Developing Chaotic Systems

So, Cacophonous.org is taking off, getting a few postings and a few downloads. It's being used in ways I didn't at first think was kosher, but have decided, usage is more important than policing abuse. It's weird how setting up these new systems/communities without completely developing expectations about how they'll be used changes their basic concept. I've decided to announce it at various active new music scenes, the microtonal community, the Csound community, Sequenza21. I guess it'll shortly be out of my hands.

If you do use it, please don't abuse it! Thanks!

New Music is Too Cacophonous.org

Cacophonous.org is really getting into shape now. There's a Cacophonous.org Podcast RSS Feed and when you add notes to your del.icio.us entry it now turns links into valid HTML. This will let composers add program style notes to their announcements with links to scores and parts and commentary. The coolest thing about setting up something like this is watching how usage generates new ideas about how the service should be run.

Please visit, listen and add your comments. Unfortunately for the few comments that were there I accidentally deleted them in part of my code tweak. This won't happen too often, I hope! And please, lets keep it down to only new MP3's and not overburden the system. I'm still approving by hand, so they won't get through anyway, hehe... but it's a pain for me. This means, write lots of new music people, so we can aggregate it into oblivion!

Oh yeah, I've also added a XSPF Flash MP3 Streaming Player at the top of the page. If you'd like your MP3's to stream well, of course, keep them encoded 128K or below. And I'm going to try and add those cute little play buttons that Fabricio uses in his GreaseMonkey script next to the MP3 URL's. Any more ideas, please cough them up... Cya at cacophonous.org

Cacophonous.org is Ready for Business

Got the parsing and generation of blog entries working this afternoon. Cacophonous.org now periodically grabs and parses the mp3_classical_contemporary tag RSS feed from del.iciou.us and, using the Movable Type reBlog plugin generates blog entries for every new MP3 that is announced over the service. I'll be adding playlist creation and a player shortly. Comments are open, but moderated, so feel free to praise or diss any of the first few announced works.

My provider, doesn't give subdomains except to full packages, so I went ahead and got the cacophonous.org domain too.

The basic principals of the service:

Use del.icio.us to tag URL's for deep-linked (or not so deep-linked) MP3's. You'll need to set up a del.icio.us account which takes approximately 2 seconds. I propose 2 tags for our community, but can envisage a few more:

mp3_classical_contemporary

Whenever a new work is tagged in this fashion, it'll show up for anybody who has subscribed to mp3_classical_contemporary tag in their inbox. You 'post' your MP3 URL and tag it with one of those tags. I'd suggest we begin using it for new works and not for our entire catalogs. Users that want to see these new works can subscribe to these tags in their inbox or the RSS feed at cacophonous.org or by visiting the cacophonous.org website.

Cacophonous.org is basically going to be a addon service provider to the del.icio.us tag feed, for adding comments, and getting the service into full blown activity.

Also, please ignore that default bloggy look at the site. Will be spiffing it up into coolness this weekend.

Full of Color and Utterly Boring

Full of color and utterly boring... haha your comment, Ian Moss (in a comment at S21), reminded me of the NY Times article this morning about movie flops:

Where Have all the Howlers Gone

But the very worst films achieve a special distinction, soliciting membership in a kind of negative canon, an empyrean of anti-masterpieces. It is this kind of bad movie - the train wreck, the catastrophe, the utter and absolute artistic disaster - that seems to be in short supply.

And this is very bad news. Disasters and masterpieces, after all, often arise from the same impulses: extravagant ambition, irrational risk, pure chutzpah, a synergistic blend of vanity, vision and self-delusion. The tiniest miscalculation on the part of the artist - or of the audience - can mean the
difference between adulation and derision. So in the realm of creative achievement, the worst is not just the opposite of the best, but also
its neighbor.

And another comment Elsie made a few weeks ago, after listening to too much Murail and Hurel, that 'spectralists aren't bungee jumpers.'

And something I say all the time on my blog and in the newsgroups for years it that it is mediocrity that is recognized today, and has always been recognized in the day. Trying to write something different is dangerous and if you depend on your reputation for your $$$, such as most academics do, or even most careerists do, then it is problematic to say, 'ah fuck iit' and write something totally off the wall, disgusting, dirty, or even perfect and clean, but totally true to yourself. That was a decision I made after a family incident... to just go ahead and risk it. Even if it was horrible, eventually something awesome would come out or else I would prove that I do in fact suck. Anything is better than sticking with the tried and true, the muddling middle, the competent and forgettable.

Generalizing the Announcement Service

So, I'm starting to see how there's a real need for all types of musicians to have this service. I'm not sure if I want to create a community for commenting on all types of new music, but I think it would be interesting to have hundreds of genre-specific RSS feeds representing announcements of new MP3's as they come online.

I've got a XML-RPC server up and running and am getting to the API. It'll be like a blog ping server where an artist or an OMD or a rep can do a XML submit of the info I need, or a full blown XSPF playlist or fill out a form DIY style.

