Domination World Tour!
Actually, it's just the United States. Sister Machine Gun are heading out on the road in just under a week. I've got to wait nearly two months into The Domination Tour before they blast into Seattle, but for those of you on the other end of the tour, get on out of the house. It's been nearly six years since Sister Machine Gun toured and since then they've forgone the major label route and built their own niche: Positron Records. This is the little guy making his own way without the tired machine of the music industry and he's putting out a solid string of industrial funk records along the way.
I wish I hadn't cleaned out my Inbox so thoroughly this morning. I had a great little email from SMG HQ that said they'd be harkening back to Burn-era style with their stomp and pomp which is delightful news. The new record, Influence, is all about putting a live wire to a synth station and letting the sinuous electro-funk work its way out. And it's very good. However, Burn is still my favorite and if they're going to bring the house down that way, I'll be there. Actually, I'll be there anyway, but now I might be inclined to force myself to the front and bang my head on the edge of the stage.
Gothic Futurism
Hip-Hop Writer Rammellzee argues that our Western system of letters has obscured the true mathematics of the Letters. Hidden within the structure of the alphabet is information which will allow us to ascend once again to the stars. The April issue of The Wire has an interesting profile written by Greg Tate. "The letter appeared from the first dimension. The first dimension has total power over everything because it is total electromagnetic energy. It is an integer in itself. No one controls the alpha-beta. If you drop the [last] 'a,' it becomes alphabet. That's what they did...We have this government that doesn't want you to remember the alphabeta, they want you to remember the alphabet. We're not going to speak their bullshit anymore. We want our sound for the letter now. We want you to take the letter, put it in the computer and find the sound that emanates from that integer which is called the aura of the letter."
Rammellzee's Gothic Futurism site has a manifesto entitled "Alpha's Bet" that comes across as the script for a litergy. Or rather, a passion play masquerading as a no-holds grudge match betwen the gods of Garbage and Gluttony and one letter-carrying Transformer.
Actually, there's a lot of stuff there. If you'd rather tackle something less cinematic, but equally dense, try the Ionic Treatise. "If this knowledge scares you, the equation is working."
1,000 songs
An entry at Engadget today mentions a online survey that says 90% of consumers (well, at least, those surveyed) have no more than 1,000 songs on their computers. Which roughly translates to about 4GB in size -- the same size, as Endgadget points out, as Apple's new mini iPod. Coincidence? Probably not. Apple always gets points for thinking things through when it comes to design and catering to the market, even if it looks like they're ahead of the curve.
I've got about 6GB on my iRiver iHD-120 right now (because I'm encoding at a higher rate than typical) and my song total is just shy of 800. That's about 50 CDs (give or take) which I can't believe is the size of any geek's CD collection and so the key words in this survey may be "on their computer." Fifty CDs is more than enough to cover my daily mood swings; in fact, it should be enough to run tunes more than two days straight without a repeat. So why do I feel like I'm missing something in this piece of data?
I'm in the process of grooming the CD collection at home. It's gotten out of control and I'm weeding out those things which I'll probably never listen to again, and I'm trying to be very stern about it. With the advent of online radio show streaming and other means by which I can listen to certain genres and records casually, being my own radio station isn't necessary any longer. Nor is the insane amount of CDs on the shelves. Nor do I have the time to listen to all this stuff even if I did keep it all.
I mean, really, how many albums do you listen to regularly? Would fifty serve you for the rest of your life? Would a hundred? Could you be happy with just a roster of 1,000 songs? I used to have the collection/acquisition disease -- BADLY -- and I'm trying to break free of it, trying to rescue myself from the ton of shit that I've spent the last few decades acquiring. So the question posed here interests me. Do I really need more than 50 hours of readily accessible music? Sure, I can "archive" a couple hundred more hours at home if I needed to, but do I?
The Desert Island Discs game has always been futile for me. Reducing my musical needs down to ten records has always reflected the mood of the day and has never been able to encompass a lifetime of exile and, with the advent of the multi-GB portable player, it has become somewhat of a moot point. Why bother with ten when you can take fifty? Or a hundred? Or a thousand?
90% have fewer than a 1,000 songs on their computers. These are the casual listeners, weekend junkies who flirt with the drug. I'm not so concerned with what they are listening to, but how. Is this their only means of listening to music? Do they slap on talk radio in the car? Listen to whatever the gym is blaring over its sound system when they work out? Does the totality of their musical collection fit in this 4GB space?
Okay, I don't believe that last question. I'm sure the answer is no.
1,000 is an arbitrary number, much like 10 used to be. It's a number that's been touched by inflation, and it's one that I might be able to attain. I doubt it. But I also wonder, why not?
Higher Education
I have always said that if I ever went back to school it would be for a Doctorate of Divinity from the University of Chicago which would pretty much kill my IT-industry credentials (based on the time away from the tech life this degree would require and, if I was going to bother, then it wouldn't make sense to go back to tech after receving the Ph.D, you know?). However, if American Pacific University ever becomes accredited in the US, their Online Esoteric Degree Program would be mighty tempting.
