While beastieboys.com does indeed, currently offer a free anti-war song download (In A World Gone Mad ), twas the take on the times, by another bunch of Americans who tickled me this week. The Viridians are out to culturally re-engineer the future we’d prefer, through clever, lateral design – and imagination. Founded by sci-fi provocateur Bruce Sterling, they recently called out for ‘contemplation of pretty things in this sad and ugly historical period’, offering a long list of wondrous examples. Got me thinking.

www.viridiandesign.org
Homebase for the V-cats proclaims they be “Creating irresistible demand for a global atmosphere upgrade”, fuelled by our #need# to address the now indisputably serious issue of global warming. Their strategy for countering the threat of a oil driven war with prettiness might sound ‘pretty pissweak’ to some, but it’s meant to supplement rather than replace anti-war organising efforts, and importantly reminds us to reward and encourage seeds of beauty and ethics as we encounter them. Like Jeff Noon’s gorgeous new book, ‘Falling Out of Cars‘.

Vurt-Boy Returns
Fans of yellow feathers, or frequent visitors to www.jeffnoon.com will be no doubt aware of his new novel, and I encourage you to seek it out at your local library. The beauty of libraries themselves are to be celebrated – most of them now have online browsing, ordering and notification ( too easy). Jeff’s an author whose playful language mutations and conceptual tweaks make all of his work worthy of a read on at least one level.

After Falling Out of Cars – order in his older books – the classic Vurt and it’s worthy clones Nymphomation & Pollen, the Pixel Juice short stories featuring people with human off-switches, sexuality externalised as a creature, his more recent Needle in the Groove with it’s overt feeding off electronic music processes and his book of text experiments Cobralingus – designed to provide an imaginary toolkit of ‘filters and effects’ for the writer.

Scratch Film
“After many morning walks…an idea hit me that seemed like a complete revelation. It was to compose motion, just as musicians compose sound.”
With this in mind, Len Lye (1901-1980) created an extraordinary body of works including paintings, drawings, writings, kinetic sculptures and what he is most famous for – a series of gorgeous films made by scratching and painting directly onto the film itself. Seeing these on the big screen is to have your eyes washed by a waterfall of overwhelming colour, shape and rhythm. Seek this boy out~! (www.govettbrewster.com/NR/lenlye )

Ed Kuepper & Len Lye
Fittingly the Australian Centre of Moving Image (melb) recently hosted a live soundtrack to a projected collection of Len Lye’s films. Len’s playful yet meticulous edits of his films to music, make them truly astonishing to behold. However with the edits already in place, Ed Kuepper’s live soundtrack was always going to be an interpretation that only sometimes hit the mark. Impressively though, with guitar, heavily milked FX processors, drummer & electronic pads they managed to inject life and feeling into several moments of the pieces, only at times retreating to a kind of lazily effected stoner garage jam. These walls of sounds were luscious and to be celebrated, but sometimes grated against the often minimal and more percussively edited visual delights. Do yourself a favour and see these films.

“We felt it was important to comment on where the US appears to be heading now. A war in Iraq will not resolve our problems. It can only result in the deaths of many innocent civilians and US troops. If we are truly striving for safety, we need to build friendships, not try to bully the rest of the world.”
- Adam Yauch on the beastie boys frontpage.

Samurai mythology is riddled with serpentine goddesses, encounters with the spirit world, and tales of profound transformation. Take the Tokyo Tea for example. With shots of vodka, white rum, triple sec, half a gin, one and a half Midori and sweet and sours, this momma transforms even the most disciplined soul into a right little beastie. Transformation of your MP3 collection however, is better achieved with the likes of Native Instrument’s quite fantastic MP3 mixer and loopfarmer, the trusty Traktor 2.0.

What It Is, What It Is
Traktor 2 emulates the features of a traditional hardware audio mixer, allowing you to apply a complex array of mixing techniques to that MP3 collection threatening to swallow your hard drive. Line up your tracks on either side of the screen, load them onto your ‘decks’, loop sections, shift pitch or tempo, apply filtering, equalisation, ’scratch’ the files back and forwards, and crossfade or mix your tracks together. Cueing tracks works by sending a mono signal out thereby freeing the left or right channel for pre-listening to tracks being lined up, or can work in stereo if you have a soundcard that can handle this. ( The Traktor site has extensive info about how best to set this up ). Software mixers have their limitations, but this one integrates easily with traditional hardware mixers, so you can connect a standard mixer to your computer and use most of it’s functions on your MP3 files. Software also offers a whole smorgasbord of possibilities that hardware can’t touch, and Traktor explores some of these solidly.

Feature List
Waveform Displays – soundwave displays of each track allow anticipation of upcoming sound changes. Loops and cue points can also be seen easily and adapted to suit. Something simple, but it really makes your job easier.

Tempo Detection – Traktor can accurately analyse and detect the BPM of each song, allowing for easy synching.

Looping – This is my favourite aspect of Traktor, and the most immediately fun – up to ten tempo-precise loops can be set on the fly, and these can be stretched or shrunk, or shifted along the timeline backwards and forwards, allowing endless ways to stretch breaks for as long as you want them to be. Fluid.

Cue Points – Save up to 10 cue points for each track and jump to these whenever you want.