Comments?

Cac.ophono.us - Building A New Music Announcement Aggregator

OK, the Cac.ophono.us site is up and I've wired up the del.icio.us feed to one of the columns. This is not even a pre-alpha site yet. Initial ideas are in the previous article, A Proposal for Announcing New Music Recordings on the Net. At the moment, I'm still experimenting with how to auto-generate blog entries from the del.icio.us mp3_classical_contemporary RSS feed. Once that's done and I settle on a look, this should get rolling.

Current plans are:

1. Auto-generate blog entries from new items in the del.icio.us RSS feed.
2. Auto-modify a playlist at Webjay.org which can also serve as a podcast for people that just want to subscribe and watch the new MP3's just drop in.
3. More as I remember/think them up and digest your comments.

What I could really use a hand in is how to make it so that when we do start promoting the service (especially the use of del.icio.us tags) it gets some traction. Am I forgetting anything that would make it more compelling as a new music announcement service? Is requiring a del.icio.us account going to stymie this service? I can certainly use the post to generate new tagged entries, by way of the Cac.ophono.us site or an email list, but I'm afraid that's just inviting spam. Also, there's a real advantage in slowly identifying composers who use the list through their announcements. Del.icio.us allows for subscription to a tag by tagger and that could pave the way for a privileging that could be helpful in maintaing this micro-community service.

I'm thinking of ways to invite the electronic music community, also. That's a can of worm for sure, since every kid with a computer now is a composer. Requiring a del.icio.us account identifier might be key here in keeping the list maintainable and interesting.

I'm leaving comments open here and in the announcement below for the moment, until it gets googled and blog-spammed. Please help me out with your thoughts and ideas. If you're reading this through the New Music ReBlog site, please comment at beepSNORT.

A Proposal for Announcing New Music Recordings on the Net

I've got an idea, and I'm working on an implementation, of a generalized way to announce new MP3's on the net. Been thinking for a while, about what a loss of community, the demise of MP3.com was. We've experienced a diaspora of sorts, spread out all over from Ampcast to Download.com. We no longer have any site that welcomes comments or even just pointers to new recordings.

And it's not just the community that's been lost, its the mechanism for attracting the release of new net-distributed recordings. So, a modest proposal is in order.

I'm setting up a new site, which is now up and empty, called Cacophonus. I don't intend to re-create Sequenza21 or even the MP3.com Classical Forum. It's main purpose will be to aggregate new music announcements and at some point, possibly critiques and commentaries in an informal way.

But the first step, that we can all begin doing, so that we can find each other's new recordings is to use del.icio.us to tag URL's for deep-linked (or not so deep-linked) MP3's. You'll need to set up a del.icio.us account which takes approximately 2 seconds. I propose 2 tags for our community, but can envisage a few more:

mp3_classical
mp3_classical_contemporary

Whenever a new work is tagged in this fashion, it'll show up for anybody who has subscribed to mp3_classical_contemporary tag in their inbox. You 'post' your MP3 URL and tag it with one of those tags. I'd suggest we begin using it for new works and not for our entire catalogs. Users that want to see these new works can subscribe to these tags in their inbox.

Example:

del.icio.us mp3_classical_contemporary

Now when, somebody posts a new MP3 URL in this manner, I will see it in my inbox, because I have subscribed to that tag. Notice there is an RSS feed to that page. You can subscribe to that almost as a podcast and that'll play into some of my plans on how to aggregate these announcements and at some point create a comments system.

At a Loss for Compositional Ideas?

Nick Didkovsky on the JMSL list reminds us all of Webhamster Henry's Top 10 Imaginary Recordings of 2005. a brilliant spoof/sendup/ideafarm of conceptual possibilities in sonic design.

My favorite...
Return To Sender (Mail Ops, 2005)
Experimental sound artist Holga Becker modded up her Mp3 recorder to run extra slowly, stuck it in a package and mailed it to her self. Hear the sounds of travel, other packages (what's that ticking noise?), sorting machines, mutterings of the postal employees and lots of bumps.

Exposing MySpace Artist Exposure

I've recently joined MySpace after a year or two (how long has it been around?) of avoiding it cuz it looked so HotOrNotty. My page has BlueStrider and a few other 'hits' of mine and I've been wondering where the music promotion scene was going from there. I've actually met quite a few interesting composers there, FWIW, and even have the Kronos Quartet as a friend. Woo hoo! Hint to Kronos, my string quartet Anamorphosis would be a compelling addition to any of your concerts!

I found an article about a band that was featured on the front page there for a week and what that meant in CD sales. They shared the feature with Madonna and 2 other big names. They got tons of downloads, friend requests and sold... well... 0 that is a big naught CD's.

Overexposed is an article by Scott Andrew about this and its pretty interesting. What is exposure now? What can one reasonably hope for with online exposure?

I received an email from a friend last week about some radio airplay he'd had with a few of his pieces. It seemed so old-skool I thought it was a little funny. The show probably has 200 listeners. How is that different from 200 downloads?

