dutch design
Icon catches up on the latest goings on in the Dutch design world. (via Tesugen.com)
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June 30, 2004
June 27, 2004
who are you?
On the bus the other day, I started writing a collection of dichotomies, some rather suspect in their assumption of contradiction, others not, and then choosing the ones "which mostly closely approximates your interests," like in those ridiculous personality tests from grade school.
So far:
(X )Kitsch
( )Tacky
This one occurred to me when looking at the tackiness of the Pride celebration decorations in San Francisco. Whatever happened to gays with good taste? Kitsch can be in excellent taste, but angel wings and rainbow flags painted on everything? Hmm....
(X)Complexity
( )Irrationality
I think it's interesting to think of these two things as polar opposites, creating a strange spectrum wherein the middle would be comprised of a perfect mix of the two. It seems Brian Ferneyhough's music works in this spectrum at times.
( )Austerity
(X)Humor
( )Permanence
(X)Pop
This one was inspired by Momus.
(X)Architecture
( )Improvisation
Making an architecture inside of which you can play and move around, musically speaking, is a much different thing than turning your brain off and turning your instrument on.
( )Input
(X)Output
Always the most important thing.
(X)Mystification
( )Demystification
Thanks to living in Japan for this!
(X)Simplicity
( )Simplistic
Learned this from Fred Frith and Alvin Lucier.
and just where are we now?
Tonight was the first rehearsal of a new network music piece that Pan Pacific Playground (aka Tadashi Usami) is developing. I'm planning to use it in performance for the SuperCollider class I'm teaching at STEIM next month. Tonight we were connecting three points on the globe: Doug Van Nort in Montreal, Michael Cox and I in Oakland, and Tadashi in Tokyo. The sounds that Tadashi has developed in this program are strikingly subtle and delicate, listening to it was a great treat.
The way the patch functions is that basically there are a set of sound architectures, each one of them can be controlled by a series of interfaces that influence tonal quality and rhythm in different ways. These sound architectures live on each machine locked into the grid, and can be fired up at will. Every machine is producing the same final sound product, we're all listening to and influencing a nearly identical sonic object in each respective geographic point, with very little delay, since no audio data is being transferred, only terse and tight control information telling every computer what sound it should be making, when, and how, shifting the architectures as we like. There are a few exceptions, but generally that is what is happening.
When playing tonight, I got a very real sense of the "ghost in the machine." Looking at my screen, I could see others changing parameters in real time, sliders moving without my control. Topographical space was of no importance in this music, was quite a stunning feeling to be part of it, an experience that I would not be able to have if I were simply watching someone else do it.
In a recent article in Frieze magazine, the topic of which is quite different than mine, Jan Verwoert writes, "Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari suggest that the proximity between two points in space is determined not necessarily by physical distance but by the mutual relationship between the people at those points, reciprocally observing each other." I think in this sense the first rehearsal was a success, we were very close, observing and reacting to one another in a meaningful way. But if that is the case, why did it feel so lonely? Maybe because, as a friend pointed out the other day, theoretical constructs, and I would add smart code, do have their limitations.
June 25, 2004
clocks of notes
I visited my friend and mentor, composer Mark Applebaum the other day in Palo Alto. Here are some wonderfully absurd clocks he's making, they line the top of a wall in his studio.
Mark's a busy man, he just released two new CD's, Catfish and Intellectual Property , has performances coming up in Antwerp, Belgium and at the Vienna Modern Festival among many many other projects. Ah... his example always reminds me that I should fight my tendency towards inertia. Time to get to work!!
ok, this is pretty nice
When is every airline going to offer wifi aboard their flights? iChat at 35,000 ft.
June 23, 2004
music for a mausoleum
Two nights ago I went to the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, a beautiful and intensely maze-like building housing the ashes of many northern Californians. I totally want my ashes to be kept there, it's a building of beautiful sun-drenched golds and browns with occasional blasts of razor sharp blue.
On the night I was there, eccentric composers from all over the area had descended on the place putting sound installations in fountains and flowers, Max/MSP garbled acoustic instruments making strange yelps from hidden hallways. All in all it was a wonderfully "California" type event, in the way it proclaimed that even death can be sunny, warm, and full of electronic music and smily people.
Now I'm so looking forward to seeing the not-so-young Francis Dhomont perform on Friday with Matmos. His Frankenstein Symphony was a huge influence on me when I was young and intellectually sponge-like. Well, I'm still pretty sponge-like, but am certainly not young anymore.
I think this may be tangentially related to Momus' recent pronouncement in which he stated "It's interesting that one of the key elements of the American identity touches precisely on this problem: Americans tend to believe that there is no conflict between 'staying in touch with your roots' and 'becoming whoever you want to be.'" There are so many connections to be drawn, I just don't have the time at the moment to give it the thought it deserves.
right now, over there
robert's weblog entry today made me happy.
June 19, 2004
japanese chihuahuas sporting art lovers
June 16, 2004
radio station of the day
Formerly on the air, now on the WiFi, so to speak, Radio 100 is broadcasting strange and exciting experimentalism 24 hours a day from some underground bunker in the heart of Amsterdam.
June 14, 2004
antwerp memories
If I could live anywhere in Europe, I think I would choose Antwerp. It's really difficult to put my finger on exactly what it is that I find so attractive about it. It has a kind of artsy and intelligent self-awareness that is never permitted to blossom into full-blown snobbery.
