Obscure and famous, people touch us in creative ways, ways that reverberate in patterns that reach clarity at odd times. With just such a story, our last entry in Bob Moog’s birthday this week, from Moog Music veteran and experimentalsynth.com artist Chris Stack:

Driving a truck into the night, headed to Nashville to tell the world about a new way to play guitar… no, wait… that’s a different (but related) story. Back on track… Here goes…

It’s late evening, May 23, 2012. Bob Moog’s birthday. It has been a great day with people remembering Bob in many ways. His birthday five years ago was a very special event in some very different ways. Michelle Moog-Koussa and I have been talking about writing about it ever since. I promised some people I would do it now, so here it is…

For me, this story encompasses not just Bob’s birthday in 2007, but also other events separated by many years, so this may jump around a bit. To understand the full impact on me you’ll need to know about these somewhat disparate points in my life.

An elementary school music teacher let my class listen to the Album “Swithced-on Bach”. As most (or all) of you know, this album was performed by Walter (later Wendy) Carlos on synthesizers designed by Bob Moog. This starts my near life-long interest in electronic music.

Around the same time I see Nipsey Russell on the Tonight Show recite the poem “Abu Ben Adhem”

“Abou Ben Adhem”
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold:

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said,
“What writest thou?” The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”

“And is mine one?” said Abou. “Nay, not so,”
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still; and said, “I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men.”

The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!

– By Leigh Hunt.

I loved the poem, looked it up and memorized it. I still remember it.

I graduate from highschool and work various factory jobs, primarily to enable me to buy synthesizers. My interest in electronic music (and five years in a zinc die-casting factory) prompts me to return to school to get an associates degree in Electrical Engineering, after which I go to work as a printed circuit board designer. I spend the next ten years designing PCBs for the industrial computer industry.

During that time, I learn that Bob Moog lives in Asheville and is giving a public lecture at UNCA. I attend the lecture and afterwards introduce myself. Bob calls me the next day and I wind up designing a few boards for him. This was back in the Big Briar days. These boards were for the Multi Touch Sensitive Keyboard that he designed for John Eaton, a product that according to the Moog Foundation, he considered to be his crowning achievement. This is of course a very significant event for me since he played a large part in me choosing electronics as a profession.

Many years go by…

After ten years as a printed circuit designer, I make a switch and spend the next ten years working primarily as a marketing manager, broken up by a year and a half stint as an engineering manager (high frequency CATV analog electronics). In addition to electronic music, I start playing music (on oud, flute etc) for belly dancers every weekend in Asheville, NC.

Mid-afternoon, Sunday, August 21, 2005 – Preparing for a bellydance music gig, I get the idea to start a song by reciting “Abu Ben Adhem” over a low drum beat with Ishani, the dancer that night, playing the part of the angel. I call her to see if she has a “book of gold” to use as a prop. She does.

Sunday night approximately 10:00pm, August 21, 2005 – We perform Abu Ben Adhem at Hookah Joe’s hookah lounge. Ishani is a great dancer and it is very well received.

Monday morning, August 22, 2005 – I get an email from Barry Darnell who also did printed circuit design for Bob. The email informs me of Bob’s death. I had been out of touch with Bob for a while at that point. I heard he was sick, but had no idea that it was terminal. Needless to say, it came as a shock.

Tuesday afternoon, August 23, 2005 – Barry and I attend Bob’s funeral at a local synagogue. After the rabbi finishes his part, one-by-one he calls the family members up to speak. The first one to speak is Bob’s oldest daughter. She says she wanted to start by reciting one of Bob’s favorite poems…
…Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream….

When I heard that, I almost passed out. I was standing at the edge of the room. My legs got weak and my vision grew dark. And then I remembered that the email mentioned that Bob died at 2:00 on Sunday… right about the time that I got the idea to add the poem to our performance. I was in a daze for quite a while after that.

I cannot say I knew Bob well. After doing the projects for him, I would see him occasionally here and there, but we never really hung out or talked about anything much other than electronics. The subject of poetry never came up.

I’m still trying to understand the significance (if any) of this. The mathematician in me says that everything we do, think or say is an opportunity for a coincidence. That would add up to billions, trillions or more opportunities in a lifetime. If some amazing ones didn’t come along every once in a while, that would be the strange thing. But still, when something like this happens to you, it’s hard to be objective about it.

In May of 2007, Moog Music hired me as Marketing Manager. This actually had little or nothing to do with the previous work I had done for Bob. Bob was gone and the only one there from the Big Briar days that even remembered me was Steve Dunnington.

My first week at Moog was also the week of Bob’s birthday. We had a nice birthday party at the office in his memory, and over ice-cream and cake we found out that SonicState.com (who had been doing a weekly countdown of the top 20 synthsizers of all time) had “coincidentially” just named the Minimoog as the top synth. When Mike Adams (President of Moog Music) called them to thank them for doing that on Bob’s birthday, their reply was something like “What… we didn’t know it was his birthday!”

It was at this party that I first met Michelle Moog-Koussa. When I told her the story about the poem, her response was “Oh my god, you’re the “Abou-Ben-Adhem-Guy”. After Bob’s funeral, I sent my story to the Caring Bridge website set up for Bob and his family. Mixed in with the hundreds (if not thousands) of other comments, I didn’t think that anyone had seen it. I was wrong.

Michelle and I spent much of the party talking about this coincidence… and many others. It turns out that my story was one of many surrounding Bob’s passing. She related numerous other similar stories (many of which I unfortunately can’t remember). There were one or two that were along the lines of “when I heard that Bob died, I went to turn on my old Minimoog that hadn’t worked in years… it worked!”

I thought that the birthday party supplied a nice end to the story. I was wrong. The next day Michelle called me. Our conversation went something like this…

Michelle: “Did you see LOST last night?”

Me: “No, why?”

Michelle: “It was the season finale (of season two). They were breaking into a bunker to stop the device that was jamming their radio transmissions. In doing so, they mortally wounded the person inside. As this person was dying they divulged, “The programmer was a musician. The password is GOOD VIBRATIONS”.

Me: “Yeah? Beach Boys… so?”

Michelle: “GOOD VIBRATIONS is the epitaph on dad’s tombstone.”

Me: “Hoe-lee _________ !!!!!!” (Insert uniquely Southern expression of surprise)

It wasn’t over then either. At NAMM shows or during factory visits I heard many similar stories. It helped give my time at Moog a very surrealistic edge.

