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February 27, 2008
Introducing Jemapur
We interviewed new artist for Tokyo Lab, Jemapur, the other day, and we should be on track to feature a new music video of his in our compilation tenth release, Tokyo.Ten. Read the interview on the new Tokyo.Ten blog, and also check his MySpace.
Posted by shane at 09:29 PM
February 25, 2008
Tujiko / Trust
Photos from the live show last week, I am way delayed in uploading. I’d like to point you to a Flickr account now where you could see many more, higher-res photos, but that’s one other web 2.0 service I have been meaning to start for the last three years and still haven’t. YouTube shows nothing from this show unfortunately. Great new quasi-album, Trust, coming out in March. Seven new tracks and seven remixes.
Posted by shane at 06:29 PM
February 19, 2008
Björk’s Reactable: A Reaction
I just returned from Björk’s live show, and I don’t mean to dodge the whole issue of the actual performance (it was quite good) but one thing that really stood out to me was that they used this technology that looked very familiar to me as a MIT Media Lab project that I remember seeing a few years ago. Throughout the show, this instrument was featured on screens as one of the musicians played with it, and I could swear I had seen it before, though I had remembered it as a prototype, not commercially available or otherwise attainable in any way except to these two MIT students who had developed it. I marveled at the fact that Björk–or whoever tipped her off to it–had found this thing, gone through the trouble of contacting the developers about using their invention, perhaps even convinced them to develop it further, and that this whole complicated transaction must have happened so I could ultimately see it used in this performance today.
But going home and researching, to my surprise, I was completely wrong! I did find the piece that I had remembered, its called Audiopad, was developed by James Patten and Ben Recht, and can be seen here as well as in the video above. What she is using is this other thing called the Reactable, made mostly by a team of four from Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University.
What’s really strange to me is that although the Reactable is literally almost the exact same thing as the Audiopad, there is very little mention of said device from the Reactable team. No real debt to it is given, although listed on top of the related page of Reactable’s website, and there is no indication of any transaction ever going on between the two teams behind the devices–although conspicuously, Audiopad was exhibited at Sonar festival in Barcelona in 2003. Same for James Patten’s page. No mention of Reactable whatsover.
Is Reactable just a rip-off of Audiopad? If so, do the two Audiopad creators care? After all, news about their invention seems to have died out. On YouTube, the Audiopad video with the most hits has around 7000. Reactable on the other hand got picked up by Björk, has cracked well over a million hits in YouTube, and is apparently being made into an actual product in the near future.
Björk seems to always be incorporating some kind of bleeding edge technology into her performances. Previous to Reactable, she was using Lemur before anyone else, and it still features in the show as well. My next question however is, does this explicit gizmo-flaunting actually add to the performance? This is a little tricky and could be compellingly argued either way, but ultimately I would say it does. I could start to say that it doesn’t, that they’re not doing anything in that live show that they couldn't accomplish without traditional synths and sequencers (which is true), but this is beyond the point, and smacks of hard-headed, narrow-minded music snobbery.
The point is that Björk is smart. If she hadn’t jumped on this thing before anyone else, I wouldn’t be writing this, would I? I could just be saying, hey she played these songs from these albums, had a nice harpsichord player and a brass section, danced around a bit, and was out. ¥9000 later I had a good time. But its not that simple. These machines look amazing, and everyone knows it. That’s why there is no VJ or prerecorded video in these shows–just a camera on the machines. They’re the goddamn interface from the bridge of the NCC-1701-D come to life, and just to control sounds, for fuck’s sake. And once that prototype becomes a real device and people start to talk about it, buy it, or use it, Björk’s name is going to come up in every one of those conversations as being the pioneer. Even if the devices aren’t adding a lot to the sound, they are in fact superseding that purpose with the role of providing atmosphere and the intangible value of creating an overall lasting experience. I guess what I mean to say is, if you ever find yourself questioning the sexificiation of technology, especially in relation to Björk, you need look no further than that gem from 1999.