Not sure... but there is a difference, I'm sure. People do download without listening and people do listen to the radio without listening. Does getting real world exposure, a Wire feature, or a TV spot add up to anything in the current scene when there is so much music competing for our attention?

I keep telling people that we're in a new scene now, that online exposure will become more and more important. That an online buzz will be THE buzz that propells great artists to the top. We'll see I guess, it sure is taking a long time.

On that note, I guess I should mention here that Stirling Newberry, composer and political blogger of fame wrote a very flattering article about yours truly recently focussing on my music and my activities in the net music world to create a classical music scene.

Jeff Harrington, The Unwritten Chapter.

DMCA Penalizes Classical Net Radio

Because classical net radio must play many works from the same CD (usually in a row, snicker) many classical net radio stations, including Kyle Gann's Postclassic Radio are having their service disrupted or delisted. Kyle's Blog Entry

It's difficult to imagine a copyright policy that would be so clueless about music and music history. It indicates to me, a mindset where the arts serve only to promote business interests, not the interests of the listener or the work (yes a work of art can have an interest, definitely with regards to it being presented appropriately).

On a side note, Kyle's blog entries continue not to be Reblogged because as I've reminded him, his Microsoft chars violate good XML!

BBC Pulls Back on Free Downloads

Caving to industry pressure and the threat of job loss, the BBC has decided to limit downloads in its upcoming Bach series. The controversy is that a public broadcasting network would in this manner forsake the educational agenda begun with the Beethoven download series. No doubt whatever downloads are allowed will be incomplete in some way.

That a public broadcasting network, funded with tax payer dollars would favor the recording corporations (and it is multi-faceted for sure) over a public which doesn't really know what they're missing is disturbing.

The fantastic part of the Beethoven giveaway was that its audio 'freeness' made a stuffy old dead guy cool.

I'd like to see some real stats about the cost (percieved cost) to the industry. I would be willing to bet that if anything, there was a net gain, if not in sales, in attention, in interest, in a new fascination with one of the wonders of the universe, previously available only by chance (on the radio) or by spending money.

The idea that you would give away such phenomenal beauty and then stop the process because of corporate pressure is frankly, shocking. Booo....

Kyle Gann on Nancarrow

Conlon Nancarrow, Reluctant Celebrity

He was humble, reticent, full of integrity, sure of himself, but imposing no expectations on others. Taking John Cage's politics with a grain of salt, he once told me, "Cage isn't really an anarchist, he just doesn't want to be bothered!"

Internet - The End of MusicoPolitical Theatre?

A few more words about Rzewski's comments during Kyle Gann's pre-concert interview Thursday night.  He recommeneded an 'open source' approach to all musical scores.  He claimed that he was putting all of his scores that weren't under contractual agreements online for free download.  'Music should be free' he claimed. 

This was after his previously mentioned comments bashing the iPoddification of music away from live performance.  I'm just trying to figure this guy out...  So he sees the Internet solely as a means to promote performances but not listens.  Now, why would someone pitch that to an audience of Columbia students/New Music Fans? 

My theory is that there is a confusion at work here with regards to what listening is.  If the Internet essentially functions as asynchronous radio, how is that a bad thing for music? 

It seems that Rzewski, because he looks at his ouevre as very political and ritual music theatre, needs to believe that the iPod will never become the predominant venue.  His extra-musical message is lost.  You can't insist that the listener to 32 Variations look at a red curtain for an hour like he could at the concert.  This extra-musical infatuation with ideas, ultimately is what is problematic about Internet distro. 

Heh, he also could not explain the dearth of political music.  It's my guess that he blames the Internet for that too.  Right, the 60's were not a generation of me-obsessed narcissists.  The draft drove the anti-war movement.  Not music.  Duh?  Old Hippies... what can I say.  Do everything my way cuz I'm old and angry and know better! 

Flocking Luddites

I'm typing this from the new Flock browser with builtin blog editor.  It's built off of Firefox and looks like a great new tool.  Maybe this will get me off my ass to post more and probably shorter commentaries. 

Went to the Rzewski concert at Miller Theatre last night for the premiere of "Bring Them Home".  Kyle Gann interviewed Rzewski before the concert where he made some entertainingly luddital views (like a luddite) about how music was going to shortly return to a live-performance centered activity and that iPods would no longer rule. 

Almost fell out of my seat.  ;)

The music was well performed and reminded me how, Rzewski can really write great music.  Too bad he seems he'd rather play with ideas.  I don't mean the politics.  I just don't find watching two great pianists slapping their knees intersting.  Call me a luddite in that regard!  

WikiNews Story on Fascist Rave Bust

Dance party broken up by police in Utah, USA

Music and Fascism in Utah

Watch this video. Save it and spread it around. This is the U.S. military attacking ravers in Utah. Police Raid Outdoor Music Event. These are not police. Seems like a warm-up for Bush's visit and the ensuing anti-war protests? First hand account on Daily Kos.

