For bowed xylophone and piano, with a patch from the Boards of Deluge program.
An exercise in compression and ambiguity.
I was challenged to write a “straight-up banger.” I’m not sure I understand that description, but I hope this fits.
Rainy day quarantine music.
Right after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, online retailer Cheaper than Dirt announced they would no longer be selling firearms. What they actually did was hold back their inventory, wait until other retailers sold out in the panic, then release the inventory at inflated prices. In case you don’t remember, I took a screenshot of their site at the time.
It was a cheap and dishonest way to take advantage of a stressful situation, and because the gun culture forgave and forgot, they’re at it again. This time, they’ve at least dropped the outright deception. I suppose that’s something, but they’re still gouging on their prices.
That’s about three times what retail pricing should be on that ammunition.
They are not our friends. They do not deserve your business.
A quick sketch for bass guitar and sequencer.
Disney chose to release the digital version a few days early, and I took my time rewatching it last night. This is a fast, dense film, and it can’t all be taken in at once. It really does benefit from subsequent viewings, and it’s a great ending for the saga.
We live in an unfortunate time. Everyone confuses being edgy with being sophisticated. Given the cultural enormity of the franchise, everyone feels compelled to weigh in and glue their biases to it. The discourse around the new trilogy has run the gamut from selfish to surreal to downright ugly. Alt-right trolls complain about the inclusion of strong female characters, self-declared fanboys gripe that these aren’t the movies they would have made, and people with no real interest in the movies themselves have to graft political allegories to them.
It’s all really tiresome, and it all misses the mark. Star Wars isn’t meant to be high art. Continued...
The Senate has refused to hear witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Trump. It’s not the cover-up Pelosi and Schiff are claiming. They brought the articles to the Senate (with no small amount of ridiculous grade-school theater) under the assertion that they had an unassailable case, backed by compelling evidence.
Apparently, they don’t. Well, that’s their problem. Let’s run through the whole 2016 narrative, shall we?
- Donald Trump personally worked with Vladimir Putin to sway the election! We have evidence, but we won’t show you just yet. Well, OK. We don’t have evidence.
- Here’s a fake report from the “intelligence community.” That’s evidence, right? No? OK.
- Let’s talk about Stormy Daniels. She…what? Russia? That was last week.
- OK. OK. We’ve got it. There’s this thing called the Emoluments Clause. We’ll use some big words to confuse people, and…oh for $%&* sake.
- Two scoops of iced cream. TWO SCOOPS, people!
- So, that Russia thing?
Continued...
Gun control advocates have long been coy about their actual agenda. They’ve given the public platitudes about “compromise” and “reasonable regulation,” and they’ve taken pains to assure us that “nobody’s coming for your guns.” Then Beto O’Rourke went and spilled the beans on live television. He wasn’t jumping the gun. He was just dumb enough to say it out loud.
In doing so, he conveniently left the door open for Joe Biden to step in with his own plan, which he’s claiming to be moderate in comparison. It’s not. Under the Biden scheme, anyone owning an “assault weapon” will have two choices: sell it back to the government or register it.
I’m not clear how I can sell something back to the government when they never owned it in the first place. I can guarantee that any such “buyback” will only offer a fraction of most weapons’ value, which raises certain 5th Amendment concerns. Continued...
Sometimes, I do subtlety. Sometimes, I do a mashup of Husker Du and acid house.
Mixed signals and crossed meters.
This recent batch of material was something of a journal from my days as a trucker. This piece is the final entry of sorts.
Feedback and Shepard tones.
Rural minimal drone techno? I dunno. Call it what you like. It’s a bonus track for the new EP.
Just pickin’ and grinnin’. With a sequencer, that is.
Part of this piece involves the use of a whammy bar. Does that make it metal?
Steering a bit more in an analog direction lately.
Kids today wouldn’t recognize the internet of the 1990s. Access was metered by service providers and connections were largely made over slow telephone lines. Still, it had taken off as a medium, and people were finding new ways to use it. More to the point, they were finding ways to capitalize on it.
Everyone, that is, except the record labels. At first they ignored it. Then they despised it.
Early on, artists and fans built websites to promote music. Given the lack of usable bandwidth, posting actual music was nearly impossible. A five-minute song consumed 50MB of data, which was completely unworkable over a 56KB connection.
