[ni'k]

crushed under the weightlessness of infinite myspace mp3s

[atsonicpark]

"...Wanna go fer a ride?"

[ni'k]

my point is that our connection to a pool of infinite instant access product has had massively disorientating effects. i dont think that physical format fetishism is a valid solution, altho it does have its merits. but there is an element of nostalgic conservatism for the good old days of fordist punks buying vinyl after a days work. while vinyl does offer superior audio quality - thats really not what yr paying for even tho you pretend you are. oh look what i bought off volcanic tongue its so nice and shiny and new and its mine mine mine! £15 for it but it will just sit on the shelf because im already bored of it from my mp3 player cos it took 5 days to arrive in the post. what is this nostalgia for punk as product? maybe flac is the (immeadiate) future, with a laptop hooked up to a good preamp, but the finality of the start and finish time of the album, forever sealed into a vacuum of its own materiality - is not. the new physicality that sustains it is computer hardware/memory/bandwidth/instruments plugged into the laptop/software/video cameras/harddrives/cdrs instead of cds, jewel cases,paper inlays and record store racks. live, real time jamming from laptop to laptop is on the horizon, it will gain popularity when bandwidth and speed increase. people tuning into online jam channels. using the entire of the computer, not just the play button and speakers. websites AS album art not just a grave for it. with online video - still images are not the only option for album art. destabilisation of the frontman ego. poets tune in and out speaking over the live jam. lurkers on the edges (or software) edit and cut out worthwhile bits. yr own words fired back and forth at you. once spoken grappled grasped and edited by anyone. the new underground space - text fired out at anytime - no more of these fucking sites imitating the formats of old newspapers. in the new underground space noone needs to listen to the same song twice. bands form online - collaborating - elitist groups that can kick out anyone they dont like from joining in just like a mod can ban you from a board - groups share ideas and come together to collaborate and create new strategies - thus new patterns emerge and new connections can be made. i come back from the pyschiatric hospital where i used my hidden recording devices to gather tapes of schizophrenes gibbering - upload it - cut up and deconstruct - mix it with others - good source of vocals. everyday this week at 6pm there is a specific piece of a jam being broadcast by one group - since i am listening to it everyday at 6 oclock i am able to notice new patterns and repeating but altered moves in relation to the previous days jam. thus the listening expieriance is totally changed. music no longer has to be devised in a straight linear form in private and then repeated on a certain public stage or recording booth. or instead improvised on stage from beginning to end. think of the conventions in tv shows that are broadcast at the same time each week.

