Weblog
Your beat is nice.
Logickal - Twelve Offerings
3/17/08 21:09 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Logickal - Twelve Offerings

Troubles on the world seemingly tend to limited lifespans as fodder for big media, staying in the public eye only long enough to force a spend-to-forget reflex. Big troubles roll back cyclically. We're at the top of the cycle again, and China's oppression and killings in Tibet are in the news once more.

Somewhere along the cycle is also the plight of Burma, highly influenced by its shared border with China. The communist government in China holds vested interest in keeping non-democratic, shackled states as buffer zones. China supplies arms and aid to the military dictatorships in both Burma and North Korea. I don't disagree with engaging China economically... I believe many of the social advances within China are a direct result of barriers being broken by information, money and, ironically, tragically, almost as redemption... consumerism. However, when a government massacres its own citizens or enables the genocides of others rather than allow those citizens the exercise of self-determination, the response should be a swift rebuke from every free nation, regardless of how much money in trade is at stake.

The easy impulse is to turn sword against sword, but I know this perpetuates the cycle of violence when what is required is a full stop. To this end, I'd like to highlight a peaceful means of engagement: Twelve Offerings, my friend Jeremy Dickens' musical efforts as Logickal to create public awareness of the crisis in Burma and raise funds to aid the struggle. All proceeds from this recording go to the U.S. Campaign For Burma. While Twelve Offerings is connected directly to Burma, the feelings it evokes and awareness it creates are for every unfree people. It's available (with sound previews) through iTunes, Beatport or direct from Jeremy via Paypal.

Created live over three days, this is Ritual Musick of the finest warp. There is life moving within every ambient piece, and together the twelve tracks are far more than their sum. This music spiritualizes every moment and place conscious listening occurs. Twelve Offerings on San Francisco's subway system pulls the veil away: the homeless become radiant, the bus itself a mechanism of wonderment rolling on wheels of liminal magick, time exposed as fiction of the mind, light pouring from every surface and, in pulsing bursts, from every still beating heart.

I - An open doorway of sonic mystery: slow, reverberant, gong-like tones... their resonance slips vibratory tendrils around your brainstem, pulls you forward to a space far beyond headphones.

II - Clears the air of all obstacles, initiating a transformative process on your psyche: you become rarified atmosphere without definition. You become wind and you move through the sky.

III -Coalesces you as light rain falling on temple roofs, early morning condensate, animist communicative substance for the pre-dawn set. There is light here, but it's not from Sol.

IV - Brings the dawn, dew gathered into the shape of a human once again. Rivulets of shine thread through the world, across the plain, across your eyes, your skin, your lips, your heart, your everything. Light grows in power, day blasts through the shifting sky and the world awakens.

V - Centers the full power of the day in your chest, a single drone entering to work its magick then slip quietly into each and every cell. This light, as this day, is now part of you and will endure.

VI - Temple gongs in perpetual, living weave as forces and powers released by the Light, the interplay of every being as the land expands in definition to take on the truth: it is, in fact, a deceptive, overlapping nexus of all time and space.

VII - There is peace here, a calm pause, a moment between actions which is an action itself: awareness spreads across the plain of existence in three expanding discs at height of heart, head and hands.

VIII - The conversation begins, in tones and drones of aching beauty. All beings are represented, from the smallest sparks between subatomic particles to the flotsam of single cells to the lumbering groupings we know as sentient creatures to the vast expanse of celestial colonies, their thoughts occurring once per light year through thin networks of interstellar matter.

IX - The work of the day is begun! Life has discussed, life has agreed, life has chosen. This evolutionary path, this entry portal, this way shall be opened and this shall move through into manifestation.

X - The realm is as it always was. The realm is something new. The realm is as it always will be. The realm is changed... you open your eyes and see, as if for the very first time. The realm is you.

XI - As you were created in this moment, in connection with every other action/reaction, every other living being from the rocks beneath to the friend beside you to the sun wheeling through the sky above, you move through the moment and carry it forward in the work. You are the moment, you are the work, you are the energy between everything. Footstep by footstep, you are the choice that life made.