Every year about this time Michelle and I talk about how all this needs to be written down. This was the year it happened.

Chris also sends this image along, with another story:

Trying to think of a good photo for this. I remembered this image. It has a bit of historical connection to the story. I created this in the early 90s. It was one of my first forays into computer graphics and photography. I think I did this in Aldus Photostyler on an 80386-based PC.

It kind of has a vaguely cosmic/spiritual feel that fits the story.

The circuit elements came from my PCB design work for Bob. He got a kick out of seeing it used this way. This image was used in the poster and ticket design for the first (and possibly only) rave in Spartanburg SC.

Here’s to all the ghosts in our machines, from Bob Moog to Max Mathews. I certainly feel their gifts in the work I’ve done just in the last couple of weeks alone.

This may already be the image you have in your mind of Skrillex’s fan base, but let’s get real: these are actual kids, and they really are getting introduced to electronic dance music through Skrillex for the first time.

“What is dubstep?”

Darned if I know any more, kid.

What have we learned?

1. All kids sound cooler when they have English accents. (It’s unreal. They can be throwing a temper tantrum and still sound oddly sophisticated, or at least charmingly in-character. CDM’s sizable readership of English people may wonder what the heck I’m talking about, then dare me to buy an umbrella and take up babysitting until I come to my senses.)
2. This video will prompt haterade in comments so long as you have a soul made of ice.
3. Kids can dance.
4. These kids look cooler than I do.
5. Saying you need to take substances to understand Electronic Dance Music is a fair statement – that is, provided you have entirely lost connection with your inner child or ability to dance. (That’s not to judge the use of such substances one way or another, only to say viewing any substance as a prerequisite to music appreciation may be overstatement. This does bring new meaning to candy ravers, however.)
6. VICE got kids dancing to Skrillex. What should CDM introduce them to? (Xenakis might terrify them; how about Aphex Twin?)

After all, I do hear dance music advocates routinely point out that Skrillex could be an introduction to young folks to electronic music that opens more doors later. These kids are absolutely getting a fresh start.

“Where’s the after-party?”

Updated: Answer – after-party is right here…

3-year old: “I’m a Jungalist!!!”

(Thanks, Gwydion!)

Try http://networkawesome.com/2012-5-11 if the video above isn’t loading for you.

It’s not hard to understand the impact of the loss of Adam Yauch, aka MCA, founding Beastie Boy. With the passing of music idols comes a sense of the passage of time, all the more so when they’re barely into middle age. But MCA, to a swath of music fans, is more than a distant idol. He, and the band he helped build, somehow make a connection as everymen to those who loved their music. It’s not because they’re white kids from Brooklyn rapping, or because Yauch had a Jewish mother; that’d ignore their popularity across the broader hip-hop spectrum and far from the New York City boroughs. It’s not simply their combination of punk and hip-hop and rock, though that blend they and producer Rick Rubin brewed was clearly an essential vehicle.

Somehow, Yauch spans coming of age all the way from unapologetic immaturity to genuine manhood. Maybe it’s beause Yauch was so downright irreverant, ready to speak up, in that uniquely forward manner of New Yorkers, across that whole span. And Yauch’s own journey has unique appeal, seeming to play every possible role a musician can. From starting a band with an inflatable phallus and crank calls to ice cream shops made into raps to contemplative Buddhist advocate and activist, everyone seems to just follow along. “You’ve got to fight for your right to party,” and the fans nod in agreement. “The disrespect to women has got to be through,” and the fans nod in agreement. From raucous kid to advocate of women’s rights, against violence, for Tibetan freedom, in a New York facing down 9/11 and an America choosing between peace and war, Yauch earnestly gave voice to those people. Celebrities can try to do this, but Yauch and the Beasties could do it for fans who truly felt they were one of their own.

To understand that appeal, though, you have to go back to the most irreverant stuff, the jokes the Beasties would later apologize for. You have to see them in their rawest state, mugging for New York’s DIY public access television, making weird informercials for their music. You have to see them live, tearing it up, making the music that kept them from being just another label creation or young kids’ fantasy. People loved Adam Yauch the man because they understood the kid, because they grew up with him. And what an extraordinary path he took – what an incredible, unforgettable voice.

That’s why I’m hugely grateful to Jason Forrest of Network Awesome for teaming up with us to share some of those videos, some of the oddest and most obscure finds, dug from the archives and found via YouTube, “sampled” from the Interwebs in the way the Beasties sampled on their records. In the lineup:

• Interviews with the Beastie Boys at every stage of their career.
• The Beasties in 1994 presenting MTV’s excellent, sadly-defunct 120 Minutes.
• An extraordinary live performance in Germany on the Hello Nasty tour.
• In LA, the charming Paul’s Boutique record release party, which shows off a lot of the character of the trio.
• An early view of the band on NYC public access cable – The Scott and Gary Show.
• Faux infomercial, made obviously on the cheap, for Hello Nasty. Did MCA invent hipster fashion? You be the judge.

Live Music Show: Beastie Boys, Curated by The Sadnesses

TALK SHOW – BEASTIE BOYS

http://networkawesome.com/2012-5-11 – All the videos on one Network Awesome page

Assuming you can tear yourself away from watching the videos, we have text, too. Among the many words spilled over the past week by fans, here are a few of my favorites.

Sasha Frere-Jones, who met Yauch first in 1982 at age 15, gets straight to this personal connection in his obituary for The New Yorker:

Adam Yauch was a part of my childhood, an ambassador to America from our New York, which is now gone, as is he.

Understanding both the pre-Rubin Beasties and the improbable, million-selling phenomenon that was to come, Frere-Jones explains:

“Licensed to Ill” presented us with a can of question marks. When did they gain access to handguns? When did they start smoking angel dust? When did they start hitting girls? WHAT. (And you could just sample a Led Zeppelin record? That was O.K.?) When “Licensed to Ill” hit the world, at the end of 1986, it was like an April Fools’ joke that lasted a year. America apparently wanted to hear backward TR-808 drums and samples of Trouble Funk records. Or maybe they liked white kids rapping over loud guitars about partying. O.K.—hold on. Maybe it wasn’t a mystery. “Cooky Puss” was a joke for New York. “Licensed To Ill” was a joke for America. Or on America. It was hard to tell.

