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Thursday was the annual Cycling '74 Party in SOMA. Entertainment ranged from Les Stuck and some Kentucky jump-ropers demonstrating the magic that is the Kroonde Gamma 
to performances by Laetitia Sonami, Sutekh, and quite a few other Max/MSP-wielding folk. Here's Chris Willits (l) and Aaron Ximm (r). 
Wow, I'm not sure I've seen a video with such strong leftist imagery just floating around out there in mainstream American culture. But rather than starting the revolution, the black-hooded bandits just go and vote in the end. Still...
Oh my, I have no time to make a halloween costume, but this being San Francisco and all, this little holiday is such a big deal! So much pressure to think of a brilliant costume, but it doesn't matter, there will be 100o that are so much better. So I think I will go as a unicorn, it's all about the horn, after all, and that seems rather simple to construct.
For my November 3rd performance in San Francisco, I'm going to make a sound piece out of recordings of people explaining how their lives will (or will not) change if Bush wins the election. I've already started recording some people answering this question. If anyone reading this blog would like to have their voice included in the piece, regardless of where you live, please send me a sound file (any format) with your comments or leave a message on my voicemail (please email me first). roddys@thing.net
In this perceptive article by Michael Kimmelman, we get to see a glimpse of the conflicted view of Japan through the eyes of Shomei Tomatsu. (in today's NY Times).
"Of course, an American is a different type of human than a Dutchman," the colonel said. [...] Instead of armored vehicles, the Dutch drive vehicles that leave them exposed to the people around them. To encourage interaction with local residents, they go bare-headed and are forbidden to wear mirror sunglasses. Making soldiers accessible and vulnerable to their surroundings increases their security, they contend. Making them inaccessible decreases it.from today's New York Times.
I don't think the world-view of the Dutch is particularly more complex or sophisticated than that of other cultures, but I always had this suspicion, while living in The Netherlands, that they were able to see the obvious more clearly than other cultures, whether it is in their easy acceptance of bicycles as an extraordinarily practical form of transportation or their empathetic and logical approach to gay rights. While Americans tend to bludgeon their way around the globe like a paranoid schizophrenic, the Dutch seem to follow their own way in a brilliantly eccentric yet practical manner.
"We have our own culture. But I think the Americans could have a way of operating with more respect and more understanding toward the population."
They seem to be pretty adept at understatement as well.
I am performing on November 3rd, the day after the elections, at Rickshaw Stop in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. I've been thinking a lot about what to do, depending on who wins the presidential race. I mean, come on, if Bush wins, my performance of heady sound-art-music is going to seem about as relevant as a dinner party on the Titanic after it had begun to sink.
I've been thinking of preparing two pieces: the first is for Bush winning. It will function as ritualistic mourning, made of the vocal sounds of Americans in San Francisco speaking now about their lives in a second Bush term, how many more will move abroad, how many will stay, how their lives will change. I can start recording them this weekend and build a collection of their voices and thoughts over the next 11 days.
If Kerry wins, I am thinking of presenting a preview performance of Seconds Of Salvation, the larger work I will premiere at the Lab on December 9. But, really, the race seems completely unpredictable, it is very possible Bush will be president again, as unimaginable as it seems.
Residents @ the French Fry Factory
Passing through the door you will find yourself in the alternative world of warehouse parties, where "alternative" does not mean a new marketing term. A partially disassemble Chevy Camero sits in the middle of the downstairs room. It is not artistically lit. It is not some dramatic statement of the "commercial world in decay". No. It is the car that belongs to the owner and it is for sale. Its stark reality of being exactly what it appears to be is disturbing in a way that contrived surrealistic statements can never be. The comfort of knowing it is only art is ripped away and we are left staring at a very sad car.
I just got some nice new Behringer studio monitors this morning... ahh.... bliss... pink bunnies and ice cream...
Releases:
-Digiki and his pets have been slaving away on "Animals Don't Care" out December 24. I can't wait to hear what he's done to what everybody did to him, or how did that work again? One thing's for sure, this is gonna be very very cool, bringing together artists who might not normally all be on the same release, but who really should be. Thanks Digiki!
-October 25th: The Soft Pink Truth "Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?"
Soundslike for the UK/Europe, on Tigerbeat6 for the USA.A welcome antidote to cold autumn days. Well, OK, it doesn't really get that cold in San Francisco, but it does get a little chilly though...