XII - You are here. Burma is there. The people are asking for you. You become wind and move to heed their call.


Effect69 - Contact Made
10/15/07 23:09 - permalink - email - category: Listen
effect69 Has Transport

Rather than basking in the vintage NASA vibes of Effect69 at San Francisco's Backlit Lounge tonight, I'm in the studio hacking on new plug-ins and Pirate Video. Since I can't be there, I'm contenting myself with the hard house beats of the new Effect69 album, Contact Made.

Effect69 mastermind Chris Martinez is a long-time friend and highly skilled tester of plug-ins. Above, you can see him dropping house science on the crowd at last month's Backlit. His new work is filled with four-to-the-floor heavy rhythms and bass for days. I'm fairly certain my heart rate is still up and my fingers have been driven to faster key press rates while listening to Contact Made tracks on repeat tonight. Superstars, 5-HTP, F*ck The Big Beat and, of course, San Francisco are relentless booty-movers.

The release party was held in Second Life, at Chris' super-tech club, Contact. Extra-special remixes were given to the Second Life crowd in attendance. I especially love the Chemical Brothers We Are The Night remix.

Shhhh... if anyone asks, yes, you were there.


Beta Two Agonist - Zero Point Field
2/13/07 22:17 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Beta Two Agonist - Zero Point Field

When I began work on the Daevl.Plugs, I did not realize one of the best side benefits of releasing audio software would be connecting with and hearing the work of many amazing musicians I may not have otherwise.

Beta Two Agonist is one of these musicians. His most recent work, Zero Point Field on Databloem, is a perfect study of beautiful ambience.

The album opens with the slow, sly slide-in of steady-state Midian, synthetic washes and melodic droplets mingling with understated gritty percussion and a sustained sense of rain and cloudburst.

The jangled atmospherics of Horta evolve into lush, achingly beautiful string textures and ringing pads. The rain has created a gorgeous world for you to be. Oxygen status: clear and high.

In Cesar, you begin exploring this new realm. Chiming, percussive tones sound a welcome to your expected and prepared for arrival. It's taken aeons, but you're right on time.

Geode goes inside your crystalline world's heart, sparkling currents of charged air and phosphorescence guiding you in your passage. Size is an illusion, for the farther in you go the more it expands.

And you've passed through! Rainbow greets you on the other side, the world re-appearing in muted rhythmic paths and shining fragments of light whirring about your head. The arch grows vast before you and you climb. Pot of gold? No... you won't be coming down the other side. The rainbow is an entrance.

The view widens as you stand at the apex. Flanked by stars and space, Inkling begins the realization this immense, vast realm is your true home.

The spell was woven by your actions, simply waiting for you to fling wide your arms exactly where you are. You've been changed by everything which has gone before, and Mesm is the sealing of those changes in place: static-laden beats and the clockwork pulse of your heart fuse to become something new. Who are you now? You are the hypnotist and hypnotized at once.

Was it worth it? Who can say? You're not the person who began this trip. In Fontana, your feet leave the rainbow as you move outward to the sky.


Daevls On FlightDynamics
1/28/07 21:00 - permalink - email - category: Listen

We're not even out of January and 02007 is taking on a distinctively tesseractic quality. Are the Great Old Ones near the cross-over point?

Jeremy Dickens (aka Logickal) is doing his best to break down Euclidean space and attract Elder God attention through the massive sonic vibrations found on his weblog, FlightDynamics. His wide-ranging series of podcasts are must-listens if you're into warped electronica and reality-altering sound.

His current installment in the series is Episode 35: Daevl.Plugs and the LOEBT. Jeremy pulled the raw material for his continuous mixwork from tracks by Daevl.Plug users and members of The League of Extraordinary Beta Testers, all wrapped up in shimmering, Logickal magick. Music from Martin Spernau, Duane Sigel's Legis Sustain, Joshua Goran, Thee Machete's Orphan Of The Sea, Effect69, my own Blue Deceiver and Logickal himself are all mutated into one snaking line of rhythm and aural rotation.

