A Month Off

 
Last year I took part in Weeklybeats, a year-long challenge to produce a new piece of music every week for all of 2014. While the results varied wildly, I was proud that I was able to get a new track online each week (with one exception, which I conveniently don't count, due to technical difficulties).

Since the end of 2014 I've found myself distracted with a whole new set of crazy schemes, but I found I've missed the routine of trying to quickly produce a track to Weeklybeats' local Monday morning deadline. I've thought about continuing the tradition off my own steam, but I just haven't been able to make it stick. And to be honest, the drive just hasn't been there. Something to do with the combination of said deadline, and an inbuilt competitive streak.

Whilst listening to All Songs Considered a few weeks back I heard about the RPM Challenge, which seeks to have people write and record an album's worth of material (10 tracks or 35 minutes) during the month of February. Being one to overcommit myself, I thought to give it a shot, but I've decided to make the process slightly easier on myself. I'm simply going to write a bunch of tunes, commit them to my hard drive, and then release them come March. 

Recently Historic

Study for Rage Against The Machine, 2015.

Opening this Thursday at Gaffa in the Sydney CBD is Recently Historic: Australian Electronic Arts in Western Sydney #2, featuring recent work by myself and a whole bunch of people I used to go to university with. While a description like that may read like a reclaiming of one's glory days, the broader context ties into research by the show's curator, Monica Brooks, into the Bachelor of Electronic Arts at the University of Western Sydney. Now for what it's worth, I studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts, but that's a whole other story.

Sometimes a good idea is just a good idea.

The New Year is usually a good time to give yourself a series of lofty goals that aren't well-enough defined. In 2015 I've decided to give myself several of these, figuring that surely at least one of them will stick.

One of these goals involves being all milennial and starting to use the blog again. After a couple of years of not updating, coupled with the death of RSS services (or at least Google Reader, I'm sure there are others that people still like), I'm sure there are fewer than ever people to shout into void at, but let's give this a shot.

Other goals are more pragmatic (and apparently really obvious), like "reading more". I could just write this as "use the internet less so you can read more", but I don't think that really addresses the issue. I already know I'm easily distracted; I feel that my aim overall is to better channel these distractions.

In thinking about this, a friend involved in the International Librarians Network pointed me towards this list of ways to build a reading habit. First on the slate is this:

Set times. You should have a few set times during every day when you’ll read for at least 5-10 minutes. These are times that you will read no matter what — triggers that happen each day...

I am terrible at sticking to a routine, and I can usually dismiss advice like this out of hand, but there's something about reading this list at this moment in space and time that is completely resonant for me. So let's see if I can be a little more structured about things, and maybe in 2015 I can get a few more things done. Either that, or I'll see you in another two years.  
 

What I talk about when I talk about burritos isn't necessarily what some people talk about when they talk about burritos.

Lots of things are said about the fact that Australia is damned lucky when it comes to the wealth of produce available to us, and that this combined with an astounding diversity of cultures living here leads to a vast array of taste sensations. There are also a lot of food courts in Australia that promise said delacacies, and then put peas in a burrito.

Thing is, I don't know if it's OK to put beans in a burrito, or if it's OK if this burrito is the size of your head. What I do know is that XQuisito at the University of Sydney's Camerdown campus thinks it's OK, as long as they put some red stuff on top of the burrito along with some partially melted cheese. Don't get me wrong, this thing was perfectly edible, but it was edible in the same way that combining lettuce, cheese, sour cream, guacamole and some sort of warm chicken goo in a wrap is fundamentally edible, it just didn't feel particularly authentic.

And that's the kicker, isn't it? Authenticity. Serving mexican speedily has always been somewhat in fashion in Australia (especially when combined as an outlet for stuffing things into potatoes), but it's recently hit some sort of new plain of franchised consciousness, with at least two competeing chains doing the rounds in Sydney. This is on top of numerous actual restaurants serving burritos around the inner-west, all purporting to different degrees of authenticity, or at least authentic tex-mex. That's a whole other deal.

I don't care about any of this. I just want someone's grandmother to make me a burrito, the way their grandmother used to make it for them. Maybe this doesn't even exist, so I'll just take whatever, and be immensely grateful for the experience. Either way, I bet it won't involve an ice-cream-scoop-worth of sour cream. Everything else, is a bonus.