A must-read, as I think the most personal of the remembrances, while still – despite his apologies – maintaining enough journalistic distance to provide insight in a way those who knew Yauch must surely appreciate:
PEACE, ADAM [The New Yorker]

CDM reader “nonnon” Dave Madden is not an obituary you’re likely to read elsewhere, but on his personal blog I think he gets right at the heart of that connection to fans, and that feeling of being “fourteen forever.” He paints a picture of 1989:

We weren’t kids, but eighteen only makes a man in theory, especially if you’re still living with your parent(s). The point is, though License to Ill would not be understood, or appreciated, or met with anything but disgust at home or by girlfriends at the time, it was the soundtrack of that first fulltime job and year between half-grownups “taking some time off from school” and someone nudging us with “you need to sort your life out, mate”. It was otherworldly, both the music and the idea that people could stay fourteen years old forever.

I’ll Steal Your Honey Like I Stole Your Bike: MCA RIP and the Influence of Beastie Boys On My 1989

I write about gory technical details because I always find some sense of what makes musicians tick. So, accordingly, we can look back to Electronic Musician for one view of how MCA and the Beasties worked together. For a band that came out of neighborhood friends, it’s little wonder that even in their late albums, they got there by getting together in a room and recording together, all at once. MCA tells EM:

“There is something about the energy of the three of us in the room at the same time,” MCA says. “The main take for any given song will always come from that setting. You could go individually and really scrutinize and do a million punches, but, somehow, the master take always comes from the three of us together. We don’t do as many fixes as compared to how most records are made.”

Future Flashback (2004)

The New York Times takes a New York-centric view of Yauch – whose last name is pronounced, conveniently, in the way the city’s denizens once pronounced York. (Say it: “Yowk.”) Writing for that paper, Jon Pareles codifies the many dimensions of what MCA was to the Beastie Boys, and the Beastie Boys to music:

Mr. Yauch was a major factor in the Beastie Boys’ evolution from their early incarnation, as testosterone-driven pranksters, to their later years as sonic experimenters, as socially conscious rappers — championing the cause of freedom in Tibet — and as keepers of old-school hip-hop memories. The Beastie Boys became an institution — one that could have arisen only amid the artistic, social and accidental connections of New York City.

In the history of hip-hop, the Beastie Boys were both improbable and perhaps inevitable: appreciators, popularizers and extrapolators of a culture they weren’t born into.

Rapper Conquered Music World in ’80s With Beastie Boys [New York Times obituary]

But maybe the most hopeful vision comes from some of these videos, from the youngest iteration of Adam Yauch on cable TV in his home of New York. That homebrewed, DIY, straight-from-the-neighborhood spirit endured in their albums and videos through multiple decades, multiple generations. And it’s appropriate to remember Yauch as a filmmaker through that medium. It seems we still haven’t seen the act to come out of the YouTube generation, the way the Beasties ascended from public access to MTV. But maybe, somewhere, that neighborhood band is there, whether in Brooklyn or a suburb of Delhi. Maybe they’re fourteen. Through the miracle of recording and the album, we can remember Yauch as the man he became, but also as MCA, fourteen forever, and that spirit that drives musicians – endless, irreverant possibility.

It’s a question so elemental in music, you might forget to ask it: what can you get out of a (music) jam?

Electronic music worldwide is dominated by the DJ, the dance party. That, in turn, often tends to the safe playback and mixing of produced records. So, what happens when you let all of that go, invite your audience to get up and make strange noises with you and not only dance at a safe distance? What happens when you just set yourself free and play?

Jam sessions are nothing new in and of themselves – but the beauty of them is, put unexpected combinations of musicians together in a room, and they can always be something new. Here, I’ve invited one set of guest reports authored by the Berlin-based collective Mindpirates. Their recent set of jam sessions was notable in its varied international artists, covering the gamut from gong artist Jens Zygar to electronic artists like Machinedrum and Kid 606. Since you probably didn’t get to attend, you can experience the results through plenty of photos and videos they’ve shared with us. Californian Lionel Williams, grandchild of film composer John Williams, provides the backdrop for all of this with otherworldy, psychedelic imagery. For that reason, perhaps, the Mindpirates get happily far-out in their reflections on what all of this means, and dub the series “an adventure into the supernatural power of the jam.”

Here’s what the Mindpirates’ Easton West, Owen Roberts and Pauline Doutreluingne, tell CDM about the event and what it’s meant to them:

In January, we opened our new project space, Mindpirates Projektraum, with “Let The Sun Shine In — The Berlin Sessions.” The event included an exhibition of the supernatural collage art from the young California-based artist and musician Lionel Williams. Knowing that Williams was also a talented musician, we decided to bless our new space with a week-long series of jams between Williams, special guests, and ourselves.

The guests included visual artist Manfred Kage, Jens Zygar, Raz Ohara and The Odd Orchestra, Annika Henderson & Nick Henderson (from Anika), Hermione Frank aka rRoxymore, Jochen Arbeit (from Einstürzende Neubauten), Brian Mitchell aka 785, Valerie Renay (from Noblesse Oblige), Travis Stewart aka Machinedrum, Miguel De Pedro aka Kid 606, Verity Susman (from Electrelane), Infinite Livez, Michel Morin aka Sneak-Thief, Antaeus Roy aka Lando Kal and more.

Williams comes from a very musical background. His great-grandfather Johnny Williams was a respected jazz drummer and percussionist who played from the 30s to the 50s for the CBS Radio Orchestra, Raymond Scott, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. His grandfather John Williams has written some of the most loved and recognized film music of all time. Ed.: Yep, that John Williams. Lionel’s father Mark Williams drummed with Crosby, Stills and Nash, Tina Turner, and Air Supply.

Given the Williams family’s cross-generational success, one would expect Lionel to follow suit in his own musical endeavours. But there’s something of a sunchild in Williams that directs his varied creations. A fascination with the supernatural comes across in his artwork — abstract, yet suggestive windows into a mind filled with cosmic, mystic, and utopian images. Listening to his ambient electronic rock band Vinyl Williams, it’s apparent that Williams inhabits a slightly different artistic realm to his predecessors.

Jamming has always been an indispensable part of music-making across generations and cultures. The immediate connection people make when they combine sounds — instant, unplanned, and unrepeatable — is an incomparable experience. It allows humans to communicate in a language outside of words. The jam creates an opportunity to explore individual sounds and their relationships to one another. While exploring the relationships of tones, we explore our relationships to one another and to our environment. Improvisation demands an amount of personal development and discipline to open up the channels of communication that allow a group to function as one.

