Weblogs have revolutionised the media. But are they more than just vanity publishing? And if so, what kind of content is best? Leading bloggers Salam Pax, Rhodri Marsden and Gregor Wright debate the issues. Via email, naturally. More
Ellen Alien's label B-Pitch is featured as the label of the month at bbc-radio1. She talks about her beginnigs in the music business and alsoplays a mix. You can listen to the stream here
Tracklisting for the Ellen Allien mix:
Caustic Window - 'Joyrex 2' e.p. (White)
M83 - 'Runintoflowers' (Gooom)
Ambit3 - 'Enwrapped' (Finalfrontier)
Gridlock - 'Engram' (Hymen)
Afx - 'Men2' (White)
Goldchains - 'Let's Get It On' Ellen Allien remix (BPitch Control)
I just realised that I completly forgot to post the "main link" this old posting. The Posting was about a guy who discovered, that there is an image of an diabolic face hidden in one aphex twin's tracks. The webpage seems obselete now, but there is a big article in the wired magazine about the whole story.
A journey into the micro geography of vinyl records.
The video is the product of examining, in micro detail the record groove of a self made vinyl flexidisk. The acoustic geography animation featured in video has been produced from a computer generated model of the groove terrain using a scan of one portion of this platter. The video and audio replicate a rotational motion of half a revolution per minute. The audio is also syncronised to the groove terrain. The design of this workis intended as a preparitory sketch prior to
The artist completing the final installation work which uses a 40/1640x EPI microscope and video projector to present the journey along the groove in real time. Watch it
Many artists are using the Quake and Wolfenstein graphics engine to create "art".
Feng Mengbo
After months of playing the visceral action game Quake III Arena (Q3A) with others online, Feng Mengbo used the games ability to create custom game characters, to develop his own version for his performance piece (called Q4U).
Nullpointer - Q "This project is the results of my initial attempts to exploit the source code of the original Quake1 game. In this case I chose to transform the graphics engine to produce a highly abstract environment that not only reduced the actual 3D ambitions of the original to minimal 2D planes but also exposed the pixel mechanics behind the software. "
q3apd
q3apd uses activity in QuakeIII as control data for the realtime audio synthesis environment Pure Data.
WOLFENSHMOOG 4 computers were network conected and the shooting game "return to castle wolfenstein" was running on it. all the sound output of these computers were conected to 3 other computers. on these, 3 musicians were real time processing the sounds generated by the game.
the first vienna vegetable orchestra plays music exclusively on vegetable instruments: carrots and cucumbers instead of guitars and drums. or, with their new cd automate, a cuke-o-phon and radish-marimba instead of laptop and sampler. the music presents a transfer of electronic music pieces and structures to the instruments of the vegetable garden. More info and downloads
NewMusicJukebox is the online library and listening room that provides immediate access to scores, streaming audio, and vital information about music by American composers.
Updated daily by the composers and publishers themselves, NewMusicJukebox is a continually growing resource designed to meet the needs of today's new-music community.
The lives of jazz musicians as portrayed in many popular films would have most people believing that the hard-living of someone like Charlie Parker is representative of most persons working in this particular line of cultural expression and endeavor. Seeking to go beyond this misguided stereotype, this interesting document produced by the National Endowment for the Arts (with the assistance of numerous other groups such as the Packard Foundation and the Grammy Foundation) takes a broad look at the worklife of jazz musicians in several major metropolitan areas in the U.S., including New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco. As the introduction to the work suggests, "This study provided an opportunity to examine the working lives of jazz musicians in a systematic way and to produce quantitative and qualitative information about the jazz community, the professional lives of jazz musicians, and the place of jazz in the music industry." Conducted under the direction of Joan Jeffri (director of the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Columbia University's Teachers College), the document contains sections on the demographics of the study group, information about the nature of touring as a component of their work, and comments from study participants.