When the Parisian fashion crowd travels down to Antwerp, they do so in the full glory of slumming. But the designers in Antwerp know this as well, and slum it up for all its worth, thereby getting the avant-edge that comes from being the "outsider" as well as the euros and yen that come from the Parisian fashion machine. In a sense, they leave the snobbery to the professionals.
What got me thinking about Antwerp was this project they're doing, a sort of SMS urban memory machine.
sf
I'm back in San Francisco. The more time I spend away from it, the happier I am to come back. I think it was Momus who described the city as "America with its head in the clouds." Sounds about right to me.
Best San Francisco discovery in the last 24 hours: Peko Sushi Bar! Totally fresh Japanese and California style sushi, all served with Waylon Jennings music in the background. It's great to be here again.
June 12, 2004
stranger
Yesterday I re-read sociologist Georg Simmel's illuminating and eloquent short essay The Stranger.
"[The stranger] is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of 'objectivity.'" But objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement."
"Objectivity may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given. The freedom, however, which allows the stranger to experience and treat even his close relationships as though from a bird's-eye view, contains many dangerous possibilities."
"The stranger has only certain more general qualities in common with others, whereas the relation to more organically connected persons is based on the commonness of specific differences from merely general features."
While reading this, I began recognizing the personality traits of many of the people I know and work with around the world. My best friends are the ones who are always at least slightly removed from the culture, either aesthetically or socially, in which they are working. They favor distance, skepticism, and multiple perspective over regionality, certainty, and singular focus. It seems I do prefer the company of "strangers." No doubt that I often depend on their kindess.
June 10, 2004
sky tractor!
Early early sunday morning, I'm off to San Francisco. While there I'll be busy, a welcome change from my long alcohol-padded afternoons basking in the blinding southern sunshine sipping on mint juleps, working on my tan in the hammock.
Well, I have been doing a bit more than that! Recently I've been sampling a lot of piano sounds, building up a collection that I can keep working with, it's not everyday that I have access to an acoustic piano. Actually, nobody has pianos anymore, do they? I enjoy removing the attack portion of a piano sound, it creates such a great texture, almost like some sort of New Romantics analog electronic synthesized sound circa '82.
Also I am working with Tadashi Usami in Tokyo and Michael Cox in California on planning the network music portion of the Supercollider workshop I am teaching in Amsterdam at STEIM in July. Big thanks to them both.
June 7, 2004
this place has been falling down since i was born
Today I took pictures of some of my favorite buildings, currently in a state of ruin, located in my childhood town. Every few years when I make it back to this part of the country, I always like to see how much more they've collapsed since last time. Here is the former Prairie, Mississippi (yes, it is really called Prairie) postal office, code 39756, in operation until about 1980.
June 3, 2004
code, aesthetics, and urban design
Peter Lindberg's blog has prompted me, on several occasions, to visit the local library to find a book he is reading. If you need some brain food, this is not a bad place to look.
June 2, 2004
sweet sexy simple
I made a short piece of music that was, I think, inspired by what I've been reading of Jean Cocteau in recent days. It is all about lines, delicate interruptions, and dreamy malaise. I recorded it in one take with a quiet afternoon rain shower falling outside.*
When I saw the Cocteau retrospective at the Pompidou Centre while in Paris at the beginning of the year, I was struck by how he could render the most difficult images into dreamy cartoons. Even his airy depictions of what looked to be strenuous sexual positions seemed to come from the perspective of nonchalance and starry-eyed wonder.
Two For B (an mp3 file, 2'49")
I'm still giving my music away. Hopefully someday (soon?) I can get my work out there in the formats preferred by a capitalist world, and after that I'll start thinking about the money stuff. I've always hated thinking about money. My lack of it is certainly testimony to that.
*After writing the above and listening to my music again, I think it is actually fairly active, need to aim for even less busy-ness next time.
June 1, 2004
he fancies himself an artist
"The exquisite dandy, a homosexual type adopted, and perfected, by Cocteau in Belle-Epoque Paris, turned into an object of suspicion after the events at Stonewall galvanized the gay-rights movement; it has since become rare. Nobody these days - except for the transsexual and the drag queen, those inextinguishable figures of the perverse sublime - seems to have the patience and discipline necessary for such supreme vanity."
Walrus Magazine, on Jean Cocteau.
points of origin
"This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg."
-Robert Moses, political activist and schoolteacher in Jackson, Mississippi
"Apartheid is an English word that came into South African English from Afrikaans, the language of the Dutch settlers of South Africa. They in turn had made up the word from the Dutch word apart, “separate,” and the suffix -heid, which corresponds to our suffix -hood. Thus apartheid literally means 'separateness.'"
-Joseph Lelyveld, from his book Move Your Shadow
Mississippi Becomes A Democracy (listen via realplayer): a radio documentary by Soundprint that provides an overview of the recent (in the last 40 years) racial battles of this state, a place which has historically embodied the most insane, paranoid, and violent tendencies in American culture.
Why has there never been a truth and reconciliation committee here? Where are the public testimonies to apologies? There are so many things I do not understand at all about this place. Before coming back this time, I thought I was ready to face it, I had plans to make art about it, to celebrate the musical history, make digital samples of gospel singers in countryside churches (fun!) and blues musicians in juke joints. But in reality I just feel demoralized and powerless while here. The problems of this part of the world are beyond rational comprehension. I will not be leaving a moment too soon.