LonelyMachines

Wednesday, December 31, 2003
 
Records that made the world a better place in 2003

Fourtet: Rounds

(Reviewed here) In which Hebden refines and outstrips Pause to make an electronic record that actually breathes. I catch something new every time I listen to it. His best work yet.

Xela: For Frosty Mornings...

A modest and wistful album that matches is title. Subtle and evocative; the equivalent of watching frost etch its way across a windowpane.

Postal Service: Give Up

A continuation of last year's Benjamin Gibbard/Dntel collaboration. Some of the catchiest stuff you'll hear this year. Good enough that the few glaring mis-steps (read the lyrics to "Nothing Better") can be easily overlooked.

Notwist: Neon Golden (US version)

A record which channels everything from vintage New Order to Wire without missing a beat. "Pilot" is one of the best singles this year and comes off (strangely enough) as a post-rock successor to REM's "Driver 8."

Yasume: Where We're from the Birds Sing a Pretty Song

Xela side project using source material from the "Twin Peaks" soundtrack. Not nearly as derivative as you'd expect. I defy anyone to find a track as beautiful as "Triumph of Two" this year.

Various Artists: Mas Confusion

Label comp from Michael Fakesch of Funkstorung. Established acts like L'usine and Funckarma turn in solid tracks, but the surprises are Adam Johnson's ruminative pieces and Mr. Projectile's "More Music Less Math," which sports an amazing gamelan orchestration.

Jóhann Jóhannsson: Englabörn

Haunting treated string-quartet soundtrack to a Norse film. Minimal and direct, but very effective.

Monolake: Momentum

Everything Basic Channel ever released was a prelude to this. Robert Hencke finally pulls it all together into a coherent and fascinating album.

Starflyer 59: Old

Jason Martin finally grows up and drops the shoegazer schtick. The result is everything we knew he was capable of. A witty, catchy and meticulously arranged pop record. "Passengers" is easily the best thing he's ever written.

Ned Rorem: Chamber Music (Fibonacci Sequence/Naxos Records)

God bless Naxos for bringing obscure repetoire into the light. Two great pieces by Rorem, performed wonderfully (if, forgivably, a bit roughly) by the Fibonacci Sequence. At 8 bucks, this isn't a bargain, it's a treasure.

Keith Fullerton Whitman: Playthroughs

(Reviewed here) If Music for Airports opened the book on ambient music, then this record officially closes it. Never have I heard someone convey so much with so little.

Gjallarhorn: Grimborg

Norse/Finnish music that has to be heard to be believed. Forget what you know about "world music," this is a genre unto itself. These guys specialize in conjuring the hedonistic pagan spirit of their forbears. Jenny Wilhelms has one of the most amazing voices on the planet, and even when her backing band whips itself into a frenzy, she holds her own in the tempest. Cathartic, exhilirating and sometimes overwhelming.

Chris Clark: Empty the Bones of You and Lexaunculpt: Blurring of Trees

Neither of these records will change the world, but in their own subtle ways, they each bring something unique to the table. Lexaunculpt combines Lp5-era drum frenzy with a strong sense of melody and arrangement, while Clark takes the low road, mingling acid-tinged tracks with beautiful atmospherics and treated piano.

Soundtrack: Haibane Renmei

This year's big surprise for me. Music from an anime series by the director of Serial Experiments: Lain, which follows the daily lives of people who may or may not be angels, the album mixes late-renaissance/early-baroque instrumentation into a cohesive whole that fits the film perfectly. Enthusiastically performed, and marvelous in its simplicity and innocence.