Unfinished Projects as of June 2011

The Fall of Turkish Pop Group (2004, 2005)
The Song Remains The Same (2005)
Real Ultimate Power (2006)
Mario's Unfinished Symphonies (2006)
"An Unexpected Gift" (2008)
It's All Been Done Before / The Day The Music Died (2008)

[Updated 26/06/2011]

Somewhere in Sydney, April 4th, 2011.

K: It looks like it want to eat my soul.
D: What's with stealing your soul? Nobody wants to steal your soul.
K: Why, what's wrong with it?

Mountain Dew Code Red is evil.

I mean, just look at it. It's evil. In a can.

Further Reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Dew_Code_Red#Flavors_and_varieties
http://www.dewmocracy.com/

Somewhere between Yass and Sydney, March 20th, 2011.

D: There's a video of Jason Bateman crying while watching the Justin Bieber movie.

K: There's a Justin Bieber movie?

D: It's a documentary about his life. It's in 3D.

K: But he's twelve.

D: It's in 3D.

K: But he's twelve, is it in real-time too?

Current pressing questions.

1. Does the Nintendo DS suffer from screen burn?
2. Who in Sydney would one speak to about acquiring a full-body green screen suit?
3. Does Kylie Minogue's performance of "Dancing Queen" at the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games have less to do with Australia's fondness for ABBA tunes and more to do with Kylie Minogue positioning herself as an international pop star that cannot be defined by simple notions of geography?

Belated playlist for a bookshop, complied 12.01.11

Construction - Sebastien Tellier, Mr Oizo, SebastiAn

Belinda - Ben Folds & Nick Hornby

Halo - Major Lazer (featuring Elephant Man)

I Lust U - Neon Neon

Hole In Your Soul - ABBA

Teqkilla - M.I.A.

It's Not The End Of The World? - Super Furry Animals

Rill Rill - Sleigh Bells

Four Months In The Shade -The Radio Dept.

Harry Patch (In Memory Of) - Radiohead

None Of Dem - Robyn (featuring Röyksopp)

Seductive Barry - Pulp

Lovin' On An Older Gal - Sonny and The Sunsets

Always On My Mind - Pet Shop Boys

This Wednesday at Difficult Music Festival.

Seems as though I haven't learned from my mistakes over the last couple of years, I've thrown together a night as part of the 2011 Difficult Music Festival, featuring some choice musicians who like to make obnoxious noises with a number of different instruments. It'll be a thing. You should definitely come along.

...

GEODESIC DOMES ON FUTURISTIC LANDFILL

JON HUNTER

KNIFE CRIMES

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5TH, 2011

7:30 PM

FREE

THE CROSS ART + BOOKS

33 ROSLYN STREET, KINGS CROSS

PART OF THE DIFFICULT MUSIC FESTIVAL

Current adventures in pop music: Rehash and carefully edit your adolescence in fifteen minutes.

Some people I know filled in an online questionnaire asking them to name fifteen albums they like in fifteen minutes. The rules work as follows:

Don't take too long to think about it. Only one album per artist. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes!

As a means of distracting myself I attempted this task, but after relying on my memory for the first ten I could think of, I started to cheat, flicking through various mp3 playlists to try and jog my memory of various things I should include. Quickly, the whole integrity of the process was thrown out the door as I realised I was being selective about what to include, lest I be accused of not having the correct contextually relevant nostalia-based picks. So I tried to do it again, believing I'd be truer to the process with a clean slate. I still cheated, but felt slightly better about the whole thing. For the sake of showcasing how I spent way too much time thinking about this, I'll share the list with you now (in alphabetical order, not of preference, of course):

Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
Blur - 13
LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
Michael Jackson – Dangerous
Muse – Origin of Symmetry
Nine Inch Nails – The Fragile
Pulp – This Is Hardcore
Radiohead – OK Computer
Regurgitator – Unit
Roxette – Tourism: Songs from Studios, Stages, Hotelrooms & Other Strange Places
Super Furry Animals – Guerilla
Supergrass – Supergrass
U2 – Achtung Baby
Various Artists – Teen Idols*
Weezer – Weezer (The Blue Album)

*Note: This probably doesn't count, as its not by one artist, but if it's something that theoretically "will always stick with [me]", then this definitely counts, if only because of the amount of times I listened to it as a child. This was a cassette my grandfather owned, and played in his car on almost constant repeat. As a result, I can easily recall the lyrics to "Workin' For The Man" by Roy Oribison. 