Brian Eno on the Microsoft Boot Sound

'I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.'

Q and A With Brian Eno

Sony Fake Critic - Class Action Lawsuit Won

From BoingBoing.net not exactly a new music-related story, more of an indicator of things to come as industry embraces viral/subversive marketing techniques; another indicator of an industry OUT OF CONTROL!. Sony has been forced to pay $5 to any moviegoer who can claim they were tricked into seeing a movie based on a review by their David Manning, fake film critic. Not only do we have government producing fake criticism (US Agriculture Department, US Education Department), now industry is doing it to itself.

Claim Form

Audience Like Flood's Problems

Since I've been so forthright in my promotion of the music like water service, I'd like to backtrack a second and point out my views of the problematic nature this system will create. What are the problems inherent in creating a primarily online audience base? In my experience, there are several important ones, including:

1. Anonymity of Audience

I have no way of knowing that some taste maker, somebody who could potentially shift some $$$ or audiences or performances my way has downloaded and totally dug my music. There is an implicit assumption that the downloading of music is always anonymous and not something such as a purchase that might benefit from some type of validation. Admittedly, this is a leftover part of the online::offline critical machine, but it still effects how the online audience responds and how even millions of downloads can produce no effect whatsoever in the offline audience.

2. Assumptions about offline credibility

There are still assumptions that if you deploy your content primarily offline that it is because you have to. That you've been forced to, from a lack of interest in the real world, typically because you suck. Amazingly, my friends who shell out $$$ to record and press their CD's in what used to be called vanity projects can more easily get online reviews with 1/100th of the number of listeners.

3. Bandwidth Costs

Even one recommendation can lead to a catastrophic failure in your ability to maintain a decent pipe of content.

4. Limited Offline Recognition

No matter how many listens I've received, the offline critics are primarily focussed on live performances and real CD's. No matter the size of the audience (often miniscule) or the number of CD's the musician has sold.

Anyways, I've been pitching more musicians get their music online and give it away... these are a few of the pitfalls that await this type of distro methodology. I'll be adding a few more as they wack me across the head.

In the Music Like Water World Flows the True Artist

Gerd Leonhard, self-proclaimed Musical Futurist writes an article getting a lot of attention at NewMusicBox. In it he examines the implications of a world where music is so commoditized, through online subscription services, such as Yahoo and the new Napster, that music has become a utility, like water.

From the article, Once music is unleashed and the dinosaurial fight for the simple privilege of having access to it is over for good, distribution ceases to be a barrier to entry: all music, all artists, and all writers will be in those pipeline... ...the real challenge and the real opportunity going forward: getting exposure and being discovered—the rest is already built into the pipeline.

What Gerd misses out on, is the fact that this is a great thing, because, it levels the playing field. In this type of world, the cream rises to the top, not the merely over-promoted and well-connected. Music that matters will be noticed because it is listened to.

Other writers including Pliable at On an Overgrown Path fears for the artists. His blog haiku:

Water from faucets
sounds like a listener's dream -
will hurt true artists

Hurt true artists? Huh? The majority of true artists now are fighting to get through the ear canal. They're not the ones on the radio, getting recorded. They're the artists that are not getting promoted in record stores, getting performed in concert halls. They're the ones that didn't spend the money to hire an agent like so many composers, didn't spend the money to hire an orchestra and record their own music while pretending its a real record company recording and promoting their music.

The Music Like Water flow will be huge, it will be meritocratic and it will create giant new opportunities for curators, critics, musician-networks. The main problem in getting paid, which is what everybody always focusses on, in this world is the over-abundance of musicians, not the collapse of the inherent assumptions about music distribution. This glut of artistry is one of the real problems and its a good problem. We need competition, to make better music. We need to hear everybody so that for once, the Nancarrow's don't have to almost die in obscurity.

The big question, is will we be up to building the future curatorial forums? I see the music blog as a prime contendor and the reblogging movement, re-mixing aggregated micro-content into forms that will promote more better variety and more better personalization.

reBlogging Podcasts/Playlists

While thinking about how this reBlogging stuff is going to change the nature of RSS distribution it became apparent that it would change not just blogs, but Podcasts and Webjay playlists, too. Microcontent aggregation is how the general process is being described and now Yahoo is supposedly building a tool to do just what reBlog does now.

For a Podcast reblogger to be interesting, I think you'd need to have it be able to stream Podcasts as easily switchable auto-pausing channels. So you'd have an app that would essentially let you 'scan' the dial for new Podcasts. And when an ad or a boring part came up, the app would pause that channel as you switched to another. Something like that... Just an idea... iTunes of course is already doing this to a certain extent. What other features would a playlist reblogger have? Faster scanning, of course, is the reblogging feature and direct contact with content.

