In our Midst…

Some traditions also hold that a vampire cannot enter a house unless invited by the owner, although after the first invitation they can come and go as they please.
~ An Encyclopaedia of Occultism - Lewis Spence

Hanging out on or around the fringes of any music scene (music venues, record and/or instrument stores, radio stations, etc…) one can meet some really strange flakes. You meet people who recorded with so-and-so on an album you can never find info on, people who claim some past fame or connection to fame and so on and so on…

But this one takes the cake.

We had an incident down at the station that has sent ripples through our little community. Someone gained access through the front door, misrepresented their role there by namedropping the right names to some unsuspecting volunteers - myself being one of them - and apparently stole some expensive equipment.
I say apparently because no one can be 100% sure, even though it’s pretty clear what went down that night and the following day. Out of the 1 or 2 percent chance of us being wrong, I’m not going to divulge the who and where of this particular individual.
I actually witnessed what I am now convinced was a first attempt by this individual.

Let me rewind for a moment.

New Look, New Thrills. Now the Excitement Really Begins….

Updates, Etc.

I have updated my look a little bit.
You can still glance at wonder at this blog’s namesake here.
I re-upped my hodge-podge of an audio experiment retrospective album here.
Kevin of Eclectic Grooves (Check out his amazing Ornette Coleman boot while there!) fame let me know that I had neglected to link to the audio file of part two of my radio extravaganza here. It’s fixed now, and has even more vaganza than before.

I am on vacation for a spell, here at my mountain enclave. A black bear got into our garbage can and spread about two weeks of garbage across the lawn (we aren’t voracious consumers, so between composting - no doubt the big bear attractor - and recycling, we only generate one can of garbage every two weeks). Hopefully none of my neighbors will decide to shoot him or her, although our cats are going apeshit.

If time allows, I will edit up the Laswell special and put bits of it online, for those of you who are up for the download.

Radio-Activity Update: Seven Hours, Seven Souls

I’ve done it now.
I am on board to do a seven hour radio marathon on musician Bill Laswell on the 21st of March, as part of KBOO’s spring pledge drive.
I keep thinking I’m dreaming and that I’ll wake up or that it won’t happen, but no….
…It’s in the listener’s guide now, so it’s for real.
Here’s the proposal I wrote:

Nothing is TrueEverything is permitted

A Bill Laswell Pledge-drive special

On Friday, March 21st, join The Outside World for the Seven Hours, Seven Souls pledge drive special, while we explore the vast body of work of Brooklyn musician, producer and agent of chaos, Bill Laswell.
From the downtown New York upstart Jazz Funk outfits Material and Massacre, to the extreme metal of Praxis and Painkiller, to his many dub permutations and ambient vexations, to his many World Music excursions and to too many genre-hopping collaborations to list here, we’ll barely scratch the surface of his intimidating discography, but will take you on a voyage through more musical tangent points than you thought possible.

Join us from 11PM to 6AM, for Seven Hours, Seven Souls: The Music of Bill Laswell.

Some points of interest:

* Material
* Massacre
* The Golden Palominos
* Praxis
* Buckethead
* Otomo Yoshihide
* Brian Eno and David Byrne
* John Zorn
* Divination
* Jah Wobble

and many more…

I have plenty of Material (pun intended), but am still nervous. Regular host of the show I’m hijacking - Daniel Flessas - will be out of town and across the US, so I’m flying solo, sort of. Oh, well. I also have no shortage of people willing to help out, so it’ll be swell and we’ll all have a fun time.

Be sure to listen on Friday, march 21st, from 11pm to 6am, for the Bill Laswell: Seven Hours Seven Souls pledge drive extravaganza (who’s bringing the extra vaganza, Daniel?).

KBOO is at 90.7 FM in Portland and SW Washington and is streaming on the web at kboo.fm.