The mix lasts for 29:10m, after which you'll feel much closer to Cthulhu, guaranteed. I nominate Jeremy Dickens for a weekly DJ spot in R'lyeh.


Dankoe, Gorbunov, Zemlyanikeen - Far East Sessions
11/3/06 16:48 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Dankoe, Gorbunov, Zemlyanikeen - Far East Sessions

My ideal dwelling, the household where I am most active and alive, is one where when I return to the front door from wherever I have been, I never know what's happening on the other side. Every turn of the knob, every step through the threshold is the start of new adventure. I open the door, and the unknown greets me.

A limited run of 50 beautifully packaged, hand-made, pure white CD-Rs, Far East Sessions by Dankoe, Gorbunov and Zemlyanikeen on Maxim Shubski's excellent Arterija micro-label could be a slice of soundtrack to that household, a collection of environmental recordings of the doings of that house's occupants taken at random from a month's worth of moments.

This is one of your nights in that house, if you were me and I was you:

A child will turn anything at hand into an instrument of free-ranging melody and rhythm. Fragment 1 is the kid in the next room experimenting with mouth harp and DSP, with friends occasionally running in bits of recordings they've brought from around the block.

Paper Beat begins as a gentle amalgamation of guitar, bass, unidentifiable horns and bottleish percussion you find late at night on the experimental station your lover tuned the radio to a month ago. Every time you turn it on, you wonder why you don't listen to this more often. After you realize the entire 5:06 linear progression into gorgeous, processed chaos of this track is perfect, you will.

Zverki i Nasekomiye (renoised) is the sound of your lover's lover playing with radios at 3am, sliding through the floorboards and nicely into your dreams.

Fragment 2 is where you discover that the kid in the next room has discovered how to convolute mouth harp with both beatboxing and didgeridoo. It matches well with dance steps you're learning from an old friend you haven't seen in over a decade, who just happened to drop by unannounced.

Live at Triada Theatre is all the sounds you never notice while you're reading, sleeping, eating, thinking, talking in this house... amplified and made a substantial part of the walls surrounding you, just for you. Yes, the house talks, if you pay attention.

Kto Znaet has your other lover cleansing the house of evil spirits with smudge sticks, incense and wall-kissing. But the spirits aren't evil at all, she's just practicing her witchcraft. In fact, the spirits play along, only in it for the kissing, and continue to give the house this amazing ambient vibe like faerie-folk covering Pink floyd.

Fragment 3 has the kid combining all the previous lessons into a swift, minor symphony. Whose kid is this, anyway? Oh, it's not a kid at all. It's you.

Live at Triada Theatre is the language all the appliances on the electrical grid use late at night, when everyone else in the house is comfortably embraced by absinthe and ember light. The un-stolen guitar you're playing for everyone speaks their tongue and you're deep into unknown conversation.

Fake is you, I mean me, well, both of us, pretending we're listening to intelligent dance music when really we're watching the sunrise.

Dankoe, Gorbunov and Zemlyanikeen hail from Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. Whatever is going on there, I want some more of it. If you're into electro-acoustic, audio environments or well-done processing, there are very good things happening these days on Arterija.


Eno & Byrne - My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
4/16/06 22:52 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Byrne & Eno - My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

Before the chaos of digital audio, there was the warm magic of tape and analog circuitry. Before sampling, there was found sound flown by hand from running and manipulated reel to reel, songs built with both precision and serendipity. My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, by Brian Eno and David Byrne with Jon Hassell, was born from before, created the present and expands the future.

Recorded in 1979/1980, released in 1981, remastered in 2005, re-released in 2006... this work still sounds like nothing else, before or since. The gloopy miasma of Mea Culpa, the dark-delay funk of Regiment, the island jam micro-eclectica of Help Me, Somebody, the harrowing demon-throw of a woman possessed in The Jezebel Spirit, the slow, bass conversation entrainment of Moonlight In Glory, the vibrating temple air of A Secret Life, the tear-drying dawn of Mountain Of Needles... all these tracks surround and entangle my/our/their multiple histories with a shared present. Anachronisms from decades past, bits of scavenged vocals are given context by the music and the present each listener occupies.

