EL ORÅCULO DEL SAN GENNARO

THE MOTTO REMIX FEAT. KANYAY WEST

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:52:00 -0400

By choosing to believe that your wild success comes mainly from good fortune instead of mainly from Your Unique Blend of Virtues, not only are you more likely/able to sympathize with people who are not wildly successful (which is by far most people you will meet/whose money you will take) but when your wild success wanes you won’t have to waste a bunch of time trying to figure out how to explain that without rationalizing frantically around the implication that you stopped being unique, or good, or perhaps that a mistake was made which was ultimately corrected, or that the world has changed and Your unique blend of talents no longer matter, etc.

Which means that when infinite, unflagging growth is inevitably proven to be a juvenile dream, you can continue working and progressing without falling into the k-hole of desperate projected meta-statements to imaginary audiences/critics/gods.

It is impossible to believe that one’s own success is a result of/justified by one’s own superior character without (at least subconsciously) accepting that others’ lack of success is ultimately a failure of character. The preceding generation has illustrated vividly for us where this kind of thinking leads. If this anachronistic mindset is to be shed off and tossed in the recycle bin, so that greater art and a more equitable society are to be allowed to come to fruition, it’s painfully obvious right now that this is not a change that will start with the rich or recently-quite-successful.

A realized expression which is both immediately coherent & seductively explicit concerning the universal benefits of urgently replacing the triumphalist, meritocratic mythos with one that can comfortably acknowledge the vital contribution of providence: that’s the motto.

satellitehigh: here is a brand new jack daniels ad that is...

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:00:40 -0400

satellitehigh:

here is a brand new jack daniels ad that is running in magazines. i guess a photographer must have sold this to JD and thought it was okay cuz the faces were covered.

this photo is an old shot of moss icon; that’s tonie joy in the foreground and brooks headley playing drums. neither of these guys were aware this was happening.

brooks was also in born against and if you know born against you’d definitely know that this photo is gonna ruffle some feathers

hope these guys are lawyering up right now

"It is just possible that they might have accepted the position, might even have resigned himself..."

Fri, 31 May 2013 15:41:27 -0400

““It is just possible that they might have accepted the position, might even have resigned himself staying in Italy, had Urban acted with even elementary courtesy. But Urban’s opening address to them was not merely violent but personally abusive, spitting out the bile accumulated over years of inferiority. Each cardinal was singled out for attack— his lust for power, his scandalous wealth based on simony, his immorality, his neglect of duties—each was upbraided in language drawn from a slum. Most of the charges were justified but the manner in which they were couched would have offended the mildest man. He yelled at one to shut up, called another a liar, another a fool and described the soldier-cardinal of Geneva, accurately enough, as a bandit.””

- ER Chamberlin, THE BAD POPES (1969) re: Urban VI

THAT LAST BBBLOG

Fri, 31 May 2013 14:35:00 -0400

—did that thing make any sense? I feel like I jumped in a little too medias res: the catalyst here is that I’m baffled that in 2013 so many words are used on discussing the significance of using “instruments” to simulate music made before computers got in the mix, and whether this is more interesting or innovative than using computers to simulate music made before computers got in the mix. And then also I wonder: do you need to be an electronic musician to be at all interested in the pretty curiously old/basic idea that software+machines working together IS a really exciting instrument that we are still figuring out how to play/talk about? Am I wrong in my impression that the computer is still widely perceived as a design tool that lacks certain properties that make something an “instrument”? What are those properties? Is it merely that “instruments” are played in real time? Is it not known that you can do this with a computer— and I’m not talking about turning a knob on a Nanocontrol to open a filter or pressing a button on a MPC to trigger the next pre-defined pattern.

Do music writers find the idea of IDM so easy to blow off because they associate it with a specific sound? Bc— and maybe this is just because I have been able to interface directly with so many forward-thinking electronic musicians in my lifetime— I have always perceived it as unified not by drill-n-bass breaks or proggy synth melodies or glitchy signifiers &c, but by a mindset that is looking to push one’s proficiency to the limit and Play The Machine in an unconventional way. A hunt for New Techniques. Sure, sure— you can point to a big mountain of Autechre-apers & warmed-over AFX tropes but get reaaaaal that phenomenon is no more present in IDM than in any other genre & this is Liking Music 101. I bring up IDM because lord if we’re not barreling headfirst rn into very similar conditions that got people psyched about IDM a hundred years ago, with EDM playing the part of Electronica’s amnesiac stepchild.