this jam is hot and so parts of it appear at 9pm on friday on this dudes compilation show - its widely heard cos the dude is respected for his connections to the streams and trusted to pluck out good moves for a representative whole of a certain section of the undergrond. genres are formed from a template as variable as the styistic differences and similarities of what you do on yr screen. in a certain scene sunday to tuesday are the days when most people go back over the jamming of the past week and the peak of the weekends and edit and assemble their work. were on a jam channel and reading out poetry thru my laptop mic - everyone else is listening - some people who arent listening right now but like my stuff have put tags on me so their recording my transmissions - as i read someone else is jamming along with fuckknows what instruments - some of what i speak might end up as a sample of someone elses peice - one of my lines might be the most talked about vocal hook of one of the maddest friday night jams - maybe most of it while just be spoken and not provoke and response - good - cos thats the way it should be - it only needs to be said once - if i keep repeating it and noone digs it then people wont listen to me - one of the last lines provokes more response - like backing vocals - harmonising with me is someone else - meanwhile loads of people are recording and editing and added affects to the lines - afterwards they will send me their work - i can see exactly who is listening and who is recording and what jams im active in - someone wants to dance so they turn on their webcam - everyones digging it so people are asking them would they show up friday and dance along to some of their jams - this dancing chick is developing quite a following - she brings credibility cos shes appeared in some cool stuff lately - people boast about having her present in their jams - someone else is reading words now - firing out unrelated garbled syntax- new connections and forms of language - im getting nudged by people - tiny boxes are appearing at one part of their screen - the people are nudging me with videos that they are playing along to the jam right now and they want me to see - i click on one which has got 15 other people watching - its good and syncs up well with the jam - the dude who is playing the video often collaborates with his partner who edits the video in realtime - splicing in different footage - these two dudes are jamming away - now i check the dudes stats - every particular group of jammers have preset conventions that they have decided upon in advace of the jam. (like in a song when the drum comes in and when the bass comes in etc.) - a stat box pops up telling me that in 25 seconds these dudes are obliged to add some gtr because it is one of their presets. so i know in 25 seconds some gtr is gonna be played - this syncs up well because in my group we have our own gtrist who has a preset to come in in 30 seconds - in 30 seconds when his channel opens his gtr will be audible to everyone on the jam. as the jam goes on because i have a lot of people connected to my jam i gain the priveledge to invite new musicians into the jam - other people can't do it at this moment because they haven't got enough connections - i announce to all the jammers that im gonna invite a drummer into the jam - i click something and an icon of a drumkit appears on everyones sidescreen with a counter counting down from 1min to 0 when he's gonna start playing. its all interconnected - our moves are gaining interest from other jam streams - people skirt around the edges of it peaking in and slowly edging their sounds in - we either push them out or let them in like a newcomer to an orgy. on my sidescreen i click on a scroller which replaces the mouse im using at the moment - this scroller moves the focus of my audio attention over a map of the jam - so i can focus on certain parts of the sound - i can listen in to the people on the edges playing their instruments to check them out - i can make the drums louder or highlight a particular sound i like in the mix. i can see where everyone elses audio attention is focused - all the listeners have avatars on the map and tend to congregate in spots where their friends like to listen in. i fire off some messages to some people who look cool who are realtively inactive in a jam far away - i fire them over a 30 second clip of what we're doing to intice them to come - the jam is going well - im getting enthusiastic texts from people who are reccing and editin it - hypnotic moves - quite a crowd is gathering - when things get heavy later on in the night people will prob broadcast vids of themselves fucking and masterbating and dancing to this jam - if we can keep up the pace and their attention - ive let in another gtrist - he has a link to the gtrist who is currently playing - the link alerts him when his friend is playing certain riffs so he can jump in and play along - as the jam goes on people are firing out ideas of what direction they want it to head in - we agree to shift and slow it down in 3 mins time - i run programmes that analyse the frequency and spectrum of the jam so far - they present me with print out patterns of it - i send out these patterns to everyone and they all send back patterns from past jams that their programmes say is a close match - thus we are able to plot the trajectory of our jam - the times when certain instruments or sounds come in and out - i decide at some point we want a really crazy freak out so i invite a painter - whenever he starts to paint over the video i set some sounds to sync up to his painting - his brushstrokes of colour are guiding along some of the sounds - new footage generated is spliced in - loads of people are skirting around the edges of this jam - sending in their ideas and strategies for conclusion - i look at their images and see which i think fits with ours - somebody is playing sped up footage of concrete statues crumbling - someone else who has the same footage is thus connected to the jam because when they click on their footage they are told someone is playing it in a certain jam right now - this person joins in and starts to jam - playing short bursts of footage of the crumbling statues and editing the colours - themes are being formed - someone decides to play out some sounds of concrete - someone else turns it into a beat - in reaction to this footage and sound someone else joins in with lyrics that perfectly fit in and everyones wowed by the cool connection.

thus the new format of art is closest to a pyschotic hallucination - a stream of unreal vision/hearing. we will look back on the seperation between music and video as archaic. old pictures of massive record collections will provoke the reaction: "You mean, back then people just listened to recordings of each other with nothing to look at?"

