“This sounds crazy. I want to see this. I think I may have to see this to understand what you mean. But I want to see this.”

David Dodson, journalist, writer, and electronic musician (“Primus Luta” and, most recently at our Handmade Music series, Concrete Sound System), has just told me he wants to cover New York’s Unsound Festival, the Polish-based electronic and “advanced” music festival.

Only he wants to cover it … fictionally.

There’s a love story. There’s drama. There a bits of review, interwoven with a story. In place of the usual omniscient narrator that we find in music journalism, delivering pronouncements about the State of Music from on high and dissecting the programming, we hear reflections on the work the way you do when you’re actually there – snippets of commentary from friends outside the venue, internal monologue in your head. But these thoughts come out of the heads of made-up protagonists, who then rub shoulders with the real characters spotted at the event. (Warning: if you were at Unsound, you might make a cameo.)

It’s trippy, disorienting, frequently comical, and for me, at least, leaves me half-guiltily aching for more.

It’s worth reading all the excerpts in order in the blog format in which we’re able to present them, but a few examples to whet your appetite (or, if I’m lucky, give you some idea what the heck I’m talking about):

There are drops of sweat on her lashes when Gisella finally opens her eyes. She looks at Lil’ Man who is smiling like a man who knows he’s done good. She smiles back licking the presperation off her upper lip only slightly suggestive. Lil’ Man notices but turns to give an nod to Chancha for keeping her there with him on the dance floor. Only two other ladies, who probably arrived with Chancha, could keep up with the cumbia influenced rhythms. It didn’t keep others from moving to the beat, but even with her eyes closed, Gisella knew they had been the center of attention.
“Let’s go get some air,” she says into his ear before leading him through the crowd.
As they walk down the corridor where people are still waiting to get in, Lilo comes behind them from the back room.
“Oh my god,” she says. ”I don’t know who’s on now, but whoever was doing the last set in the back room just made my night.” There are more people outside waiting to get in and small groups gathered in nicotine circles. ”You missed him playing Madonna.”
“No way,” Gisella replies as they walk toward the curb where she recognizes Praveen and Sougwen.
“But did you see Dave Q voguing behind his laptop?” Praveen asks over hearing Lilo’s enthusiasm. The guy standing next to him responds by striking a pose.
“Do you know Dave?” Sougwen asks Gisella.
“Only by reputation,” Lilo says extending her hand.

…or…

“While I don’t feel cheated,” Lilo says between sips of wine, “I do feel like I missed something. I mean it was Morton Subotnick, the Buchla was there, and he performed Silver Apples on the Moon, but something was missing.”
“He didn’t patch live,” Lil Man says.
“Yes, that is it isn’t it?” Lilo thinks about it taking a sip. ”It’s funny how laptops throw everything off.”
“You couldn’t really see what he was doing,” Gisella chimes in. ”You could see it all working but you couldn’t see the work.”
“He had a controller near the laptop,” Lil Man notes. ”He was doing something with that.”
“Yeah,” Lilo says after another sip. ”I mean you have to think, why wouldn’t he use a laptop? Can you imagine how hard it must have been to create Silver Apples back in the sixties, let alone perform it. Even now with the technology we have it’s an amazing achievement.”
“Most def,” Lil Man affirms.
“But I do wish he had pulled at least one patch cable,” Lilo adds before finishing the glass.
“Most def.”

…or…

The sound of an ambulance trails off behind her. Suddenly a female voice moves in only to be accompanied by at least ten different iterations of the same voice. They are all being manipulated diferently and floating around the space. Gisella closes her eyes and could see the voices sweeping, like ghosts in a haunted house. It was clearly the Pamela Z piece, but the description didn’t really do the effect of it justice. The title and even the description made it sound out of place. What did “The Star Spangled Banner” have to do with horror? But listening to Pamela Z’s deconstruction and recomposition of voice in the surround space, at this point Gisella recognizes, Pamela is the first artist to truly create a scene from a horror movie. So why was she thinking about sex?