The Sound of Sound (with Sub-Woofer Rant)

I ran across this fascinating article on sound mixing. It talks about how producers and mixers are mixing albums to meet the limitations of MP3s:

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. “You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3,” says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana’s Never- mind. “Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things.” Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

As technological shifts have changed the way sounds are recorded, they have encouraged an artificial perfection in music itself. Analog tape has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools, making edits that once required splicing tape together easily done with the click of a mouse. Programs like Auto-Tune can make weak singers sound pitch-perfect, and Beat Detective does the same thing for wobbly drummer

That’s not so new. Producers have always taken into account what media or player the music will be listened to on. Phil Spector made the most of his mixes, knowing they would be listened to on mono equipment and mono, AM radio. In the eighties, producers optimized their mixes to play best on 1/8″ cassette tape and the best players, as tapes were briskly outselling vinyl, just before the marketing slam-dunk of CDs came on the scene. When CD’s limitations showed through the hype, many producers tried to overcompensate by accentuating the bass and treble to an obnoxious degree. I have never owned top-of-the-line audio equipment, per se, but can play my vinyl edition of Byrne and Eno’s My Life In the Bush of Ghosts side-by-side with both CD editions I own and - despite the scratchiness - the vinyl offers a more satisfying listening experience. It has a depth and warmth that even the 2005 remaster can’t approach. To me, a lot of vinyl sounds very 3-D, and has a rich bass and midrange and something in between that digital formats can’t touch.

10 - 120 Hz

In my opinion, this was probably one of the factors that led to the emergence of the sub-woofer as a primary speaker.

I think the subwoofer is an instrument of the nincompoop. Listening to anything with that much bass is like eating a cake that’s all frosting - and the yucky, industrial bakery type at that.
It’s like listening to an all-tuba orchestra.
Young people love the subwoofer. I believe part of it is the youngsters need to mark territory by making their music penetrate walls and buildings and carry longer than a humpback whale’s singing in their quest to irritate others with their inane musical choices.
Part of my irritation may be due to the fact that I have very poor upper frequency hearing, due to years of concert going and working in industrial sweatshops. But it’s abuse and over-reliance is abundant. I once helped some coworker comrades prepare a humorous hip-hop song parody for a work party, and when it came time to set it up for an office birthday celebration, the young man whose boombox we used insisted on pushing the hell-button market ‘MEGA-BASS’, ‘ULTRA-MEGA BASS’ or whatever. The results were that everyone sitting right next to the speakers were visibly annoyed and no one could decipher the words being rapped, which was what the whole thing was about. The words were buried in this muckish mud of thwacking bass drums and muddle.

I’m relieved that either noise ordinances or personal fashion trends have made the booming car in traffic a relative rarity, these days. I remember living in a poor neighborhood when those devices were first coming on the market. You couldn’t sleep for more than an hour without being woken up by them roaming through the area. It was like some kind of Third-World nuclear proliferation issue: people who didn’t have two nickels to rub together would sign their lives away for a sub-bass annihilator, because the other guy had it.
Our hillbilly neighbors now love cranking their car stereo to some godawfull music while he tinkers outside, does yard work or administers to his still. They must yell loudly to one another to be heard over the muck, so they do it often.

Your low frequencies are there for a reason. It’s like painting a whole room bright purple. Use it sparingly and appropriately, folks.

iPod Sets Man’s Pants On Fire

Funny:

ATLANTA — The new iPod Nano is hot. But one Douglasville man said his old Nano got even hotter — hot enough to burst into flames.

“So I look down and I see flames coming up to my chest,” said Danny Williams.

Williams said the burn hole from the pocket of his pants marks the spot of his 15 seconds of flame. He said he had an iPod Nano and an glossy piece of paper in his pocket. He believes the paper shielded him from being burned.

“I’m still kind of freaked out that after only a year and a half my iPod caught fire in my pocket,” said Williams.

The iPod uses a lithium ion battery — the same type of battery under recall for setting laptops on fire.

Williams said the fact is iPod Nano burst into flames while he was at work was bad enough, where he works could have been another issue. He works at a kiosk in Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

“If TSA had come by and seen me smoking, they could have honestly thought I was a terrorist,” said Williams.

Williams said Apple wants him to send his iPod back and they’ve vowed to replace it. Williams’ mother called Channel 2 because she said this is more than one iPod. She said it’s about what could have happened.

“It could have happened when we were sleeping, it could have happened when he was driving and the outcome could have been much worse,” said Elaine Williams.

After Channel 2 sent Apple pictures of the iPod, they called back but they refused to say how common the problem is. In fact, Apple refused to talk about this particular incident at all.

