Gneumatic

The summer has certainly flown by, as evidenced by the embarrassing amount of time since my last post. It’s been almost a month since the Double Take exhibition (work produced during Interactivos?), but I wanted to at least post a few comments/thoughts before moving on to school-related posts.

It ended up being a great two weeks: Busy, fun, educational, stressful and frustrating at times, but ultimately a pretty positive experience, and great preparation for returning to school. I was assigned to work on Dan Wilcox’s SoundMetal project, which had been my first choice. I also helped Sarah Cook and the curatorial team from CRUMB document process and product, which took the form of the workshop site and the project wiki, which was maintained by the individual project teams.

Because the time frame was so compressed, and because Dan was fully committed to doing the entire project in hardware (meaning no Arduino, no Processing, etc.), my role in fabrication/production was somewhat limited (though I now have plenty of resources to read up on for learning to build analog circuits), so I didn’t gain as much hands-on learning as I might have liked, though I did get to use the laser cutter and work in the wood shop, which was fun.

Anyway, no point in me recapitulating everything here, as you can read about most of it on the Interactivos? blog and wiki, except for the text I wrote for the poster that accompanied our installation, which is after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

For The Wire’s excellent Jukebox column, an interviewer plays songs for an artist to identify, which in turn serve as a jumping off point for discussing musical influences and interests. In this month’s issue, Philip Sherburne tries to stump Carl Craig. The whole interview is great, but I particularly loved this quote about learning to do edits and remixes on reel-to-reel tape (!):

I mean it could be very easy, if you know what you’re doing. The issue is how to keep track of what’s where. So once you cut something out, if you want to use it later, you have to mark it. So for instance if you’re doing something in a computer program and you cut a piece here and a piece there, you can save them to the clipboard or you can cut and paste them into another document, or you can just put it in a playlist if you want. But I cut it like I cut tape, I don’t put things in playlists. But you had to know where that fucking tape was, and we’re talking, 1200 feet is what a typical tape is. I think a 10-inch reel is 1200 feet, or a seven-inch reel is 1200 feet and a 10-inch reel is 1500 feet. So if you’ve got, like, 15 minutes of mix, and you’re doing 30 inches per second, you’re only gonna get 15, 20 minutes on the tape. So you cut it, you’re trying to make 30 minutes out of 15 minutes of music, it’s just like — you’ve got, like, five different mixes on there, and there’s a piece here that you like, and there’s a fuckup so you’ve gotta find another piece that you like, and you might want to turn it around and change things… It’s much easier if you’re with a record and you want to repeat something, so you play a part you want to repeat, you push play and you wind it back and play it again… But when you’re cutting up shit that’s at like three minutes, and you want something that’s at 10 minutes, we’re talking probably 700 feet of tape that’s going past to find what you really want. That’s some crazy shit.

Read the whole interview here.

This documentation of an installation by Nate Harrison traces the history of the “Amen break.” A drum track originating from an obscure, late-sixties funk album, the Amen break was sampled ubiquitously in late-80s hip hop, and later served as the foundation for the entire genre of drum and bass. Asks Harrision, “Hundreds of tracks, dozens of DJs, clubs and events, in effect an entire sub-culture based on this one drum loop, I mean, based on six seconds from 1969… What’s the fascination?”

Read the rest of this entry »