Where Is My Mind
Love that song, love Pixies. Anyone else?
Simon
tumblr Meetup 2: Electric Boogaloo
It’s that time again. If you missed our last meetup, here’s your chance to finally meet the people you’ve reblogged/disliked from a distance/stalked/e-crushed.
What: a tumblr meetup for people in the NYC area
When: Thursday, March 13th @ 9 PM
Where: Fat Cat, 75 Christopher Street
Please reblog and hope to see you there!
Update: There will be drunken Scrabble.
What about a London meet up? For the English among us?
SB
To those of you who follow me:
Just take my audio if you want it. Google download helper (for Firefox) and just download the shit out of it.
I really am happy for you guys to do that. I invite you to do it!
I’m starting to wish Tumblr was my web hub. But then that would be boring, I guess.
SB
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
early demo. recorded in nottingham.
Improv Everywhere: Mobile Desktop:
For our latest mission, three agents entered a Starbucks one by one with their own giant desktop computer and CRT monitor. They bought coffee and worked at their computers as if they were laptops.
Their post also has a behind-the-scenes video. (thanks Dalas)
“ Amsterdam, beautiful place - total rip-off! ”
i’m learning drums.. not very groovy yet but i’m trying… hope to play some drums on the next album.
Kandinsky
Mapping Exercises
Those of you who listened to my Monet composition will have recognised the ambient style I chose for the painting; I wanted to capture the ‘feeling’ of the painting and, although my ‘feelings’ are subective, I think the music I composed is quite generic in the fact that anyone who listens can see and hear the connection between the painting and the music.
If a Looney Tunes cartoon is on TV, the music is always the same type. Each character has a musical motif/theme/identity, so therefore we don’t think about it, we just watch/listen.
I think that explains it…
Anyway, I got the composition completely wrong! I was supposed to clearly map parts of an image and compose parts to sections; I “painted my feelings”, as my lecturer put it.
So for this exercise, Monet was completely the wrong choice! This is a mapping exercise and therefore I am going to choose a more appropriate painting. I think I am going to compose to a Kandinsky. I will post the image.
The exercise is a lot more difficult than I thought, because on the one hand the composition must reflect each part of the painting so it can be followed, almost like a score, actually. There is a fine line between being too literal and too emotional. I will quote my lecturer’s blog post.
“Thanks to Simon for flagging the fact that this may not be clear. The task that deals with music for painting is basically a ‘mapping task’ where you assign shapes or colours to musical ‘objects’ and you consistently reflect in the music, in some way, what you ‘read’ in the painting. Be too literal and it will be boring, be too emotional and you won’t be able to demonstrate in any concrete way how the sounds correspond to the elements in the painting. So like most artforms this one requires a delicate balance between good taste, common sense and clear thinking. The criteria are the ones for artifact creation and the brief should be clear by now. I am looking for simple but interesting and appealing correspondances between sound and visual (check out your Baudelaire !!) “
I am posting this for my benefit, as well as sharing with anyone else who is interested!
SB
Sonic Acts XII
I’ll be there.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Usually when I post my audio, I do at least a paragraph writing up my thoughts. I notice other people just post the title of the song and leave it as it is. Is this the way people prefer it? I don’t see many people paying attention to my music posts so maybe this is why. Do you all like it when the audio has a writeup? Or do you just want the artist and the title and you’ll figure it out on your own? Your thoughts would be appreciated.
What happens when you take the best Three Six Mafia song released in the last couple of years and give it a little french touch?
Daft Punk - Aerodynamic (Johnatron Edit) (Mr. JL’s Stay Fly Re-edit)
I have some thoughts: when I post audio, I usually include a synopsis. If I want to explain something specific to the listener [which may not be aurally apparent] I do expand the synopsis to explain the rationale behind the music.
This always applies at university and it can be a pain, but it’s all about rules when studying!
So yeah, I would read before listening, everytime. I think that if others are into your music that much, they will want to read your write up.
Hope that helps.
SB
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Latest task in Music For Digital Media is to compose to a painting. I chose Monet. This is almost finished… probably…
Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant, 1872
Normative, LLC, part one
As of 6:29am, I am the proud owner of Normative.com, which I bought from a Russian squatter for $3,500 with the help of GoDaddy’s Domain Buy Service. This relieves a major clog in my brain: the fact that I should have owned {the name of my company}.com before starting a new business. I sort of jumped the gun, establishing Normative, LLC as a legal corporation and telling my friends that my new company was called Normative before acquiring the domain. How embarassing if I had been stuck with Normative.us.
It’s a bad idea to talk in detail about what you’re going to do, because sometimes most of the energy goes into the explanation. Or your plans change, but you half-stick to your original goals because you don’t want to be indecisive. However, at this point, I’m prepared to talk about the recent past of Normative, and give you some hints about what the future might look like.
A familiar theme in storytelling is when a place is destroyed, and the survivors dust themselves off and decide to rebuild. Sometimes it follows the apocalypse, or maybe the city was bombed-out in the war. The nightmare is over and you’re standing amidst pebbles of concrete, twists of steel, torn bodies deep-red, cloth mashed with flesh, a complete absence of leadership and, therefore, a hazy fear of the future.
The American record industry is in bad shape. It’s not that bad, yet. But I don’t want to wait around for it to crash. I don’t want to watch it get worse. Instead, I intend to capture the spirit of rebuilding. I want to pretend that the major labels were each hit with a hydrogen bomb, and now all these musicians are standing around, asking, “What do we do now?”
I want to answer that question.
The word normative refers to defining norms.
The company Normative works by asking, How should this be? and then pursuing that conclusion uncompromisingly.
It embodies my complete disinterest in the past except as a record of previous experiments. I am wholly concerned with the future: the slice of existence which can be shaped by my will; the blank canvas upon which I can paint my ideals; the one place where we might live amidst triumphant art and where existence might be tolerable.
It is only by disregarding the dominant paradigms that we can create the future that we ought to live in. I have no interest in tweaking the present system. I intend to invent something new, not “reinvent” the old.
Musical success in 2008 will require a deep familiarity with three important concepts: art, commerce, and technology. I believe this truth stands without exception. A label that doesn’t “get” the web will fail. A bedroom music producer who cringes at signing a contract will fail. A web entreprenuer who sees musicians as entertainers, not as walking gods, will fail.
The reason for the above premise is the theme of our present phase in history: Technology gives us the power to do almost anything. This means making a profitable album no longer requires hundreds of people. It requires two or three. Big record labels, and large corporations in general, are no longer needed to make money from art. This is not to say that Normative will buy magazine ads and mail press releases ourselves. That’s too much work. It means we will promote our albums in new ways that are hundreds of times more efficient; ways that record labels don’t understand, but are obvious to a seasoned web entrepreneur.
It also means that if you want to make money from music, you’re going to have to pull your weight, or you will be left behind. In the old model, a small number of artists created a living for hundreds of label employees. When those arists realize they can split the money with a couple of partners instead, will they? I’m betting the answer is yes, and every musician I talk to seems to agree with me.
I’m going to keep quiet about what I’ve accomplished so far, except to say that I’ve already signed one artist. I’m not going to make any policies about disclosing my progress, but if you’ve been following my life for the past few months, you’ve probably guessed that I’ll err on the side of revealing less, not more, than you’d like to know. My new thing is “here is a morsel from my life” instead of “here is what I ate for lunch”; I have learned my lesson about putting my whole life out there.
PS - a few weeks ago I linked to the Normatism teaser site. Normative is the company, Normatism is the philosophy behind it.
Fuck yeah!
