When I first started this blog I was posting music I created on Ableton. The reason that I haven’t done more of that is because the program began crashing on me on a regular basis. In fact it got worse and worse, and eventually trying to make the most basic adjustments caused crashes. So I’ve given up on Ableton. I’m going to look into how well Logic works out in a bit, it seems like a lot of producers I admire have good things to say about it, so that’s encouraging.
Probably the most weird and stupid thing about the world today is that we don’t have awesome music making programs on smart phones. What’s up with that?
I admire a lot of electronic music. The more technology you use, the more chances of failure are possible. So people that are able to overcome these types of obstacles deserve respect, but there’s also a virtue to folk & acoustic music, which has less opportunities for failure.
The financial crisis indicated that human society has not determined how to properly evaluate risk. Is it better to play it safe and do what works, or seek out ambitions that may result in catastrophe?
Similarly, with novels one could create short, concise works of arts, all polished & pristine, without a flaw in sight. But then there are also the authors that write big, sprawling novels, totally messy, chaotic, unable to be tamed into some kind of orderly thing.
Vacillations.
Tags: literature, markets, philosophy
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My friend Dan Haab did a remix for the first song I posted on this blog. Unfortunately when I was trying to send him the individual tracks I did something really stupid in Ableton, and the upshot is he only really had the guitar tracks to work with. So he transformed the guitars into distant sonic glaciers, and reimagined everything else, adding some appealing Gas-like atmospherics. All of this is pretty fantastic. One of my favorite cards in the Oblique Strategies set suggests to remove whatever you feel is most important about the piece. Creative destruction creates room for richer growth.
Trips One (Dan Haab Remix)
César Aira’s novel An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter wrestles with the sort of questions facing an artist in an alien and unfamiliar environment: What is the best way to render this environment intelligible? What does one perspective eliminate from another perspective? How much detail can be sacrificed before there is a critical loss to the total picture? Can an artist do justice to his/her subject material, and simultaneously fulfill the demand of a fickle marketplace?
As the digital world accelerates social transformations everything is thrown into crisis (opportunity and danger); no looking back.
Tags: avicenna, literature, mp3s
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