 

Tuesday, December 30, 2003
 
Ashleigh and the Decline of Western Civilization

Stu dropped me an email that really got me thinking. Interestingly enough, it's about my resent-and-bile filled review of the last Sasha album. I get alot of mail about that, sometimes more than all the other content on the site. Anyhow, on to Stu's letter:

"While my subject line may tip you off concerning my intentions of this email, may I say that while I don't agree with your review of Airdrawndagger, I still feel it is an excellent review. Your breadth of knowledge concerning Electronica's roots are very apparent. You mentioned the transgendered Wendy Carlos and the decidedly non-techno Mouse on Mars. Most of the 'fans' of electronic music view it as a fad, and are guilty of not knowing electronica's roots. People in the Punk scene know their roots. People in the hip hop vein know their roots. Why can't more fans do their homework like you? (don't answer that)"

Okay, Rule #1:Never ask me a question and append "don't answer that." That just makes is so much more tantalizing.

Rule #2: Flattery works.

Rule #3: if you can name-check Wendy Carlos and Mouse on Mars in the same paragraph, you've got my attention.

The way I see it, there are two types of people who enjoy music: those who listen to it, and those who simply consume it. I'm in the first group. Most of the readership for this site are in the first group, and Stu, welcome to the dysfunctional family, you're one of us, too. We love music. Many of us are musicians to some extent. We all live some part of our life through music, and it's something very dear to us.

The second group consists of people like Ashleigh. You know Ashleigh. She's in that 18-35-year-old demographic. She drives a white VW Jetta, owns an iPod, shops at Abercrombie & Fitch, and really wishes that Radiohead hadn't gotten "so weird." The last book she read was on Oprah's book list, and she buys all her music off the "New & Hot" rack by the register at Tower.

She probably seems pretty harmless at first. After all, she's been raised by our commodity culture to be dumb as a stump and to make knee-jerk decisions based on what the media and (by extension) her friends think is good. Ashleigh has been presented with sanitized and abridged versions of everything for her whole life, and she doesn't even know it. Chances are, if you pointed this fact out to her, you'd get nothing but a blank stare.

The problem is, people like Ashleigh vote. They have kids who they pass this glassy-eyed vacancy on to. And they spend money, which keeps the whole system trundling along.

As long as people like Ashleigh exist, there will be a market for Yanni.

When I ran a record store, I had a friend named Wes. Wes was like a more charming version of Dick from High Fidelity. He was a walking encyclopedia of music. When he loved something, he was emphatic about it. Even if I played something he didn't like, he'd find some redeeming quality in it, and vice-versa. It was Wes who introduced me to Leo Kottke and Bruce Cockburn and who taught me that it wasn't wrong to like Genesis before Peter Gabriel left.

He and I once actually tried to sit through that infernal Yanni concert video, and after three minutes, he hit on why it was so repugnant. It's music for people who don't listen to music. Stuff like that suffers under any kind of scrutiny or close attention, but it's bland enough to be functional. Essentially, it's something you "put on the stereo" rather than something you become immersed in.

The music that people like Wes and I enjoy is a hard thing to make. It takes talent and a lot of work. It's not always warmly received. And these days, it's nothing to build a career on.

Ever since record labels have existed and peddled recorded music, they've known the value of people like Ashleigh. Ashleigh unwittingly provides them with a template for sure-fire success: take the same old reatread drivel, dress it up with polished bits of stuff from the fringes so it sounds "fresh," and push it to market as the next big thing. There's very little effort involved and little chance of failure. This is just the way large corporations like it.

It's sad for Ashleigh, really, though she doesn't know it. Her beloved Linkin Park is nothing but a hollow imitation of Killing Joke. When she cruises through the mall parking-lot blasting Daft Punk, she's got no idea that they're ripping Kraftwerk on a legally culpable level. When she sings along with the Ataris or Blink-182, she's oblivious to the fact that Husker Du and and the Descendents were doing this so much better (and with more emotion) 15 years ago. She lives, in a sense, detached from history, and in the music business, those who do not learn from history are bound to buy it over and over again in different packaging.