ReBlogoSpherical Contextual Distortion Devices

This week I started the New Music reBlog as a way to promote and disseminate new music blogginess throughout the galaxy. It uses software from Eyebeam called, reBlog which lets you subscribe and aggregate multiple RSS feeds for later commenting, quoting, or merely pointing to. Several issues about identity and authorship have come up by Robert Gable at awoks, et al because reBlogging essentially creates blog entries from RSS feeds and their inherent context is morphed by the act of re-associating the texts away from their home space. Also, some feeds quote in their entirety the blog entry while others have no text at all. Kyle Gann's PostClassic blog's RSS feed doesn't even have his name in it, nor his text. I've been trying to hand-edit those, but at a certain point, the RSS feed itself determines the reblogged content.

I use RSS readers from time to time (when I remember to look at them) but I've noticed I'm reading more music blogs since I set up this reBlog. So, maybe, the loss of context will encourage a curiosity about their home blog planet and the reader will voyage into their native blogospace.

Although it's been talked about a bit already, I'm heartened by the recent news that studies have proven that people who Online file sharers buy 5 times the amount of music that non-pirates do. Sounds like all this talk about attacking piracy is just hurting their strongest and fastest growing customer base. Who'd have thunk it!

Mashups and Quodlibets Have Driven Us Apart - BBC in Hot Water for Huh?

Talking with a friend about the mashup phenomenon this morning got me thinking. The effect certainly is musico-symbolic; the tunes resonate in the memory as past experience signifiers and having those points morph into other points is interesting and pleasurable. We have in a sense, created with mashups a musical gateway into Kierkegaardian moments of rotational and repetitional experience. Nostalgia triggers, apperception moments, all rolled into one piece of sonic experience.

The real paradigm for a many of these morphogenetic musical anomalies is the classical variation. Harmonies, tunes, are essentially intact but the backing tracks are replaced in a way that Beethoven, Brahms or Bach would have found interesting - because - the accompaniments are from other pieces of music.

Maybe Bach's quodlibet from the Goldberg Variations is the original mashup. In that short, final movement, Bach used 4 pieces of street music (including the ever popular, "Cabbage and turnips have driven me away, Had my mother cooked meat, I'd have chosen to stay"). Through these contrapuntally-expressed street songs, Bach melds pop music, the Goldberg harmonies and original music. It's not the greatest piece of music, but conceptually it is mind-boggling and Bach knew it. One of his last pieces, it represents a return to the use of musical symbolism inherent in the Renaissance when composers would use tunes from pop songs in their masses and these tunes would represent, of course, emotional symbols of their prior uses.

Probably my favorite mashup so far, for its technique and for its emotive value is DJ Earworm's Stairway to Bootleg Heaven. A re-assemblage of Dolly Parton - Stairway to Heaven vs. Eurythmics - This City Never Sleeps vs. Beatles - Because vs. Laurie Anderson - O Superman vs. Art Of Noise - Moments in Love vs. Beastie Boys - So Whatcha Want vs. Pat Benetar - Love is a Battlefield into one smooth and poignant package.

Downloading trouble at the BBC

Speaking of free music, the BBC has got itself into hot water from the big classical record companies for uh.... popularizing a dying art form?, re-invigorating the symphony? No! But for
undermining the value of music and unfair competition! Sorry, it's hard to
type when I'm laughing so hard.

The record companies shall reap what they have sown.

Listening to the Freed

While setting up the Listening Room at the Sequenza21 wiki I remembered a cool Webjay feature, InstaM3U. Basically use the URL, http://webjay.org/insta.m3u?url=url by passing in your URL and it'll automatically generate a stream-worthy correctly mime-typed M3U file.

I'm sure I'm missing quite a few listens, because of IE's inept handling of MP3 files and naive users not knowing to right-click and save when that happens etc. Now I'll be taking all of my MP3 url's and turning them into streamers.

Which got me thinking, how many more ways are there that I'm losing listens by not handling naive users better. And I know for a fact many of my listeners are newbies because the whole classical music world is barely web literate. They've missed the heady MP3.COM online independent artist hysteria, the rush to try micro-payments, the selling of CD's online.

The new world is scary, free and a little lonely. A world of zero CD sales, reviews only if you pay, and distribution only if you pay. Many classical artists now assume that giving away a recording for 300 copies of a CD is the norm for distribution. I think of course, that all channels must be used to make your music heard, but I just can't get up the whatever, to cut that check, to print those CD's, to buy that ad, to mail that CD off for review. Not when I"m getting 10,000 or more downloads a month.

Come on down real classical music world. It's hopeless, it's hot and it's lonely not knowing who your listeners are but there are greedy ears everywhere. The BBC proved that this week with their BBC giveaway! Beethoven Downloads. Free stuff rules. When will it stick as legit?

The Wiki as 2nd Generation New Music Community

This Monday I installed and configured a new music wiki at the Sequenza21 web site. At first, I was questioning why bother, given my experience with MP3.COM. For those that don't remember those good old days, MP3.COM started out focussed, progressive and then slowly slipped into an anything goes type of scene which ultimately led me to start NetNewMusic and The Classical MP3 Portal. Curation seemed to be a necessity to keep every kid who had an MP3 that used a string patch from claiming their music was contemporary or classical.