I listen, and they speak.

My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts has lived as soundtrack to my life during so many important moments, each song has acquired layers of often opposing memories and meaning. Unlike most other sonic works, which become permeated with a time and place and stubbornly refuse to release, these songs continue to grow as I do. Very few works I've not created myself have this property for me.

The 2005 remastering has exposed the grained detail for further emotions to bind. I'm hearing aspects of this recording I never guessed existed. Add the excellent rough out-takes and unreleased tracks cut for time from the original vinyl pressing (Pitch To Voltage, Number 8 Mix are my favorites tonight), and My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts may last me well into the 2100s.

"...Brian, Jon, and I fantasized about making a series of recordings based on an imaginary culture... Our idea was to make the record and try to pass it off anonymously as the genuine article. This appealed for a number of reasons -- it had a lovely Borges-like quality, like one of his stories in which an encyclopedia is discovered that describes a hitherto-unknown land. It also appealed, I suspect, partly because it would make us as "authors" more or less invisible. In our imaginings we'd release a record with detailed liner notes explaining the way music functioned in that culture and how it was produced..." -David Byrne with Brian Eno, April 2005


Making Noise With Martin
3/1/06 23:40 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Making Noise With Martin Spernau

Working as a sound artist in the digital age, my palette includes, literally, any noise which may be captured. I make use of highly processed environmental material in my more ambient pieces, and a favorite trick is turning what should not have been percussive into drums. Once I've coaxed a sound into 0s and 1s, it's free to become whatever I wish. The edges and artifacts remaining from its source incarnation provide a grounding, organic mystery.

I'm always interested in examining the techniques of others, and it's terrific when they make it easy. Wicked environmentalist Martin Spernau has a very nice mini-podcast up explaining how he created the clicking back-beat for his recent track: Father, I have been dreaming. And while some of us cyborg-meld with our studios full of blinking lights, Martin created his latest audio horror play using only GarageBand and the built-in mic on his iSight. Here's sonic proof you can create great sound with a very minimal setup.

Check out Martin's dark, enveloping audio works, Mindwarp and Outro. Be prepared to have your skin crawl away from your shivering bones, and like it.


Dresden Dolls - Yes, Virginia
2/3/06 21:49 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Dresden Dolls - Yes, Virginia

The Dresden Dolls vie for top place as my favorite new act of the last five years. I caught them on their first run through San Francisco in 02004 and was hooked. Amanda Palmer's twisted intelligence and pure gritty sex appeal transmit through the ivories, and Brian Viglione is a truly monstrous live drummer. Wrap it all up in a fine, Goreyesque sheen of neo-Victorian mechanism, smoke, sonic mirrors, and they're irresistible.

Yes, Virginia picks up where their eponymous label debut left off, and swings more directly into rock song territory. More mature song-writing, the thirteen tracks span a widened range of vibes, but all still bear The Dresden Dolls' signature: simultaneously light and dark, dramatic and sardonic.

While the entire CD has been on repeat, I find myself skipping back for double listens to Sex Changes, My Alcoholic Friends, Delilah, Modern Moonlight, and the long-awaited official recordings of songs I've only heard live or on bootlegs.

Yes, several tracks on Yes, Virginia are studio versions of older songs which have been in live rotation for some time. The beautiful bounce of Backstabber (which I sang in my head all the way home after that first show), the minimally luscious First Orgasm and the syncopated gem Shores Of California finally are committed to digital and sound spectacular.

In fact, the entire album sounds spectacular. This is a tighter, more focused Dresden Dolls, from Amanda's playing, lyrics, vocal expression and control, to Brian's whip-crack rhythms, to the very production values of the recording.

Yes, Virginia is scheduled for release in April. It's worth the wait. Voice, piano and drums have never sounded so good.


