tempted to pass through the mass of it as the eye over atoms. The album does not appear to have another "First in Flight," a song that immediately and uncompromisingly lifted my attention at a five finger discount on their last album. The Gift of Gab's trademark rhythmic locquaciousness seems to fade into a drone- the spaces where the music's hooks were allowed to take over on the last release don't seem to be rearing their heads on this latest droplet of acrylic.
Keep in mind I am reviewing this record in comparison to my experience of my discovery of this duo- by no means is this album going to be a turn-off in the quality department. It simply doesn't seem to surmount the challenge erected by their last, amazing record, moving musically in nanometers in comparison- lacking the amazing changes and hooks.
Of course, I say this now.
My time is up.

Update:
After another couple of listens, I do have to say that this album is definitely a disappointment in comparison to Blazing Arrow, this record just isn't up to snuff. The trippy 5th Dimension meets Star Trek thing they have going on is cool, and it stands out particularly on the opener World of Vibrations and on The Fall and Rise of Elliot Brown, but most of the record gets lost in conventional beats and a morass of continuously invariably quickened vocals from the Gift of Gab.

[composed and posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: Hip Hop

Today whilst fiddling with the volume on my i pod I kicked i sick pigeon. This was a strange and ill occurrence.

Lindsay Lohan Freestyle

Lindsay Lohan freestyle rap

Technorati Tags: breasts, rap

Trying Something New

Just got Ecto to try to beef up my blogging. We'll see how this works out.
Soul Power from the album "Electric Circus" by Common

Earthlings colonize the universe with sexual desire:

The Aliens had no idea they wanted it doggy style.

American Women, Armenian Women

Nerf Balloon Man Treats His Ladies Indifferently

She makes to leave with cold eyelashes, doing not comely. For fair, it is she who may take her leave at her convenience. It computes.
How many steps along in the process further than she does the nerf balloon man behold?
One sees the distance, but one knows one's peg is still planted in the motionless now. He says "the dew on your mascara has gotten fat and tepid, and I feel the gravity of your eyes on me..."
Nerf balloon man spanks her for response, which returns moist and repetitively as it always has. He is behind her again, after all.
"My butterfly, I've fixed you here." Is how he finishes. She, for fair, will be here for years to come.
"You are free, making long at the door, but the danger of bringing your eyes once so close to mine..."
A mouth open is always now, be the eyes however far gone- hers, lovely, not the containment but the expression in wet skin of abundance.
"...I will always come faster than you can go."

Truly Horrible?

?

кто хочет трахаться?

Movies in the public Domain available as Bit Torrents

Public Domain Torrents dot com.

BitTorrent.

In Addition to Eno's Oblique Strategies, Now We Have:

The definitive collection of idea generation methods.

Sunday Morning Catches Me Up: Dig Desolation Jones

Listening to a little NPR "On the Media" via podcast.

As for new comics:

Got hold of the first issue of Desolation Jones this week, along with the most recent one, issue #3. Ellis's own commentary on issue #1 can be found here. This is easily one of the most visually captivating tracks on which I've ever set the eye-train running, which it does at bullet speeds. Ish one really put the whole story in place, correcting me on a few misconceptions regarding the plot. Set in some version of the present, not the near future as I had originally thought, L.A. is a sort of open prison for disbarred and out-of-favor members of the world's intelligence community. Jones is former M16, victim and sole survivor of an experiment the depths of the horrors of which have only been partially insinuated called the desolation test. In L.A. he works as a private investigator for this stray dog intelligence community. His existence is hallucinogenic, he is beset by visions and distortions of reality he can't keep at bay- he is the perfect hard-boiled supermodern private dick, a translation of noir into transient modernity. He lives in a world not unlike that encountered in the pages of Algren's New Orleans in A Walk on the Wild Side, a world peopled by the shells of the shells of people, the remainders of those mechanisms that once fulfilled a professional obsession or obligation with all traces of the social dug out of them; these are people who have become forks and who've had a few tines broken off who are then forced to fly back to the world of hugs and brunch. Ellis's theme of hyper-mediation is thoughtfully entertained and expanded in this book. Transmetropolitan explored, in the few compilations I had the good fortune to stumble across a few years ago, what I do not mean to seem derogatory in characterizing as a more superficial exploration of the effects of media on people. In that series, we see the hero, Spider Jerusalem, throwing his hands up in the air as he uses the press to try to get people in the hyper-mediated future to police their humanity and its loss. This book, in the first three issues, seems to be leading us to focus not on identifying with a voice of reason pointing out the decay of people victimised by their own eagerness to be mediated as in Transmetropolitan, but instead on a world without that antebellum voice of reason. This is a world of people ruined by their specializations, people who have tuned in to the million gallons of thought pouring down from the wire and lost vast tracts of themselves because they don't have enough channels in their perception to do something with all information at once. There are no other characters of any other stripe in this book. Though Spider Jerusalem's jaunts were set in the future, the present-day world Michael Jones inhabits is the bleaker, more far-flung.
Pay particular attention to Jones' musing on supermodernism, the mediation of space as a message: You are just passing through, you don't belong here. The characters in this book are a testament to the arrival of our plight in our mediated present- YOU don't belong here. YOU don't belong anywhere. If any part of YOU wants to get through to tomorrow, YOU had best make friends with a profession. And all professions simply use their human mediums to transfer information from one place to another.

Too much good stuff

DMX Krew just released a new cd on Rephlex with very little press. 2xCD entitled "Wave:CD".

Some sounds and interesting stuff (New Boards of Canada...)

New Boards of Canada Track, via Scissorkick.
If you haven't already, you should get hold of the BOC remix of Broken Drum on the latest Beck cd.

Sound wonderfulness from a device called THE INSANIUM.