Now that the site is up, I'm beginning to see some interesting differences. For one, there are a zillion places to promote your music now, so the S21 site is probably off of most spammers scopes. Perhaps another reason the S21 scene is working is that the good folks at S21 never seemed to go through the MP3.COM era of new music excitement, disappointment and then disgust. They seem to think that sharing MP3's is fun, hence the Listening Room. Ouch I had thought that after 150,000 downloads BlueStrider had been heard by everyone on the web. It seems not to be the case and from that participation, my piece is now being featured at Kyle Gann's PostClassic Radio.

As the web has become the primary music distribution system, perhaps micro-communities can thrive now without stepping on each other's toes? Is it possible that there won't be the need to have genre cops anymore because there will be super obvious places to place your links? Does that mean that these communities might actually thrive and promote each other's music in a genre-relevant manner? Wo...

You just never know where the web is going to turn or what opportunity is going to present itself to you. I see that I have to not make assumptions about how web communities are built, what they know, how they're going to react, how they work together. It's all exciting again. Who'd have thunk it?

Mashups and Ives and Everything All at Once

I've recently been listening to some excellent mashups, most notably found through the Radio Clash (at least I was, before it turned into a gay audioblog - since issue #29). I've been into mashups since they first started coming out, and it's been easy to notice the increasing slickness in the combining of the tunes.

Elsie pointed out to me after hearing the Clash Killers that this was the first completely successful (iho) post-modern art form. That all the pieces had maintained their integrity while allowing for a new content layer to be created. This got me thinking as to why I was enjoying them so much. It wasn't just the raw humor of hearing Abba plus Echo and the Bunnymen, it was something else, something Ivesian.

Living in a big city, I've always enjoyed the all-at-onceness of the sound experience. The halal meat market blaring Umm Kulthum over a car's subwoofer beats with the police improvising a car siren solo on top. (Some cops should really become noise artists - they do the weirdest things with their sirens). Being forced to experience a sonic space in this way, has gotten us all used to parallel musical streams as a part of our daily experience.

The simultaneity of this new art form in its paradoxical at-onceness can allow for a thrilling artistic exposure of parallelism - unparallelled since Ives. As we all have heard, Ives' father would forceably expose him to exprerience multiple brass bands simultaneously, make him sing in parallel keys, etc. This experience is now a part of our daily lives.

I realized that this parallellism of musical streams has been a musical interest for years of mine. My music has always tried to force a melodic layer to the middle and the bass line to a melodic theme. Its an area, that many artists have explored, certainly, from Ockeghem's simultaneous use of chanson in his secular works to Bach's quodlibet in the Goldberg Variations. Of course one could cite Cage and the other Chance-aholics in this vein also, but I find the intentionality of the musical parallelism to be the key to its enjoyment. The skill of finding the right moment to bring in the hook after absolutely the 'wrong' chorus can be amazing and a real commentary on our audio experience today.

Obviously, the hooks, the choruses, all function potentially as symbols, which can be a source of amusment (Abba and Echo for example). This symbolic mixing is something that not many composer's have taken advantage of. One thinks of Stockhausen's Hymnen, a monumental failure of symbolic musicality but an amazing one nonetheless. Hymnen is a mashup in that context of course. (Even given the ring modulations - today's pop mashups employ bandwidth filtering frequently to bring in new elements).

Online Audience Building and a Flood of Pirates

Sorry about the dearth of postings recently; it's been a rough few months. The crazy real estate market forced us to leave our super-cheap apartment of 16 1/2 years, the move was physically exhausting to illness. Big cities can seem like mere traps for artists these days, providing little or no real benefit while sapping every ounce of your strength.

On to the topic. We did luckily have a vacation planned - planned one week after our move! But after returning I noticed that my MP3 hosting site - Harrington MP3's was down. In a mere two days, I had had 16 GB of downloads. Now who or what power in the world could promote my eccentric classicisms towards that lofty audience size?

Russian MP3 collectors. Pirates. Piano Funky - Collection. There I was - sandwiched between Gorillaz and Chill Out Dreams. Featured like a commercial artist of value and not the forgotten American 40 something 'artiste de demain'. The unwashed, uncultured masses were downloading and sharing my music in an unprecedented manner - as if I were worthy of their criminality.

And what had happened of the barriers between classical music and pop? Where were the 'Serious Concert Music' banners that my genre absolutely requires to be intelligible? Where were the provisors - 'If you like Stravinsky or Schoenberg - this music might be up your alley'. They were non-existent - I had been curated as if I were a pop star, another underground hero to be mixed in with the eccentric noises of today's genre-bending multitude.

I felt honored and then I felt a bit frightened. If every Russian, Chinese, Indonesian, Turkish illicit MP3 site (a few other pirate sites I've found mention of myself) were going to feature my music - I wouldn't be able to afford to provide MP3's to the (ahem) civilized and cultured American/European audience that my career requires! Now the pirate free-for-all was turning my music into another online commodity that you had to have now and I wouldn't have the bandwidth to be ready to tackle the world of the real if and when it ever comes calling for 'yours truly'.

