The veil between the living and dead is growing thin, and I… uh, have some free music for you. Sorry, it turns out I don’t have a clever lead for this story, and my segue makes no sense. So let’s get to it!

Friend of the Site Liz McLean Knight aka Liz Revision aka Quantazelle of subVariant has put together a special, exclusive mix for CDM of 117-119 bpm musical goodness, excavated from the “_blippy” folder of sketches on her USB drive. Matt Moldover, who has been working on his CD-as-electronic-instrument album, lent his laptop. (Watch him assembling CDs in the video after the break.)

It’s all in celebration of a Halloweeen party Saturday night in Chicago, headlined by Josh Davis (BitShifter). Party ringleader Liz joins Josh on behalf of subVariant to represent the IDM-glitch-minimal-tech-house side of things, and Mr. Automatic (Front 312) and Onefiftyone (Chicago Workshop) will be joining in. If you’re in Chicago, this looks like the place to spend your Saturday. If, like me, you’re not, well, we have some music and videos for you to bring the party home.

Chicagoans:
Going.com Chicago event link + discount
Presale tickets on FractalSpin

And yes, while Josh is working on Game Boys in 8-bit, our CDM mix is fully 16-bit, baby! I’m telling you, 16-bit is totally the future.

Download MP3

Now, for a bit of Josh tearing it up in glorious 8 bits:

It’s round, it’s mechanically-resistant, it’s tangible, it supports multi-touch and gestures. Yep – it’s the turntable, and outdoing it would mean reinventing the wheel, literally. And so it is that more than a few Ableton fans have wondered how they might work vinyl into their software axe of choice.

Ableton and digital vinyl vendor Serato have announced they’re doing “something,” and then announced at the beginning of October that an announcement would be announced on January 14, 2010 at NAMM. Oh, and they said it will “unleash your creativity,” which sounds good. (It’s better than, say, “Ableton and Serato’s creative partnership will unleash two dozen angry badgers,” or “if you own Ableton Live, what we will say in 2010 is that we will unleash an unspeakable, nameless evil, known only to the ancients, which shall bring about the endtimes.”)

Here’s the surprise – you likely won’t have to wait for Serato to get integrated digital vinyl control. It’s already working with Ms. Pinky, and that means more choice, more DIY possibilities, and a broader variety of ways to integrate turntables and Live.

You see, there’s this little thing called Max for Live, which allows the use of Max patches inside Live as seamless instruments and effects. And one of the best – if least-known – vinyl control systems out there has long featured Max integration: Ms. Pinky. People have already made use of VST plug-in integration, but because Max for Live also connects to the Live API for control of Live itself, the functionality of the two can be expanded.

Via our friend Luthier.Lab, we get a first look at the Ms. Pinky plug-in. And this should be just the beginning, as Ms. Pinky and its Max/MSP support could be a great construction kit for building your own solution – something that may not be possible with Serato.

Ms.PinkyforLive [Luthier.Lab - en Español]
Google Translate (which has some very funny ideas about how to translate Spanish)
Discussion on the Ms. Pinky forum

While you ponder the possibilities, it’s time for a video from Daito Manabe demonstrating that not all turntablists sound quite the same.

Given a choice between boring and crazy, I always choose crazy. After all, craziness is part of the artistic persona. So bring it on.

It’s been a while since we had a celebrity saying things that didn’t really make sense. It’d be unfair to ask Ricardo Villalobos live up to some of the titans – Bob Dylan saying CDs have “no stature” and “have sound all over them,” and Elton’ John’s classic call to “tear down the Internet.” (Not to mention, in the end I think we wound up agreeing with them and turned Elton’s quote into a brand-new verb.) As with Elton John and Bob Dylan, I love and respect Villalobos’ work, no less so as he says things with which I disagree. But Ricardo Villalobos does get special credit for claiming in a recent Resident Advisor interview, among other things, that what has really hurt sound quality today is the lack of cheap drum machines from the 80s, because they were analog. Or they weren’t, but it was as if they were. Or something. (If you think this might earn some ire from Ableton loyalists, you’re right.)