Author David Dodson explains the project:

I’ve been thinking of moving back into fiction writing for a few years now, but fiction that deals with real historical places and events. A few years back I wrote a novella entitled “The Moshi” which placed characters in the middle of New York during the black out of 2003. When working with fictional characters it’s always interesting to think about how they respond to ‘real life’ situations.

For “Above the Threshold” I wanted to really embrace that. Rather
than create a world in which the characters can do whatever I saw fit, I decided to create the characters and place them in our world to see what they’d do. I started out with a very simple premise – a female lead working in the music industry attends the 2011 Unsound festival. I then attended the festival myself and ‘observed’ how my characters acted within the settings that the festival presented.

During the course of the festival I penned over 50k words of this
storyline, and in essence watched the plot unfold. It will be some
time before the full piece is ready to go to print, but I’m offering
up some excerpts from it on the CDM partner Noisepages site. These excerpts may or may not end up in the final draft, but will give some glimpses of the characters, the festival and how the two came together.

I only wish fictional characters could inhabit all the events we attend. I suppose, in fact, they could.

The full work, emerging in blog form:

Above the Threshold

Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools from Stephen Ramsay on Vimeo.

In an extended video that begins with Radio City’s Rockettes and kettle drum players, Stephen Ramsay explains a litany of technology’s most elusive topics, in terms anyone could understand — no, really. I dare you to ask anyone to watch a few clips of this video, regardless of whether they’re regular readers of this site. Secrets such as why the programming language Lisp inspires religious devotion, or how someone in their right mind would ever consider programming onstage as a form of musical performance, represent the sort of geekery that would seem to be the domain of an elite. But in the dry deadpan of this Professor of English, those mysteries actually begin to dissolve.

I love the title: “Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools.”

I doubt very seriously that live coding is the right performance medium for all computer musicians. (I expect I’ve occasionally made people wince with a couple of lines of code in a workshop example; I shudder to think of scripting in front of an audience. I’d probably be less disastrous at stand-up comedy.) But Ramsay reveals what live coding music is. It’s compositional improvisation, and code simply lays bare the workings of the compositional mind as that process unfolds. Not everyone will understand the precise meaning of what they see, but there’s an intuitive intimacy to the odd sight of watching someone type code. It’s honest; there’s no curtain between you and the wizard.

That should be a revelation about other computer music performance instruments, even the MPC. They, too, bring in elements that are as compositional as they are about performance (though the MPC has the unique power to be both at the same time). And sometimes, it’s seeing the naked skeleton of that process that allows audiences back into the performance.

The live-coding composer in question is Andrew Sorensen, who has live-coded an orchestra and does, indeed, also use samplers in the tradition of Akai. Whether you do it in front of an audience or not, you can try his gorgeous Impromptu music language, among other tools.

If you’re messing with code at all, even just to make an occasional bleep in Csound or picture in Processing, it’s worth watching Stephen’s videos. In fact, if you compose at all, it might be worth watching. (See also his reflections on writing, programming, and algorithm.) After all, even someone strumming out a tune on an acoustic guitar and scratching the results on paper is using some sorts of algorithms.

This video has been out for a few months, but I sometimes wonder how we got into the business with blogs of posting stories with expiration dates in the hours. It’s like buying milk in Manhattan.

Thanks to Philip Age for the tip.

Reading Peter Kirn’s articles on mix automation and microphone types in the new Electronic Musician Personal Studio Buyer’s Guide left me feeling a bit sad and tired. Don’t misunderstand: They’re very good articles, and I’m always glad to see younger colleagues getting their byline out there. That wasn’t where the sadness came from.

Part of my reaction, as it turned out, arose from the fact that these pieces are reprinted excerpts from Peter’s Real World Digital Audio, a book project for which I was the editor. So I was subliminally aware that the material was not fresh because I had actually seen it before.

But there’s a bigger issue here: I think I’ve written too many how-to and what-is-it articles over the last 30 years. Been there, done that, bought the coffee mug. A few years back I was looking for technical material on near-field monitors. I found a cover story on this precise topic in an old issue of Keyboard — and then realized I had written the cover story. I had no memory of having done so.