Then a frustrated German engineer introduced a format that could compress that song down to less than 5MB. He distributed the compression program freely, and the MP3 format was born. Music enthusiasts were quick to embrace it, and the next logical step came with file sharing programs, the most famous of which was Napster. Continued...
Despite the price hikes and restricted access to content, overall revenue for the music industry continued to rise during the 1990s, reaching a peak of $14 billion in 1999. *Somebody* was making money, and those somebodies were the record labels. Without stopping to ask how much of that was actually *profit,* speculators dove in to the business. Numerous mergers took place, and the industry was essentially run by three conglomerates.
Traditional promotional outlets also jumped the shark. MTV, long a source of exposure for new music, began to focus on original programming like *The Real World,* and actual music videos were gradually shifted out of the prime-time lineup. Clear Channel began buying up top-tier radio stations in large markets, and their business model focused on playing familiar hits rather than new music.
Retailers on the ground took the biggest hit. As CD prices rose, their margins actually shrank. Dealer cost for a $17 title was around $13. Continued...
I was born in the early 1970s. My parents were music fans, and I grew up at a time when the record labels actively developed and supported new artists. As long as they could count on a few big hits each year, they’d take risks on new artists. In many cases, those new artists would start trends and go on to be hitmakers themselves.
Granted, we were only hearing what they wanted us to hear, but music was relatively affordable. More to the point, it was accessible. Radio stations acted as venues to promote new music, record stores were in every strip mall, and concerts were affordable to an adolescent on a budget.
The most empowering thing at that age was the Sony Walkman. We take things like the iPod for granted now, but at the time, portable music was a novelty. Paired with headphones that allowed me to tune the world out, it was incredible. Continued...
…or, How I Quit My Job and Made a Record.
First, the plug. I have a record available for purchase on Bandcamp. You can hear it for free on YouTube.
I’ve spent the last four years of being disconnected from the world as a long-haul trucker. During that period, I had no time for anything resembling a hobby, and what time I had at home was too scarce to spend on recording. When I decided to call it quits, I gathered up some ideas from a sketchbook I’d been keeping and decided to hammer them in shape.
In just over a month, I’d recorded about 45 minutes of material. This is where things get interesting and novel for me. Anyone can access my music, and in a form that I’ve chosen. I’m not beholden to a major corporation to “advise” me on the process, manufacture the media, and (hopefully) market it correctly. Continued...
We have another gun case headed to the Supreme Court. It’s a viable challenge to New York’s transport ban, brought by a credible plaintiff, and supported by competent litigators.
But that’s not the one in the news. Instead, we have faux outrage that SCOTUS won’t hear Kettler v. United States, a case in which one idiot sold illegal silencers to another idiot, got busted, and wants to waste everyone’s time and money appealing his conviction. The lawsuit was brought by everyone’s favorite incompetents at Gun Owners of America (GOA), and I’m thankful the court chose not to hear it.
Let’s rewind. A few years ago, several states passed “Firearms Freedom Acts,” laws which claimed to exempt their citizens from federal gun regulations. Kansas passed their version in 2013. From a theoretical standpoint, these laws set up an interesting debate between federal and state power to regulate firearms, and they might provide a challenge to the overbroad application of the Commerce Clause. Continued...
Well, they’re back in the saddle. Plaid have a long and respectable history in the electronic music scene. When so-called IDM (intelligent dance music: yeesh) became a genre in the 1990’s, Ed Handley and Andy Turner were two thirds of a collective known as Black Dog, and they became a cornerstone of the Warp roster. The final work before the split was Spanners, a sprawling, imaginative record that showed a balance of skill, imagination, and the talent to hold it all together.
(Ken Downie still records excellent music under the Black Dog moniker.)
As Plaid, they made two exemplary records, the second of which featured a stunning collaboration with Bjork. Double Figure followed in 2001, showing a more disciplined and focused approach. Despite critics generally writing it off, it’s one of my favorites. Their hallmark exuberance, baroque rhythms, and creative harmonic technique were all in top form, even if it was considered a bit austere and “dark.” Continued...
It would be cruel to subject musicians to these time signatures. It would also be cruel to subject listeners to that bit at 02:30, but here we are anyhow.
W.S. Merwin passed away this last March. I hand’t heard and part of me is saddened by not knowing.
All acts of violence were simulated. No cellos or guitars were actually harmed in the making of this, and they were released into the wild once recording was completed.
New keyboard from WASD with Cherry MX green switches. It’s the little pleasures I appreciate.
