I love these polar photographs – here’s a little tutorial
> A link to the
ultimate productivity blog – touche!
>
Cinema Sampling, or How To Be Sergio Leone with a Few Easy Beats (yeah, right)
> Clutter is
procrastination: “When you deal with things in tiny little bits, before they build up, it’s easy. Deal with them while they’re easy so you don’t have to deal with them when they’re hard.”
>
Let Me See Your Package is dedicated to all things CD, DVD, and vinyl packaging related.
> Movie poster mashups
>The Strange And Frightening World Of . . . Basic Channel – hugely influential record label & production team merging dub & techno, amongst other things….
> New Aphex Twin! Download a live set with new material here
> Copyright vs Copyleft
>Trading Scarcity: Is This the Killer App for the Real-Time Web?
>Lily Allen stirred up a few extreme reactions via a blog post about filesharing, but some of the more considered discussion on Mefi is worth a read. If you don’t have time to sort the wheat from the chaff here’s a few I thought worth some thought:
- ‘The core of the “music business” was a high cost of entry to record and distribute music, not the inherent value of the music itself. Those high costs of entry are gone. Therefore, the “music business” is dying. This is simple economics. You cannot fight it.’
- ‘There will always be music, even if it was outlawed.’
- ‘Piracy isn’t theft. It’s something different. We’re still deciding what it is as a culture.’
- ‘We need a central repository of positions from artists. You check, see how they’d like you to experience their music. You give the artist a bit of respect, entirely apart from various forms of bullsh+t economic rhetoric — just *respect* — and you try to adhere to their wishes.’
I think this last one is a very valid point – too much of the rhetoric & extreme reactions occur through generalisation i.e. trying to consider bands who became famous via the old music industry with bands who have only ever existed in the new environment: while both entities make music, their two situations are so disparate as to be incomparable.
> Eno discussing his debt to Jon Hassel: “making musical particle colliders where we could crash different cultural forms with all their emotional baggage and see what came out of the collisions…”
> Direct
download link to a free 5MB Kontakt sampleset by
ToneHammer of 1850s Phonautogram recordings! “They were made by projecting sound into a cylindrical horn attached to a stylus, which in transferred the vibration into lines over the surface of soot-blackened rolls of paper. These captures were purely optical. No device existed which could translate the recorded acoustic information back into sound, until the First Sounds organization acquired the artifacts, with the help of the French Academy of Sciences. They worked with scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and other experts to devise a method of scanning and deciphering the images. In the spirit of celebrating the past and present day sonic pioneers who brought this piece of history to us, we converted one of the sets into a playable instrument. We chose the D Major scale recording titled “Gamme de la Voix – Vocal Scale (May 17, 1860)”, since it made for the most direct and flexible instrument. You’ll notice that the distorted fidelity, pitch and tone yields a smeared and crackling quality, sounding somehow between a frail and warbly voice and a washed out flute. We think it actually sounds beautiful and reminds us of the humble beginnings that modern audio-visual media has grown from. If you happen to make any cool music with this little instrument, please do share it with the folks at First Sounds. They’re very interested in hearing how people use these sounds in creative ways. We’ve included Kontakt, EXS24 and SFZ formats, as well as a set of synthetic drum sounds made from the same source material. In the Kontakt version, the modwheel controls subtle vibrato and tremolo effects.”
> The excellent OSX app
AudioFinder now spots to ProTools! Considering the massive difference in price AudioFinder is a serious contender against SoundMiner (you could have a holiday away with the money saved!)