Niklas Zimmer - Here, Now
1/17/06 22:38 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Niklas Zimmer - Here, Now

Niklas Zimmer from Upland Music sent me Here, Now because he thought I would like it. He was so right. I've been listening to it repeatedly as a focusing agent, mental space-maker, and cleansing wind for a good month at this point.

This sparse piece was originally created as ambient environment for eco-political installation art by Helen Meyer Harrison and Newton Harrison. Niklas combines clear ringing tones of Tibetan prayer bowls, gongs, cymbals and other metal percussion into sharp, mind shining currents.

Niklas claims it can be used for relaxation, but I've found it best for a certain form of meditation. Not the kind of meditation where you surface and feel calmed and detached, but the kind where your mind is invigorated and sends shocks of "Now is the time!" through your body. The kind where consciousness coils close and ready to spring, its circuits humming with life and primed for action. The kind where when you open your eyes and view the world, you know what must be done and you do it.

I've been playing it prior to studio work, and the psychological power is wondrous. I can see the space emptying, the walls becoming transparent, the air purified and alive.

It's as if the moment, here, now, becomes hyper-real.

As the consciousness in, of and defining the moment, I become hyper-real.


Giorgio Sancristoforo - oM
1/7/06 22:17 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Buddha Listens To oM At Dusk And Dawn.

Giorgio Sancristoforo, the mad scientist behind gleetchLAB, has embraced his inner mandala and released oM, a generative player of ambient music.

øM surrounds you with an endless wash of seamlessly evolving sound. It's perfect for, as Giorgio says on the site, "Meditation, Reiki or Yoga as well as everybody interested in self generated ambient music."

It's also great for writing, sleeping, reading, drawing. It's a masterful composition of floating-through-space automata. The sustained tones and wildlife ambiances create a very nice cocoon for these activities, a little pocket universe containing only you, your focus and øM.

I'm piping it through the whole house, and I've just moved from day to night: synthetic sunbirds were whirling from room to room and now I'm encircled by a darktime orchestra of nano-crickets. I love it.


Boards Of Canada - The Campfire Headphase
10/23/05 01:01 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Boards Of Canada roadtrip to The Campfire Headphase.

Were it not for continuing knowledge of present surroundings, headphone listening to Boards Of Canada's The Campfire Headphase might feel like temporal dislocation. Close your eyes, inhale deeply, and suddenly you're where you were however many years ago you consider your "misspent youth" to have taken place.

Here's the warm summer evening, here's the feel of wind through your car's window, here's the friend's porch where you got high listening to the first music you were truly one with.

Here's the face of your first love and the way you felt when the world was open wide like your eyes. Here's the brightness of uncountable stars from the seat of a bicycle at 3am. Here's the best time of your life in texture and touch and tone.

Here's the excitement of being alive, where everything is new, the unknown is every second of every minute of every hour of every day and what's ahead is a pact between the future and you.

The miracle: it's not dislocating at all. Instead of taking you back, Boards Of Canada brings it here.

In Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi, Boards reached across the sonic gap gap to pull you in, grabbed with rhythm then lead to headspace. With their latest release, they don't need to. From opening track to close, this work is all theirs, and yours... no bread crumbs required.

I can't listen to The Campfire Headphase without realizing the best time of my life has been going on since the day I was born. The good, the bad and everything between is all with me, and all of me, all the time.


Audio_z - [x]
10/11/05 08:53 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Audio_z girl in maximum machine darkness.

On the now-in-stasis Surface netlabel, [x] by Audio_z delivers ambient soundscapes of clicking rhythms and whirling tones of light in reverb drenched spaces. While mechanized, these pieces have an emergent organic quality, as if robots, taking over their own evolution, found the concept of a soul interesting and adapted it to their own uses.

