Found this recently, for $2.
Scratched but listenable.
I don’t seem to hear or read much about twelve-tone music anymore. Or about the late-classical era at all. It just sort of melted into the underpinnings of pop culture, much as the old Roman Empire just sort of melted into the Catholic Church.
Yes, I am stretching the metaphors here.
So Biden did, indeed, win the debate as only he could have. Triumph and rejoicing in many circles, though he apparently laughed and grinned more than allowed for a Democratic VP during a debate. Accusations that the tea-totaling Biden was ‘drunk’, or ‘losing control’ were the GOP spin of the day today. Offensive, frankly: You lost this one, deal with it. When Obama lost last week, Democrats could see that, and were among the first to say it. (Yet another anecdote against the alleged false symmetry between the two parties).
Any change in the poll numbers remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Romney’s (to me) mysteriously long-lived debate bump has all but tied the race. Some trendlines now favor him. Odd for a debate to make such a difference. Even more odd for there to be no apparent effect on any downticket races.
And yet– the arbitrary 8% unemployment number as re-election threshold was beat just a week ago (7.8%). Suddenly doesn’t matter. The long-collapsed housing market, starting to seem a little less collapsed. Suddenly doesn’t matter. Deficits starting to come down. Suddenly doesn’t matter.
And so on. Not good. I remember 1980, how it felt like this sudden turning away from Reality. The Turnips out there are apparently liking the sound of this new Comfortable Lie they’re being sold.
But in 1980 the US was a net creditor nation. Our nearest competitor nation was at least a decade behind us technologically. We still had a manufacturing sector (albeit one still reeling from the 1970s Oil Shock), more natural resources, and a very stable legal/political system. None of these things are true anymore. She could take it then. I don’t think she could take it now… we still haven’t recovered from the last Republican President.
Folks really should know better than to do this to themselves. Or to the rest of us.
Just realized that I pick up exactly where I left off at the old place. Symmetry is always an omen.
We’ve built up these debates to the level of gladiatorial combat. It must have started with the Republican primary debates. The energy (and expectations) built up there carried over to this current cycle of cross-party debates. And everyone, including me (and except perhaps Romney, ironically) was shocked by this.
Romney’s plan all along was to surf his way into the White House upon a Tsunami of Bullshit, Reagan-style. And we all acted surprised when he did his best in the debate last week.
And so here we are, in the odd position of having Joe Biden as our new Rhetorical Champion of Democracy. With Paul Ryan, Dual-in-One Avatar of both Christ and Rand as the opponent.
I buy into these debates as much as anybody else does, if not more. But somehow I’ve grown tired (exhausted) of the stakes being so high.
Of course I’ll watch. Of course I’ll be part of whatever freakout or triumph comes in the aftermath.
What else could I do?
…probably had something to do with allergic reactions in crowded spaces.
The last time I was on an airplane, they wouldn’t give me my bag of peanuts. Because the kid in front of me was allergic.
Some actuary had actually modeled, computed and assessed the risk of me spraying the kid in the seat in front of me with Sublime Airborne Peanut Spray, thereby causing their horrible death via anaphylactic shock. And my taste for peanuts (and sincere need for vegetable protein) were just not worth the actuarial risk.
Ok, fine. I didn’t want to kill anyone. I had just wanted to eat some peanuts.
That said, I (much later) remembered the old Boston Puritans had outlawed eating peanuts in church, long ago, and it was still technically on the books. As a child, I had assumed this had some obscure almost-medieval reasoning behind it (peanuts were of the devil and sparked fires, summoned earthquakes and made the cows infertile). Or maybe it had something to do with the slave trade.
But no, it was probably allergies. Someone’s kid got sprayed with Sublime Airborne Peanut Spray in church, and died in convulsions. Accusing the neighbors of Witchcraft to get their land was long passé at that point (and that nonsense had always been for the backwards Country Folk, anyway), so they just decided to ban the peanuts.
It’s a theory, anyway. And so now I have this domain name.
Makes perfect sense, really.
Stumbled upon a cool (if oldish, 2008) article on the now-defunct BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Which (in hindsight) turned out to be the Bletchley Park of electronica.
Influential, groundbreaking bleeps and bloops, at taxpayer expense. Thank you, taxpayer. We are forever grateful to you.
I do miss having knobs and pedals to play with.
Got another cartridge/stylus, the Shure M44-7, on sale. This will replace the original Stanton I think, it seems good with ‘crackly’ albums. It has a reputation as a bass-heavy DJ-oriented cartridge, but my particular turntable hasn’t got much response below 30Hz so excessive bass hasn’t been an issue. As for the Stanton, apparently I can replace its stylus with one designed for 78rpm records. I’ll probably just convert it and use it for that (rather than buying a dedicated cartridge). Cheaper.
Also changed the theme here, once again. I’ll get it right, eventually.
Pulled disc 2 of the Syd Barrett album, hardly any crackle. I must have only played it the one time, way back when.
Last week I pulled my copy of Hugo Largo’s Drum. Funny how an album that was so important to me 23 years ago barely exists in the public record now. Just a little footnote on wikipedia. And a long-outdated entry on the old trouserpress website. And some scattered, shattered artifacts of history on youtube.
Other than that, I’ve been working on remastering ‘2002’.
And listening to many, many new things.
This… should do nicely.
Haven’t been posting on this or the other blog much, but I’ve been busy.