I think Apple is probably scrambling to figure out why an Ipod owner has had the same ipod for over a year.
I mean, why didn’t he follow the marketing target and obediently replace it as soon as the new Nano came out?
But I also like how the man was more concerned with the possible embarrassment of being momentarily mistaken for a terrorist.
I think if I was on fire (I was on more than one occasion, but that’s not for here), I would be more concerned with my immediate survival and trying to minimize the harm - but that’s me.

iPod Troubles, Spontaneous Healing, Liberation from the Tyranny of iTunes

Hi all. How are you doing?
I found the continuity of my musical addiction cut suddenly, when nearly all my musical gadgetry suddenly malfunctioned and died at once. First it was my trusty 2nd gen 20 gig iPod, which seemed to have a hard drive meltdown. Then my ancient Sony D555 CD player - which I used to use religiously before acquiring the ‘Pod - suddenly bit the big one after nearly 20 years of crystal clear service. Then, the tape player in my car (through which I ‘played’ the iPod) died spectacularly, forcing me to buy - for the second time in my life - an aftermarket car stereo. I ended up getting a snazzy CD-R, MP3 playing one with lots of grunt output-wise.

But I digress…
In the meantime, I was more or less sure that my iPod was muerte, so I sent it in to one of the many ‘we’ll diagnose and fix your iPod sites’ so that I could be sure and maybe, I don’t know - have a little funeral?

The one I ended up sending it to was a highly rated one called MyiPodBroke.com.
The process was pretty straightforward: You simply fill out an online form, after which you’ll get confirmation and an address to send it to. You must pay return postage (via PayPal) and insure it and then ship it to the address provided. So the turnaround was pretty quick. The repairman - Peder - got back to me in a few days and informed me that while he was surprised that an iPod of my vintage was still running, he said it was working fine for him. He confirmed my suspicion that it had a problem booting up to an Intel Mac (my work computer), and that it would most likely occur again. I got it back in less than a week and it seems like nothing ever happened to it. Battery life seems to have diminished, but it is the original battery and the whole seizure episode seemed to have zapped it when I ineptly kept trying to cycle it into diagnostic mode and the battery subsequently died on me. The whole MyiPodBroke process only set me back 16 bucks or so and was really worth it. He had lots of info for me on my iPod and iPods in general and offers a broad range of repairs throughout the lineage of the iPod. I highly recommend Peder’s services.

So, in the meantime, many upgraded to hardware and software in my workplace has meant that for some reason iTunes quit working for me. Since it’s a non-essential feature of my work, it’s not real high on our poor IT guy’s list of priorities. I am always eager to explore free and non-proprietary approaches to computer tasks, especially art and entertainment related issues. The most obvious step was to use the excellent app VLC as the player for media on my hard drives. It isn’t as slick, interface-wise as iTunes, but works quite well for nearly everything you feed into it.

I then investigated a few programs that let you control your iPod independently of iTunes.
First I tried Yamipod, which worked initially, when my primary concern was with putting songs off and on my iPod while at my Itunes-crippled work environment. But playing songs on it is unnecessarily complicated. It involves ‘queueing’ songs on lists and is really confusing and poorly explained in the sparse documentation. While attempting to de-queue songs off of the playlist, I inadvertently deleted the songs off of my iPod.
The next one I tried was Floola. This is the one. So far I have used it seamlessly on both machines (my work Intel Mac and my home PowerPC) and it not only transfers songs back and forth easily, but is very straightforward in its playback process, in an interface not unlike iTunes. And, like Yamipod, it doesn’t require installation to run it. I run it from my hard drive enabled iPod on both machines.

Another cool app that I have found endlessly usefully has been Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack.
It allows you to record audio from virtually any application, Radio Shark-type radio interfaces, line input applications (Wiretap, LineIn, etc.) and more. I use it - and its indispensable timer function to record the many radio programs that I cannot stay awake for. It’ll even turn your computer ON at the required time to start recording for you, which is unnerving if you forget. The latest build allows you to record from several apps simultaneously, which is good news for those who love to make noise with their computers, as is the virtual effects rack that lets you configure and chain VST plugins as you would in a studio environment. The free preview version limits recording time to only ten minutes (enough to steal music from streaming previews), and locks many of the cooler features, but is enough to get you hooked. I rarely buy programs, but find this one worth every penny.