Over the last few years, the Big Push into our living rooms has involved Electronica. You know what it is; you've heard it blasting away in the background of those sport-drink commercials with the beautiful people. It sounds powerful, primal and maybe just a bit edgy and naughty. David Bowie even used it to make a record, so it must be good, right?

Problem is, I couldn't tell you exactly what it is, even with a gun pointed to my head.

I think it involves guys like the Prodigy and Fluke. Throw in a little bit of trance, some House, and it sells--especially if it's got that vocoder thing going on the vocals. Paul Oakenfield has certainly gotten rich, if not marginalized, on it. Problem is, it's the same old stuff as last year, except with different orchestration. At $20 a pop, I'm not wasting my money or my time on subtle variations of the same formula.

So where does that leave people like Wes and I? Well, we're sort of a niche market unto ourselves that the majors just don't cater to very often. Like people in the Punk scene or the Hip-Hop vein Stu mentioned above. In most cities, we have our own record shops filled with other weirdos like us. We know our roots and won't buy it twice. For something to impress us, it has to stand on its own merits.

When it does, it's something profound and near-life-altering. Lots of people can name the records they liked the most last year, but I can think of ones that knocked me sideways, that I bonded with, that I'll still be listening to five years down the road when every last copy of Swordfish in existence has been abandoned to gather dust in the 99-cent bin of the used-record (sorry, used-cd) store.

That's why the Sasha record bothered me so much. It doesn't tell me anything I don't already know. Stu goes on to point out,

"as far as sounds and timbre are concerned, I think that airdrawndagger is a little bit more complex than you let on. I've been working with synths for a while (a google search led me to your review), and I still can't come close to the timbres in airdrawndagger."

Fair enough, but I don't listen to music based on its technical merits. I went to high-school in a rural area, and if you were a musician, you had to be into Rush. Why? Because they were great musicians. That's all well and good, but their music was so mind-numbingly boring and heavy-handed in its sense of self-importance that it was hard to stomach. Add Geddy Lee's insectile screech to the equation, and I run the other way as quickly as possible. I can respect a record to an extent from a technical standpoint, but I just don't care about it anymore after the second listen through if there's not an emotional attachment there. Now I know that's a highly subjective thing, but I don't think I've met anyone who feels that Rush "speaks" to them on any level. Respect and enjoyment are sometimes two very different things.

I suppose that's part of my grudge against the Sasha record. The man's got so much talent that he could have made something really incredible, but it just falls flat. While it may have some technique, it simply lacks soul on a base level, and that kills it for me.

 

Saturday, December 27, 2003
 
Autechre Faq, V 1.99

I've put the finishing touches on the initial revision of the Autechre Faq. Since the original has been gathering dust for about four years now, it's quite out of date. I've been concentrating on markup and structure so far, and I haven't had the chance to do much with the content. Let me know what needs to be included.

 

Wednesday, December 24, 2003
 
Creative 1.40.06 firmware released.

Creative has finally released a firmware update for the Nomad series.

Figuring I had nothing to lose, I pulled out my recently deceased NJB3, loaded the firmware, and surprise--it now boots! It would appear that something in the 1.40.06 version fixes the underlying cause of the mysterious EAX freeze. Nice.

There are some welcome interface tweaks, including a clock/screensaver and a second skin for the "Now Playing" screen with artist and title on separate lines. Track-seek and skipping have been sped up to the point that they're almost instantaneous, and I could swear that some of the midrange frequencies have been smoothed out, but maybe that's just me.

If you've got a dead Nomad on your hands, this may be the fix. You can find it at Nomadness or the Creative site.

 

Tuesday, December 23, 2003
 
Windspan

New default theme. Click here to activate. See? I can use my powers for good...

Nothing new for the next few days, as it's Christmas, and I have all sorts of family in town. See you all next week.

 

Monday, December 22, 2003
 
Always buy the extended warranty...

