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randomly awesome music [Jul. 17th, 2009|03:21 pm]
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Sonic Router seems to turn up interesting things to listen to at an exhausting pace. The link above is to an older Scuba mix, and then there’s this track from Fulgeance who I gather is a French guy. The free track is a nicely crunchy/squelchy mid-tempo hiphop instrumental with a minor key pop vibe — kind of in the Flying Lotus headspace but a bit less woozy-sounding…

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Words from the master [Jul. 17th, 2009|06:59 am]
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I won’t say who said this to me, because it was in private e-mail, but I thought is was brilliant, and if you know the man you know who said it…

“and i will tell you my trick with drum sampling. i play off the
2’s and the 3and on the scales.
for me it is all in how it is placed on the scale. and jazz is
blues. blues is rock.
and funk is everything.”

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Nice dubstep mix from Komonazmuk [Jul. 13th, 2009|03:53 pm]
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I get some grief from my techno & house purists friends for liking Dubstep, but I guess I’ll just have to maintain nonetheless. At any rate this mix from Komonazmuk is a case study in what I like about dubstep. Credit where it’s due, I was tipped by Sonic Router. The dominant mode here is jazzy and atmospheric, recalling somewhat the days when LTJ Bukem et al added that feel to drum & bass.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This mix is mostly ‘dubplates’ — though the absence of any surface noise makes me suspect that this mix was done in Traktor or Ableton Live with digital audio files. There was a day when dubplates meant literally playing lacquers straight from the cutting lathe, but at this late date that would be absurd. Equally absurd is persisting in calling them plates when they’re just ones and zeros.

One real annoyance of dealing with emerging music from the UK is that the tracks circulate among the in-crowd DJs and producers for months before regular folks can buy them. There’s no way aside from schmoozing your way into the inner circles to be on top of the cutting edge. Of course, great music has no ’sell-by’ date, but you know what I mean. Case in point — I’ve been enticed by Blackdown and others to salivate for the Kryptic Mindz dubstep long-player, and Silkie’s debut artist album, but who know how long it will be before they’re actual products I can exchange money for…

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Crystal Cat Urine: YouTube Ads Punk Dan Deacon [Jul. 12th, 2009|05:47 pm]
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I had an interesting talk a couple weeks ago with my brother about his job at Digg, and Diggs interaction with the people at Google. Without going into the industry gossip, the takeaway from the chat is that above all else, Google values algorithms. Their business model, the companies they’re interested in acquiring, is all built around two things: collecting data and doing interesting and lucrative things with that data.

Well, to paraphrase Robbie Burns, the best-laid algorithms o’ mice an ‘men gang aft agley.

Cette vidéo n'est pas sur les chats.

Cette vidéo n'est pas sur les chats.


Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Health Care Reform: What To Do So You Don’t Get Fucked … Again [Jul. 11th, 2009|02:44 pm]
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Someone twittered This interview by Bill Moyers with Wendell Potter of Cigna. Quick summary: they make their money by denying sick people care. They spend millions of dollars to prevent meaningful health care reform.

Everyone needs to be lobbying their Representatives and Senators to force them to do something real about health care in the United States. If we don’t threaten to toss their sorry asses out of office if they don’t, nothing useful will get done. The insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and doctors and for-profit hospitals will continue to dictate the terms of how you receive health care. And even though they are theoretically in the business of helping others, they do not care about you. They care about their profits, and about maintaining the status quo.

It’s important, when the talking heads are throwing up a smoke screen and trying to say there’s a ‘debate’ about health care to remember some simple facts about how things work in the United States:

1. We have the most expensive, least effective, and least fair health care system in the industrialized world.
2. There is no debate about universal health care. A solid majority of Americans want it.
3. The people who are fighting to keep it from happening are not your friends. They’re not a reasoned, loyal opposition. They are the people that bankrupt sick people and let them die, in the name of making a profit.
4. The people complaining about the cost of universal health care are being disingenuous. We’re already paying through the nose for NOT having universal health care.