[ni'k]

in the past - scenes congregated around particular geography - but that wont be as much of a constraint in the future. punks transported records from america to the uk and back - black flag blazed a trail across america and new bands formed in their wake as they went - but now we dont have to wait as long for our emotional reactions to art to alter it - soon there will be no barriers of participation.

in the past our ability to interact with each other was limited to being in a very close proximity to each other - within eye/earshot at least. our evolutionary path leads us closer and closer. we are entering into a mass hallucinatory pyschosis - the type of artistic expieriance that will make what we're doing now seem as primitive as a cave painting. look around this early primtive internet and you will notice that most of what you see is just a image of a previous physical format of media. websites look like newspapers - pdf files are basically pictures of peices of paper. this represents a transition from physicality which is the ultimate destiny of human evolution. if, like me, you believe that humans are destined to evolve into a reality that our dreams are only tiny hints at, a reality that has laws of physics similar to the ones our dreams have now, then the current technological possibilites are surely exciting. but it is surely a luddite stance to simply recreate cds books radio and tv on a computer. yet are only beginning to shatter the restrictive boundaries between them. ive often thought of tv as (government and celebrity oligarchy) prescribed imagination for those that can't (or are too frightened too) hallucinate during the day. we should see our current techno/artistic social interactions as a primitive tool we are clumsily fumbling about with in an effort to ignite the fire of mass hallucinatory pyschosis in ways that are increasingly imaginable. or something. yeah.

also as a footnote to this i was thinking about what i said before about people dancing to the jam. it seems that the desire to maintain an image of ourselves is one of the most important things in this media age. but imagine how our images will be able to be totally shattered and eviscerated of all constancy and normality in the type of expeiriances i have been describing - imagine dancing in the jam on yr webcam and having people edit and splice you into their jam videos/people edit yr image and play it back to you - people send you videos of their own images trying to have sex with you - imagine the narcissitic potential haha! post a pic of yrself naked and watch loads of people edit it with their software and send you back videos of them fucking you haha!



in the spirit of such jamming im not gonna reread and reedit that into something more coherent until later so thats the first burst.

[atsonicpark]

That was fucking brilliant. Seemed like a Burroughs novel at times!... But in all seriousness, I don't know what flac is, so I can't help you... But in all seriousness, I am just at the point where I don't really care anymore. There was a time when I really, truely believed I could hear every great band ever, and I set about on my search to do so. At this point, I maybe, if I'm lucky, have heard 0.00000001% of the great music ever. There's just too fucking much! I buy a few cd's, I see a lot of bands, I download tons of shit, but I just can't keep up with all that's coming out, all that's came out, etc. It's overwhelming to the point of exhaustion, especially if you're someone like me who really, genuinely has OCD anyway. Gotta hear it ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I do miss the days when I had to actively search out bands, to an extent. There's some pluses and minuses with everything, but when I was 13 and discovering Melt Banana and Babyland and Dillinger Escape Plan and Atari Teenage Riot and Mr. Bungle and all that shit for the first time.. jesus. That was like entering a whole new world. A lot of music has excited me since, but really, thinking long and hard about it, I'm not really surprised anymore. The last musician to truely excite me, since I only REALLY started listening him in the past year and a half, is probably Fahey. That opened up a new world for me.. recently. And man what a world. The problem with me is that I've seeked out music for so long, and I've played music for so long, that I just get kind of burnt out with all of it. I hate my own music most of the time, I hate the way I play instruments, you know? I am not as critical as most music, giving it the benefit of the doubt unless it's completely tuneless and artless in a boring way. Sound in general is really interesting to me, but it's not as interesting as it used to be. I miss that. But you know what? It's my fault. I can easily stop downloading. I can easily unplug the burner. Well, my burner doesn't work. So, I could unplug my friend's burner. I think I'm going to do that in the immediate future. Just as soon as I finish downloading the Muslimgauze discography. That was a joke. But yeah, it's pretty hilarious and frightening how much information is out there, for us to consume. Fuck it, I dunno. It's not just music. The world in general has become too big and too... creepy. I don't know what an iphone is, I barely know what an ipod is, people show me their cellphones and I'm like "wow, that's nuts!" I don't pay attention, and it seems like there's this massive movement growing around me. Most of the music I listen to anymore is minimal. I live in the woods, so it's fun.. when I'm not worried about snakes.. to go into the woods and explore. I like to just be alone most of the time. Not alone and on the computer. I like to sit alone, in a silent room, and just think.