It's all covers of classic English punk rock and American hardcore songs (or at any rate songs by L. Voag, Crass, Die Kreuzen, a Rudimentary Peni medley, Teddy and the Frat Girls, Minor Threat, Swell Maps, Nervous Gender, The Angry Samoans, and a Carol Channing tune for good measure).
This is a snapshot of the little instrument I designed in SuperCollider and am planning to use in my upcoming performances in San Francisco. I'm sort of happier with it than anything I've made in a while, and I think it's because I feel like it has its own sound now, its own personality. But you'll have to come to the shows to hear what it sounds like.
A handy and modular touchpanel based controller designed for audio and multimedia real-time applications.
This looks like a trés sexy controller, I can only hope it's the beginning of a brave new world of OSC based controllers, along with the Kroonde Gamma. MIDI has outlived its usefulness by about 15 years, in my opinion.
The piece I'm working on right now is called Seconds of Salvation. It's going to be premiered at the Lab on December 9 with The Life On Earth playing also. Here's the official blurb (thanks Mitch!):
In Seconds of Salvation Schrock finds the underlying essence of musical redemption in various songs about hope and higher powers from different cultures and ideologies by first hacking those tunes to microscopic bleeps, next rearranging the shards, then fusing them into a new inorganic whole and finally realigning the synthetic and the natural. If that doesn't happen, it'll be really nifty anyway.
I think every culture produces songs of salvation, even those that are highly secular. This whole project came to mind when listening to Laurie Anderson's O Superman a few weeks ago, and realizing that the song is about salvation, resignation, and redemption through a higher power, in this case, science. I think the effect on the secular listener is the same as when a farmer in Tibbee, Mississippi listens to the repetitive chants of the local gospel choir. And even if this is all sociologically inaccurate, it's a provocative theory to help prod some interesting sound work out of me and my 15" electronic music box.
The photos of sort of frightening dogs on Digiki's page inspired me.
Robert, in Tokyo, seems to have almost given up on the text, except when it appears in a low resolution digital photo or as its title. Today, his weblog looks like art to me. And I'm sort of fascinated by it.
I never understood why Derrida was more popular in the United States than other parts of the world (wasn't he?) and I wondered what the French made of the American obsession with deconstructionism and its ilk. Or was his work also such a pop phenomenon in Europe? For a philosopher to penetrate mainstream American thought as thoroughly as Derrida is certainly a feat to be admired.
Whenever I read Derrida I felt that I was reading the work of a brilliant showman who was letting me in on the scam at precisely the same moment he was perpetrating it while earnestly seeming to believe that by doing just that, by setting the game up with such precision, we might both be able to get a little closer to a deeper meaning. His work has always seemed to have a Dada-like flavor to it. And his death makes me sad.
links Derrida at Cambridge (a Steve Bell cartoon) + "I'll Have To Wander All Alone" by Jacques Derrida (on the death of Deleuze) + Derrida and Jelinek on Click Opera
I don't know if Derrida impacts their work or not, but tomorrow night there is a nice concert at Mills College in Oakland, I'm planning to go, with performances by Boris Baltschun (sampler) and Serge Baghdassarians (guitar, mixing desk).
Oh Happy Day! The Knife has a new short film right here.
Mitch, my friend and clever critic of all things pop, has a great entry about the Nervous Breakdowns playing last night at the new Madrone Lounge for the Kitchen Sink Magazine issue 8 release party. He nails the show in his description. It was the best straight-up Rock Show I have seen in years.
For the last couple of months or so, I've been working on a cd project, trying to think of the medium as simply 74 minutes of space, a blank canvas in which i can work. I'm planning to call this project Stories, in it I've gathered field recordings that I've made in my travels over the last few years, as well as the sounds of my friends in different points on the globe doing things like working in their room, running away from bees in their garden, absentmindedly strumming a guitar. I am then mixing and matching them into what has become essentially two large tracks. At points it is more of a pure field recording, at other times, it is a complex sound environment. I feel like I am composing again, not on paper, but in time, making something that could function as music to be listened to with complete focus, or maybe only as an atmosphere, it should work on both these levels.
Just got this in my mailbox from the Staalplaat music people, formerly of Amsterdam, and now apparently in Berlin.
The Staalplaat Store is finally open,Staalplaat
Torstr. 72
D-10119 Berlin
U2 Rosa LuxemburgplatzYou don't have to call it music if the term shocks you