As these things go, there are always things you want to include, or wish you did due to time constraints, or a sudden change in taste. In this particular instance, these were:

The B52s – Time Capsule: Songs For A Future Generation
Faith No More – Album of The Year
Garbage – Version 2.0
Negativland - Dispepsi
(The) Smashing Pumpkins – Adore

...

Feel free to judge.  This won't change much, but you can nonetheless.

Beaten to various punches.

There's nothing like being reminded of the fact that at the end of the day you're not only not particularly unique, but over a long enough period of time you're destined for cliche. Doing this on the internet is a bonus, purely because of the volume of other mundane actions that sits alongside yours.

Case in point; writing a blog post that is apologetic about not writing blog posts. Enter artist Cory Archangel. His most recent project is a blog entirely devoted to reposting blog entries written by other people apologising for not posting on their blogs. You can find it here. It's very clever, and makes me feel just a little bit silly.

This was brought to my attenion by Samuel Bruce, who is currently curating Electro_Online, a selection of net-based art works and curios. It's all tied up in this festival I've been working on for the last few years. Perhaps you've heard of it?

Potentially unsubstantiated claims.

So a while ago I started a blog. 

It was great too; I would write things on here, and the ten or so people who read it would, well, read it. We all had a real nice thing going on there. Then I became one of those people who didn't blog all that much, and when I did, I would apologise to those ten or so people about how I write in the blog, and how, this time, things would be really different.

And so it went.

Recently, I've thought somewhat about how exactly this situation arose, and have put it down to two main contributing factors:

1. A tendency to make notes about things I wanted to blog about, but would never get around to it, thus creating a strange feeedback loop in my brain where I couldn't continue with new things until I had posted something about the other fifty things I had yet to post about.
   
2. A combination of laziness, and how facebook is a really good enabler for laziness*. Think about it, why write about things when you can just post a link to something, and then people can click on some java code that says they find the thing you like just as mildly amusing as you do. Genius.

The conclusion I have come to is that I in order to break this strange self-imposed cycle I would simply start writing again and see what happens. Seems like a logical enough idea to me anyway. So we'll see how it goes. I'm not making any promises, and I'm morbidly aware that I don't need anything else to distract me right now, but at the very least it could be entertaining for us all to watch. And that sure is something.

* This may technically count as three factors, but we can all just let this slide for now, yes?

Thoughts on James.

I was very sad about the passing of JG Ballard last month. Being someone who likes to observe contemporary entertainment culture a little too closely for their own good, Ballard's work was always on my radar; if for no other reason than the spread of its influence is so omnious throughout literary and popular culture. This said, of all his work I've only ever read Crash, and even then I only read it whilst researching my installation Medium Level Animated Violence from 2006. The work presented recorded footage from the videogame Burnout 3: Takedown, which has the objective of driving cars really fast and then crashing into things as best as possible. I took footage from the game, and edited all the driving bits out. As such, it seemed that reading a novel about a chap who enjoyed such things with real cars would be a good point of reference. So to the point is Ballard's writing that the key quote that I would center the catalogue essay [and by proxy the work] appeared within the first fifty pages:

"Sitting in the darkness on the floor cushions we watched the silent impacts flicker on the wall above our heads. The repeated sequences of crashing cars first calmed and then aroused me. Crusing alone on the motorway under the yellow glare of the sodium lights, I thought of myself at the controls of these imapcting vehicles."
- JG Ballard, Crash.

Despite the fact that he was talking about a couple of guys sitting on the floor watching Super 8 films, the allegory between this simuacral experience and playing videogames is not difficult to make. Sure, one can make an argument about the user holding a controller that allows them take make active decisions about the paths they take within a virtual landscape, but the fact remains that throughout this experience you are stationary, and your choices are illusionary - entirely dependent on the size of the playing field bequested to you by programmers.

"The future would be boring," says Jim Rossingol, quoting Ballard, in his column on Offworld, "Our modern age sits at the point at which the march of rationalism and reason has peaked, divorcing us from our early extremism and our innate primitivism, and giving us a bland culture of calm consumer choices and deadened emotions."