I’ve always found the Intelligent part of the term IDM to be funny & sarcastic— how on earth anyone would immediately assume that a lack of self-awareness is the only possible reason a nerd might flex their muscles at you, that’s beyond me. And now that EDM is an acceptable term/thing it’s even more funny. People in a post-Bush II era spitting on the idea of anyone aspiring to be Intelligent is pure dark comedy. Can you tell I have a non-music-related article I should be working on right now?

gypsythatiwas: the only thing that’s ever mattered

Thu, 30 May 2013 12:54:52 -0400

gypsythatiwas:

the only thing that’s ever mattered

THAT LAST REBLOG

Thu, 30 May 2013 11:58:00 -0400

has me thinking a lot about my perception of other peoples’ perception of how electronic music is made. I get that talking about the tone of amps or the differences between certain synthesizers can be really boring— but I also feel like it’s not impossible to convey the importance of certain deliberate technical choices to a regular punter without boring them, provided that these choices have been made for compelling reasons. But beyond that, I have a vivid suspicion that a lot of people think that creating electronic music with a computer is basically a variation on the experience of putting together a movie in Final Cut or altering a picture in Photoshop. You sit, you click, you arrange and re-arrange elements you’ve dropped into a project until they are perfect, then you mix it down.

And that’s probably how most laptop jockeys probably approach it, but ohhhh my friends, this is merely the surfaciest surface of how machines & man can harmonize together. Making music with machines owns making movies or images on the computer imo bc so much of it can be done in real time with real collaboration occurring between the musicians’ subconscious & the machines’… inclination, is maybe the word? I don’t think “spirit” would be entirely inappropriate but I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m going all Real Is A Feeling on you or anything here. But truly, working with machines is An Orgy Of Choices. Squint hard enough into the right softwareoscope & you can see all manner of different representations of thousands of elementary particles of your sounds. & with the right tools & knowledge of how to use them, you can change those particles in any way you could possibly imagine.

The natural progression, I think, for any machine-music maker who eventually tires of creating to spec for a conjured audience & begins to seek fulfillment from the writing/recording process itself, leads away from building songs towards the building of systems that produce music. In this way, you can create that music isn’t entirely premeditated or deliberate, but much more precise than non-machine-assisted improvisation, & capable of doing things a human performer could never do. And at the same time: Something that is more emotional than most strictly-generative music & more malleable/variable than working with looped audio files. Instead of setting out towards a finished, finite song by writingand assembling song parts, you design the song’s characteristics (tone, tempo, key, rhythm, swing, arc, etc, etc, etc) & ways in which those elements can be altered, or alter themselves.

I’m not talking about clicking up a little environment & then sitting back & letting them go off unattended. No, you’ve got scores of parameters you can nuance while the system runs, interacting with what the machines are doing with your plans while they’re doing it— a benevolent creator that observes & influences his creation, but thoughtful enough to imbue it with a sense of self-determination. Or like I said that one time, “I’d rather be my machines’ Phil Jackson than their Phil Glass.”

Mofos have been doing this live with Max & some other software for at least 15 years now, but it seems that the popular image that maybe exists of electronic music creation or performance is still more or less a hybrid of dude-clicks-around-Photoshop mixed with a little of guy-turns-that-knob-and-the-filter-opens-up. But those images presuppose that your goal is to realize something that existed in your head: “I want to make a housey track that will get the floor moving.” Truly taking on machines as collaborators, though, requires a totally different goal: to create the conditions in which the machines can frequently & surprise you with the cleverness of their choices.

I have a new 10-track digital album coming out in 2 weeks called PRISMATIC SPRAY & it will hopefully help illustrate what I’m gesturing at here. It’s not abstract music at all, imo, but it was all created by pre-arranging the MIDI data for a few rhythmic & melodic motifs, then altering that data in real time as it flowed from the computer to various pieces of cheap MIDI hardware. The audio that resulted was then recorded onto the computer & excessively sloppy or searchy passages were excised & the results were sutured into song-length songs. I’m super interested to see if any of the organic character of the process comes across to the lame man— pardon me, I mean the lay man.

A CARELESS MAN'S CAREFUL DAUGHTER: this is a quote from a philip sherburne piece on spin dissembling all...

Thu, 30 May 2013 10:42:00 -0400

A CARELESS MAN'S CAREFUL DAUGHTER: this is a quote from a philip sherburne piece on spin dissembling all...:

deadgirlfriends:

this is a quote from a philip sherburne piece on spin dissembling all the rhetoric from daft punk and boards of canada and everyone else about the relationship between computers and electronic music lately. ultimately i don’t really want to get super into that because it feels like it’s…

Photo

Tue, 28 May 2013 12:08:15 -0400

but for right now let me just whale on this fake piano

Tue, 28 May 2013 12:04:44 -0400

but for right now let me just whale on this fake piano

Annex Theater presents MACBETH, every Thursday, Friday,...

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:17:51 -0400

Annex Theater presents MACBETH, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, & Sunday from May 23rd to June 9th at the Chicken Box, 1 North Ave (at Charles street.) 7$ students, 10$ general admission/ 730pm doors, 8pm show. There are also midnight shows on Saturday 6/1 & Saturday 6/8.

Pre-sale & more info here: http://www.baltimoreannextheater.org/index.html

SHAMBHALA: THE SACRED PATH OF THE WARRIOR, Chögyam Trungpa...