Last year, I got my baby, a Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. I loved this thing. It held 20GB of mp3s, pumped out near-reference quality sound, and had a great suite of recording features to boot. I could live with the fact that I had to use a workaround to access the proprietary interface in Linux. I could overlook the fact that it sometimes froze up, requiring a hard reset, and the fact that it didn't support Ogg. What finally broke me was the dreaded EAX freeze.

Lots of folks reported that their units had frozen at the intro (EAX) screen and could not be reset. These unfortunates had to send the units back to Creative for replacement or repair, which gets woefully expensive after the three-month (yes...) warranty expires. However, as most of these problems cropped up in the first couple of months of use, I figured I had dodged the bullet after 11 months.

Wrong.

Now I have this problem. I reported it here, and as you can see, the outlook is less than encouraging. Nobody knows what causes it, nobody knows how to prevent it, and nobody knows a way to fix it beyond ripping out and replacing all the internals, a process that costs anywhere up to $200US. The player only cost $299. On top of that, I've got no guarantee that it won't happen again. No thanks.

I'm not bashing Creative here, but I certainly need to think twice before investing in a product with only a 90-day warranty. The product is spectacular, but the support is non-existent. And yes, this (and similar) catastrophic problems have been reported frequently on their whole hard-drive based line.

So I'm down to shopping the after-Christmas sales for a new option. So far I'm narrowed down to the iRiver or the Rio Karma, both of which support Ogg and work in Linux.

...and yes, I will be getting the silly extended warranty this time 8-)

 

Sunday, December 21, 2003
 
Viola

New default theme today. This one's based on a screenshot of Quon Kisuragi. As usual, you may have to refresh the page to make it show up.

 

Saturday, December 20, 2003
 
Latent Quarter

I've decided to run the Autechre info on a separate page parallel to this one. That's where I've moved the ongoing Draft 7.30 review.

Eventually, I'd like to run it as a sort of central hub for collected Autechre information. As it stands now, Autechre.nu has been stripped of most of its content, and most other sites out there present only small pieces of the whole. This is still in the early stages, and I'm in the process of gathering material and contacting the authors of several other pages.

The first order of business is mirroring and updating the Faq, but I am unable to reach the maintainer. If anyone knows how to reach him (or if you know of anything else that should be included) let me know.

 

Thursday, December 18, 2003
 
Crux

Another day, another site theme. This one's based on a photograph I took several years ago in south Georgia. Believe it or not, although I've done some editing for the charcoal effect, the colors are exactly the same as the original shot. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and I was fortunate to have a camera on hand for it. Enjoy!

 

Monday, December 15, 2003
 
More on subjectivity...

It's been awhile since I wrote the Autechre Guide, and I've gotten alot of reactions. Most have been surprisingly flattering, though the critical ones have been even more pointed. Good or not, I must be doing something right.

That said, I've never implied that it's some sort of scholarly treatise, nor have I pretended to any sort of objectivity. The more merit the material under review has, the more divided opinions on it are bound to be, and Autechre fans have some pretty strong opinions! The Guide is just my interpretation, and a highly personal (and therefore subjective) one at that. It's certainly not the last word, and though I hope it's some help for those navigating the briny waters for the first time, it's rife with my own biases and prejudices.

There are certain works of theirs I can't stand (like "Silverside"), and some I think are just mis-steps (like "Leterel"), but hey, that's me. If I didn't have as much admiration for their work as I do, I wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of starting the Guide in the first place. In many ways, it's an 8500-word fan-letter, and I know it, so take it with a grain of salt. Feel free to disagree. I enjoy hearing other people's viewpoints. In fact, many of my own opinions have been altered after hearing from folks here and on alt.music.autechre. We're generally all open-minded folks. If we weren't, we'd probably run screaming from something like Chiastic Slide and never look back.