From the frequency-drenched opening performance of gong master Jens Zygar and ground breaking visuals of microphotographer Manfred Kage, to the analog dance party rhythms of our friends Michel Morin aka Sneak Thief and Antaeus Roy aka Lando Kal, the week was wildly diverse with approaches to sound, pitch, rhythm, color and texture and from a wide variety of sources.

For us, the main interest in the improvisations was a constantly-evolving relationship between acoustic instruments and digital music technology. This tension was really visible watching the performances. Williams spent a large part of the week hunched over a dizzying collection of guitar pedals while, next to him, he gathered an even more dizzying collection of musical and percussive instruments, effects and processors. Mindpirates became a melting pot of sound, color, movement, and voices, as seen in our film documentation.

Behind everything lay the real pool of inspiration, the seemingly-infinite timbral, rhythmic, and textural possibilities from a relatively small group of attuned musicians. The representation of the supernatural in The Berlin Sessions was achieved by both the organic and digital and the aural and visual. Never was it discernible where a sound began, where it was processed or the nature of that processing. All is One — a beautiful and mystical message realized through the jams.

Archival website on the project:
http://www.mindpirates.org/theberlinsessions/

Session 1: Lionel Williams, Jens Zygar, Manfred Kage & special guests

Session 2: Lionel Williams & Raz O’Hara and The Odd Orchestra

Session 3: Lionel Williams, Hermione Frank aka rRoxymore & Annika Henderson and Nick Henderson (from Anika)

Session 4: Lionel Williams, Jochen Arbeit (from Einstürzende Neubauten), Valerie Renay (from Noblesse Oblige) & Brian Mitchell aka 785

Session 5: Lionel Williams, Travis Stewart aka Machinedrum & Miguel De Pedro aka Kid 606

Session 6: Lionel Williams, Infinite Livez & Verity Susman (from Electrelane)

Session 7: Lionel Williams, Michel Morin aka Sneak-Thief, Antaeus Roy aka Lando Kal, Mindpirates & good friends

We welcome other event reports like this from around the world, particularly as I’m human and can’t be in all places at once. If you can document it, and tell us a bit about what happened, we’d love to hear from you. And we’d love to hear what has made successful – or unsuccessful – jam sessions in your musical experience.

Mobile computing has already had an enormous impact on music making. A modern phone or tablet (and yes, most often, these come from Apple) is capable of out-performing a lot of dedicated hardware and easily runs the synths and workstations that required state-of-the-art desktops just a decade or so ago.

But what if this same computing power – low-energy, low-cost chips – could be in other music gear, too? They could offer significant advantages. Bare boards, while on their own not quite road-ready, can wind up in music-friendly housings. (Think stompboxes – without stomping on your phone, or buying a big, silly dock.) You’ll never have to sign a contract with a phone company to get one, or stop your latest song sketch to take a call. And they could be significantly cheaper: the Raspberry Pi isn’t quite ready for mass consumption yet, but it has already begun shipping at US$25, meaning the entire computer costs what a phone car charger might.

In fact, much as the original personal computing revolution took computing to masses of new audiences, this could extend music computational power worldwide. We’re not just talking strange DIY software, either – these boards run Linux, meaning a lot of off-the-shelf music software will “just work,” including even some fine commercial entries.

If you’re ready to stop dreaming and start making music, now’s a great time. CCRMA at Stanford in the United States and STEIM in Amsterdam, NL have each been working on development. STEIM even has a workshop scheduled for June, taught by Edgar Berdahl (CCRMA) and Florian Goltz (DE):
Satellite CCRMA: Interactive design with open embedded computers

The instructors offer some great inspiration about what this is all about in their description:

These small computers combine the connectivity of a laptop with the computational power of a high-end smartphone; however they are less expensive than either and fit inside a cigar box. We will dedicate much of the workshop to prototyping new functional artworks, for example: musical instruments, effects processors, interactive installation works, and anything else you can imagine that requires high computational power in a small, inexpensive footprint.

In the broader sense this workshop deals with interaction design: What happens when human behaviours meet those of machines?

But even if you’re not able to get to California or Holland, you can give the software a try. The BeagleBoard is now supported by a custom distro; the Raspberry Pi seems a logical next frontier once it starts shipping. With Pd (Pure Data) included, you can even copy-and-paste instruments and effects like synthesizers, step sequencers and drum machines, and granulators built by a broad community – even without necessarily being a master patcher yourself. (And then, when you do want to modify the way it functions or sounds or gets controller, you can.)
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~eberdahl/Satellite/

It’s not all beginner-friendly yet, but these hacklabs seem the perfect way to begin to move in that direction, as more people test the solutions, gather data on how different patches perform, and make tweaks and write documentation.

Jack Tramiel, who died this week, had as deep an impact on computer music for the everyday musician as just about any computing industry pioneer. While Jobs, Woz, Moore, Grove, and Gates get a lot of the attention, Tramiel’s legacy was in making computing affordable and accessible. As such, he was indispensable to the computing revolution, and his computers were early forebears of the digital music-making Renaissance. In an extraordinary microcosm of the 20th Century, Polish-born Tramiel escaped Auschwitz, served in the US army, and built the roots of the most successful desktop computer of all time in a typewriter repair business in the Bronx. And today, when you make music with a computer, you’re connected to that extraordinary story.

Take the Commodore 64. Its ground-breaking SID chip (the 6581, with three oscillators, four waveforms, a filter, an ADSR envelope, and a ring mod) remains sought-after today. It’s easy to forget, but rival computers – including, notably, Apple – were fairly tone-deaf when it came to sound capabilities. Commodore, via a design by Bob Yannes, was the first major computing hit to include high-quality sound. The C64 single-handedly transformed the sound of game music, spawning new genres of game scores, and later becoming a major part of the demoscene and chip music movement. (In fact, you might even argue that the C64, not Nintendo game systems, really produced the initial spark for what would evolve into chip music or 8-bit music.)

Or, consider Tramiel’s second leadership role, at Atari. The Atari ST’s standard inclusion of MIDI set a benchmark that still influences machines like today’s iPad. In fact, if you’ve got an iPad handy, remember that Apple’s pro music focus is led by one Gerhard Lengeling, founder of Emagic and C-Lab, whose first products were all for Tramiel’s computers: the Commodore 64, and then the Atari ST. Maybe it should come as no surprise, then, that suitably infused with Emagic DNA, Apple would make software MIDI support standard on the iPad. Ed.: Okay, I should in fairness note that the OS team at Apple is not led by Lengeling, although I’m sure he’s enjoying that MIDI support on there. Let’s at least say that *all* of us – myself included – have expectations of MIDI that were nudged along by the Atari ST. The Atari ST set the stage for a host of music software, including being the primary platform on which the “tracker” evolved (see today’s Renoise), many of today’s sequencer features (see Logic, Cubase), and, albeit to a lesser extent, graphical music notation.

