Naming names

Vivek Ramaswamy can take his family values and insert them firmly into his tired, crusty anal cavity on an habitual basis.

Only sky

The trouble with religion is it assures people that no matter how badly they fail, no matter how monumental their error or how abject their condition, someone or something will protect them, forgive them and clean up their mess.

Convincing People

The truth is out there

Alexa, find the emails, texts and documents proving that a mountain of disinformation and an avalanche of corporate dark money successfully convinced millions of Americans that the ordinary functioning of civil society is actually a radical leftist plot to take away their "freedom" to be endlessly exploited by a tiny plutocratic elite that aspires to pay ordinary workers practically nothing while systematically excluding them from the political process, not only exposing them to countless lethal and completely preventable hazards but converting workers into de facto indentured servants: a vast browbeaten horde of Homo economicus earning wages and buying products primarily for the benefit of someone else at rates determined by their new technocratic overlords.

The authoritarians of the 20th century would be absolutely green with envy. None of them could have so much as dreamed of exerting this much control over a population.

Thanks to all

As we near the close of yet another eventful year, I'd like to take this opportunity to extend my deepest thanks to everyone who has supported or contributed in some way to my music project so far. I think you all know who you are! By now we are all pretty much inescapably party to the blessing, or curse if you like, of living in interesting times. The world is undoubtedly poised at a dangerous crossroads, with the path forward uncertain amid increasing threats to peace and even the propects for human survival into the coming century. The challenges ahead will force us to grow as individuals and must cause us to become yet more dedicated to the task of promoting justice and preserving our freedoms of expression. The thing to remember is that ordinary people have in fact organized their way to better conditions before, and arguably under far worse circumstances. Fortunately there are even more tools than ever before for facilitating interpersonal communication. It's ultimately more a question of having the motivation to stay connected and informed in a world with an endless array of potentially sidelining distractions. Nevertheless, the threats we collectively face, including structural disincentives to original thinking, are severe and very real, and whichever decisions people end up making for themselves, their repercussions will have the potential to substantially alter the face of the future.   

Concurrently this is a time of transition for Insectoid Intelligence, the alias under which I have released all of my music professionally to date, beginning nearly 15 years ago with the release of "Cellular Automata" on the netlabel Gebeit Industries (subsequently sold to a German distribution company - that's a story for another post). While my early efforts were heavily focused around computer-based production, using mostly Propellerheads Reason along with Ableton Live software, gradually over the years I've expanded my equipment roster to the point that I am primarily using hardware for what I'm working on now. My first instrument was piano, and despite the temptation to sequence everything I still harbor a huge love of playing keyboard synthesizers, which is what they were really designed for (or any real-time controller), something I've tried to incorporate wherever possible. I still use a laptop, but mainly as a kind of souped-up channel strip with extensive plug-in effects options through which I typically record to a hard-disk based multi-track. This allows me get the best of both the flexibility of computer audio and the ease and intuitive flow of hardware-based recording. So I had already changed my production process, which may have been noticeable to an extent by the time I had made, say, "Echoes of Another Dawn" parts i and ii.

But that's not all. Over time I started to become increasingly dissatisfied with the pace of studio production in general, the overall aesthetic direction of much of contemporary music, and frustrated by what seems to be an almost ridiculous over-saturation of the market for vinyl LPs, a commercial nightmare with no end in sight for audiophiles like myself who have always striven for the highest possible sound quality using the best digital recording techniques and formats available. The race to the bottom was already well underway by the late 00s, and what we are witnessing now, with super-deluxe "gilded lily" reissues suffering from embarassing manufacturing defects and botched remastering jobs amid dwindling opportunities for fresh talent in an increasingly gentrified streaming media landscape (delivered at ghastly bitrates), is the end result of decades of mismanagement by an industry that never imagined it would exist in the first place and consequently never developed a plan for the future. The idea that all music is supposed to be either "lobotomized" to fit an artificially inflated demand for an inferior electromechanical format invented over a century ago or chopped up and essentially given away for nothing via streaming is patently absurd; it is a false choice, and I wish more musicians would speak up about it. In any event, I became convinced that something of a radically new approach was called for.