This rant was largely inspired by an email I got from Jeffrey Gordon, who believes that "Leterel" is one of their greatest tracks. "To me, 'Leterel' is the perfect synthesis of fervent melody and electronic beats," he writes, and, "this is one of the tracks for which Autechre will be most remembered 100 years from now." He could be right. (He's also right that I don't really say anything to back it up.) What's cool is that we agree on one important thing: Autechre most likely will be remembered 100 years from now.

But hey, I'm just a monkey with a typewriter in the long run. You should see the vitriol I got for roasting Airdrawndagger.

That said, the other topic of much email is the fact that I've been dragging my feet for months getting around to a Draft 7.30 overview. Well, I've started several times, but something always seems to choke. I think the problem is that I'm trying to cover it all at once, so what I'm going to do is review it piecemeal over the next couple of weeks, then tie it all together in one meta-review at the end.

Stay tuned, and wear clean undies...

NP: Drops, B. Fleischmann

 

Tuesday, December 09, 2003
 
New default theme

Changed the default theme to Winter. Depending on your browser's cookie settings, you may have to refresh this page for it to show up.

The background is constructed from the same elements used in the Fenris theme, and the "trees" were rendered from scratch using a Gimp module called IFSCompose.

NP: The Passengers, Starflyer 59

 

Monday, December 08, 2003
 
More fun with alternate stylesheets

You'll notice that the sidebar now has a "Site Themes" section. Try it.

Pretty cool, eh? Saturday's rant gave a general idea of how I did it, and this weekend, I'm going to work on a writeup explaining the construction of this site in more detail. There's still no way to make most of the themes look right on Internet Explorer, but at least Windows users have a couple of usable ways to view the page. If you're using Internet Explorer, Sobel and Woody should be fine, though some important effects are lost.

Long-time readers will probably notice that several of the site themes are adaptations of my WindowMaker themes. That's intentional-I'm not just recycling material. With the new themable layout, the site itself can now depict the themes in use (to some extent) instead of just static screenshots.

Rpeg, for example, is a loose port of its briny forbear, while the Railway theme is a pretty much a variation on Kaamos. Barsoom, on the other hand ports only the active parts of its parent theme.

In case you're wondering, no I'm not currently developing WindowMaker themes, mostly because I'm not using it at the moment. My stumbling block is the lack of anti-aliased font support, though a fix is in the works as we speak, and as soon as the stable upgrade is available, I'll be back in business. I could certainly build some nice themes around Autumn and the default theme...

In the meantime, I'll be putting my energy into themes for the site, as well as a few GTK themes I've been tinkering with.

As always, feel free to redistribute or recycle any of the work here. I only ask that proper credit be given, and that you let me know how and where it's used, so I can gloat. I'm also willing to return the favor if anyone's got some material they'd like me to interpret.

God Bless and goodnight

NP: Ame no Basu Tei, Hoshi no Koe Soundtrack

 

Saturday, December 06, 2003
 
In which our hero caters to the lowest common denominator

As it turns out, there is easy no way around Internet Explorer's faulty CSS handling. Most of the audience for this page consists of Linux and BSD users, and we all use browser flavors that are almost completely compliant with CSS2, so it wouldn't seem to be that pressing of an issue, but the plain fact is, I've spent alot of time on the design of this page, and the fact that 90-something percent of the world can't view it correctly...well, it bugs me.

The simplest answer is to specify a simpler (read: "dumbed down") alternate stylesheet that Explorer can handle. So, being the accomodating guy I am, I set about making a nice one for IE users. Then I checked it on a Windows box, and the ugly truth hit me like a wet flounder across the nose--there's no way to select stylesheets in Explorer. W3C regs suggest that all browsers have an onboard menu for switching stylesheets. The Gecko family all do, as do Netscape and Opera, but lo and behold, Explorer doesn't. Joy.

Scratch another bright idea. Turns out that I can make all the alternates I want; there's simply no way for Explorer to recognize them. What do they do all day up there in Redmond?

There's another, somewhat obfuscated, approach similar to the "voice family" hack, but it involves tricking Explorer into sifting through several stylesheets until it finds one it assumes is the default, but that's just...wrong somehow.