It’s a complete cliche to trot out Edmund Burke in a blog post but I’m going to do it anyway: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

We elected Obama to, among other things, fix health care, but he’s just the President — he can’t do it alone. Every one of us has to be an active proponent of fixing the system, or it won’t get fixed.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Interesting blog post about remixes [Jul. 10th, 2009|08:13 pm]
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bassmusicblog ponders The Remix, how to do it, etc. With Slam’s “Positive Education” as a f’rinstance.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Bargain Guitar-to-MIDI converter at Audiomidi… [Jul. 10th, 2009|06:14 pm]
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The Sonuus G2M Converter is, at $99 almost cheap enough for me to impulse-buy. But I’ve played around with guitar-to-midi converters from time to time and I’ve always been disappointed, and besides, after paying bills I’m already broke for July.

This thing is, of course, monophonic, and who knows what it does if you play a chord. That is usually pretty comical, and not musically useful with this sort of device. What I liked is the way the sales copy seeks to turn the drawbacks with audio to MIDI conversion into a virtue:

“For optimal MIDI conversion, your guitar playing needs to be clean and accurate. Accidental notes, resonating open strings and other sounds can often be converted into undesired MIDI notes. Often you don’t hear these when playing guitar yourself, but can detect them easily when listening live to the generated MIDI.

“Striving to improve MIDI note accuracy, encourages clean picking and accurate fingering, with good control over non-sounding strings by damping them.

“Not only will your MIDI output be more accurate, your normal guitar playing will sound clearer and more professional. It’s like having a tutor sitting beside you giving you advice. It’s also great fun!

In other words this thing is no better than any other attempt to extract note & pitch information from audio, and you’ll have to practice to build enough technique for it to be even marginally useful…

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Leaf To Uvula Musk? Lip Pear Pinky Negus! [Jul. 10th, 2009|03:22 pm]
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I was going thru my spam folder looking for false positives, and came on a message that was (of course) a come-on for erectile dysfunction pills, that had one essential difference: Not only was it spam poetry, they actually broke it up into poetry-like lines:

grim whirl yore mesh!
unpin to leaf.
lain view bout emir.
nosey pear lain.
hoar buyer.
tinny elfin erst leaf.
slim lama.
leaf to uvula musk?
to basal loud full.
erst volet.
uhlan regie.
smirk brad kick pinky?
up softy scute lung?
pshaw smirk dine scute.
twain pear fecit.
hoar knee gauss elfin.
march dotty.
bar frizz hoar dour?
lip pear pinky swish!
fetal felly pinky negus!
pear axial mesh slot.
trill toils view emir?
shelf hue tammy.
bar grin gleam.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Good ol Facebook Targeted Ads: BYU Potty Chair! [Jul. 8th, 2009|08:39 pm]
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byupotty I think I mention having attended BYU in my Facebook profile. So those brilliant Ad targeters thought I’d want this little beauty. Well played!

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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How little does Google Chrome OS means to Musicians & Producers? [Jul. 8th, 2009|05:04 pm]
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The big buzz (and trending Twitter topic of the day) is Google OS. This will apparently comprise a minimal Linux Kernel, a graphical rendering engine, and Google Chrome. It will be perfect for what people spend 95% of their computing time on: dicking around in a web browser, and running web applicaitons.

This is all well and good for 99% of users, and not so good at all for people who actually do CPU-intensive computing. That means any sort of scientific computation, CAD, Image Processing, Gaming, and Music Software. All those applications require optimized native code processing, and are usually written in low level languages like C++. While the average person had enough computing power 10 years ago to satisfy their needs, those applications have no trouble soaking up all available CPU bandwidth.

If you read Slashdot or any mainstream Computer publications, they run articles every 6 months or so about how “Today’s software doesn’t take advantage of new Multi-core processors.” That might be true for applications (like Web browsers or Word processors) that spend most of their time waiting for a user to hit the next key or click the mouse, but it is not true of music software or any of the other applications mentioned above. I write software that routinely saturates as many processor cores as it can, and software like Cubase and Ableton Live do so as well.

When Google talks about the browser being the only interface to Chrome OS, and only portable web applications being available, it seems like a missed opportunity. They should allow native development, and expose an API for presentation, because it would allow people to write computationally expensive software that will run very well on their platform. A minimal Linux core and a streamlined GUI platform would be perfect for e.g. music software, and Google has the market presence to finally make Linux a viable commercial software platform.

