Posts Tagged ‘science fiction’

you’re a jerk (en espanol)

Thanks to the Soundway’s Panama! comps we know about how much amazing music has come out of this tiny (but geographically fascinating) country. Chief Boima (SF heads can catch him spin, among other places, at Little Baobab) has posted an amazing remix of You’re A Jerk. There’s also a Nigerian remix, but I have to agree with Boima on this one, the Panama version kills it.

Also, of somewhat related interest, although I have a basic familiarity with Jerkin’ and the culture that it entails for over a year now thanks to the internet, it was only this month that I actually personally witnessed a black teenager in skinny jeans. I sometimes like to think about how science fiction was once the stuff people would write about concerning the future, but these days science fiction mostly consists of stuff going on in the present, but perhaps we will soon be entering a phase where science fiction is the stuff that we are writing about from the past that we are only now fully aware of.

biohacking the sound wave

This Economist article about biohacking got me wondering about what possibilities this developing new class of geeks might create for musicians? After all, if the field is undergoing a revolution comparable to the computer revolution from 30 years ago it stands to reason that this will eventually have a big impact on our culture as well. Think the “I’m T-Pain” iPhone app is cool? Wait until you consume a bacterial culture that alters the properties of your voice to make you sound like Diamanda Galas. You could design clouds of invisible spores to change the tonal properties of sound waves in a given area, thereby improving the acoustics of a room and creating a much better overall soundsystem culture. Micro-orchestras of organisms that produce alien clicks, buzzes, chirps, etc. could be produced in a vat, which Villalobos would use to produce the first micro-house radio hit as a curious public started listening to strange, subtle sounds in a different context. People would start pumping these organisms full of drugs to produce stranger and stranger melodies, and the genre of field recordings would enter into a golden era as the biohacks permeated every inch of our social spaces.