Yay!

Participant in share.dj, member of the dnb squad We(tm), remixer, ableton user, theAgriculture artist, and really chill guy, Lloop has been producing a lot of deep tracks in the years post-We. You might remember We from their underground junglish drum and bass hit “Magnesium Flares.”

Lloop’s 60Hz dropped a bit ago and I like it a lot.

His latest though, “love songs” is unbelievable. I was about to go into a treatise on how he went back to the roots of music, of rock n roll, of love and happiness to craft this… And well, I won’t go into too large a post about this. Suffice it to say he wrote a lot of distinct, danceable, well thought out, sub 5 minute songs with enough bass to burn calories. Bass that sometimes sounds like iit was recorded bumping from 4×15″ 200 watt amplified speakers in the back of a 1972 Cadillac locked up running in the basement of a parking garage. Sick sick stuff.

So go to his blog to read his writings etc. Then go to amazon or itunes and get love songs… You and your loved ones will thank you.

Latest tracks by Clark 8

Clark 8 7″ is all set up and should be getting pressed soon. Need to get t-shirts to print, but the screen is done. No one is probably reading this, but whatever. :-)

Led me to much happiness, but away from using Linux on the desktop when my wonderful research group bestowed a first generation MacBook Pro on me.

Well, I was going to make this longer, but in essence, get some cool software from irradiatedsoftware.com/ Like SizeUp or Cinch. SizeUp is more powerful, but Cinch has a better UI. I wish they’d combine the two. Then set your terminal to focus follows mouse with:
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES


In your Terminal window. Then at least between terminals that you have gridded out, your focus will be under your cursor. Still no explanation why the scroll wheel will work (and not switch focus) and other oddities of OS X. Which aren’t necessarily wrong, just not what I would choose if I were in charge of the OS.

It’s hard to say, though, overall which is a better user experience. I have seen some young whippersnappers with their Lenovo Linux laptops, set up with minimal window managers emulating OS X… but there is a benefit to the limited choices of OS X. I sound like such an old fogey Mac apologist for saying it, but the fact that I can hop on any OS X machine from 10.3-10.6 and have a similar experience, is a marked change from logging into an Ubuntu machine from those same eras.

Perhaps that’s an over generalization, but you get what I mean. I was there with GNOME 1 and KDE 2, etc… and honestly I remember liking KDE 2 more than just about any other GUI ever. But then they had to complicate it, more and more… to the point where I was using blackbox (then fluxbox) …

And around we go.

There.

ewh34t

These days it took me about 10 minutes of watching a youtube video and playing around in Ableton Live 8 to get a somewhat decent wobble. Big ups to the originators. Oh, and by the way, this song, like many of the genre, doesn’t make a lot of sense on computer speakers or small headphones.

Of course there can be the argument that people should have thought about the consequences of contracting MS, diabetes, congenital heart defects and the like before they got them. That we should just let them deal with it. But I’ve seen herds of animals on nature shows that treat their hurt and sick members better than that. This false Darwinian logic of so many individualists seems to drop the concept that helping people stay healthy helps all people.

They got back to me and are hooking me up with some replacement parts. Good on them, thanks Ed! Hopefully they will not make the pickups so weird too. Badly mounted. I didn’t fret too much about it because I’m getting them redone anyway.

So… ah yes, I’m spending money I don’t have (nb: I don’t have any money.) to get Curtis Novak to rewind/rebuild my pickups to honest to gosh vintage style. The pickup shipped with the guitar is quite different from the original Seth Glover Wide-Range Humbucker. I will be sure to review the pickups when I get them back and installed.

Ok, now onto the Text of Light review. I went to the Text of Light site and saw that Text of Light (or these folks playing along with Brakhage films) has been going on since 1999 or 2001 depending on which story you read. During 1997-2001 I would pretty much try and go to anything involving any sonic youth member in nyc… that eventually branched out into Christian Marclay and DJ\Olive (with the entire We(TM) / Subtonic (can’t recall the night) … etc etc.) … but yeah… the first Text of Light shows had Marclay and Olive and others… but regardless, last night it was Lee Ranaldo, Ulrich Krieger and Alan Licht.

Stan Brakhage… Trey Stone and Matt Parker were his students. That alone should be enough to codify/canonize/whatever else into history, but no… the guy essentially founded good experimental film. I have seen a bit of terrible experimental film. It’s sort of like the difference between what a guy who looks at Jackson Pollack and says “anyone could do that” would produce and what Pollack produced. Yeah… he’s nuts. Like… lush colors you simply cannot see on a computer screen… amazing waves of movement, at once the rotation of the film itself and at other times the … gosh I can’t explain it, I’m not into film enough to know the lingo.

So… gear and music and noise I know enough about. Lee Ranaldo was playing his real Fender Jazzmaster (which looks like his custom one that I have, but with a natural headstock and… real vintage pickups), Ulrich Krieger played sax and Alan Licht played a Burns guitar… I wish I was in the plush front row so I could’ve seen their gear, but whatever. They probably all had loopers, Lee & Alan both had fuzz, Alan may have had a tone generator, but it was probably just a memory man… Alan also used an ebow I think. Lee broke out drumsticks, a bow and bells. He also busted out a cell phone and played back perhaps a voicemail through his microphonic vintage pickups (aka one of the reasons I’m getting mine rewound)… Kind of reminiscent of “Providence” from Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation.

The whole event was a great wash of sound… never too loud (well some people left, but that’s a sign of a good noise show imho)… You could still hear some pedals get clicked on… Ulrich used his amplified sax loud enough to feedback and use the clicking of the keys rhythmically.

Alan provided a nice baseline of hums and … haunting hills of tones… as in volume wise.

As it was I really wish I’d went up just to gawk at what gear they were using, but I just went out and loitered around. Kinda hoping to talk with Lee about gear, his signature model fender, how his band mate is doing a split 7″ with TMIAF, etc etc. But he was doing some lame video interview between the two shows… so he never came out before I got booted by this greasy cinefamily guy. I say greasy because his hair was greased back.

But, I did get to tell Alan that it was a good set and then almost get into a conversation about contemporary composition with Ulrich, but that got cut short. C’est la vie.

So yeah, it was a good show… it felt like hanging at Tonic again when I was ~21… except I’m 31 and yeah it still ruled.