The net has opened up vast vast vast audiences. I know, I hope, that my music can speak to millions of them - I am that deluded. And I know, I hope that many musics of all flavors will be able to be heard by these audiences, also. But how can 'le deluge' of anybody with a PC and a wire be controlled?

Of course it can't. It can't be channeled, it can't be charmed. It is the Baudrilliardian mass that lurches one way and the other. I played a game - a game of creating a site that looked like a pirate MP3 site and I became a pirate player. I've merged the roles of apparently illegal sharing and music promotion and been burned. Now how do I proceed?

Since that happened (actually even before as my 40GB limit had been approached) I've had to take my site offline the end of each month. I've been mirroring my site at Parnasse, but Elsie needs her share of the bandwidth for all the people looking for 'Anime' and finding her painting called 'Anime.'

The web's chaotic audience takes and takes and takes... when will it give?

Criticism and Legitimacy - Net vs. The Real

Reading some of the discussions at other blogs on this issue, I came upon a comment about a fellow electronic musician who had just gotten signed onto an IDM label. He'd been forced to announce that all his tracks were coming down and that he'd no longer be giving them away for free.

So, what did he accomplish? Why was he willing to risk losing his entire net audience? People now would have to buy his album to hear his music. Would they follow him into being an artist they would pay to hear? That was the risk. And it is a huge risk because labels that don't cater to popular tastes typically do CD pressings of less than a thousand copies. So, there's a hope this musician will sell that many CD's. An unknown electronic musician would stand a better chance of getting into the record stores and getting heard by giving away his CD's; sneaking fake-barcoded home-made CDR's into Tower herself! And in a year from now, without his net audience, he'll be a nobody, with perhaps a few hundred bucks in his pocket but many less ears jamming to his work.

Two worlds are colliding. The net music world, with its assumptions of popular validity and sharing, typically beyond fair use standards, and the old music world, with its hierarchies, promotional methodologies and assumptions about fat paybacks. I believe, of course, as an early net music adopter, that the net music world is destined to win; one can't fight free music; the net will encompass everything at some point and become the global library.

So we're fighting for what now? Sales as a symbol of legitimacy? Print reviews or awards as a symbol of quality? That is bordering on pointless now. A write up now, a feature in say, Computer Music Journal or even Rolling Stone haha would produce in my life nothing. I've heard that even Putlitzer prizes now no longer guarantee a string of commissions.

Without the metric of the sale, legitimacy has become the playground of the elites. In the contemporary classical world, its increasingly reverting back to the playground of the idle rich. I don't believe its unconnected to point out that the first composer of my generation to win the incredibly prestigious Grawemeyer prize (first awards went to Ligeti, Lutoslawski and Takemitsu) is coincidentally a multi-millionaire, George Tsontakis. I'm not sure how it helped; he's a good composer IMO, but I am absolutely certain that without his fortune he'd likely be in the same boat as the rest of us poor mugs. Nowhere. The rich have to hide their connectedness or their privilege would be exposed. And the rich, still control, to an astonishing degree the playing field that we play on, when we engage the real world. Another reason the real music world, within the arts, is crumbling. We want a world without favorites. We want a world that rewards attentiveness not mere connectedness. We want a world where what I say to my bud matters, that artist X does in fact rock even though he's a poor shmuck working at Kinko's during the day.

For most musicians, frankly, who are not pandering to the popular tastes, any review, is to the point of being practically futile. I won't get a record deal, I won't get a fat commission from the NYPO, even if Alex Ross calls me the next Beethoven. That is how impotent the print media has become and its partially a consequence of the blogosphere and partly a consequence of the increasingly non-hierarchical way that fame is being distributed.

Again, what are we fighting for? I think we're fighting for listens, and if the audience is receptive, we're fighting for a type of placement in a loosely defined database of musical references. We're fighting to get listed in web wikis, and in directories of personal faves. We're fighting for more listens to the point where a rave review by a big name critic - even a cover feature in a magazine - become a mere anecdote in the well-linked conglomeration of pointers to one's favorite musics.

Another example. Yesterday I received a fund raising mailing from Elliott Carter. The man himself, my very very old ex-teacher and not coincidentally a multi-millionaire himself, begging at my door for the American Music Center. Curious as to what they were up to lately, I read the usual hype and noticed one intriguing new program. They're going to be putting up some type of online radio show. Maybe something like Kyle Gann is doing. Of course, the station will represent, not the desparate futile masses who are the AMC membership, but instead, the selected favorites of both non-members and members alike. How do I know this? Because I know the AMC. (They can prove me wrong, but I'm certain it won't be a random selecting of member MP3's). So if I join, I have a shot at getting featured in their radio show. What would happen, in the best possible situation if I were featured on every radio show they put on?

