ale{atori}c

I can’t find much info about this film about the oud and banjo psych-folk pioneer, but I’d love to see it. Hope it comes to New Orleans sometime. Apparently it’s by Bull’s daughter.

Arthur Magazine: Sandy Bull documentary showing in Brooklyn

sandybull.net

My friend proswell has re-released “Konami” on his own Eerik Inpuj Sound netlabel. It’s 8 years old but now remastered; a really nice collection of impulse tracker songs in the IDM genre. For fans of Boards of Canada, Autechre, etc.

You can download Konami at Bandcamp. You can pay any amount you like, even $0.

thanks to experimental electronics group IGE*timer and maggie at mckeown’s books and difficult music a handful of new orleanians were able to get a crash course in circuit bending at loyola’s school of music’s electronics lab.

for those wanting to take this further, i just ran across some good resources at casper electronics for circuit benders.

i am also intrigued by their Drone Lab V2, which is a souped-up version of dan’s homebrew cigar-box oscillator box, aka the “ass tone.”

SoundHack is the venerable music processing platform; it’s been around as long as I’ve known you could make music on Macs. I had no idea it even still existed. The site is worth looking at, plus there’s some cool free delay plugins and the like. Thanks to proswell for the tip.

I’ve been pruning my digital music collection in preparation of moving hard drives, and coming across lots of old Chef Menteur mp3s that we had intended to do something with, or were otherwise interesting, but never saw the light of day for one reason or another. Some are unfinished tracks, some are live versions of tracks, and some are finished but just didn’t make it on a CD for one reason or another. At one point we thought there might be a reason to go back and release some of these on some kind of official compilation, but since we have two full albums of new material we’re still working on, it’s not likely going to happen, so I think it’s time to set these free to the world. I am going to upload them as I come across them on the Chef Menteur blog here:

chefmenteur.org

Not just using laptops, but coding in a live performance? See this story on BBC News’ web site.

No mentions of what languages are being used, but screen shots seem to suggest Max/MSP and either CSound or ChucK.

[preface: obivously, this blog is going to be about more than music, I guess, since I don’t really have a better place to write about this and I really don’t want to create another blog. ]

Last week after much procrastination, the wife and I finally saw Food, Inc, which directly assaulted something I’d been fairly ambivalent about for over a decade now.

Let me set something straight: I love eating meat. I love steak, hamburgers, fried chicken, bacon, pepperoni, you name it. In particular I love roast beef po-boys, Cuban sandwiches, Reubens and above all, North Carolina-style pulled pork. For this latter my passion was extreme: with my old band Shinola we went on several day tours, during one of these Barbequests™ in eastern Carolina we ate at five Q shacks in one day — and created the first N.C. BBQ resource ever on the web back in 1996. In the past few years I’ve had great times smoking pork shoulders in homemade smokers (a la Alton Brown) and homemade hot vinegar sauce made from peppers grown in my backyard.

But before that, as a late teenager and in college I was a vegetarian… not primarily for health reasons, but for all the reasons this film brought back to me. When I started eating meat again it was the result of going through some especially dark times that brought on a nihilistic phase, and while my family was probably relieved that I was eating like a normal American again, I felt like I had sold out somewhat.

And now, the food industry is more consolidated, more streamlined, more disgusting, more dangerous, and more cruel than ever. I don’t want to say too much more, other than you owe it to yourself to see this movie. (You might have to wait for it to come out on DVD at this point, depending where you live.)

It hasn’t made me commit to be a full-on vegetarian again, but it’s made me change my habits about where I buy my food, and not just meat either.

I’ve been researching places to buy meat that comes from cruelty free farms (preferably local), both for home cooking and restaurants. New Orleans, where I live, is a culinary Mecca, but not particularly green. I’m hoping that some of my favorite places to eat are thinking about getting on the bandwagon, if they haven’t already.

Otherwise, sad to say, no barbecue for me.

I was looking at the site logs for Backporch Revolution and noticed that a lot more hits were coming in from YouTube. It seems that people have recently been taking an interest in my good friend Bryan Killingsworth’s “Sound Patterns” series. This got me looking at them again, and remembering how cool this experiment was.

Using a laser pointer, plastic wrap, and a metal bowl for the visuals, Bryan cranked up his modular analog synthesizer and made some trippy visual patterns that co-relate nicely to the sine waves he’s tuning.

For information on how this was done take a look. The links to the YouTube videos are at the bottom of the page.

Group Doueh: Treeg Salaam LP SF048

I found out recently that the obscure world music label Sublime Frequencies (both the music and the label are somewhat obscure, but not nearly as obscure as say Backporch Revolution), founded by the guys from the Sun City Girls had a way for me to easily rectify my almost complete lack of possessing the ability to listen to any part of their catalog on demand.

You can get the entire SF catalog through SF 039 here. It’s just a data DVD, so I am sure there’s lots of awesome pictures, art and liner notes that you’ll miss, but almost all of these CDs and LPs are out of print, so for someone like me, this was about the only way to get them.

Included is the relatively well-known (among world music fans) album by Omar Souleyman, Highway to Hassake: Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria. But there is also lots of really great cassette tape field recordings from deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia, radio broadcasts of unknown pop songs and chatter from Africa and the Middle East, religious and tribal music from some forgotten provinces of Asian highlands, and way too much more to even begin to comprehend.

I’ve been playing the collection in iTunes on shuffle for a few days now, and I still haven’t gotten sick of it.

I thought I had posted this link to the blog before, but it appears that I have not. Apparently, it was featured earlier this week on NPR.

http://www.opensoundneworleans.com