Last week, to follow on from the discussion of atemporality, I started sort of an essay/rant about the future being a fictional construct, the non-linear nature of “progress”, and how making and remixing intersect. I haven’t felt inspired to shape it into something actually readable, so instead, how about some music and photos?
Above is a song I wrote with the KORG DS-10 cartridge on my Nintendo DS (RSS reader folks, click through to see it).
I also made something I’m calling an atemporal dance mix (my mom says it’s good for cheering yourself up, too).
Over the weekend, Lucas and I watched both Solaris and From Beyond, a combination that’s possibly as high/low style as one can get with SF. I love the interior of the Solaris station, the round walls, electrical panels, and piles of books shoved onto shelves. With From Beyond, I started wondering how to rewrite the whole thing as a police procedural—the original story is short enough you could do all sorts of things with it.
One of the enjoyable things about Solaris is that it combines a universe with space travel and alien intelligence with one that has paper books, tea, and long walks around the pond. It’s unevenly technological, past and present intermingling. Which is a good way to describe my music experiments the last week as well.
First, I should note that I’m using an iPhone app to tune my ukulele. It’s called Cleartune, and it’s a full chromatic tuner that can be used with any instrument. The graphics are beautifully designed, and downloading it was cheaper and more immediate than purchasing a hardware tuner.
I recorded myself playing Amazing Grace using AudioBoo, a handy little iPhone app and website for doing up to 5-minute recordings that other people can subscribe to in iTunes or a RSS reader. One of the interesting things about practicing ukulele is that since I like to sing as well, finding songs to practice is a balance between what has manageable chords, and what has a melody I already know (hopefully it fits my vocal range as well). This arrangement of Amazing Grace definitely hits that spot for me.
Then, on Thursday, I brought the UCreate mixer to the weekly hackathon at Lucky Lab. I still had one of the ukulele samples on there from earlier experiments, and Reid whipped up a little drum loop using TweakyBeat (yet another iPhone app, hmm?). Below is the result.
Reid had suggested that the 30 Hour Day recordings (from an awesome no-sleep fundraiser held in December) might produce some interesting clips for remixing, so I took the highlight video, split off some promising bits of music and conversation, and came up with something that makes me laugh (though I can’t speak for anyone else, and it probably helps if you know Rick and Cami, the hosts, personally).
So that’s what my week sounded like. And the future thing: I would’ve killed to be able to do this as a kid, you know? From as early as I knew I could use computers to make things, I wanted to be able to carry the pieces in my backpack, plug the parts together, and have it all just work. These kind of music experiments really highlight for me how we’re there, finally. I sat around at a pub on Thursday and plugged my friend’s phone into a toy mixer so we could manipulate the sound, and it was about as simple as it gets. That’s pretty neat.
I hope you are all having a good new year so far. Lucas and I started with a delicious NYE dinner at Nostrana, watching Star Trek movies, and a little knitting over the weekend. (He finished a really nifty scarf project and will hopefully post lots of pictures soon.)
I’ve been feeling like everything is slowed way down, muddled and difficult and confusing. I know this is part winter blah and part burnout, but I hoped between the end of the holidays and my near-hermitlike behavior over the last few months, I’d be feeling re-energized by now. So far, no luck. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this blank approaching a new year. It’s making it kind of hard to plan or set goals, and I like planning.
Alas.
Ukulele has been loads of fun, though. I have five or six songs I can strum my way through pretty consistently. I’ve been tinkering with making a recording of something to show off, but I haven’t spent enough time at it to have a song ready to post. I do have a couple of bits of ukulele riffs looped and distorted on the UCreate mixer, though.
I think there’s a couple of sections in each of these that might be worth pulling out to use in something else. We’ll see. I collect a fair number of audio snippets that just sit in folders on my hard drive because I haven’t worked out what I want to make with it. In my mind I’m a budding electronica genius, but in practice, I need to actually finish something here.