So we strap on Wii Remotes and play tennis, because we're never actually going to take up the real thing. We stand in arcades and stare at small monitors that emulate sniper rifles, dreaming of pink pixels like the guy Jake Gyllenhall plays in the film based on the book by the guy who never actually got to shoot anyone either (at least in the film anyway). And it's all harmless fun, because its entertainment.

It's quite the paradoxical situation. Whilst its perceivable that this sort of similacral living would only be conducive to more boredom, Rossingol via Ballard posits that if we're going to engage in this sort of thing it should be more realistic, more visceral:

That is not to say that videogames need to be more sensationalist, more vulgar, or more crass, but that they need not fear being more transgressive, or more expressive... They need not to shy away from their darker depictions of our fantasies, or become embarrassed when people point out how they dwell on violence and excitement. This, the safe excursion to the gladiatorial arena, is what games do best.
- Jim Rossingol, Ragdoll Metaphysics: JG Ballard, Boredom, And The Violent Promise Of Videogames.

The conclusion reached is an obvious one for armchair psychiatrists; that we should follow our obsessions, the things that fascinate and bewilder us. In his writing, Ballard made no short work of putting his obsessions to paper, taking a good long stare at the world and what his quirks said about it. If you draw a line from this, it can almost be used as an excuse to commit any act of creativity. Which, in a currently phase of feeling trapped within linear strands of thinking, is a very timely thing to be reminded of.

With the passing of James Graham Ballard, we lose another cultural antagonist. For a few seconds, the world is a little more boring because of it.

Quality control.

No, I can't believe I wrote a post about a puzzle either.

Let's never speak of it again.

Getting off the gear.

Chain Factor is my current excuse for taking too long to get anything done. I've dallied in things like this before, but I'm pretty sure this one is special. I'm told you can get it on your iPhone for free if you so desire.

You don't have anything better to do, right?

Camera Obscura, Easter Monday, and you (and me I guess).

In 2008 myself and Michael Prior of Tape Projects curated Electroprojections, an annual showcase of local and international video art that screens as part of Electrofringe, an annual electronic festival of electronic arts that is part of This Is Not Art...

And so it goes.

This Monday, a selection of works from the 2008 Electroprojections program will be shown at Serial Space in Chippendale heralding the return of Camera Obscura after a two year absence. Camera Obscura was the premiere monthly source of strange moments in screen culture, which met its end with the demise of Lanfranchi's Memorial Discotheque. And now it's back at a new home; huzzah!

After the Electroprojections program and a small break, Victor Sjöström’s classic (at least I keep hearing it's a classic, I've never actually seen it) silent horror film from 1921 “The Phantom Carriage”, will be screened. Filling in the silence will be a new soundtrack recorded by dark wave noise wunderkinds KTL, which features Stephen O’Malley of SUNN O))) and Peter ‘Pita’ Rehberg [for those playing at home].

If this sounds like a good idea to you, you should head to Serial Space, which is located at 33 Wellington Street, Chippendale (which is here) by 7pm. If you would like more information on Camera Obscura, you can go to their facebook thing or email cameraobscura.syd@gmail.com.

Current adventures in pop music: "Silence like the wind overtakes me..."

Dan Deacon is coming back to Australia, in support of his new album Bromst and that's pretty exciting. It's actually kind of amazing now that I think about it. Ever since being introduced to the video for his song The Crystal Cat (directed by Jimmy Joe Roche) by a friend of mine last year, I've been a tremendous fan of Deacon's warped electronics and squirrel vocal stylings. Should you be able to find a retailer in Sydney that stocks it, his album Spiderman of The Rings comes highly recommended as it is the ideal soundtrack for most things.

Whilst his recent live shows have incorporated many numbers of musicians, this run of Australian shows will apparently see Dan Deacon playing solo. As the above image by Mick Ø and this video show, this will not necessarily be a bad thing.

If you would like to hear Get Older from Dan Deacon's new album Bromst, you can do so here.
If you would like to download almost all of Dan Deacon's back catalogue, you can do that here.
If you would like to hear or download an interview with Dan Deacon on The Sound of Yound America, where he discusses things like his history in composition and the evolution of his performance style, well, you might want to do that here.

Australia Day resolution, 2009.

Try to keep in touch more. Just a little.