I know there’s still a need for features that introduce musicians to the concepts, because new musicians are always coming along. But at this point in my life, I mainly want to play music. With writers like Peter on the job, there’s no need for me to write another word. (I will make an exception when Reason 4.0 arrives on my doorstep next week. That’s one product review I’m itching to write.)

Most of the technological challenges I deal with today are not the sort that can be turned into magazine articles. I just bought a pair of JBL Eon G2 powered speakers, for instance, from Sweetwater — and I’m sending them back in exchange for some passive JBL speakers with smaller woofers. Two reasons: The Eons’ massive size (I’m getting too old to lift them without risk of injury), but more importantly their massive bass response. If you’re doing dance music, you’d probably love the Eons. But in order to pump my backing tracks through them at a gig, I would have to remix everything to dial back the overwhelming bass.

The process of educating myself about the frequency response of monitors was laborious, and made worse by the profound shortage of reliable specs. Most of the so-called “specs” on loudspeaker frequency response that I found on the Web are pure marketing fluff. That’s not a suitable topic for a magazine article, though. For one thing, it would alienate advertisers. For another, there’s very little helpful information I could pass on to readers, other than, “Do some listening tests.”

And please don’t tell anyone that I sweet-talked Sweetwater into taking back the Eons after I had auditioned them. I’m sure they don’t want to be in the rent-a-loudspeaker-for-a-week-for-free business. The Internet is a great place for low prices, but if you need to do hands-on or ears-on comparison shopping, PLEASE buy from your local retailer. Don’t use the floor stock and then buy online. It may cost a little more, but you’re making an investment in that store so that it won’t have closed its doors the next time you need to check out some gear.

Here’s another example: I bought a new laptop (also for gigging), and an M-Audio Ozone keyboard-plus-audio-interface to turn the laptop into a studio-in-a-backpack. Way cool! I already had an M-Audio Fast Track Pro, which is a better quality interface and would be more useful in clubs, where I certainly don’t need the Ozone’s spongy two-octave keyboard. Trouble is, only one M-Audio USB ASIO interface can exist in Windows at a time. When both the Ozone and Fast Track Pro drivers are installed, the Ozone can’t use ASIO, though it can still use high-latency DirectSound.

I don’t know whether this is a Windows problem or an M-Audio problem. Either way, uninstalling and reinstalling drivers over and over isn’t impossible, it’s just annoying. But try turning that inconvenient fact into a magazine article. As they say in Texas, “That dog won’t hunt.”

A few weeks ago, I turned down an offer from a major publisher to write a how-to book on the soon-to-be-released next version of Ableton Live. It wasn’t a very good offer, but the real reason I gave it a pass was because, you know, Live comes with a manual. Why would anybody want to buy a separate book about it? That makes very little sense to me.

If you buy a copy of Live (and it’s a terrific piece of software), here’s what you should do: Make music. Make music all day and far into the night. Don’t worry about mix automation until you need mix automation. When you need it, read the manual. If you don’t understand the manual, and if clicking on a bunch of stuff on-screen doesn’t help, post a few messages on a user forum and learn from other musicians. Then go back to making music.

At 10:00 tonight, after three hours working on a synth arrangement in the computer, I pulled out the cello and started improvising over my new track. That’s purely enjoyable. I tried a few fancy licks, but mainly I just played the tune. You might think it’s a pretty good tune (or not), but I think it’s terrific, because I recorded exactly what I wanted to hear.

One reason it’s enjoyable is because I’ve put a LOT of hours into learning to play the cello, and a lot more hours into thinking about chords and melodies. I know how to produce the sounds that I want, in real time, using a bow.

Is there a magazine article in that? No. The message is way too short and sweet: Play music. Don’t get distracted — life is too short for distractions. Just play music, that’s all. Do exactly what you like musically, and stay focussed, and work hard at it, and get better. Become amazing. If you can find other people to play with, you’ll have more fun, and you’ll learn some people skills on the side. If you can’t find anyone who is into what you’re into, do it all yourself.

Find some people who want to listen, and play your music for them. Watch their faces while you play. Learn a new instrument, or re-learn an old instrument. Care about tone. Care about rhythm. Care about chords and intonation and technique. Play with passion and insight. Continue until the world ends. Then stop.