But once again, as with Microsoft and Apple, the needs of musicians, graphic artists and scientists come last after the unwashed masses who just want to watch kittens play piano, and send nude pics of themselves to their innamorata or innamorato. This seems really short-sighted.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Magical Musical Mystery Tour on Last.FM — start with The Shaggs [Jul. 8th, 2009|03:17 pm]
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Start with The Shaggs. That will get you to R. Stevie Moore, Jandek, Television Personalities, and on and on…

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Insane Movie: “Nothing Personal” [Jul. 6th, 2009|02:21 pm]
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Nothing Personal is on Encore, and it’s fucking insane. The description in the tv guide: “Donald Sutherland and Suzanne Somers vs. a giant corporation killing baby seals.”

With a tagline like that how can you resist? And if that doesn’t get you excited, it also has Dabney Coleman, Catherine O’Hara, and Roscoe Lee Browne. Those 3 are the the utility infielders of 80s and 90s cinema — rarely the star, but in dozens of movies and tv shows.

And what other movie has Donald Sutherland and Suzanne Somers laying in bed talking about how many orgasms they had? They also drive a VW bug into the Reflecting Pond in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Quit possibly a benchmark in cinematic absurdity.
Roscoe Browne, in case you don't recognize him by name...
Roscoe Brown — cast member of “Soap”, acted in Roots, was a voice actor for “The Real Ghostbusters!”

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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4th of July DJ Mix: All FXHE, All The Time [Jul. 5th, 2009|03:51 am]
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Omar S is kind of a big deal these days. A mix CD for Fabric, gigs in the UK and Europe. But this is a guy who has stayed independent, and done his own thing his own way. I was completely blown away by his afternoon DJ set in Greektown this year during DEMF, so when I got home I went to the FXHE site and bought all the MP3s he offers and some vinyl as well.

Turns out when you order stuff from FXHE, you have to exchange e-mails with Alex himself, which is kinda cool. Great guy, too — he ended up sending me more MP3s than I actually ordered.

So in honor of Independence Day, I give you an all-FXHE mix.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-FourthOfFXHE-Mix.mp3

  1. Luke Hess “Motor Dub”
  2. Marcellus Pittman “Obsession”
  3. Oasis “1″
  4. Omar S “6600 3″
  5. Luke Hess “Sacred”
  6. Oasis “3″
  7. Omar S “Always There”
  8. Omar S “Bladerunner”
  9. Omar S “Congolese”
  10. Omar S “Foe Show”
  11. Omar S “Give It To Me”
  12. Omar S “Groove On”
  13. Omar S “Morning Drive”
  14. Luke Hess “Real To Real”
  15. Oasis “13″
  16. Omar S “AM Mix”
  17. Omar S “Just Ask The Lonely”
  18. Omar S “Obsession”
  19. Omar S “Out Of Control”
  20. Omar S “The Maker”
  21. Omar S “Set It Out”
  22. Omar S “The Grandson of Detroit Techno”
  23. Omar S “Turn And Walk Away”
Omar S at the Max Powers Rooftop Party Memorial Day Weekend 2009

Omar S at the Max Powers Rooftop Party Memorial Day Weekend 2009

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Fun for some value of fun: W3C HTML Validation [Jul. 2nd, 2009|03:30 pm]
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So for ‘fun’ I ran http://www.cornwarning.com/Tickertape through the W3C Markup Validator.

Actually, the thing I was concerned about is that the page looked fucked up in IE8, and presumably other browsers. Haven’t rechecked it yet, since I’m on a Mac at work. But at a minimum it found a bunch of small coding errors. No doubt I wouldn’t have had these problems if I’d been using an HTML editor more capable than emacs, but I haven’t yet found a WYSIWYG editor that’s free and doesn’t screw you somehow…

Anyway I learned some stuff, like XHTML transitional wants ’self contained’ tags to self terminate, e.g. <br> should be <br />, and attribute values should always be in quotes. I’m not sure the permissive nature of web browsers’ HTML parsers has done us any favors.

I also (DUH) am a big believer in standards compliance. Yeah I’m looking at you Microsoft.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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NI Komplete blown out at $399?!? What does it mean? [Jul. 1st, 2009|07:53 pm]
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So this NI Komplete Special is definitely the talk of the music production blogs today. It’s a great deal IMHO, but it raises some questions…

Q1: It kind of makes everyone who dropped $1200 on Komplete recently feel like a chump, doesn’t it?

Q2: Does this mean NI is hard up for cash?

Q3: Is this an indication that NI is no longer as relevant as it once was?