Musicians who used the ST range from 808 State to Fatboy Slim to Jean Michel Jarre – and, of course, Atari Teenage Riot. In fact, I’d go as far as arguing to say the two Tramiel machines are the only desktop computers that have actually directly touched the sound of electronic music – the C64 for the SID and its influence on game music, the Atari ST for driving a new interest in sequenced sounds and the micro-editing of trackers. There’s no “sound” of an Apple or a Windows (or even DOS) PC, but there’s a personality, a style, in a Commodore 64 or even Atari ST. We love our computers, to be fair, but the Atari and Commodore might be imagined as their own instrument. (This is a debateable opinion, and I don’t want to get too carried away, so I’m happy to hear opposing viewpoints. Or just join me in singing a love song to the SID, and waxing nostalgic about the Steinberg – Emagic – Dr. T rivalry, and we’ll leave it at that.)

What’s most compelling is that the legacy of these machines is more alive than ever. Computer musicians acquire Commodore 64s the way a guitarist might a vintage instrument, and even continue to develop software for them. (When the hardware dies, I expect this will live on in emulation. Us computer musicians don’t die; we just run on a new virtual machine.)

Then, there’s what’s next. I know that Tramiel’s aesthetic of affordability, and the approach of his chips, has inspired us on the MeeBlip open source synth. Now, we can look forward, as well, to the ultra-affordable, DIY-friendly Rasberry Pi, which itself promises to become a compelling music platform. (The moment they’re available in any quantity, I know I’ll be trying that out.)

Watching as we lose our heroes, the men and women who produced the incredible technological world in which we live, could be a sad affair. But because these individuals championed businesses with real ideas and real innovation, we see instead hope. The products of their imagination, the ones for which they fought to run their businesses, are more vibrant and alive than ever. As Silicon Valley becomes obsessed with “exit strategies,” quick fixes and disposable apps, it’s heartening to think of the people who really work to put something physical in peoples’ hands. That computing power has led to the fastest technological advances in a range of fields in the history of humanity – and, boy, can it make some fun noises, too.

With that in mind, I present for your enjoyment the Tramiel machines in images and video, as seen on CDM, with a few extras. And here’s to not only Mr. Tramiel, but all the people who worked to make these machines available.

MSSIAH is still available as an actively-developed cartridge for your Commodore computer. The cart even allows you to connect a MIDI cable.

The MIDIbox SID project produced new hardware, powered by the SID chip.

Combining these projects, here’s one of my favorite mods – a gorgeous, orange, modded C64 with SID2SID expansion and Prophet64 cartridge.

Demonstrating just how significant the machine was to music composition, The C64 Orchestra transcribes classic game music back to full orchestra.

What happens when Guitar Hero meets the C64:

A Commodore 64 speaks and plays:

Digimancy: A Commodore 64 Spouts Philosophy, Plays Modular Synths

And a reminder that Commodore will never die:

Behold sequencers we use today in their early days on the Atari ST:
Main screens of Atari ST sequencers
Pictures of Vintage MIDI Sequencers

Previously:
Musical Mods of the Commodore 64, from Traktor DJing to Knobs for Prophet64 [CDM, vintage 2006]
For Love of Chips: Chipsounds Instrument and EP and the Gear That Inspired Them [this release by Plogue of a chip instrument turned out to be a window into the chip music scene - artists and equipment - as well as a way to get these sounds on more modern computers]

More:
CNET has a nice obituary, as well as an extensive look at Tramiel and his contributions

What does it mean to “master for iTunes?” Apple tripped that question with the launch of a suite of utilities and sound-processing algorithms intended to master music for their codecs and software, rather than more generically as would be done with the CD. More significantly, what does it mean that an increasing number of music listeners experience all music through Apple’s software as the final gateway to their ears? In our first look at this issue, we welcome guest writer and producer Primus Luta (David Dodson). He tests this issue the only way that really matters: with his ears.

There’s so much to say, in fact, that almost each line here of David’s conclusions is up for potential discussion and debate. That to me isn’t a red flag for posting – quite the opposite, it’s an invitation. So we consider this the beginning, not the end, of this conversation. -PK

The announcement of Apple’s new Mastered for iTunes suite caught me at a serendipitous time, as I prepped the first release on my new label.  In fact, the day of the announcement came right in the midst of reviewing masters for the release.  It’s an interesting situation for a compilation release, in which styles range from ambient to muddy beats.  Finding a good balance that keeps them all flowing together is an art in and of itself.  But it would seem Apple has that all solved with their Master for iTunes droplet.  Drag the high-quality files to the droplet, and presto-chango — out come files that all play perfectly in iTunes.

Well, that’s the claim, but is it mastering or encoding?  To their credit, in the documentation Apple explains that their 32-bit process manages to encode from high-res audio without leaving a dithered footprint.  Ed.: “Dithering” is the addition of adding small amounts of noise to compensate for errors that can occur in downsampling from greater bit depth to less – it’s used in image processing as well as in sound. According to Apple, their use of greater bit depth in the intermediary file prevents aliasing and clipping, and thus they don’t need to use dithering. -PK Apple’s tools aren’t the only way to do this. Most pro audio editors can achieve the same, but often people are ripping MP3s or AACs in their media players, so it is an important distinction.  It still begs the question: why go down to CD specifications,  especially while making the point of noting their process results in a quality better than CD’s or CD rips? Ed.: The greater bit-depth is only an intermediary file; eventually delivery is not only compressed, but at specifications set by the CD. Greater resolution and bit depth are limited to the mastered files, not to what the listener ultimately hears.

The most important question, though, is how does it sound?  If you send a song to be mastered, you expect in general to get back a song that sounds different than the one with which you started.  Generally, this difference is in perceived overall volume, but also can include changes to dynamics and other touches.  So what changes does the Master for iTunes droplet make to your files?  Well, none: it just encodes them.  They describe the process as such:

The Droplet creates an AAC audio file from an AIFF or WAVE source file by first generating a CAF (Core Audio File) rendered with an iTunes sound check profile applied to the file. If the sample rate of the source file is greater than 44.1 kHz, it’s downsampled to 44.1 kHz using our mastering-quality SRC. Next, it uses this newly-rendered CAF to render a high-quality AAC audio file. Once the final AAC audio file is generated, the intermediary CAF is deleted.