Pirate Radio
Listening to the Sun City Girls this evening. The trio of mystical music mayhem-eers live in Seattle and have been the subject of two recent profiles (one in The Wire's February 2004 issue and last week's Seattle Weekly [that article is archived here]). I'm late to the party and snapped up one of the last copies of Carnival Folklore Resurrection Radio today and Solomon and I have been listening to it tonight. It's a smash-up of avant-jazz, field recordings, regional cassette tape music, wild-eyed preacherman poetry, shortwave transmissions, and fragmentary radio signals. It is like tapping in to a radio station from someplace very distant and very different than where you are right now.
Their home page has a statement of identity written by Tom Vague (of Vague Magazine). It's too good not to share.
"SUN CITY GIRLS are not really a 'Band' but more of a factory of ideas; musical, artistic, philosophical and beyond. They are the epitome of DIY, having recorded, toured, traveled, researched, and hustled for over two decades creating an archive of music, film, writing, Art, etc., with their own financial and associate resources. Because of their fearless approach, bizarre performances, and trickster reputation, there are many legends spread about them: some TRUE, some half-true, some false, yet many of their more 'extreme resumé entries' will probably remain, for the most part, unknown. Every mystery revealed about them seems to create even more mystery. There is a strange energy surrounding them and an honesty about their presentation which separates (and isolates) them from the entertainment industry. They are THEIR OWN entertainment industry, entertaining themselves. And, as one of their song titles suggests, Sun City Girls are 'Without Compare'."
It's got me thinking about late night transmission, late night creativity, and how this hour always sparks with me as sixty minutes of high creative energy. There's something about the sounds of the city at just before midnight, the heaviness of the air and the movement of the winds. The rain always sounds different at sixty clicks to midnight, and the drift of the shadows suggests intelligence or, at the very least, malevolent thirst.
I get up too early in the morning for this hour. I'm supposed to be in bed right now, resting up for tomorrow. I never make it under the sheets in time. I'm always drawn by the whispers of eleven o'clock. If I had a worldband shortwave radio, this would be the hour I disappear to go visit the mutterings of the ether.
From the Still Not Getting It Department
There is a recent article at The Register which mentions that the five major record labels are quieting considering raising the digital download rate from 99 cents a song to upwards of $2.99. This just boggles my mind. Can they be so completely stupid? Do they think that we'll (the Internet youth at large, of course) stop downloading music because of the price will suddenly be "right"? A 10 track album will suddenly cost $30.00.
Which, of course, may be the point. If it is prohibitively expensive to buy online, you'll go back to the stores, thereby perpetuating the brick and mortar style of commerce. Which, more specifically, will drive more people to alternative methods of finding music. It just continues to amaze me that the major labels can't seem to figure out the problem isn't downloading, it's the exhorbitant pricing on sub-par material which is causing downloading to become more prevalent. Stop feeding us overpriced shit and maybe we'll come back to the table.
The Register also has an interesting article which purports to solve the entire problem of downloading music. And it will only cost you $6.00 a month.
Sunday Morning
Getting caught up on some things. Wrestled for a bit with a wireless keyboard/KVM switch setup so that I could run both a Mac and PC from one monitor and keyboard/mouse and, like all changes in technology, it took longer than I had hoped it would and I still ended up at IO Gear's website to discover that they don't fully support wireless connections to their KVM switches. Bummer. The funny bit is that a Macintosh keyboard (being USB) has come in terribly handy right now since the KVM switch is USB driven.
Alright, enough geek wonkery. Melissa and Solomon are still sleeping and I'm getting some things cleared off my desk (both physically and virtually). This is a hodge-podge entry.
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For those who read this through a RSS aggregate reader, the above symbols are how most of them parse my photo log entries. I've got a bit of PHP code in them that decides what size to show the picture so that I show the larger version of the picture in the individual entry page and the smaller one elsewhere. The downside of doing is that, well, the code doesn't parse when it gets dropped into XML and picked up by the news readers. So, yeah, if you see the contents of an entry being just those characters, you're missing out on a picture.
I've been busy getting settled in over at Igloo where I've been made a Contributing Editor. It's a great site that focuses more on electronic and experimental music (where my love is right now), giving me more direct access to music and a readership that is more in tune with my interests. There have also been a number of other reviews which haven't found homes since eP went on hiatus and I'm putting them up here. So, yeah, lots to read.
A couple of the records which I'm still enjoying quite a bit (links are to their reviews at Igloo):
Fennesz - Venice
Minion - Depression, Truth & Love
Various Artists - Intelligent Toys
Lamb - Between Darkness & Wonder
And I've added a SEARCH box to the Journal page. I keep missing it so it went back in. It searches against all of the blogs even though it is on the Journal page.
[np: the Schizophonia show of 03.17.04]