The new home studio setup is working. I’ve been bouncing between working on new stuff, and reclaiming/repurposing pieces I did in the summer of 2002 but never got around to formally releasing. There’s 45+ minutes worth of it, so there’s no harm in remastering it and ‘releasing’ it on the bandcamp site. Playing with pieces that are essentially done will help me climb these learning curves (currently seeing what I can do with Audacity and the LE version of Cubase that came with my guitar processing stomp box).
Meanwhile I’m about 30-40% through a new set (some of it still in my head). That’s scattered across the computers, some in ACID Pro, some in Cubase, some in my old copy of Ableton Live (v5.1, which I got working again two weeks ago). I’m also thinking of getting a copy of Logic Pro, at $200 it seems to come with better effects and VSTi’s than anything else that cheap. Updating the Cubase LE to full would cost nearly twice as much.
Actually haven’t been turntabling or sampling much. Found my old Syd Barrett double album and pulled the first disc. Not in bad shape (even back then I used records as ‘masters’, pulling them onto cassette tapes to be played on my Walkman, so the few records I do have from the time aren’t too worn). Haven’t had time to clean that up and burn it to CD, but I will eventually.
More as it comes. I’m hoping to have the old 2002 remastered and online by the end of October (day job permitting). The newer stuff by the end of this year.
Then I’ll have to take a look back and decide what to do next.
I’ve set up a site on Bandcamp.
The first release is an album of two pieces based on work from 2003. I had been lurking on the old microsound mailing list, and a thread on capturing environmental sounds inspired me to try my own hand at making an altered/found-sound piece. There are a number of variants floating around, (at least seven), but these two mixes were always the best– yet different enough from each other to be presented side by side.
After all the musical work I had done back in 2002 (more on that in a future post), I was exhausted, felt stuck, and found myself wondering what to do next. Meanwhile, at my day job, the project I was working on had been abruptly cancelled. Disgusted, I figured I’d fuck off work, take a week’s vacation, and spend some time playing with sounds instead.
The core sound is a little under 23 minutes of ambient noise, as recorded outside my then-apartment window (as shown) on a slightly rainy day in late May 2003. Literally just set up two microphones and pointed them at angles outside of the window, slight compression, a mild notch filter to “condition” the AC-power drone of the building’s transformer, but otherwise just the raw sound. Typical sounds of a lazy rainy afternoon in that complex: cars (their wet tires skimmering on the pavement). People coming in and out of the building. Car doors, slamming. The aforementioned transformer, droning an almost B-flat off to the left hand side of the mix throughout. A little girl, skipping or hop-scotching her way past her mother. Some interior noises as I went about my business in the apartment.
I then spent the better part of a year playing with ambient mixes over that core sound. Each mix had its own secondary sample/instrumentation set, and (like I said) I ended up with 6-7 distinct variants of Outside. Moving to Salem, work schedule and other life-events postponed mastering these until 2006, when they were declared “finished”, then mostly forgotten or written off as eccentric exercises and curiosities. All I’ve done since then was to do a little rebalancing/eq to get them up to snuff for uploading.
And now… well, I have no idea.
Not sure if it’s the best of ideas to have my first album upload –my first official ‘release’, really– be this off the wall ambient/found-sound/experimental piece from nine years ago. But this was the easiest one to prep and upload, and it was ready.
Next up: 2002.
Bought a well-used (and, sadly, well-crackled) LP copy of the King’s College Choir from Christmas 1958. Finally got around to googling it today, and found out that the recording’s fairly well known. Well known enough that the BBC actually remastered the recording into 4:0 “Surround” just this past Christmas. (Not clear from the article what the format means. Is it just 5:1 without the center and subwoofer? Or is “4:0” just what we’re supposed to call old-style quadrophonic sound these days)?
My own copy, bought for $3 at a local second-hand bookstore’s used records bin, is not in the best of shape. As a Christmas album, it was quite likely played once a year, and it shows from the wear and tear. No major scratches (except for one brief dig towards the very beginning), but it sounds as though the disc was never properly cleaned by the original owner (lots of burned-in dust, pops and crackles). It’s also doubtful they had high-end equipment.
But as I played it (pulling it onto the laptop as I did so), I realized that patterns within the wear and tear allowed me to do some forensics. Whoever owned this album is almost certainly dead (as are many of the voices on it, by now), but you can tell from the degree of noise which parts of the disc had been listened to quite often, and which had been largely ignored. I could tell you which three songs he or she adored, playing and replaying them over the years. I can imagine the time someone must have slipped while cueing up the first track to make that scratch I mentioned. It also sounds like they skipped most or all of the vicar’s sermons. And, for whatever reason, they were NOT fond of Oh Come All Ye Faithful, which sounds almost pristine (I intend to recover that one outright for my own Christmas music mix).
With respect to the recording itself, I can understand why this one seems so beloved by experts on the subject. It’s the BBC’s first stereo recording of the King’s College Christmas Mass (or ‘Service’?– do Anglicans call it ‘Mass’?), and it sold well into the 1970s on both vinyl and reel-to-reel. Presumably recorded at the tech limits of late 1958 (at the very beginning you can even hear a truck/lorry driving by outside before the singing starts).
The cleaning software does an admirable job on this material, though some of the noise can’t be totally removed without doing injury to the original recording beneath. Other than Faithful, I have no idea what I will do with these sounds. The vicar’s voice is well recorded, and might have some future use to me. And I’ve always wondered what could be done with a voiced choir’s sounds, after breaking it up into grains.
the mjl etc 