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:44:22 -0400

SHAMBHALA: THE SACRED PATH OF THE WARRIOR, Chögyam Trungpa (1984)

"Eckhart affirms that he does indeed find the notion of the One the most adequate way of speaking of..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:15:33 -0400

“Eckhart affirms that he does indeed find the notion of the One the most adequate way of speaking of God. All else (God the ‘good’, the ‘all-powerful’, etc.) appears to ‘add’ some- thing to him and therefore to conceal him. Oneness alone comes close to capturing something of God’s essence in language, without clothing him in concepts which seem to owe more to our nature than to his.”

- Oliver Davies in the foreword to the Penguin Classics collection of MEISTER ECKHART

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:56:26 -0400

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:55:22 -0400

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:54:04 -0400

the Ideal video game

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:20:18 -0400

is a prequel to ki duk kim’s 3-IRON where you play the mute protagonist who breaks into houses in a huge open world, and if you look hard & patiently you can find the homes of characters from all of kim’s other films.

"Being involved in the complexities of a nation at war and a city in business-as-usual led me to know..."

Wed, 08 May 2013 20:49:20 -0400

“Being involved in the complexities of a nation at war and a city in business-as-usual led me to know that there is a difference between large things and small things, between big organizations and two people alone in a room together.”

- John Cage

U STREAM C (SPOILERS (LOL RIGHT))

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:49:00 -0400

SO the homey @pyschologyrever put up a link to this review of UPSTREAM COLOR which really helped grease my cogs regarding that beast. Half my crew walked halfway through & I didn’t stick around to see that the sinister pigman is named “The Sampler” but holy shit.

(I haven’t read Slate or Salon pieces on this yet. Gonna put that off as long as possible. SO sorry if I’m psyched about stuff here that has already been put forth, or put forth more thoughtfully, but)

My most basic take is that the movie is about what would happen if people were to somehow become aware of the true interconnectedness of life on our planet. I think also that an awareness of time as relative & not linear is occurring, too. Of course, nobody can totally grasp this because it doesn’t relate at all to our daily lives & our ingrained frame of reference, the language we organize our thoughts in, etc.

BUT anyway Now the scenes with the Quinoa Valley CDs make sense to me. The Sampler is not omniscient, but he seems to have the most scientific approach to dealing with what is being revealed. Also, the most Zen. His awareness & appreciation of different sounds & environmental ambience is genuine… but what he does with them is not. Not because he is evil, but because he is an American circa 2013. The only thing you can do with this grand revelation is turn it into a research project.. which needs to be funded— I mean, look at all that gear!

The identity theft (never explicitly called that, but what an apt name in this case!!!) is of course a big part of it, but I’m guessing the field recording record label is helping, too— or maybe it’s a just a hobby that he enjoys. Either way, it’s a naked commercialization of his heightened sensitivity. Again: he’s not an evil capitalist mastermind out to exploit the perks of his new consciousness, he’s just a guy living in the system we all live in. He’s not a god, either— he’s just figured out how to focus his awareness on the particular people he’s empiggened.

I don’t know that much about WALDEN but I’m thinking, “The TAO OF PHYSICS would probably be an even more appropriate book.” But WALDEN comes from a more alone-in-the-wilderness place, right? A guy without the benefit of post-Quantum physics who intuits that the lives we perceive as distinct, atomized consciousnesses are in fact one organism, & who tries to make sense of this as best he can.

I think The Sampler’s look of sadness & surprise when he realizes Kris can see him towards the end is his quantumtastic realization that he’s not just an objective observer studying this phenomenon. And he feels stupid & guilty because of COURSE he isn’t, the idea goes contrary to the entire revelation. He accepts his execution because he has failed, he has brought immeasurable pain & suffering to the people he’s studied. And maybe even, in that moment, he recognizes that it might be hopeless for anyone to try & intentionally utilize this revelation to some mundane, pre-revelation end. (Also, dude included the WALDEN imprinting as part of the process to try & pass on some key to what has occurred, right? So he had illusions of being beneficent. Which make him feel so foolish at the end.)

The ending depicts Kris & Jeff & the others starting a COLLECTIVE effort towards understanding the truth, as opposed to the fundamentally flawed individual effort. A big deal is made of the solitary aspect of the Sampler’s work. The use of kids to collect the worms & a younger guy to do the bank-emptying are deliberate efforts to stay solitary. These kids aren’t going to inquire about the root of all this strange activity the same way that his peers might. Carruth maybe believes that Thoreau was on to something really big, and even that his solitude was necessary at first to sort things out, but that ultimately you have to come out of the woods or else you can’t do any good.

Gays against Gaga

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:39:55 -0400

Gays against Gaga:

I heart GAG, follow GAG

MAC DIESEL

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:02:35 -0400

A huge, heavy, old snake, draped in the branches of a tree. Yes, an ancient serpent that’s loathe to move. You can get right in his face & this cold-blooded hulk will show no concern whatsoever. He knows & you know & he knows you know that there is no question that any fight between you would be over before you could even finish noticing that it had begun.

Because the way that the snake “hears” vibrations, most music means nothing to him. He regards it as you might regard the noise of cars in the background of a television show. The sound of bells, however, are unmistakably musical to the snake, who will pause to contemplate their beauty somewhat similarly to how he might sun himself on a rock— except coldly, if that makes sense.