The key part relating to how your files sound is the “iTunes sound check profile applied to the file.”  Rather than changing the volume gain in the file, metadata information is used to tell the playback device how to play it.  What the documentation does not tell you is what or how this information is determined.

Reviewing masters involves listening on many different systems.  I like to listen on studio monitors, a small boombox, a consumer surround sound theatre system, laptop speakers, desktop computer with headphones and, of course, in a portable media player with various headphones.  I’ve also added a cloud-based stream to that mix — and doing that is what brought me to the experiment I conducted.

I uploaded a test master to the the cloud and was comparing listening to it and iTunes, when I noticed a rather huge discrepancy in volume.  At first, I figured they were just set to different levels, but upon checking both were at their max.  So I went to play my reference song, which currently is the title track from Monolake’s new album Ghosts (I tend to try to keep my reference material relatively contemporary.)  The volumes on this track between applications were more or less the same.  Meanwhile, my test master, which was playing pretty much on par with the Monolake track from the cloud, played significantly lower in iTunes.

That was when I remembered Sound Check.  I wasn’t on my normal listening computer and never bothered to see if Sound Check had been enabled, but sure enough, when I looked the preference was checked.

Ed.: I actually had some difficulty getting a solid answer, but consulting with Apple-following journalist Jim Dalrymple of The Loop, we believe that the default setting is off in iTunes for Mac and Windows and on iOS. If someone has a different answer to this, I’d love to hear it. What you can tell about it is what Apple has documented in support document HT2425, namely, Sound Check operates track-by-track, not album-by-album, operates in the background, and computes and stores non-destructive normalization information in ID3 tags. It works exclusively with .mp3, .AAC, .wav, and .aiff file types, and gain increases occur before the built-in iTunes Limiter. That also means you should consider the iTunes Limited as part of this process.

As soon as I disabled it, the volume was consistent across players.  This inspired me to test how Sound Check was affecting other files, and so, going through my iTunes library, I built up a sample set of 25 songs to test the effects of Sound Check:

- = Sound Check turned down the volume
+ = Sound Check turned up the volume
null = Sound Check had no effect on volume

This was all done by ear, and while my ears aren’t what they used to be, I’m willing to guess if you tested, your results would be similar.  Ed.: You should also be able to investigate the actual ID3 data, but in this case, perceived volume may be more interesting anyway, and the effect isn’t necessarily subtle.

About halfway through, I thought it’d be good to confirm these findings with numerical tests, but then I started noticing a pattern.  Almost everything gets turned down, some more extremely than others — the most extreme example being the Nine Inch Nails track.  The two tracks that get turned up are both archival recordings, and so it makes sense that they are at a lower volume.  The vinyl rip from Pharoah Sanders would likely have gotten turned down, as well, save for the fact that vinyl rips are re-mastered to raise their volumes.  Same goes for the live Stevie Wonder boot.

The stand-outs are the ones which Sound Check has no affect on, each of which was released within the last two years. The Tori Amos track comes from her last orchestral album.  Because of the result, I tested two other selections by her on either side of the advances of digital technology, both of which get turned down.  The track “Blood Roses,” like “Night of the Hunters,” features no drums but still gets turned down, as the mixing for the album is definitely rock-influenced and so the harpsichord falls on the loud side.

Stellar OM Source’s track is of the ambient drone variety, also without drums.  But the Monolake track is techno, full of drums and crunching distortions, yet it remained unaffected by Sound Check. (It’s also worth noting that the Powell track, which also has prominent drums, is only barely turned down by Sound Check.)  Because “Ghosts” is one of my reference tracks, I had previously done an analysis of it. I noted that, despite peaking at the max of 0 dB, its RMS only averages out at -14.5 dB.  I’ve done this type of analysis for a number of modern tracks and this is unusually low.  Typically, drum- and bass- heavy tracks manage to hit around -10 dB RMS with some going as high as -6 dB RMS.

The results for the Monolake track led me to hypothesize that what Sound Check was actually doing was applying an RMS limit on tracks of around -15 dB (with a +/- that I haven’t calculated yet).  Anything below that gets turned up and anything above that gets turned down (with the precaution that turning up never results in clipping by going above the 0 dB max).  This was confirmed when I normalized one of my test master’s to an RMS of -15 dB.  This version of the track, when played in iTunes with Sound Check enabled, played at the same volume as with Sound Check disabled.

Where an object of mastering is to create a version of a song which plays at the optimum level across playback devices, where iTunes is understood as rapidly becoming a primary application for playback, and where Sound Check is often enabled as a preference in iTunes, it stands to reason that those producing masters today should be working to create versions of songs for which Sound Check does not need change the levels.  As such, mastering for iTunes can be understood as creating a quality master which has an average RMS of -15 dB.

Prior to this, the primary barrier for the levels of a master was the 0 dB max limit to prevent clipping.  Within that, the RMS levels could fall anywhere, which is the freedom that gave way to the loudness wars. The so-called “loudness wars” refer to the increase in compression to produce greater perceived loudness, as tracked over the rise of big FM radio and the CD through the 80s, 90s, and today.  Two songs with a max of 0 dB can have extreme differences in volume based on the RMS.  Production and mixing tricks, especially with the heavy use of dynamics processors like compressors, can squash a song, allowing the overall volume to be raised incredibly.  Using these techniques, it’s entirely possible to create a mix (not a master) which has a max level of -4 dB but an RMS of -10 dB.  If you master that track, raising the max, to 0 dB, the RMS level will push close to -6 dB.  When this file is played in iTunes with Sound Check enabled, however, it’s going to be turned down to -15 dB RMS which will be below the -4 dB max level that it started with.

The potential of adopting this as a standard is an end to the loudness wars as we’ve known them.  As the above example shows, doing everything you can to push a song to the max ends up having the opposite effect.  So rather than worry about loudness, producers and mixing engineers can return to focusing on getting good, clean mixes of songs.  Mastering engineers can also worry less about pushing the volume to the max and focus on bringing the best out of the mixes.