I think our whole world is becoming more cold and distant, which is odd and somewhat contradictory because these devices we're using are made to connect with people. However, in a way, this "connection" is REPLACING interaction with your fellow man. I know a few dudes who only exist online and that's it. Fucking WoW and shit. But when the real world is so fucked up, it's hard to blame them. I don't feel like i've lost my stride as far as connecting with other people goes... but I certainly do feel a bit out of the loop when people talk about their bluray players and shit. What the fuck is a blu ray? Didn't I just recently, like 3 mnoths ago, start replacing some of my favorite VHS movies with DVD's? And there's already more formats since THEN?! What the fuck?!

I dunno. Just in general, I am trying not to think about these things. There's more important things in life worth thinking about. I just want to get back to the simpler times in life, like when I was a child. Or when I was 13 and discovering Melt Banana for the first time. You know? I want to get back to those times. But first I need to unplug the internet for a few days.

I realize my reply didn't totally reply to the points you brought up in your post, but I think this overwhelming cultural explosion of insanity and technology kind of motivates all of us to be the way we are. Your post was brilliant and hilarious, btw.

[atsonicpark]

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.

[ni'k]

by the way flac is just an audio file that is uncompressed unlike an mp3.

hopefully my ramblings will provoke some discussion

[terminal pharmacy]

nice writing ni'k

but i'll take the pub and a live band anyday, i'm not scared to go out on thestreet and interact with people in the flesh

[Glice]

Originally Posted by ni'k

"You mean, back then people just listened to recordings of each other with nothing to look at?"

I quite often wonder why I listen to these things that are just some disconnected sounds, with nothing to look at. Maybe the hegemony of the recorded era is passing, but I don't think it'll usher in your cyborg fantasy, it'll more likely see the return to live shows.

If memory serves, Future Sound of London were pushing the notion of ISDN gigs somewhere in the mid-90s (possibly earlier), but I don't think it caught on. I do like the idea of jamming online, but it's hard enough jamming with real-world people - so much of jamming is in half-observing facial ticks and a general 'vibe' in the room, you couldn't possibly have that without physical presence.

(And what Herr TP said).

[ni'k]

well the point of this type of technology is that it could facilitate new types of live expieriances - as for the half observed facial ticks and general vibe of the room - you would still have these because you could have video of each person in the room on a particular screen. also the vibe of the room would be far enhanced by the this technology cos the room would be virtual. you could easily have film of each person jamming live using such a technology that would cut out the backround and superimpose each person together onto a room on screen.

if anything this would make live shows in a pub better - cos people who arent there can watch them as well. we've already seen that with live streams of shows. im sure very soon we'll see a stream of a live show were people who dance along on their webcams or make posters or whatever make up an online crowd who you can watch on yr second screen or in a smaller window if you only have one screen.

[Glice]

I like your optimism. That's a good thing. But... we're talking pubs here. Probably my favourite show of the year was one person (a good friend) playing to 4 people (including 1x bar staff and 1x sound guy). I can't envisage any situation whereby that would've been enhance by voyeurs on the interbox. Having said that, I've been thinking of ways to make long-form gigs (6+ hours) tenable, and there's a few pointers in your first post to think about.