"The group was filmed in Northampton, Mass at the Pearl Street nightclub. The documentary ends at 22 minutes, but, for people who enjoy the occasional last "bonus" song, there's something extra special waiting this time." More
Ob Frauen tatsächlich häufiger vergessen, die Leerstelle am Anfang einer Kassette zu berücksichtigen, ob es beliebter ist, einen Spannungsbogen zu erzeugen oder dramatisch auf demselben Level zu bleiben, ob die Texte auf Mixtapes Botschaften sind oder ob die Hauptbotschaft in der Sammlung als Beweis für den tollen Geschmack des Tapers dient, ob es am Ende vielleicht doch nur darum geht, anderen eine Freude zu machen oder Erinnerungen festzuhalten, diese Frage war Inhalt eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Seminars an der Uni Hamburg. Parallel dazu ging es auf der Ausstellung "KassettenGeschichten" um die Menschen und Begebenheiten hinter (oder vor) ihren Mixtapes. Dazu fertigte der Fotograf Stefan Malzkorn lebensgroße Portraits der Urheber an , über die der Besucher einen direkten Einblick in eine ansonsten so persönliche Sache erhält. Die Ausstellung wandert nun bald von Hamburg nach Frankfurt
E. Pouncey has managed throughout his career to mix his two passions, which are music and comics. As far as music is concerned, he is a regular contibutor to the magazine The Wire and is actively involved in other music publications. As far as graphic arts goes, he's been working under the pseudonym Savage Pencil, his peculiar style making him the ultimate rock'n'roll and underground cartoonist. More
Mulatta Records, the record company behind the records of the musical instruments, has even more "interesting" stuf. For example:
"The People's Choice: Music composed by Dave Soldier in collaboration with the painters Komar & Melamid with lyrics by Nina Mankin. The music is written according to a survey of likes and dislikes of the public, and features two tunes: a 5 minute song designed to be liked by the greatest number of listeners, and a 30 minute long song designed to be disliked by the greatest number of listeners."
"The exhibition "adonnaM.mp3" is concerned with the phenomenons of audio filesharing, peer- to- peer- networking and the mp3-standard. It analyses the drastic changes which the use of this digital tool is effecting in society, the economy, art and design. File sharing is revealed as a contemporary vehicle that provides the basis for a new means of communication and is also an instrument of creative expression. Selected designerworks about the mp3-topic are enhancing the exhibition with sensual facets."
Looks like I missed another interesting exibition in Frankfurt. Nevertheless there is lots of interesting content, including an article on the history of MP3, available on the official homepage.
Somewhere in East London the turntables are motionless. The only thing spinning is a chorus of iPod hard drives, or the ceiling (if you're friends with the bartender).
The club's name is Dreambagsjaguarshoes and the event is called noWax. The concept for noWax is simple: MP3s, not wax. iPods, not decks. On noWax nights, mp3js bring their iPods and wait for the automated projector above the DJ booth to flash their number. Then they plug-in and mix three songs back-to-back against another mp3j. More
"This electric heater works considering the conversation exchanged on a network as the power.In order to eat roast meat, you have to continue carrying out a chat.You have to continue carrying out the chat with the partner surrounding a table.If a chat is stopped, the fire of an electric heater will go out.
This electric heater is the network household electric appliances of a new century!" More
What is data bending? Down at the intersection of electronic and experimental is an idea called data bending. It is the abuse of software to produce new sound. Software including programs, files and raw data of all kinds. Why do it? Good question. It's probably some mix of the following: (a) the joy of new and unexpected sound, (b) the possibility of taking data that has a particular meaning and translating it into sound - an image file, for example, (c) the overriding of cold, byte-perfect computer logic, (d) it's fun to fuck with things.
A cousin of data bending is circuit bending - the hardware equivalent. Electronic devices of all kinds are hacked to produce new results. More
"Nestune" is a circuit bent Famicom (Asian nintendo entertainment system) and allows manual override of its internal circuitry to create visual and auditory corruption. Nestune also excepts audio signals to control various circuitry acting like an 8bit audio visualizer. More
cementimental is another circuit bender with lot's of mp3 and video files on his webpage.
From the www.microsound.org mailinglist:
"Anyone on this list point me to any web sites of artists that have modified CD's to make them intentionally skip?"