Nothing. I'm not being bitter or cynical, I am beginning to recognize the futility of combatting the hiearchies of the real musical world AS THEY CRUMBLE. The real music world, won't commission a piece from a nobody. They need the map of the resume, to prove that the artist is in fact on the road to Rome. Without this certified map of on the wayness that artist is a nobody. This dependency on mapped legitimacy, with the implicit recognition all players in this world have - that it is in fact bullshit; a pointless listing of favoritisms, connections through friends, and lucky happenstances - is one reason these hierarchies are crumbling. If there are 20,000 American composers all with vaguely interesting resumes how can we make our decision as to who to promote - or even who to listen to? Organizational recognition is pointless and only feeds the aspirations of the most mediocre careerist today.

So what does web recognition look like? I've noticed over the years, web pages that list my name, right underneath Beethoven and before Haydn. Are these listings incompetent? Are they a rave review of my genius? Neither - I believe. They are indicators of 'check this shit out' by amateurs; they point but do not praise. They nestle together in the Googlesphere like the crowds at a red carpet reception. Given enough of these pointers anything is possible. The real world cracks. The critics gasp at their pointlessness. And billions of friendly ears begin to listen.

Why risk that for a few sales? The real world exists today to be the audience. Not to be the critic. We are bees in a hive singing and listening to each other without concern for symbolic hierarchy. The real critic today is the multitudinous fluidity of the net.

Electronic Music Workflows - Some Rambling Thoughts

In the act of responding to an interesting thread on an electronic music BBS about 'composition' and how traditional composition differs from the methods most popular electronic experimentalists I attempted to explain how the workflow itself can stymie or encourage promising musical moments...

IMO, he process most interesting emusicians use, is more a process of 'discovery' than it is of composition. What you need to develop, IMO, is a workflow which allows for rapid and intense experimentation over sections of interesting material. You need to get good at 'constructing' machines, as SP put in a recent interview, which allow themselves to be broken until their destructive capacities become interesting.

It is this destructive process that I believe enables good emusicians to go places that say, a contemporary classical experimentalist might not. Its a violent, and chaotic workflow. And developing this workflow, itself is problematic. Intutively, one would think that using something like Max or AudioMulch would make it easier, but in the real world, getting quick with simpler tools like CoolEdit Pro or Cubase, will probably lead to more interesting results, as you seem to be searching for.

While contributing that bit of pomposity, it ocurred to me that workflow itself was the big electronic music problem. The idea that good electronic music can be 'found' or even that it is 'composed' or even 'constructed' I think is to lose fact of the powerful way we use software now to continually disassemble and reassemble its pieces. Regardless of whether the music is beat-driven or not, finding a good workflow, that allows for the musician to experiment live with morphing processes is incredibly important to the productivity of new musics. To this end, as a dedicated hardware enthusiast I've recently purchased, for $12.95, a P5 Essential Reality Glove and a Control Freak 16 slider MIDI controller. Running these controllers on top of randomly cycling MIDI CC data with my FS1R produces astonishing timbral differences. This process was first used on my pieces A Moist Mirage in Desert Eyes and Arddha Jangala. Finding new morph targets (as 3D enthusiasts call their object morphing controller sets) through randomized control of cyclic streams presents a powerful and teleologically interesting musical process that I'm just begining to explore.

Money and Music, Legitimacy and Recognition

I've been thinking recently about impediments that can cause new music to miss out on opportunities for getting heard. This past summer, I'd uploaded some MP3's to MP3RIA.COM, a micropayment OMD; it seemed like a good idea at the time. I also recently saw an article (and lost its reference) to somebody online writing that it was silly to charge $5 for a new music concert. You'd scare away half the audience cuz it was too cheap and the rest probably didn't have the $5! Plus wouldn't the organizers really rather get 50 people than 20?

Six months later, and watching the stats that MP3RIA brings in (rather pathetic at the moment), I started realizing that once again, I'd created an impediment to getting heard. Did I really want a few hundred bucks or would I rather have a few thousand listens? I'd spent the better part of a month re-mastering my Obliterature album (off and on) and had toyed with the idea of getting it pressed through Oasis or on demand distro like Mixonic. But I could just never get up the nerve to cut that check and thoughts haunted me that the on demand CDR pressings would be sub par.

So I started looking around for sites where I could house hundreds of megabytes of MP3's and have a lot of bandwidth too for dirt cheap. There are quite a few bargains online now in this regard. I've since uploaded 3 albums and a SVCD.

A friend of mine keeps telling me, online distro is dead. It just gets in the way for the search for 'legitimacy.' You won't get written up, reviewed, or mentioned in offline publications as long as you're focussed on online distro, he says. I think he's being naive. He's disappointed that his fame since MP3.COM days has dissipated and he doesn't see the merging between art worlds online and off.

For example, my spouse, Elsie Russell, was recently quoted in the New York Times magazine. (She only found out through clicking around the New York Times Online one day; we stopped buying the paper years ago). Why did sh