All the tracks in this release are simply numbered: x_1 through x_7.

x_1 finds you in a nano-growth chamber during hatch time, mechanical podlings breaking through nutrient containment membranes, moving on to their next stage of assembly.

x_2 wraps echoing signals in the soft children's voices of something other than human, but not quite angelic.

x_3 showcases a ride on an observation platform, waiting for what's emerging from the dimensional rift below.

x_4 tags along with a network consciousness in VoIP traffic flowing through undersea, trans-Atlantic cabling.

x_5 documents an assembly line spirit in the dead of night, preparing a surprise for tomorrow's unwelcome workers.

x_6 exists in the signals recorded at the intersection of human neurons and the electrodes implanted by medical bots seeking to discover what makes organic life tick.

x_7 is a field recording of a rainy afternoon in a post-human future.

You can download [x] from the Surface archive, along with many other exceptional and unsettling ambient releases.


Brian Eno - Another Day On Earth
7/15/05 07:53 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Just Another Day On Earth In An Asian Marketplace.

With Another Day On Earth, Eno returns after long hiatus with a full-length comprised of strange, moody songs fronting as pop pieces but something else just beneath the skin.

From the beautiful opening lift of This with it's single word signature, to the final, slow-build realization of Bone Bomb these tracks are all ambient pieces disguised as more accessible fare. Traces of Eno's tendency toward texture and sliding frames of compositional reference could be found in his earlier pop/progressive rock works, but this feels more like wrapping a thin veneer of external form around vast ambient landscapes within.

Going Unconscious creates sonic fabric from melodic rhythms syncing and unsyncing, with gorgeously accented spoken word work carried aloft. The title track Just Another Day brings in mellow, ambient funk perfect for contemplative head-bobbing and occasional moonwalk. Eno's flat, almost deadpan voice has always been perfectly pitched, but vocal processing has a surprisingly prominent spot in many of these pieces. The heartache of And Then So Clear is pulled directly from your chest by the high, pitch-shifted vox-as-instument. I love his stylistic choice to leave between-phrase breaths intact and unprocessed. Vocal harmonies and multiples are everywhere. A Long Way Down has our globe of blue slowly rotating in space before you. Passing Over fills your head to overflowing built on minimal piano and the dissonance of processed rides.

Bottomliners could be an endlessly flowing track from the Apollo sessions, reworked with chorused voice:

And in the future

new forms of romance

grenade and lamplight

in twilit silence

You can hear it online: Rykodisc has a downloadable medley of the tracks and an interesting interview of Eno by Danny Hillis.


Ceckj - 8 Tracks To Fulfill Your Post-Wishes
5/29/05 01:29 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Ceckj cloud bear flying over 8 tracks to fulfill your post-wishes.

This is madness, surely, but of a most beautiful kind. What's harsh doesn't hold back, but flowing beneath, around and through is processed beautiful of all varieties. There's rhythm, but no beats. There's melody, but no obvious structural plays. There's noise that has become music and music made of noise.

8 Tracks To Fulfill Your Post-Wishes, by Maxim Shubski recording as Ceckj is a brilliant work of DSP art. From the skipped record transformed by inter-dimensional radio of the opener, Expocos Free. Fr. to the finale of Seasummer, all mario blips carrying Hollywood movie strings and organ from the 50s through your mind, there's nothing but brain-exploding goodness between.

The ultra-slowed grit of Teddy, Your Honey molasses its way into coursing, crushed static subdued by clean clear bells in The Dirty Sun Is Gone And I Shall Never Kiss Your Filthy Lips Again. Swarming cuts edit out a masterpiece of a thousand clicks in Nigel Said It Was Monumental, I Really Hope It Is. Stars, A Tale And A Hug For Me takes you into the cross-modulated world between telephone wires and superstrings while casino meets astral circus in Corn Flakes by "Fruyth Co. Baby Foam."

This is Ceckj's debut CD, and is currently only available in hand-burned limited edition, so check with Maxim quickly if you want in on it. Someone should really pick this up and make it more widely available to the experimental music community around the globe.


Jeffrey Radcliffe - Travelog
5/22/05 02:39 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Travelog, flying overhead.