Spectrasonic releases drum loop collection to benefit victims of Katrina. Page seems to be down, though- maybe bandwidth problems? Here's a story linking to it.

Via Getlofi:
Sounds from hacked Yamaha FM chips here.

Feeling Shit Getting Multiple with MOOG

Yesterday I Watched MOOG, a recent documentary focusing on the spiritual side of Robert Moog, the man the movie would have you believe invented the whole world's ability to digest the idea of a synthesizer. That would be beautiful if it were true. I wonder if it is. The good people at the Keio Organ Company, also known as KORG, might have something to say about that. At least it never comes out and asserts that he actually invented the synthesizer, an insane proposition that almost everyone is fond of getting behind. Some early synthesizers were actually developed in conjunction with the technology for reproducing the human voice over telephone wires. You think that stuff just happens? That is synthesis, pink one. That's like a vocoder whose distortion we have been taught is simply a signifier of the real, technical anamnesis of the authentic human voice. It's synthesis we've been taught to ignore.
In any event, the movie was good. It focuses on Moog's thoughts on energy and the interconnectedness of all things. He describes his work with the design of synthesizers as a communion between a timeless realm of pure energy and human memory. It is his ingenuity and patience that puts MOOG-branded, oscillator-equipped hash marks on reality, inserts him into the flow of history, into everyone else's history. In naming these machines, as he puts it, it was not his wish to insinuate that the music they made was "synthetic," but that the music was real, that it exists, that it is whole and continuous- every bit as much as the music from conventional instruments. The music was not synthetic, but synthesized- made, irrefutable.
A short conversation excerpted in the movie between Bob Moog and European University professor DJ Spooky explores this same theme of the humanity of synthesized music, the compassion and emotion and the natural flavor it embodies. The Subliminal Kid spoke about his notions on sampling, on the idea that you can take sounds that exists in your memory and as a physical artifact recorded or encoded in something, a sound that remains forever in the time it was recorded (1922, 1950, 2003) and splice all these parts together into a new composition. Memory loses its time-locked sequence, its imprisonment in the past and in its context, its servitude to the limited multi-tasking opportunities provided by THE MOMENT. Notions and concepts remain whole but excerpted, recombined, real and whole and new in a whole new context. Bob saw his own act of bearing witness to the link between concept, URGE, and creation, a process that produced the synthesizers he built and thus enabled musicians to expand their performative capabilities, as a sign of the continuousness of the mental, conceptual realm and the world of the works of hands and days. DJ Spooky saw this same continousness played out in a perceptually adjusted vector, not in the audible expression of the simplest waveforms, but in the recombination through sampling of concepts and energy across time, across format, across the borders between life and death.

ADHD

A rundown of a million unrelated things:
Linux for the ipod.

I saw Scarlet Johannsen at Croxley eating 10 cent wings.

Yesterday I got Safety Scissors' Tainted Lunch.

Brian Eno and Cluster's 1977 collaboration, Cluster and Eno has been re-released, so two years after I start looking for it (three?) it is suddenly available to everyone. Hooray.

I am in possession of issue no. 2 of The Winter Men (Зимние Мужчины) and issue no. 3 of Desolation Jones. I read them last night.
There will certainly be more said regarding these.

Can someone please tell me how I can get hold of a copy of Good Sound by Mr. Schmuck's Farm (AKA Schneider TM and a collaborator)? This shit is hard to get hold of if you are me and do not want to order from abroad.

For the time being, that will be all.

Water and Cheese

A quiet evening in a living room, in the apartment where I now reside. Won't find me painting more tonight, I'll let the latex dry another day before I affix the masking tape to the beautful orange walls.

A Tinier World

Blink, Blink:
Your eyes drop twice like ice cubes
and we drop into a tinier world
And you and I and the others simplify
and I'm a martini and you're a gin and tonic and we're all just drinking each from the other
with the customary greeting:
Drink from me, I runneth over.

a quick list of appropriate protest music

I've been meaning to write this post for about a week, but the new job, the moving, the painting, have all been getting in the way. I am suffering withdrawal from alcohol as I type this, but I am here eating and taking a break from painting for the moment, giving me the opportunity to post. Albums appropriate to the current state of government:
Trans Am: Liberation
Skinny Puppy's single "Tin Omen," done with the help of Alain Jourgenson, auteur of-
Ministry: Twitch, The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste (and all the other ones pre-filthpig, too, I guess)
Megadebt: Misadventures in Global Desecration
Food For Animals: Scavengers
Ted Leo "The High Party," "Ballad of the Sin-eater"
Free new protest track by TV on the Radio available here.
Short list, but, you know, these things are amendable.

Alarmism

With the deluge come so many new ways for the world to end. Take heart in a new possibility to be right, finally, sexily, with no threat of revisionists hijacking your last words.

Tiny visions of summer

Summer is pulling shut, we've sent the love home and the chlorophyll is seeping away from the surface of things, peeling away as a veneer from the murder beneath. In the soggy south the poor are at each other's throats.


I go to the bar, but I'm tired I will drink water and coke. this weekend I will not drink at all.nor will I smoke.

The Big Easy is underwater. New Orleans has sunk.
Current TV blog coverage here.
Watch your donations, article here.

Excellent interview with Matt Taibbi, formerly of the eXile and, more recently, the New York Press here. Elucidation on the swing right of that free weekly and the disgusting plight of reason under the merciless wheels of ideologically violent christian culture cultists.

I watch the degraded plight of the poor left behind in New Orleans, and a line from the National's "City Middle" keeps running through my head.
"Take me to the nearest major city middle where they hang the lights/where it's random and it's common versus common..."

It is clear and cool in New York City. I am tired and uneasy. Chaos right here in the States is peeling the paint off the illusion of safety, and the poor are left to float downstream.