Personally I use all the NI stuff much less than I once did. I paid for Reaktor and several upgrades, before I started getting NFR review copies — the only instruments I don’t have are Massive, Absynth, Elektrik Piano and Akoustic Piano. Those might justify buying Komplete, but like a lot of people (I think) who have started doing most their work in Ableton Live, there aren’t a lot of reasons to go beyond the instruments built into Live.

The Live Instruments are by no means the be-all and end-all of virtual instruments, but they’re good enough to get the job done, especially when you’re putting something together whose musical charms aren’t primarily a matter of sound design.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Mad EP Twenty-Four Breakbeats? Free? Brilliant? [Jul. 1st, 2009|07:41 pm]
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Mad EP’s Twenty-Four Breakbeats is one of those unclassifiable albums, except to classify it as awesome. His M.O. involves skittery cutups of acoustic drum breaks, occasional vague minor chord interludes, and what sounds like live bass merging seamlessly into digitally edited live bass…

So like Squarepusher, only not so overtly manic. IDM-esque, perhaps but more like a hip hop guy getting fancy with the MPC than bad-skinned kid randomly clicking in the the piano roll view. And some ‘cello as well?

So an interesting and pleasant release, well worth the price of FREE!

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Falty DL Mix & Interview @ Sonic Router [Jul. 1st, 2009|04:29 pm]
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Falty DL’s “Love is a Liability” is the latest in a long line of Planet Mu releases that show there’s no record label currently doing a better job artistically.

Sonic Router presents a mix and interview.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Use Audio Player Wordpress Plugin outside Wordpress Blogs [Jul. 1st, 2009|03:50 pm]
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I figured this out yesterday, and it is the sort of thing a lot of people would like to do and haven’t figured out yet.

First off, this is the audio player:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

and you can read up on it at the AudioPlayer website. It’s very easy to integrate in Wordpress, and putting a player in a post looks like this:

[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/quicktime-vs-the-upsetter.mp3]

Second off, my ‘easy’ way to integrate it outside Wordpress:
0. Make sure you can use PHP with your web server. This is pretty standard anymore; you’d probably have to install your own build of Apache to avoid having PHP.

1. First put this php function in a file. My version is here:http://www.cornwarning.com/php-includes/audioplayer.php

<?php
function audioplayer($audioURL,$playerIndex )
{
echo "<script language=\"JavaScript\"
src=\"http://YOURPATH/audio-player.js\">
</script>
<object type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"
data=\"http://YOURPATH/player.swf\"
id=\"audioplayer1\" height=\"24\" width=\"150\">
<param name=\"movie\" value=\"http://YOURPATH/player.swf\">
<param name=\"FlashVars\"
value=\"playerID=$playerIndex&soundFile=$audioURL\">
<param name=\"quality\" value=\"high\">
<param name=\"menu\" value=\"false\">
<param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\">
</object>";
}
?>

2. You will need two files to make the player work: audio-player.js, and player.swf. In a WordPress install these will be in wp-content/plugins/audio-player/assets. Copy these someplace in your web directory — maybe the same place you put audioplayer.php. Then replace YOURPATH with the URL for that directory.

3. To use the audioplayer PHP function in an html page:

<?php include("http://YOURPATH/audioplayer.php"); ?>
<?php audioplayer("YourMP3URL",1); ?>

There you have it. Now I realize, not everyone writes their own web pages and most of the above might be pretty forbidding, but I hope that if you can write a simple web page and manage the files in your public_html, this is enough information to get you going.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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New CornWarning Joint: Codebase “Tickertape EP” free download [Jul. 1st, 2009|05:10 am]
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Deets are here:
http://cornwarning.com/Tickertape/

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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Those we lose we keep forever [Jun. 28th, 2009|05:12 pm]
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Our dog Marge who has been with us since 1996 (at least, we don’t remember) died yesterday suddenly. I don’t mention this because I want sympathy, or because the world needs another ‘death of pet’ eulogy, but because some of you who follow my blog have actually been to my house and met Marge.

If you met Marge, you know what we’ve lost. Pour one out for her tonight. We will miss her very much.

Marge was afraid of thunderstorms, walking across unfamilar surfaces, and cameras, so these are the only two pictures of her we have. The first is canned from a Mother’s Day card I made for Melissa with our three dogs saying “We love you.”

Marge, contemplating an impending treat.

Marge, contemplating an impending treat.


Marge,rampant

Marge was afraid of cameras

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

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