In the liner notes for Travelog, Jeffrey Radcliffe defines his approach to creating music as "describing a place, or even just the feel of a place." This CD is truly a compendium of wondrous locations, wayfaring between border defining realms of IDM and ambient to nouveau classical and soundtrack. Clear chimes between plucked glass and tapped piano with lush, sweeping strings over synthetic drums and rasps create places individually unique yet collectively shared. Listening with headphones is rewarded: this is music to write to.

Whither kicks it off with tick-tock percussion building a rhythmic foundation for the entire collection. Dream Flight of Atalanta is filled with hope and homecoming and a joyous dawn, moving beautifully into the minimal repetitions of Transalpine. Roto whirls you into orbit with staccato melodies rushing and lifting your ears, dropping you into the washed terrain of Landscape, where warm ocean is somewhere close enough to slip right into and float all day. Ocean comes to wooded shore in the Evening Song, pre-feast in a sylvan setting with mead and maidens. You Are An seems to be missing a descriptive word, but the quest for definition is aimed inwards, not out. This track has been on repeat while I write this recommendation. Et Tu and Cisalpine form a labyrinthine duo of pitched percussion, warped bass and vibrato tones with the Goblin King leading the dance. Twisty Passages All Alike finds our hero with torch in hand, making passage through the underground, likely to be eaten by a grue. Lament closes the album with a funeral boat carrying a slain warrior to the falls.

Radcliffe makes his music available for download at Tinctoris, his weblog. There are many excellent additional tracks to listen to. Be sure to check out one of my favorites, Binary Clock 01, made with a Max/MSP patch counting through an hour of binary representation in exactly fifteen minutes.

If you like what you hear, buy Radcliffe's sonic journey through CD Baby. Become a patron, support the arts and a cool musician: go get one, throw a candle-lit dinner party and play it for everyone.


Noosfera - Jungian Epiphanies
4/22/05 23:07 - permalink - email - category: Listen
World tree reaches to the sky on the cover graphic of Jungian Epiphanies by Noosfera.

Chris O'Shea at Pixelsumo turned me onto Devachan by Cesare Marilungo, which looks like a groovy app for 3d programming. I'll be compiling Devachan on one of my Win boxes later this week, but at the moment I'm swimming in Cesare's music while Jittering.

This, my friends, is very fine and unique ambient, centering around reverb drenched guitar work and washes of droning feedback. Surprising melodies, even more surprising melodies hidden underneath, complete with understated, atmospheric vox, occasional piano and zero percussion.

Noosfera doesn't get in the way, doesn't force you to concentrate on it, instead creates an embedded place, a structure for time, space and mind to unfold within. "Noosfera" is Italian for "noosphere," which seems entirely appropriate.

Every few tracks I looked up from my Jitter efforts to find myself surprised by the room I was still in.


Monolake - Invisible Force
4/18/05 00:41 - permalink - email - category: Listen
BlueYellow streamers on cover of Monolake's Invisible Force single.

Monolake returns with a stomper: the double A sided single Invisible Force.

Invisible leads us out of the thumping, machined darkness of Monolake's last full-length, Momentum, and into steamy, tribal tech amidst glistening noir cities. Repetitive and insistent, but never static. You're heading for the station to hop the trans-ether express and can't help bobbing your head along the way.

Force sounds like phenotypical expression of an evolved genotype from Excentric or Reminiscence off Momentum. A lightly swung kick and hidden bounce in the snare, the sparsely atmospheric space around body-pop drum programming... but the comparison ends with the rhythmic structures. Chopped and re-arranged female utterances guide you through the beat, a subway driver bleeding through from the future. You can't help but move, and when you reach your destination, you want to ride the trans-ether loop again.

Invisible Force is the first advance single from upcoming Monolake album Polygon Cities, due in June. Robert Henke's changed up his solo artist situation and worked with a new partner for this album, T++. Invisible Force is still very much Monolake, but fresh from tomorrow. I can't wait for the entire new plate to drop.


Apparat - Duplex (remixes)
4/5/05 15:05 - permalink - email - category: Listen
Swirly cover image of Apparat's Duplex Remixes.

