I can’t breakdance. I want to learn. It looks like fun. When I worked for the Parks Department I was involved in their afterschool programs. One of them met in the Alfred E Smith Recreation Center in the housing project of the same name. In the basketball gym, Roc-a-fella (the b-girl, not the record label) [...]
Filed in Dance, Improvisation, Music
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Also tagged breakdancing, dance, disco, fan art, funk, grandmaster flash, hip-hop, michael jackson, nyc, turntablism, youtube
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See also a post about the Dead and electronic music. Whenever I play guitar, it comes out sounding a lot like Jerry Garcia. I can’t help it. From the ages of fifteen to twenty, my guitar-learning years, there was no musician I cared more about in the world than Jerry. It’s not about drugs; I’ve [...]
Filed in Autobio, Emotion, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Music Business
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Also tagged audience participation, depression, design, drugs, fashion, grateful dead, guitar, hippies, janis joplin, jerry garcia, midi, sixties, steal your face, tape trading, viral marketing
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Saturday, October 3, 2009
Okay, so we’ve all firmly established that he’s not exactly Mr Personality. President Obama called him a jackass. Even before he disrupted the MTV awards, a lot of my friends disliked him intensely. This dislike crosses racial, class and gender boundaries. And yet, I like Kanye’s music better than just about anything that anyone is [...]
Filed in Emotion, Key Musicians, Music, Race and Identity
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Also tagged autotune, depression, drum machines, Emotion, hip-hop, kanye west, lil wayne, masculinity, pop, posthuman, remixes, t-pain, taylor swift
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Saturday, September 12, 2009
Over the weekend we stayed with Anna’s sister Joanna, her husband Chris and their adorable new baby Lucas. Chris and I spent some of the time talking about electronic music and the internet. He’s a social media professional and a music fan but not a musician, and it was cool to hear his perspective on [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Internet, Music, Music Teaching, Software
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Also tagged daft punk, delicious, design, drum machines, fun, interface, Internet, inudge, minimalism, multitracking, reason, remixes, sequencing, Social Media, tenori-on, toys, visualization, web browser
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Wednesday, August 26, 2009
I revere Björk above most other musicians. She knows how to balance the coldness of electronic production with hotly unpredictable vocals and instrumental textures. Not everybody loves Björk as much as I do; her approach is eccentric and her sound gets on some people’s nerves. It took me a couple years to be convinced by [...]
Filed in Composition, Key Musicians, Music, Recording
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Also tagged audio editing, bjork, depression, hipster, iceland, interface, lord of the rings, missy elliot, pro tools, Recording, remixes, Sampling, sequencing, timbaland, tolkien
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This is a picture of my electronic funk-soul-R&B band doing a show. From left to right, it’s Nicole Bishop, me and Barbara Singer. We were the whole band for that show. I did all the beats, samples and keyboards from my computer using a video game controller. Here’s a screenshot of the program that the [...]
Filed in Autobio, Hardware, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged composing, hip-hop, Improvisation, interface, keybs, mapping, max/msp, midi, programming, reason, Sampling, sequencing, synths, Video Games
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Thursday, August 13, 2009
Here’s one of my favorite bits of South Park.
Filed in Dance, Interfaces, Music, Music Teaching, Video Games
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Also tagged america, beatles, dance, gender, guitar hero, masculinity, Recording, remixes, rock, rock band, simulation, south park, Video Games, visualization
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I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on a stranger’s blog. There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Key Musicians, Math, Music, Software
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Also tagged computers, drum machines, eighties, Emotion, funk, herbie hancock, interface, jazz, keybs, Music, quincy jones, sequencing, sesame street, synths
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People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly they used it as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first musicians to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Key Musicians, Math, Music, Physics
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Also tagged analog, electricity, electromagnetism, feedback, guitar, harmonics, harmony, interface, jimi hendrix, Music, Music Theory, recursion, remixes, resonance, tuning, wah pedal
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Back in 1966, Glenn Gould predicted that recorded music would become an interactive conversation between musician and listener. He described dial twiddling as “an interpretive act.” He was wrong about the dials, but right about the main point, that technology would make listening to music more like making music. Anybody with iTunes instantly becomes a [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Internet, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged dave brubeck, digging the crates, dj, dj earworm, django reinhardt, double dee and steinski, fan art, fugees, funk, girl talk, glenn gould, grandmaster flash, green lantern, hip-hop, jonathan lethem, kelis, ludacris, mashups, memes, michael jackson, mixtapes, mozart, nas, paul simon, pop, pro tools, radiohead, recursion, remixes, sample maps, Sampling, sasha frere-jones, wayne marshall, youtube
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