Incidentally, the system for producing tracks that comply to this have long existed in the mastering world, thanks to Bob Katz and the K system of level metering.  Using the K-14 system of metering for mastering (and producing and mixing) can ensure that engineers are not pushing their mixes too loud.

There are, however, some negatives which can be attributed to the adoption of such a standard.  Because of the headroom afforded by digital, in the last decade, the creative use of volume has increased.  ”Loud” has new musical meaning, and the tools utilized to maximize loudness normally in mastering are being introduced during production to create effects.  An example of this is the pumping effect of side-chain compression on drums.  This can be quite appealing creatively even when (and perhaps because) it pushes to levels of distortion.  Creating this effect without clipping is easily managed with a limiter at the end of the signal chain.  However, creating this effect below -15 dB is not so straightforward, and the results won’t necessarily be the same.

For the mastering of multi-song projects there are other issues.  Over the course of an album, dynamic shifts between songs can help to carry the mood of the project.  One wouldn’t necessarily want all of the tracks to have the same -15 dB RMS; ideally, that would be reserved for the loudest song and the others mixed under that accordingly.   It presents a challenge, but it is manageable.  What’s nice about this type of limit is that, unlike the 0 dB max limitation, going over it does not necessarily result in destructive clipping, so there’s still a dynamic range within which to work.  It’s also worth noting that the Sound Check process can be applied to an album to ensure consistency in listening.

One has to hope that, should this become a standard, new creative ways of working within these parameters will be born.  To be clear, -15 dB RMS, while not the loudest, can sound great for a great mix.  Just listen to the Monolake track if you want proof.  Getting people to adopt to it is a challenge, but I think the incentive to adopt will be there once artists realize that the more they push the volume, like their mother, the more Sound Check will turn the volume down.

As a footnote, I thought to test how Sound Check treated what was previously considered the most perfect album from a mixing mastering perspective – Steely Dan’s Aja.  In iTunes, Sound Check turns “Peg” down.  So it’s not just your bass heavy-beats that could be affected by this.  Also, it’s not just iTunes and not just Sound Check.  Replay Gain is a similar tool found in other media players.  Spotify also has similar limiting for its streaming services.  These things will likely show up in more playback applications as time goes on so adopting to this now is a pretty safe bet.  Sure, your tracks may not sound the loudest when tested without these services, but with good mixes, they will still sound good, regardless. “Good” is far more important than “loud.”

I’m still on the fence, though.  In general, I’m not a fan of auto volume control.  Adopting a mastering standard that caters to them just seems wrong, even if I am (for the most part) on the side of ending the loudness wars.  And, again, on the creative side, I’m very concerned.  A decade of loudness wars in many ways has changed our sense of sound possibilities, and signals pushed into the red — well, I kind of like those, when they’re done creatively.  People talking about the loudness wars are usually talking about traditional rock and pop music being squashed and absent of dynamics.  But we’re at a point now where there are other genres for whom pushing into the red can be seen as more valuable than dynamic range.  It’s a completely different school of thought and need not be shut down (or turned down) because of an antiquated sense of norm.

You can follow David Dodson on Twitter. http://twitter.com/#!/primusluta

We’re interested to hear what you think.

If, in my opinion, you want to see how to run a label in 2012, look no further than Project Mooncircle (PMC). It’s based out of Berlin and was originally an offshoot of HipHopVinyl Records – a store I wandered into one summer day in 2004 and left, several hours later, minus a quarter of my summer tour earnings. The label bills itself as “specializing in the conjunction between electronic and organic music.” I could expand on that a little by saying that PMC’s music falls somewhere in the gray intersection between instrumental hip-hop, soul, and jazz, with a particular focus on whatever the thing is called that’s hip-hop post-Dilla or post-Fly Lo. I’ll call it Future Beats until someone tells me better. Ed. I hear the comment button clicking already. -PK

In PMC’s releases, swung, tumbling, complex, tricky beats weave in and out of melodies and vocals in a sweet cascade of emotion. Their records are the kind I want to play for people who think hip-hop began and ended with Native Tongues, or believe the pinacle of musical creation happened between ’94 and ’96 in the era of Trip Hop. Although just saying PMC is the logical extension of those movements fails to convey how extremely “right now” their sound is.

Apart from just putting out good music, PMC warms my heart by executing its affairs brilliantly and thoroughly. They have incredible art (including multiple reoccurring illustrators). Their catalog only skips 3 numbers in 100 releases. A huge amount of the music is available for sale on their Bandcamp page, with a healthy number of free giveaways. PMC even has two sub-labels, Project Squared and Finest-Ego, the later of which has put together a series of stunning compilations. These are probably the best place in the world to hear interesting new production in hip-hop, and they are all organized by country, one of my favorite discrete units of any scene.

The crew behind the label is above, but as I found out in a recent conversation with Robert Koch of Robots Don’t Sleep and several PMC release, the whole project rests squarely on the shoulders of the label’s founder Gordon Geiseking. Koch painted a picture of Geiseking tirelessly sitting at his desk, working late, surrounded by boxes and boxes of HHV vinyl waiting to be sent off all over the world. It makes sense – there’s no way something like PMC could have reached the heights it has without an extremely dedicated personality at the helm.

PMC’s other catchphrase is: “… an interesting experience for anyone looking for the extraordinary.” Almost absurdly humble words from an entity that’s just celebrated their 100th release with a 10-year anniversary boxset compilation, pressed onto two white and two black pieces of vinyl. That release alone is 46 tracks long if you get the digital version, one track each from just about anyone who currently has something to do with the label. It’s a great starting point to check out their sound, but if you want to delve further, you can listen to nearly the whole catalog on their website. I’ve picked a few past and current favorites below, but really, let yourself stroll through their incredibly deep catalog to find your own favorite future beats from around the world.

Rumpistol and Red Baron – Floating


The next release forthcoming on the label, the veteran Danish producer Rumpistol of Rump Recordings teams up with fellow Dane Red Barron (currently living in LA) to create a haunting soundtrack of etherial broken pop. Snippets from the entire release can be heard above.

Long Arm – The Branches

“The Branches” is amazing organic future jazz that isn’t cheesy in the slightest, from Russian mastermind Long Arm. It’s like he was sitting there in a smoky jazz club in 1955 with a tape recorder running. The true inheritor of the mantle of DJ Cam and his ilk.

Flako – The Mesektet

Beat maestro Flako takes you on a playful stumbling journey through a forest of beats – this is a true beat tape, more simple sketches than fleshed out epics, but it works so well that it’s difficult to tear yourself away from it till the whole thing’s over.