Equalizer – A 3-band DJ (-24db/+12db) with kill switches (to -80db), punch-in and mute buttons, +/-12 db input gain and auto-gain, a crossfader and a cue mix section with separate headphone mix.

High-end filters – easy control of cutoff, width, and resonance.

Database functions – manage and archive tens of thousands of tracks with powerful naming, sorting and searching tools that allow you to access and load tracks lightning fast.

Keyboard triggering – assign over 400 functions to whatever keyboard shortcuts u want.

Mix recording – either as an audio file, or as a small file which records your knob movements etc and can be easily sent to friends or collaborators.

Mix Audio CDs – ( including visual waveforms of your CD track ) along with MP3s on the PC & Mac OS X versions.

Missing Links
If Traktors already playin with digital files, why shouldn’t it include a range of simple FX such as delay or reverb, distortion, and access other ways of processing the sounds as well as mixing them?

Starting A Traktor
You’re gonna need US$199 ( see www.native-instruments.com ). And you’re gonna need a computer.

Mac Minimum: OS 9.2 and higher or OS X (incl. 10.1, 10.2), G3 500 MHz, 128 MB RAM
Mac Recommended: OS X (incl. 10.1, 10.2), G4 733 MHz, 512 MB RAM, multi-channel soundcard (minimum 4 mono or 2 stereo outputs)

PC Minimum: Windows 98/2000/ME/XP, Pentium III 500 MHz, 128 MB RAM
PC Recommended: Windows XP, Pentium III 700 MHz, 256 MB RAM, multi-channel soundcard (minimum 4 mono or 2 stereo outputs)

Verdict
Traktor feels like it’s trying to very much emulate a traditional mixer, and only beginning to expand the possibilities of mixing to take advantage of the totally crazy and flexible audio manipulation processes available to modern computers. If you’re going to use a computer to mix music, you may as well enjoy what the computer s capable of rather than pretend it has to be something else. That said, Traktor is rock solid at what it does, has all the smoothness and quality you’d expect from Native Instruments, is getting plenty of rave reviews from professional Djs over the globe, and I’ve yet to see an article claiming there’s a better MP3 mixer out there.

William Gibson has a new book out, ‘Pattern Recognition’. He’s the sci-fi boy who named ‘cyberspace’, without even knowing how to use a computer at the time. Gleaned the idea from watching kids play arcade games and wondering where their joystick frenzied minds were. The kids of those kids are probably building wobots nowadays and grappling with artificial intelligence algorithms. They’d like these books from www.mcgraw-hill.com.au.

High Score~! The Illustrated History of Electronic Games
By Rusel Demaria & Johnny l. Wilson
300+ pages of pixel porn, tracing the prehistory of electronic games through to today’s multiplayer online and immersive realism. Even early pinball machines get some gorgeous space on the page, and as the book slides through the 70s, 80s & 90s, the fantastic plastic architecture of early game machinery is as pervworthy as the endless screenshots of games such as Ms Pacman, Donkey Kong, Marble Madness, Dragon’s Lair etc etc. Funny how many dormant game memories come flooding back when you can browse such a thorough collection of screengrabs.

Luscious colour graphics aside, High Score also packs a compelling retelling of the human stories behind the rise of computer games. Be charmed by the passion and innovations of early pioneers and experimenters. Thrill at the many technical and creative hurdles these cats leap over, as they strive to provide new levels of interactive entertainment. And grin at the games of today: 4750 x 2 for a Boneless + mute backflip (dude). Purrrrrrfect coffee table fodder for the gamer at heart.

Junkbots, Bugbots & Bots on Wheels:
Building Simple Robots with BEAM technology.
By Dave Hrynkiw & Mark W. Tilden

‘Perpetual motion machines can be really annoying unless you build really well’ – from the preface, Mark Tilden.

Trying to fast-track the robot dream, these kids figure the more people out there building their own robots the better. Fed by long-term experimentation with the possibilities of automated machinery in the household, this book outlines an introduction to electronics, mechanics and assembly techniques, several projects for immediate tackling, and an extensive array of research resources, technical schematics and material listings.

BEAM stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics, and is apparently a growing alternative to traditional CPU-based robotics. Accordingly, this BEAM robotics book aims to get you ‘breeding’ bots as soon as possible with a range of cheap ‘n’ dirty techniques for building cool robots.

Project bots include a mini-sumo wrestling robot, a BEAM walking robot, a magbot pendulum, a herbie photovore, and a solaroller drag racer. For the financially challenged, there’s even a chapter on how to best scavenge robot parts : Dumpster Diving 101. They really want you raising the robot population. A great introduction to creating simple and fun, self-guiding robots. Ongoing support for the book and roboprojects can be found at http://junkbots.solarbotics.com

Robot Invasion – 7 Cool & Easy Robot Projects
Dave Johnson

With a nice introduction chapter about the world of robotics – thought for robots, robots around us, neural nets, laws of robotics etc – Dave soon dives into building the beasties. Except he lands in something like a kiddies pool, compared to say the dumpster of the Junkbots crew. Thing is, while these projects are cool, they all require the Lego mindstorms robotics kit. Which makes it a bit more like a Toys ‘R’ Us invasion, but still a decent swarming – given the robotic car hammers, robotic arms, racing robots, 4 wheeled robots, solar powered rover robots and remote-controleld videobots on offer for building. You’ll still learn a lot with this, and have fun, but ultimately Junkbots offers more.