Posted by shane at 11:09 PM
Tujiko Noriko This Weds
Tujiko Noriko is on a recent jaunt of Japan, purportedly having played live with Sailor Ojisan (can’t find link now, but highly amusing, and easy to imagine by taking the name literally) in Osaka, and now with a release party coming up this Wednesday. Her music seems to draw a lot of comparisons to Björk from overseas listeners, which I won’t take the time to comment on, but funnily enough, I will also be attending that performer’s show tomorrow night, so it’s on fools!
Posted by shane at 12:26 AM
February 18, 2008
DJ Codomo
The long-awaited proper first album from DJ Codomo is out and its really, really, extremely good. Kiiiiiii is also featured rapping on one track.
Posted by shane at 12:06 PM
February 08, 2008
Social Graphing
Google announced the Social Graph API, allowing easy access by developers to publicly declared information about social connections between people online, and Apophenia responds with this insightful rebuttal.
Interestingly enough, I often find that the philosophical ideas we are confronted with in modern technological society have already been tackled with or at the very least artfully and poignantly explored by some Momus song from years prior.
The following are the lyrics from The Age of Information, from the album Ping Pong, 1997:
This is a public service announcement
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering
The age of information
It's perfectly safe
If we all take a few basic precautions
May I make some observations?
Axiom 1 for the world we've begun:
Your reputation used to depend on
What you concealed
Now it depends on what you reveal
The age of secretive mandarins who creep on heels of tact is dead:
We are all players now in the great game of fact instead
So since you can't keep your cards to your chest
I'd suggest you think a few moves ahead
As one does when playing a game of chess
Axiom 2 to make the world new:
Paranoia's simply a word for seeing things as they are
Act as you wish to be seen to act
Or leave for some other star
Somebody is prying through your files, probably
Somebody's hand is in your tin of Netscape magic cookies
But relax: if you're an interesting person
Morally good in your acts
You have nothing to fear from facts
Axiom 3 for transparency:
In the age of information the only way to hide facts
Is with interpretations, there is no way to stop the free exchange
Of idle speculations
In the days before communication privacy meant staying at home
Sitting in the dark with the curtains shut unsure whether to answer the phone
But these are different times, now the bottom line
Is that everyone should prepare to be known
Most of your friends will still like you fine
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an E-mail and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming world war three
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
Axiom 4 for this world I adore:
Our loyalties should shift in view
According to what we know
And who we are speaking to
Once I was loyal to you, and prepared to be against information
Now I am loyal to information, maybe I'm disloyal to you
My loyalty becomes more complex and cubist with every new fact I learn
It depends who I'm speaking to
And who they speak to in turn
Axiom 5 for information workers who wish to stay alive:
Supply, never withhold, the information requested
With total disregard for interests
Personal and vested
Chinese whispers was an analogue game
Where the signal degraded between brain and brain
Digital whispers is the same in reverse
The word we spread gets better, not worse
Better, not worse
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an E-mail and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming world war three
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
Posted by shane at 07:53 PM
February 01, 2008
Mind-Bending New Image Scaling Technology
With all the myriad ways that images are captured and inserted into various digital media (blogs being paramount) people who are sensitive to digital publishing, while also trying to maintain a strong sense of aesthetics, are often confronted with obnoxious but necessary decisions in cropping and resizing images to keep things organized and formatted correctly while maintaining image integrity.
Since the introduction of the artwork displaying and browsing function in iTunes, there have been countless pieces of album artwork not originally designed in a perfectly square format, but which I essentially redesigned myself, so as to fill the entire frame in the iTunes window to give myself a more pleasurable user experience. Yes, I am turned on by organization, I am a neat-freak, anal-retentive, or whatever you want call it (in Japan they just call you blood-type A). I just call it a designer I guess.
On other days, I make stupid decisions about how to crop images to fit into any number of places that have different tolerances for size and ratio. If you upload to mixi it might be one size, if its Facebook another, if its this blog another, W+K blog, yet another, etc.
If you watch this, and like me, it makes you go a bit insane, then maybe you are thinking beyond its usefulness–which is amazing, they need to integrate it into Photoshop like NOW–and instead about the strange philosophical implications of it, and the potential for artistic exploration in its errors.
Posted by shane at 01:41 PM