No. I think the development is going in the opposite direction because everyone is making tracks in programs like Ableton, which has an OK sound engine. When I started making music 20 years ago, you had to at least buy a mixer, then some synthesizers, a drum machine—which is the best quality possible of a sampled drum. There was a pureness of the source of the music. It was analog, direct.

Ah, yes, the good old days. Back in the day, digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital-to-analog-converters were real digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital -to-analog-converters. It was analog, direct – well, aside from the fact that it was digital and not direct, but it was real … um … analog … digital. Pulse code modulation was real, pure pulse code modulation, not like the pulse code modulation you kids have today. Not like now, when people don’t … own… mixers. It’s not like you kids today, you people who use Ableton, people like… Ricardo Villalobos. (Villalobos is, in fact, a notable Live user.)

I mean, at least it’s a novel argument. Usually, you get the “mixing in the box is bad” and “computers aren’t real” argument from crusty audio engineers with massive outboard analog mixing boards, not electronic musicians. Recently, many experienced engineers I’ve talked to have come to the side of accepting that “in-the-box” recordings in software can be just as good as their analog counterparts. So, we may have reached a real landmark, a world in which electronic musicians claim digital’s no good and turntables are the only way to listen, while engineers experienced with analog claim just the opposite.

Let’s go back in time. For the record, twenty years ago by my calculations would be 1989.

Commercial developers are now releasing music creation apps for mobile game systems, in the form of the KORG DS-10 for Nintendo DS and Rockstar’s Beaterator for PSP. But some of the best ideas still come from the homebrew community.

What’s most impressive about ToneSynthDS is not so much what it does as its interface, fitting all its functionality into the DS’ two compact screens. Its minimal interface finds an elegant arrangement of everything you most urgently need, with a sequencer screen on one DS screen and basic virtual analog synth parameters on the other. A 4 x 4 matrix next to the main sequencer grid lets you switch between patterns, in a step sequencer reminiscent of the monome and Tenori-On. There isn’t a whole lot of depth to event editing in this early version, but it could be a lovely way to sketch melodic patterns. (And some of those limitations come from the DS itself. Note, though, that this app gets a full 16 real-time channels on the original DS hardware to the Korg DS-10’s paltry two.)

Developer Fanta/Hotelsinus Sound Design has been posting mock-ups, demos, and now builds as he goes. That means that he gets feedback from an audience of readers and incorporates those as he develops the app – another key difference between the DIY/homebrew scene and conventional commercial development.

More good news: this DS app should also run as a PC VST in a forthcoming version, opening up the fun to folks using netbooks and laptops instead of the DS and creating a nice mobile-to-computer workflow.

http://ndscomposer.blogspot.com/

In related Nintendo DS news: If you’re thinking about getting the new DS-10 Plus Limited Edition of the KORG DS-10, you’ll need to get it for the region coding of your DS. (In other words, you probably won’t want to import it.) The “Dual Mode” functions are region-locked, so North American and European users can’t use the Japanese DS-10. That’s not such a big deal, as North American distribution was announced, and other regions are expected to follow, but it’s good to know. See details on the All Things KORG DS-10 blog. (Thanks, DS-10 Dominator!)

Check out some demo videos and a quick run-down on specs, and if you’ve got the capability to run homebrew, you can give this a try. Thanks to Art/toitoy for the tip!

I think that live streaming will play a big part in the future of music performance. Having spent an entire year of my life driving and flying around just to be able to reach new audiences in a single country, it pains me to think how comparatively simple it would have been to organize streaming shows to reach those fans.

Commencing in about 12 hours, Visionsonic 2009 showcases Audiovisual artists from around the world. The Thursday show is “for Young Audiences”, but I’ll definitely be watching The Odyssey of Rick the Cube.

L’Odyssée de Rick le cube (extraits du spectacle) from Jesse Lucas on Vimeo.

The festival program has 20 artists performing over Friday and Saturday, which you can view on the Visionsonic TV page, or load the WMV stream in your media player of choice (VLC works beautifully).