Robot Koch and John Robinson: Robot Robinson

One of my favorite hip-hop albums in a long time – John Robinson not only has a totally unique voice and flow, but he’s a born storyteller, a craft sorely missed in today’s beat scene. Robot Koch is at his finest on production.

V/A: Finest Ego | Russian Beatmaker Compilation

My introduction to the incredibly fertile Russian beat scene, which is almost crushingly large and diverse – but fortunately this is the cream of the crop – 813, Moa Pillar, DZA, Pixelord, Damscray and a bunch of others are all here. Get familiar!

Asusu – Small Hours / Taurean

I had forgotten about this till just now, but Project Squared is home to some of the better recordings in the Future Garage world, with Asusu being one of my all time favorites in this sound. Hope to hear more from this offshoot of PMC in the future!

Ed.: I’d been following Project Mooncircle, too, particularly as they pop up around Berlin, though I think the whole label will have international appeal. Got favorite releases you’d like to add to Matt’s list? Let us know comments!

Kid Kameleon is a San Francisco-based DJ, promoter, writer, blogger, historian, archivist, and fan of electronic music. He joins us regularly for our “Created” series, doing whatever the digital equivalent of digging through crates is. (Nominees welcome for that term.)
http://kidkameleon.com

The center of the macular portion of your eye is called the fovea; it’s the portion of your retina that most nearly represents what you’re looking at directly. I adopted from my father the phrase “thinking off the fovea.” It means tackling a problem not by focusing directly on it, but what’s at the periphery. And in any creative question, that can be a great tool for harnessing different ways of thinking. In music production, it’s doubly true: by necessity, working on music production can take large amounts of time and effort, and the more effort you spend, the further you get from the ability to judge what you’re doing objectively or recall that initial creative spark was.

The question of how to approach tools in music technology comes up constantly. The “why are we all here and what are these things for?” question seems especially apt as I bunk in Frankfurt, Germany, a stone’s throw from cavernous halls full of gear for the annual Musikmesse trade show.

People talk about focusing on music instead of tools, as if the two can be neatly separated. These discussions can become circular, though, in groups of musicians.

So, instead, let’s ask chefs. Food and music are often connected, spiritually, socially, and metaphorically. (Music being the food of love and whatnot.) Both can be an aesthetic experience, but both also connect to some need in our being.

Can they connect philosophically? Practically?

Watch the video above and see if you nod along; I know I did not only personally but having interviewed artists across a great gamut of style and training. I won’t give away the content of the video, but I’m also curious:

What’s your knife?

Film by Cool Hunting, who do a wonderful series of shorts about design and inspiration, regularly relevant to music even when they’re about something else.

There was a time when the ability to record and playback music didn’t exist – such things were magical fiction no one had seen. So, the idea of playing one channel of recorded sound, then two channels, had to be invented. Artists hadn’t created something called an “album” until there were devices that played back that monophonic and stereophonic sound; even the idea that such a strange art counted as “music” had to be constructed. It’s obvious now, but it’s easy to forget that these musical forms were produced to cater to the capabilities of what was once a new device.

Now that your music device can do more than play a couple of channels of sound, will musicians find use in those features? Or are they just distractions? Can the fact that your music player knows where you are be as important as the fact that it can play audio?

We saw the work of Bluebrain, the Washington, DC-based duo of Hays Holladay & Ryan Holladay, before. They’ve been slowly building up a repertoire of locative art, starting with the Mall in DC. Their first full-length album came to Central Park, as documented beautifully in a short film that details the creation of the music and software, and various critics responding to its significance.

The most compelling image recurring in the film may be their scrawled-upon map of the city itself. It’s clear in those images that composition and place converge: the map itself becomes a score for the music, a topography of interaction through the landmark park.

One of those people interviewed in the film, briefly, is me. You’ll see some of the answers from the interviewees don’t entirely agree with others. Rather than focus on the novelty of the thing, I chose to look at their work as rooted in history. It’s not entirely clear whether the musical card game attributed to Mozart was his work, but various aleatoric and algorithmic approaches to composition pre-date even recording, let alone GPS. That to me gives a context and a continuity to these kinds of activities.

But beyond the meaning of “disruptive” technology as one person puts it, what the film conveys most is the artists’ love of where they are. They’re not making an album that’s an app, they hasten to add. They really just want you to hear this music in this particular place, moving in these particular ways. The fact that they record an organ that is part of where they grew up is added evidence.

If you’re going to South by Southwest, you can experience this application when you’re in Austin, as covered in an article on The Creators’ Project. You should do it if you’re there, especially as you otherwise can’t hear this music without going to the National Mall or New York’s Central Park.

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure App Album Debuts At SXSW

In a way, though, that seems to me the least interesting of these applications. Perhaps I’m biased in that I have a connection in my life to Manhattan and not so much to downtown Austin. But to me, the arguably-perverse requirement that you go to a place in order to hear a work seems part of the joy of these creations. Having it switch on in a place already full of iPhone-toting Web geeks deeply in love with GPS seems to take out the fun and the challenge. It comes to its audience; the other works demand an audience come to it.

What the duo succeeded in doing in New York and DC – even though these places are landmarks – is making the ever-present software somehow more ephemeral. It works in one place, and then it’s gone. Like the generative limited edition we saw last month, it undercuts the very ubiquity that seems to be digital music’s fundamental character.

And yes, greetings, New York and New Yorkers; I love where I am, but I do miss you. Unlike in software, in the real world, we can’t be more than one place at once. We have to be alive, and we have to do what we’re doing now. We are where we are, and we’re not somewhere else. If you aren’t there when someone plays, you miss it. You have to choose.

And perhaps that’s what is sometimes missing in our music and technology.

Previously:
An Album That Can Be Heard Only in One Location, in Interactive Ode to Washington, D.C.

More:
Bluebrain’s Music, locative and non-locative alike

A free app download for iOS, for use in Austin, TX

Listen in Central Park

I love reviews. One person writes on the iTunes App Store about the Central Park app, “Weirdest music we have ever heard. Creepy, eerie noise.” You can’t please everyone.

I’m also quoted in a story in The New York Times from December:
Central Park, the Soundtrack

I believe I did the interview from Amsterdam (ironically, the old one), and apparently said:

“It’s not just that they are using this as a novel delivery mechanism. It’s part of their musical process. They are forcing you to go to a place because that place for them is musically meaningful.”