organic sound

big band in the air, at approximately 13 bell street, NW1 5BZ, followed soon after by diligently layered fiteer just a few doors down. adequate hydration was not a problem.

aesthetic value

Theorists are apt to vex themselves with vain efforts to remove uncertainty just where it has a high aesthetic value.

donald francis tovey, essays in musical analysis, vol. 3 (1936).

the right beer at the right time

When the cool of the pond makes you drop down on it
When the smell of the lawn makes you flop down on it
When the teenage car gets the cop down on it
That time is here for one more year

jonathan richman, that summer feeling*

(for illustration only; what we're actually Drinking now is la clarine on the fifth day.)

(and if you're watching jonathan richman anyway, you can't not see the one with the camel outfit.)

mind over mirrors

this is jaime fennelly:


howdy pardner and the hard truths, my easy-listening aloha-shirt country music band, will henceforth be known as smoke and matter.

katachi

by tokumaru shūgo, stop-motion animation by kijek/adamski.

keromin

backstage at the ignobels, a suitcase is re-filled with appealingly goofy frog-shaped pitch/volume instruments. from japan, of course. "kaeru" (カエル) is japanese for frog, "kero" is the sound japanese frogs make (thx mako), and of course you know of the theremin. 

ads on streaming radio

i believe, the way some xooglers do, that properly targeted, relevant, well-produced ads are unobjectionable and can even be enjoyable. spotify is a beautifully designed, well-implemented service and i thought, at first, that the radio ads on spotify wouldn't bother me much. i was wrong. wrong, wrong, wrong. the voice talent is awful but the worst thing is that spotify ads are incredibly poorly targeted: playing a tanqueray gin ad between tracks of glenn gould's goldberg variations is comical only once.

(though i will admit to snorting some coffee in dwelltime yesterday when i overheard the laptop next to me play an ad for durex condoms right after maria callas sang ave maria.)

taste and choice

The thing I like most about rediscovering Led Zeppelin—and listening to the Chemical Brothers and The Bends—is that they can no longer be comfortably accommodated into my life. So much of what you consume when you get older is about accommodation: I have kids, and neighbours, and a partner who could quite happily never hear another blues-metal riff or a block-rockin' beat in her life. I have less time, less tolerance for bullshit, more interest in good taste, more confidence in my own judgement. The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be. In learning to do that, however, things get lost, too, and one of the things that got lost—along with a taste for, I don't know, hospital dramas involving sick children, and experimental films, was Jimmy Page. The noise he makes is not who I am any more, but it's still a noise worth listening to; it's also a reminder that the attempt to grow up smart comes at a cost.

nick hornby, songbook

otomata

this generative sequencer is very neat. it is a set of rules that "produces chaotic results in some settings, therefore you can end up with never repeating*, gradually evolving sequences."

* also neat is the FAQ:

Q: You are a filthy liar! You can't create "never repeating" patterns with a system whose state space is finite!
A: You are right. I should have said "(practically) never repeating" above. But please do the math, it is possible (but not proven) that there might exist some configurations where the exact repetition would take (billions of billions of times) longer than the known age of our universe. I am not a mathematician by any means, so that is as far as infinity goes for me (I also believe that light travels in infinite speed in a vacuum, come at me bro! I am a digital being, speed of light is my universe's sampling rate). 

little honda

grindin'

via youtube.com

it's the transformers! these blocks, ladies and gentlemen, are real. stop motion is such a wondrous thing. the video is great, but the making of video is even better.

Posted via web from flavourcountry