Accordingly I am in the process of rethinking and retooling my fundamental approach to making music. While I still intend to release more tracks and at least an album as Insectoid Intelligence from the vast trove of unfinished material that has, by now, almost literally piled up like a giant snowball amid the chaos of the last few moves, the creation of studio recordings for later issue will soon likely no longer continue to occupy the center of my creative focus. Instead, in order to enable more spontaneity, improvisation and to explore novel and expressive real-time performance possibilities, I'm progressively reconfiguring my recording studio into a hybrid studio / live performance environment. To be honest, for many years I was fairly averse to the idea of performing, preferring to concoct my studio-as-instrument creations in a space practically delineated by its isolation from the wider world. My thinking then was that performing was a limiting but somewhat unavoidable formality, and that all important musical decisions would be made elsewhere. But now with the possibilities of livestreaming opening up the potential to reach new audiences directly via a new and heavily interactive portal, real-time performance has begun to appear a more and more attractive option. There are some technical details to iron out regarding lighting especially (trying to find a non-flicker-inducing LED light string is more challenging than you'd think), but expect some changes to arrive soon in the form of a series of impromptu live streams and video sessions, many of which may feature new and unreleased material. I will be sure to keep everyone informed about the timing of any such future events.

It's been an enormous privilege sharing my music with everyone. At the same time, I feel as if my own journey through music has only just started, and I'm really looking forward to what will assuredly be an exciting new phase in the evolution of Insectoid Intelligence. If you would like to contribute to this transition to a partially live multimedia video project directly, there is now also a new way to do so at Buy Me A Coffee. In the mean time please stay safe & healthy and I hope everyone has the best possible holiday season!!

DB

Random Chicago pics part 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

making sense

To borrow Frege's SR-theory terminology, time appears to have a sense but lacks any referent. "It's time to leave"; "I have a pain in my left shoulder"; "It's cold outside"... Similarly sensible things without obvious referents, etc.  

Unsafe at any speed

TestTube Motors announced its latest innovation at a press conference Monday: passengerless vehicles. "I always thought it would be awesome to have a fleet of ultra- cool-looking cars that just drive around endlessly for no reason with nobody in them," company founder and CEO Pilon Mollusc was quoted as saying. "We've already gone as far as driverless cars - why not take it a step further and get rid of the passengers as well?" he added.

Mollusc demurred when confronted with the opinion that this would largely defeat the purpose of buying or owning a car. "It's a safety feature," he explained. "We'll never have to recall any of these vehicles because there isn't anyone in them to complain. And, uh, yeah, rumors that they would actually be driven remotely by Russian political prisoners from an underground bunker in Siberia are bogus. They would really drive themselves." 

Details of how soon these vehicles would be produced, the size of the fleet and the projected cost to US taxpayers were not available at press time. 

Tearin' the roof off the sucker

explanantia

"...detectable transients": Admittedly I am using the term "transient" in an unconventional, slightly novel way, and I think this warrants an explanation. In the audio or electroacoustic realm, a transient typically refers either to the initial upswing of a waveform or a brief burst of noise found at the very start of the attack portion of a sound. For example, a ride cymbal being played with a stick produces a sharp initial pulse or "click" which is actually a spectrum or mixture of extremely high frequencies with a steep, yet non-zero, amplitude decay; that is, the transient dies away quickly and gives way to a progressively more muted-sounding spectrum produced by the fundamental frequency of the cymbal and its characteristic overtone series. The latter is responsible for the extended "crash" or "ride" sound that dies away much more gradually over many seconds as the energy of the vibrating cymbal slowly dissipates into the surrounding air.

Here, however, I am using "transient" to refer to each individual "up" cycle of a waveform, no matter where they occur. Technically, this is wrong. Why am I doing this? Well, the reason is this: if you make a two-dimensional plot of some audio-frequency waveform, that waveform has to have a beginning somewhere. Where is that beginning? Essentially it's arbitrary. It can be anywhere you like! It wouldn't have to be the "up" cycle. It just as easily could be the "down" cycle": the point is that there is some cue our brains latch onto, by way of neural entrainment, that enables a signal to be "correctly" interpreted as belonging to various species of rhythm and pitch. Sounds are vibrations in air or water no matter when or on what time scale they occur. That is to say, a transient is something of a formal designation referring to a specific feature of a sound or its oscillogram. But the phenomenon of sound itself is continuous. Here on Earth, the world is never silent. At every moment, some combination of tones prevails at any location, including those outside the range of human hearing. A transient, then, in this sense, is some detectable change that either initiates OR sustains an audible phenomenon.

 

Sorry for the confusion.

Alternative media

"Other media"; e.g., the Earth's gravitational field. The phenomenon of Rossby waves across the entire Carribean Sea produces a fluctuating basin pressure and corresponding periodic change in sea level spanning a period of 120 days, detectable as anomalies by satellites measuring the Earth's gravity field. 

Otherwise known as: The Rossby whistle.