1- Schallstrom (Thomas Fehlmann remix)

2- Contradiction (L'usine remix)

3- Steinholtz (Monolake remix)

4- Wooden (Anders Ilar remix)

Four excellent original tracks from Apparat's Duplex + four luminaries of the electronic sound world == four excellent, luminous remixes. I can't stop playing this today. I am compelled to shuttle back and hit play again.

Thomas Fehlmann's click and run version of Schallstrom hits the virtual four on the floor crowd right where they like it... electronic body music for the brain.

L'Usine's reconstruction of Contradiction warps the vocals into another instrument entirely, then presses them into service of ride-tha-funk glitch-hop.

Monolake engineers a frozen, linear take on Steinholtz, whirring and bumping on the boundary between Apparat's and his own world of paradoxical motion and stillness in ever-increasing quantities.

Closing out the tracks, Anders Ilar's vast reconstruction of Wooden is playing somewhere right now in a cylindrical space ship traveling between solar systems. It's been a centuries-long voyage to colonize a new world, but the destination is finally near.


the weblog of Vlad Spears
Chief Iconoclast - Daevlmakr Media
Designing Monsters - vitruvius.livejournal.com

reading
Emma Bull - War For The Oaks
Thomas Jefferson - The Jefferson Bible
Baggini & Fosl - The Philosopher's Toolkit

listening
Beta Two Agonist - Zero Point Field
Daevls On FlightDynamics
Dankoe, Gorbunov, Zemlyanikeen - Far East Sessions

recent
Cycling '74 Loves Cats
Seemingly Solid Things - Glenn Gibson @ GIVEN
drmArm
Life In 3d
It's Full Of Stars
Retracted Landing Gear

This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from vladspears. Make your own badge here.

category
2Second(fuse) 7
Action 1
Atmos 3
Biome 1
BlueDeceiver 2
Creation 6
Daevlmakr 12
Exorcism 16
Flow 10
Futurism 15
Gear 19
Idea 4
Image 3
Incantation 19
Knowledge 5
Listen 18
LiveMusic 3
Locate 2
Look 3
MaxMSPJitter 16
Politics 16
Quote 1
Read 10
Science 2
SoundDesign 4
Technology 3
Tinderbox 5
Unfälle 2
Vegetarian 3
Vision 2

month
03_02008
02_02008
01_02008
11_02007
10_02007
09_02007
07_02007
06_02007
05_02007
04_02007
03_02007
02_02007
01_02007
12_02006
11_02006
10_02006
09_02006
08_02006
07_02006
06_02006
05_02006
04_02006
03_02006
02_02006
01_02006
12_02005
11_02005
10_02005
09_02005
08_02005
07_02005
06_02005
05_02005
04_02005







weblog
bldg.blog
Cesare Marilungo
Chris O'Shea
Christian Fromme
Dan Winckler
Data Is Nature
David Fine
Doug Miller
Hal Rager
Hihiromi
hyperTextuality
Information Aesthetics
Jacob Appelbaum
Jaeysin's Xylophone
Jeff Vail
Jeffrey Radcliffe
FlightDynamics
Mac Tonnies
Maehymn
Mark Bernstein
Marsha Vdovin
Martin Spernau
Mediapathic
Neomarxisme
Onegoodmove
Pascal Venier
Seth Elalouf
Sex In Art
Steven R. Livingstone
The Nonist
Trond Lossius

link
Better Humans
Council for Secular Humanism
Creative Commons
DailyKos
Diesel Sweeties
EFF
FuturePundit
The Heinlein Society
HMC MediaLab
IFTF
Make
New Scientist
The Panda's Thumb
Press Think
Questionable Content
Rarefaction
ScaryGoRound
SpaceSuitGroup
Scientific American

legalese
All written material on 2Second(fuse)
authored by Vlad Spears is published under the
Creative Commons Some Rights Reserved license



Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivs 2.0

Fight corporate ownership of culture:
Create and Disseminate!