[max]

brilliant post all the same - i see myself in what you say.

i think the destabilization of "no barriers anymore" is starting to drive me a bit too crazy in the flesh. my sucky town seems now much more than just a cage. it seems like a place where all could happen if i barricade myself into my room and stay online all fucking day.

to make a fitting example: we did our album with chout from minnesota (usa) and xavier from catalunya (spain). now all i am dying for is to play with these two dudes physically, at the same time in the same room.

knowing that much probably that won't ever happen makes me cringe.
but at the same time I feel the paradox of this because without the net, i would never have met them in the first place.

so it's really a whole disconnection of our selves from the space we physically occupy.

don't know if it's for the best.

the bit about the music biz is just too right.
no labels are taking the risk to get into bands that aren't touring.
no booking agencies are getting bands that aren't on a label.

it's a vicious circle.

i'm giving away my band's debut album on mp3, 128kbps.
anyone interested?

Ni'k, there's some interesting writing in there. My only problem with it is its vision of modernity as something so aggressively assertive of its own self, rather than a more natural, relaxed, and passive process of assimilation of what's at your disposal in the current reality. Which so far seems to be - give or take the odd war or desease that have been here for quite a while, anyway - the more likely scenario.

[atsonicpark]

Originally Posted by ni'k

in the past - scenes congregated around particular geography - but that wont be as much of a constraint in the future. punks transported records from america to the uk and back - black flag blazed a trail across america and new bands formed in their wake as they went - but now we dont have to wait as long for our emotional reactions to art to alter it - soon there will be no barriers of participation.

in the past our ability to interact with each other was limited to being in a very close proximity to each other - within eye/earshot at least. our evolutionary path leads us closer and closer. we are entering into a mass hallucinatory pyschosis - the type of artistic expieriance that will make what we're doing now seem as primitive as a cave painting. look around this early primtive internet and you will notice that most of what you see is just a image of a previous physical format of media. websites look like newspapers - pdf files are basically pictures of peices of paper. this represents a transition from physicality which is the ultimate destiny of human evolution. if, like me, you believe that humans are destined to evolve into a reality that our dreams are only tiny hints at, a reality that has laws of physics similar to the ones our dreams have now, then the current technological possibilites are surely exciting. but it is surely a luddite stance to simply recreate cds books radio and tv on a computer. yet are only beginning to shatter the restrictive boundaries between them. ive often thought of tv as (government and celebrity oligarchy) prescribed imagination for those that can't (or are too frightened too) hallucinate during the day. we should see our current techno/artistic social interactions as a primitive tool we are clumsily fumbling about with in an effort to ignite the fire of mass hallucinatory pyschosis in ways that are increasingly imaginable. or something. yeah.

also as a footnote to this i was thinking about what i said before about people dancing to the jam. it seems that the desire to maintain an image of ourselves is one of the most important things in this media age. but imagine how our images will be able to be totally shattered and eviscerated of all constancy and normality in the type of expeiriances i have been describing - imagine dancing in the jam on yr webcam and having people edit and splice you into their jam videos/people edit yr image and play it back to you - people send you videos of their own images trying to have sex with you - imagine the narcissitic potential haha! post a pic of yrself naked and watch loads of people edit it with their software and send you back videos of them fucking you haha!



in the spirit of such jamming im not gonna reread and reedit that into something more coherent until later so thats the first burst.

this is the funniest fucking post on this board!

[ni'k]

wowed By The Cool Connection Y'all

[pbradley]

I sent a guitar track to slavo and he couldn't do anything with it.

I would hate it if forming a band offline was absorbed in The Blob of retro mannerisms, partly because I hate retro mannerisms by definition and I'm too lame for hallucinogenic skype rock.

[ni'k]

yeah yeah you're so cool i know.

cooley bumped this.

it needs work.

[pbradley]

Originally Posted by ni'k

yeah yeah you're so cool i know.

No, bro, you're cool.

Maybe ASP bumped it having been reminded of it by a fan-made sex video tape to one of his tracks? I would like to see that, for socio-political reasons entirely, of course.

[ni'k]

dont you mean you are?

[pbradley]

If I say yes, would you write a polemic against irony?