FundamentallySound Blog

Let's take the web back to 1995, when everyone would put their favorite links on their "homepages" as a way to help others with their online searches. You know, just find someone who has similar taste and they will have links to the things you want to find. This was way before Google could magically take you where you want to go, even if you yourself don't quite know. 99% of the time when Google suggests an alternate search, it really is the one I wanted to do in the first place.

Anyway, first off we have my favorite pilot, Patrick Smith, who writes the Ask The Pilot column in Salon Magazine.

I love that he has such an unlikely combination of passions: airplanes and 80's punk rock, with a dash of leftist/progressive thinking. He has even personally written back to me when I had a question about a flight between Germany and Tokyo. It seemed that the flight was going in completely the wrong direction for quite a long time after takeoff, as was noted per the cool Lufthansa digital interactive map on the back of the seat in front of me. Apparently this can be due to heavy air traffic, ground noise regulations, and that type of thing. I was afraid the pilots had punched in the wrong coordinates. Calmly rational thinking while flying is not my strong point, ask anyone who's ever flown with me. But at the same time I absolutely adore flying, even in this age of cramped seats and inappropriately frisky pilots.

Winning the most anticipated new software package for Mac OS X award is Ardour. It's an open source audio workstation, a homemade "ProTools Free." But it's anyone's guess as to when it will be ready. I know it's rather bad form to be impatient for freebies, but I could really use this thing. Now.

And who couldn't use an inside tip on lower airfares. Airfare Watchdog is a good resource for this.

All of the links I've listed so far just seem so... practical. Here are some musician's links. William Basinski makes lovely repetitive music hitting just the right spot on foggy cold mornings. Un caddie renversé dans l'herbe is smart. And fun. Also Chahe Demian, a San Franciscan, makes impeccably clean and minimal techno. He's playing at Mezzanine this Friday night.

And a few labels about very nice experimental music: Softl Music, Dekorder, and Antiopic.

That's about all I can find of interest from my Safari bookmarks today. Until next time...

Posted by at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm drinking a glass of this very nice old Dutch alcohol (Oud Genever, I think) and listening to Strange Eyes by Magnetic Fields all in an attempt to make this last hour of being 28 years old last as long as possible.

Posted by at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm tired of being disappointed by the gay club parties in San Francisco. I mean, it's all pretty exotic to me, I don't claim to be an expert in the field. But I know what I like. I want parties with weird and exciting music, people who make their own costumes, wit, glamour, original fashion, and high 21st century camp. I oh–so–don't want predictability and style asphyxiation. When did so many gay men start dressing like conservative Republicans? I've been thinking about how gay men have become so boring since becoming a "normal" part of society a lot recently, partly because I'm reading Homos, by Leo Bersani. It's a very Act-Up kind of mid-90s diatribe against the de-gaying of gayness.

Anyway... This party at Deco looks like it has potential:

Posted by at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Luc Ferrari died. If these things happen in threes, who's next? I don't want to know.

Posted by at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I bought some new red shoes. They're a brilliant red that I really enjoy, much better than other types of red. There's only one type of red that I like, and it's this barn/church door red. I've also noticed the color on those huge wooden shutters on old houses in the Hague.

Today I took a walk through Golden Gate Park. I always seem to forget how lovely the park is, especially the Botanical Gardens.

It was a typical late summer San Francisco day, cold, gray, and windy. I really love this weather, makes me want to do nothing more than sort of barricade myself in my apartment and work.

Speaking of work, I've recently updated the Sound Swap site, an online collaborative node for Seamus Cater and I to continue our work together while in different parts of the world. On the site, I've added a new ending for our piece (untitled). I like the new ending much better. Marc at disquiet.com had this to say about the piece: "Cater's harmonica [is] processed by Schrock, who creates a kind of monastic zone-out realm, with overlapping patterns of round tones that echo Terry Riley's minimalist mysticism." Apparently it was also the top download at that site this past week.

In other music news, my piece commissioned by the American Music Center's Siday–Music–On–Hold program is now online at the AMC site. NPR did a story on the project, you can listen to it here.

While walking through the park this morning, I noticed that the new de Young museum, designed by the Pritzker prize winning duo of Herzog & de Meuron, is almost finished. I snapped some photos. "Continue reading" to see them...

update: I'm *not* going to be performing at Le Placard on Sunday. I misread their schedule and signed up for 5:30 AM instead of 5:30 PM. Next time... Living in America has put me back on a 12 hour clock instead of a 24 hour clock.

Posted by at 7:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The New York Times brought William T. Vollmann (here's an interview) to review a new biography of Nietzsche. Don't know about the book, but the review is excellent.

Posted by at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm bored. Can somebody please tell me something interesting to do in San Francisco? I'd be sooo grateful.

Posted by at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Marc at disquiet.com's latest journal entry is a collection of all the news that is news. Lots of good music/etc information to be found here.

Posted by at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are two days remaining of Air Vent

Five minute snippets of sound will be transmitted hourly for those 10 days, both pre-recorded & live via mobile/landline/internet phones from around the world.

The idea is to take the background sound from a specific space & relocate it (mainly live) into other new, similar & contrasting environments through radio.

I submitted a recording of cicadas (9.5 MB) made on a hot night last month in the northern Mississippi countryside.

Posted by at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past week was largely spent with my friend and frequent musical partner–in–crime Seamus Cater. We played shows on Wednesday and Friday nights, Wednesday at 21 Grand's new space in Oakland and Friday night at The Drum Machine Museum.

I think I was happier with our performance on Wednesday, we seemed to strike a good balance of quiet sound and understated gesture versus Friday night's slightly sort of over-the-top noisiness. I think we were just taken with the sound system, enjoying it for the fact that it could accurately reproduce the low frequencies we meant to make. Although, I have to say, Seamus' rhythmically granulated harmonica performance for the first ten minutes was entrancing and evocative, I hope he'll do that more. It reminded me of very early Steve Reich. His Supercollider patch, that I had a hand in developing early on, has grown into a lean and mean music machine, and looks great to boot.

I also finally got my dear friend R. to go to Cafe Hurghada with me. It is my favorite cafe in the whole city, with seating for about 4.

It's the kind of place where you can hang out with art-fags, Swedish tourists, and construction workers all at the same time. I don't know of any place like that, well, anywhere else in the world.

R. just got her first digital camera and is obsessively taking pictures of anyone and everyone. I love it, she's unafraid to take pictures of strangers without asking, just walking right up to them and snapping their picture. And with a digital camera, there's no chance of ever running out of images, but I wonder if that also lessens their value a bit when compared to analog cameras.

Posted by at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)