(In case you don't know, the "voice family" hack works around Explorer's box-model parsing bugs by feeding it a string of junk characters [in this case, "\"}\""] until it stumbles back onto its feet. No thanks.)

So basically, I'm stuck with regards to Explorer. I refuse to make design choices to accomodate bad code, especially when it comes from the largest consumer software company in the world. Why is it that every Free browser out there has nearly 100% CSS1 compliance, and yet a commercial behemoth like Microsoft can't get it right? They should be the driving force for the adoption of new standards, but instead, they're singlehandedly holding web development back by several years' time. Go figure.

So, the only logical answer is to put links to the alternate stylesheets in the HTML itself. Easy enough, right?

Wrong. Go ahead and try it. Yep.

There's no way to simply plonk a link down on the page and have it work. The link above, for example, will only take you to the stylesheet. What we need is a way to change the environment itself. Basically, that involves fetching the style elements, loading them, then (and this is the tricky part) retaining the settings. That means using cookies to some extent, which means Javascript. Paul Sowden wrote a script on ALA that's perfect for this. All that's left is to implement.

The basic idea is twofold: specifying the alternate stylesheets in the headers and linking to them in the body. Take a look at the source for this page in a separate window. Beneath the default stylesheet declaration, I've got each of the alternates specified with the syntax

  <link rel="alternate stylesheet" title="Title" href="filename.css"/>

The title is the important bit, since that's what we'll be referencing further down rather than the filename. Make sure that this block is the same in the headers for all pages you want affected by theme changes. Beneath all link properties (but still in the head), you'll need to tell the system to reference the script like so:

  <script type="text/javascript" src="/directory/styleswitcher.js">

Skip to the bottom, and you'll see the relevant links in the second loopback div. The

  a href="#"

bit specifies a null location, then the

  onclick="setActiveStyleSheet('Barsoom'); return false;"

bit (notice the trailing semicolon) calls the script to read the specified title from the head.

Simple enough, eh?

What I'm left with is a pretty nice themeable interface. Adding new themes is as simple as writing up the new stylesheet and plugging a reference to it in the headers. The Javascript is a bit of a clunky workaround, but it works, and since this site is centered on the idea of interface customization, the whole experience comes out as a nice (if unintentional) piece of synergy.

NP: From Such Great Heights, Postal Service

 

Friday, December 05, 2003
 
Compatibility Notes

Received an email from Marc Cain, who informs me that the page renders just fine on Apple OSX. He's run it on Camino, Safari, and oddly enough, the Mac version of IE5, and it renders just fine. As in *nix, the Gecko family (Mozilla, Netscape, Galeon) also renders correctly.

There's a bug in Konqueror 3.1.4 that causes the main body to remain stationary while the title and sidebar elements scroll. If anyone knows a workaround, let me know. This is one I'd definitely want to fix.

Basically, the operative element is in the background property background: #333 url(sharp.jpg) no-repeat fixed 0 0;. The fixed 0 0 value tells the browser to keep the background image fixed and aligned to the top-left corner. The individual sections use a modified version of the image, which is blurred and darkened, but has the same dimensions and alignment. Since both the foreground and background images are aligned and (theoretically) fixed on the canvas, the effect should be that of scrolling text on a translucent background.

This is all standard CSS and HTML stuff. There are no Javascript or image hacks involved in the process. You're welcome to view or swipe the stylesheet for this page, and if you have any suggestions, let me know.

NP: Solang, Sogar

 

Previously...

Guns don't kill people...

"Oh my God, it's on fire! We're all gonna..."

Stupidity hits home

More New Orleans fallout

Challenger, 20 years later Today marks the 20th a...

New year, new car.

Zen wisdom of the Mall Ninja

Rumors of Rio's demise possibly premature.

On forced migration and format changes.

Darwinism in action...

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