A few weeks ago, I resumed near-daily music practice, alternating between flute and recorder. I set a low goal: at least 15 minutes, stopping when I felt tired.
There are other daily practices in my life. On work days, we try to start off with a quick standup meeting in Campfire. What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Things you learned? Blockers? I’ve tried this practice at companies where we all worked together in an office, but I like the online version better. It seems to skip some of the conversational distractions that keep these meetings from staying short.
Some people make one of cleaning out their inbox, but I never manage to keep up with this. I’m a lurker in my own email, sitting on responses forever for no real reason, sometimes even the easy ones. If you need a fast response, catch me on IM, or Twitter, or IRC. The 14 messages in my personal inbox are the fewest I’ve had sitting unresolved in weeks.
I’m also very conscious of the lack of exercise in my daily practices. I’ve been reading through old blog posts, adding tags, adjusting categories, which took me through a section where I was doing yoga or Pilates or dance every day. When I started getting involved in tech events, those things were pushed off my calendar.
When I worked at a job that had a number of daily tasks that had to be completed at specific times, I put them all on index cards, and shuffled through the stack as the day progressed. It was very effective in keeping me on task, despite many interruptions. Now I have fewer things like that to keep track of, but I still use a todo list and try to keep the most urgent items easy to review.
I’ve switched from my text-file system over to Hiveminder, at least for a while. It has some features that make it easier to whittle down tasks to just a few things to focus on at a time. I hid “sign up for Pilates” for a few more days, but maybe I’ll add “practice flute/recorder” as a daily reminder.
I wonder if anyone’s using collections of iTunes playlists to give suggestions for music you might like. If you and someone else both have a certain song on your playlist, it suggests to each of you that you might be interested in the other songs the other person has. With a large group, it could pick the songs from lists that match yours most closely, and songs that show up most often on lists similar to yours. Seems a lot easier than Pandora, where they have complicated analyses of music structure that they match up. Sifting through actual peoples’ playlists would allow for the possibility that Weird Al fans will listen to anything as long as the singer has big hair, or some other kind of anomaly.
I’m also wondering if I’m going to get used to the way this Apple keyboard is about 10 zillion times more sensitive than the heavy clunky IBM one I’m used to. I’m getting double letters all over the place.
I had a music-filled evening yesterday. It started with singing at the Cathedral for the annual Chrism Mass. This is when they bless sacramental oils. It’s done right before Easter because oil is used to baptize and confirm the people who join the church at the Easter Vigil.
The music we sang was nothing special, but it was a really enjoyable event, because the entire diocese is involved. All of the priests come to renew their commitment to the church, which means that during the eucharistic prayer you have 100+ priests all saying the same words and making the same motions. I love watching that. Also, women from the SE Asian Vicarate wear traditional Vietnamese clothes, each reading is done in a different language, and there are women religious in their orders’ habits. The one new group represented that I hadn’t seen before were Native Americans. Four women wearing fringed blankets and wafting incense (sage mixed with something spicy) participated in the presentation of the third type of oil to be blessed. They held the incense in what looked like large shells, and used feathers to fan it out into the church.
Afterward Lucas and I went to the Doug Fir for a free live show. A few weeks ago we saw a poster advertising that Hillstomp would be there. We heard them perform at one of the beer festivals last summer, and really liked it. They play blues, with a great dirty sound, just two guys on slide guitar and bucket drums.
The second group playing was one I hadn’t encountered before, so it was a pleasant surprise when they turned out to be good. They’re called The Vinos. It sounded kind of like indie-rock Leonard Cohen, especially because of the lead singer’s low, scratchy voice, and the great instrumentation: two violins, guitar, keyboard, bass, drums. They also had a bellydancer who came out for a few songs, dancing and clicking her finger cymbals with the music. You can listen to samples of their music on their website.
And one non-music thing: I decided to try out the blog feature on Bloglines, to share links to posts and articles I like. It’s at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/ame.
