Hope for the world

Sometimes the world seems a little bleak to me. The actions of people, corporations, and governments all seem to be both predictable and petty.

Then you read something like the following excerpt from this article

A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country's borders. These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes. According to the announcement made by Iranian intelligence officials, alert police officials caught these squirrels before they could carry out any task.

Really?! That is so AWESOME! Normally the struggles of nations is just depressing, but when you throw trained rodents in trench coats into the equation, it just gets cool. I just hope the countermeasures are as inventive...

Brian Eno discovers screensavers

I'm assuming that most of you know who Brian Eno is. If not- he wrote some good music, he wrote some pretentious music, he did amazing things as a producer, probably the most impressive of which was inventing the Talking Heads' sound.

Anyway.

He's had some interesting compositional practices in the past, and I am always interested in hearing what he is up to.

Apparently, this week, that is presenting an installation in which he basically makes a screen saver. With audio. There's a bit of a tease over at apple.com where they pretend to maybe discuss the interesting bits of what exactly he did, but- as is usually the case- the people who report on algorithmic composition aren't really interested in algorithms (looks like maybe it was some primitive genetic algorithm? or possibly random...). There were some frightening bits (they used DIRECTOR?!), and, sadly, I came away with the impression that they hadnt actually done anything other than make a nifty screensaver, then cash in on Eno's reputation as an electronic magician.

I'm sure we can all relate...

Poor, poor Souljahboy.

Gamelan on Bicycle

So, after looking more into contact mics, I found out about Richard Lerman- a man who, it appears, knows a great deal about recording strange objects, and not much about web design. The video above shows some gamelan-esque composition using a bicycle and contact microphones.

The Score is the best part. I am a sucker for non-traditional notation, especially if it is as well executed as this.

Bridge Music (first post)

So, this guy is composing a percussive piece that uses a bridge outside of Poughkeepsie, NY as an instrument.

He recorded a 2 -minute proof of concept which I thought was pretty neatly done.

This gives me a longing for contact mics.

Artistic Statements always tend to rub me the wrong way, so I tried to hurry over the majority of the article (which was rife with statements such as "I only play big instruments"). However, the article did mention several different strikers (rubber mallets, peen hammers, and an assortment of ball bearings run down a surface). Once you get past the obligatory music biz blah-blah, this is a pretty impressive example of composition with found material.

I was a little surprised that he went exclusively with contact mics, I would have thought that some of those surfaces would behave like gongs, allowing for some radically different sounds based on mic distance from the surface, like stockhausen did in Mikrophonie