People came up with these reommendation:
Beer-coated CDs offer new sounds
A Melbourne DJ and scientist has come up with a new way to update CD collections - dip them in beer and let them dry before playing them.The discovery, known as an "optical biocomputer", is the brainchild of Cameron Jones. More
CHAOTIC ENTERTAINMENT
DJ-culture deconstructionism? Formalized, art-music post-modernism? Neither, or both? More
Disc
It's hard not to use the word "perverse" when describing Disc. What other word could appropriately describe an ensemble that collects the sounds of CDs skipping, assembles these sounds into fascinating and hypnotic collages, and then releases the results exclusively on clear vinyl? More
Databenders
Sound Synthesis using Raw Data. Also including discussions of cd-bending, data-to- image,image-to-sound and other related techniques. More
Scot Taylor
a gentle ep mixes nostalgia and melancholy to create a stunning ep made by/with a computer that obviously loves him. recommended listening for those nursing a hangover or those too depressed to get out of the bath. in the first of a slew of his forthcoming releases, we only hope your total disinterest can slow him down.More
unter anderem mit Andreas Ammer und Console. Eigentlich nur zum streamen, mit dem Winamp-Plugin Streamripper kann man die Höhrspiele trotzdem runterladen.
Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, author of The God of Small Things, for which she won the Booker Prize. Born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, she spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a bohemian lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof and making a living selling empty beer bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture.
Roy is also a well known peace activist. One of her first essays was in response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan. The essay, titled The End of Imagination, is a critique against the Indian government's nuclear policies.
In Germany she gaind additional fame, because a guy from television (Ulrich Wickert) quoted from her bokks, saying "Bin Laden and Bush are similiar minded". He had to appologise in public...
Downloads:
I collected all the articles she wrote for "Outlook India" during August '98 and April 2003 and converted them to a handy book-style pdf file.
ROY
(application/pdf, 941 KB)
For decades, short wave listeners have been hearing stations that do nothing but read blocks of numbers, usually using a woman's voice, in a variety of languages and on innumerable different frequencies. All available evidence indicates that some of these transmissions may be somehow connected to espionage activities. These are the numbers stations, the most enduring mystery on the shortwave bands. More info
Some artists are using snippets from number stations transmissions for theire own tracks. Fans of Scanner, Merzbow or Autechre may even like to listen to them un-edited :-)
Just follow the links below to find mp3 recordings.
Links:
The most comprehensive webpage, links and downloads
"We believe in a future where music will no longer be considered a linear composition, but a dynamic structure, and musical composition will extend to interaction. We also believe that the divisions of composer, performer, and audience will be blurred, by the introduction of such media.
Block Jam is a musical interface controlled by the arrangement of 25 tangible blocks. By arranging the blocks musical phrases and sequences are created, allowing multiple users to play and collaborate. The system takes advantage of both graphical and tangible user interfaces. Each block has a visual display and a combination of a gestural input and a click-able input. Each Block metaphorically contains a sound group that can be chosen via the gestural input, the click-able input changes a block functionally. Thus, musically complex and engaging configurations can be rapidly assembled. The tangible nature of the blocks and the intuitive interface promotes face-to-face collaboration, and the presence of the GUI allows for remote collaboration across a network." More
3 minute Movie of the First Prototype is availible at the blogjam projet homepage (link above)
Ellen Alien's label B-Pitch is 
The video is the product of examining, in micro detail the record groove of a self made vinyl flexidisk. The acoustic geography animation featured in video has been produced from a computer generated model of the groove terrain using a scan of one portion of this platter. The video and audio replicate a rotational motion of half a revolution per minute. The audio is also syncronised to the groove terrain. The design of this workis intended as a preparitory sketch prior to
The artist completing the final installation work which uses a 40/1640x EPI microscope and video projector to present the journey along the groove in real time. 
Many artists are using the 
the first vienna vegetable orchestra plays music exclusively on vegetable instruments: carrots and cucumbers instead of guitars and drums. or, with their new cd automate, a cuke-o-phon and radish-marimba instead of laptop and sampler. the music presents a transfer of electronic music pieces and structures to the instruments of the vegetable garden. 
"The exhibition "adonnaM.mp3" is concerned with the phenomenons of audio filesharing, peer- to- peer- networking and the mp3-standard. It analyses the drastic changes which the use of this digital tool is effecting in society, the economy, art and design. File sharing is revealed as a contemporary vehicle that provides the basis for a new means of communication and is also an instrument of creative expression. Selected designerworks about the mp3-topic are enhancing the exhibition with sensual facets."
Somewhere in East London the turntables are motionless. The only thing spinning is a chorus of iPod hard drives, or the ceiling (if you're friends with the bartender).
Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, author of The God of Small Things, for which she won the Booker Prize. Born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, she spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a bohemian lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof and making a living selling empty beer bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture.
