"In the earlier days people where first referring to amazing music and much less to aspects of production. Nowadays music production became more and more an element of creating music and 'good production' is often seen as being more important than a musical idea. People are overwhelmed by the possibilities and by the results they can achieve with very little effort, because the tools they have at hand give them overwhelming results with very little knowledge.
The initiative for making music has been shifted to the production side and so did the perception of the process. The colour of the composition, musical inspiration and decisions, all these aspects have been shrunken a little bit perceptional in favour of the production."
on the temporality of obsolescence: forgotten computers reanimate when industry abandons a physical connector or physical media, when file formats drift, when operating systems or system architectures render software inoperable.
we experienced this recently while attempting to retrieve video footage from a MiniDV tape. we have the same DV camera which works fine, but it uses firewire, a port standard which quietly went away over the decades. i assumed there'd be a cheap firewire to usb C or whatever dongle but for some reason it's either more complicated than that or search engines have gotten so terrible that i am no longer adept at using the internet.
as a result, the computer from the same era as the camera (almost two decades old) became suddenly invaluable: it was the only way for us to retrieve the footage. of course, this old computer can longer meaningfully connect to the internet (due to apple abandoning the OS amidst ever-accelerating web standards) so we transfer files the old fashioned way with thumb drives.
surely this happens constantly with all sorts of physical media, but also file formats. i can't imagine going through the complexity of assembling a virtual machine emulating my early 2000's music studio setup and expect abandoned DAW sessions to function.
the celebration of each innovation obfuscates the coincident impediment to preserving what came before. it's only after some time has elapsed that we suddenly realize that our previous tools and collections of work are no longer accessible: we'd already moved on to shinier tools and continued to generate more work, both of which will surely meet the same fate as those who came before.
these machines that we stopped using, kept for perhaps sentimental reasons or simply because our barn accepts everyone and all, these machines are alive again as portals to past work. these are not new ideas, but my curiosity lies in the timeframes: identifying the vanishing and reemergence of relevance.
"It's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people from expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying."
the great thing about improvising is you don't need to follow a score
the great thing about following a score is you don't need to improvise
"Today's crisis of freedom stems from the fact that the operative technology of power does not negate or repress freedom so much as exploit it. Free choice is eliminated to make way for a free selection from among the items on offer."
yukihiro takahashi – drip dry eyes (1984)
this mortal coil - another day (1984)
ryuichi sakamoto - prototype (1987)
[mp3] - 12:17
behold, we are feeling through a less mono-spaced world, guided by this excellent open-source font, inter.
hickory has dropped. sleep well.
white sky
rainbow mountain
"Early this spring I met a musician, the composer Pauline Oliveros, a beautiful woman like a grey rock in a streambed; and to a group of us, women, who were beginning to quarrel over theories in abstract, objective language-- and I with my splendid Eastern-women's-college training in the father tongue was in the thick of the fight and going for the kill-- to us, Pauline, who is sparing with words, said after clearing her throat, 'Offer your experience as your truth.' There was a short silence. When we started talking again we didn't talk objectively, and we didn't fight. We went back to feeling our way into ideas, using the whole intellect not half of it, talking with one another, which involves listening. We tried to offer our experiences to one another. Not claiming something: offering something."
"AI’s automated forms of decision making, regardless of their specific instantiation or situational impact, all contribute to a general understanding that non-datafied forms of experience are not relevant. They are ineffective: They are not part of the formula and have no hold on the world. Converting experience into data, abstracting away from any situated perspective, is what makes an experience real, consequential."
bulgarian state radio and television female vocal choir - pilentze pee (1975)
mica levi - love (2014)
bing and ruth - the pressure of this water (2020)
[mp3] - 17:49
"This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it: though all my actions are bent on erasing the consequences of previous actions and though I manage to achieve appreciable results in this erasure, enough to open my heart to hopes of immediate relief, I must, however, bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events provokes a rain of new events, which complicate the situation worse than before and which I will then, in their turn, have to try to erase. Therefore I must calculate carefully every move so as to achieve the maximum of erasure with the minimum of recomplication."
autechre - vletremix23 (1995)
david lang - the little match girl passion: have mercy, my god (2007)
low - dancing and the fire (2018)
[mp3] - 17:01
new materials, awaiting new designs
drawing, design, print two color silkscreen collaboration with kelli cain, 2011.
mlr inspired landscape cutup.
"what are you reading about?"
"the history of the internet."
"again?"
ryuichi sakamoto - solari (2017)
gowns - clawless (2007)
kali malone - litanic cloth wrung (2019)
[mp3] - 19:34
sculpture of home of creature later becomes actual home of creature
fireside, frenetic group conversational mix of comedy and doom. a proposal emerged:
the most important post-collapse skill is friendship
reckoning: three scenes from the barn
bound. forty foot ladder. you think you need to, but once getting that high you question why. it's impossible to move around. borrowed from a friend who says oh you hold onto it, because they don't want to move it either. a cursed object. somebody probably wants it, for some reason, but it's also too hard to find that person. so it just takes up space. luckily this one doesn't deteriorate. but others in their same situation do. many you didn't even ask for, but were bestowed into your perpetual care. in a way these objects might be a metaphor, but in this case you actually are really stuck with a ladder.
seen. things you stored, for historical value and anti-obsolesense, too much forgotten technology. a black cable appears to have some grey something on it. on closer inspection it is actually a grey cable covered in black. this object was stored for over a decade without humidity control and assuredly dusted multiple times with bird shit. for some reason it was brought into a previously clean part of the barn, which now has what the victorians would have called "bad air." every object and surface is now suspicious.
unseen. after a protracted vinegar-fueled reclamation of space from advancing mold, you eye a pile of forlorn rugs and army blankets which have moved rarely over the years. their smell is known before approaching. bagging begins, fully masked and gloved, but a different adversary emerges. a burning in your arm, explosive buzzing, instinctively you perform the timeless way of fleeing from the invisible. the hornet bites cause your hand and arm to swell to unrecognizability, everyone finds this hilarious.
universal question diagram. recreated drawing from the age of alchemy. possibilities and interconnectedness. screen from 2015.
"As they say, with the rising tide lifting; there’s no liberation in isolation.
I want us to be a part of the ocean, not the boat."
so we made a new thing
but really an old thing
from over a decade ago
and so there was this impulse that we had to
somehow make the new thing actually new
with a fancy new application or something
but i guess we decided not to do that
this light pattern is an experiment we made a few months ago
with a demoscene-era plasma technique
the important stuff all happens in one line of code
which we wanted to mention simply to spread the concept of
permacomputing and also
despite the grid fundamentally being interactive
sometimes a visual or sound can powerfully stand on its own
like when nine inch nails had this same new thing on stage
just visualizing and hell they are still cooler than us
but really the point is
the grid hasn't meaningfully changed for two decades
still doing nothing yet
containing endless horizons to explore new instrument design
a vehicle for new skills and
perhaps making new friends
but we guess everyone knows that by now
so it's new and it's the same
and that's mostly why there's not really a new killer app
lesser reasons include
us opening an art store and
still tending a farm and finding time to make music
such as this forthcoming softbits cut you're hearing now
but we are glad to be building these again
and look forward to seeing what comes next
moondog - theme and variations (1953)
james holden - in the end you'll know (2023)
dead can dance - how fortunate the man with none (1993)
[mp3] - 18:16
we were in college, the father of a friend visiting, telling us that the world is covered in a fine layer of shit
didn't really take this seriously despite him being a doctor, the delivery made it sound like a joke
this remains one of the more profound truths i missed at first pass
tehn@nnnnnnnn.co