17 minute video about the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the amen break, from the the pop track Amen Brother by ‘60s soul band, The Winstons.
& by the same guy – Bassline Baseline, a short video history of the TB303 :
( both via the wonderful ‘music thing‘.
Robot Deejayism : the first random-access, fully analog robotic dj system, living at the cute URL: www.dj-i-robot.com
For audiences in cubicles, sucking down media dripfeeds, virtual nightclubbing no longer sounds just inevitable, but already exists. Witness the auctioneer fitness of the virtual spaceship bought for $100,000, being set up as a virtual marketplace and nightclub within the online multiplayer game Entropia. ( and enough with the weirdness of virtual real estate, virtual economies… virtual bank cards… but yes, google them if unfamaliar with how crazy that terrain is getting) Seems like a place for daft punks, but maybe it’ll offer a more compelling integration with our lives than the games already morphing millions of online players into machine gun wielding, medieval sword thrusting or magical potion spraying addicts?
Back in the twentieth century, Cold-Cut agreed to do a live audiovisual netcast from London to the Electrofringe 1999 festival in Newcastle – which excited the crap out of us as organisers, and which was facilitated in part by the sheer luck of having an electronic music loving ISP owner sponsoring the festival with bandwidth, and coincidentally having a warehouse next to our main venue, which meant we could just physically roll a high speed cable into our venue. Most loved the netcast idea, but some were disappointed – who expressed ‘this kind of thing’ could spell a problem for future local music, with big name stars being merely piped in from afar all the time. Luckily it doesnt need to be an either / or scenario… and for that event, we tried to make both co-exist – with a post-netcast 2way jam online using software by elefant traks called DASE ( which allowed online jamming via a 56k modem back in 99 folks! ) and resrocket(.com) – which after 6 months of tests and trials, fell down on the night because someone was asleep in San Francisco who needed to open some server…. anywaysssss… the 3D grime-lord avatars kicking down the pixel doors, make all that seem a little quaint now…
And don’t you just know these places are going to be crawling with Mp3 Bloggers?
Out of work turntablists might enjoy an advantage within some of the following occupations:
Sandpapering the tops of telegraph poles ( it’s all in the wrists ) .
Washing dinner plates (two at a time, tap & temperature controls in the middle).
Rotund buttock massaging & hubcap cleaning ( again, that two for one upper hand ).
Merry go round operators.
Assistant in vintage vinyl museums.
High speed flicking through filing cabinet drawers.
Or changing lightbulbs.
How many Djs does it take to change a lightbulb? 20.
One to select the wattage which best suits the mood of the room,
One to rifle through the bootleg lightbulbs to find one that works,
One to flicker the light switch back and forth,
And seventeen to liase with the people lining up to find out which brand of lightbulb they are using.
In the river of mp3 watches, crazy frog mutations and the white noise of over-abundant music choice, floats the DJ species, but are they flowing forward with the tide, or being washed back out to sea? A few snapshots from the DJ interface frontlines.
http://www.nationaldayofslayer.org sez :
# Stage a “Slay-out.” Don’t go to work. Listen to Slayer.
- Have a huge block party that clogs up a street in your neighborhood. Blast Slayer albums all evening. Get police cruisers and helicopters on the scene. Finish with a full-scale riot.
- Spray paint Slayer logos on churches, synagogues, or cemeteries.
- Play Slayer covers with your own band (since 99% of your riffs are stolen from Slayer anyway).
- Kill the neighbor’s dog and blame it on Slayer.
Also a fun day to play with your Slayer Barbie ( thanks ektopia ), or listen to commodore 64 & NES renditions of Angel of Death. The Japanese accapella artist Dokaka’s version is pretty great too.
Buy your fake blood early.
Maps & directions are perceived as a key desire on mobile devices, and so there’s been plenty of action on this front lately. Google Maps started the ball rolling when they made the world’s terrain available to browse and zoom in on. Yahoo & Microsoft have followed, but neither have enjoyed similar success. Google Earth followed with 3D exploration of the globe, and now Google mobile allows net connected and java enabled phones to explore satellite photos or maps of your location and provide step by step directions to a destination ( visit www.google.com/gmm with a mobile browser and download a map application). Yahoo maps can now be downloaded onto your ipod but, Google Maps is by far the more utilised and popularily remixed of the map interfaces:
Lotta recent splashes in the race to dominate net connected phones. Mostly Stateside only, but we’ll have caught up with them (down under), by the time they’ve caught up with the Japanese, 90% of whom have already used email on a phone.
Net Phones
Portable machines have proven immensely popular in recent years – whether we use them to listen to music, talk to friends, or record photos, sounds or video. Juicily, all of these functions are starting to be possible on the one device, the possibilities amplified by the simultaneous growth of wireless net connectivity. Naturally there are plenty wishing to be the monoliths providing us these capacities. Alongside growing rumours of an Apple phone, in recent weeks :
VOIP
Must be a tumultous time to be a Telecommunications giant, what with all
Finally exited the househunting merry-go-round on the weekend. Shout outs to the landlady who decided she wanted to renovate her house, the interviewee who took pains to point out how destabilising it is to be without a home for too long, to the girls who were looking for a flatmate aged 27-29 who MUST like rock n roll, NOT TECHNO, and to the girls who revealed that their fridge sometimes leaks ‘rotten meat juice’. It’s a jungle out there… which reminded me of a comic I’d made about chasing a room in Brisbane a few years ago. Impressively, was even able to find that very piece of paper within a bunch of milk-crates of ‘stuff’. Without google, or any ‘internet of thingies’ plug-ins.
Ever morphing deep ocean guzzlers, Google, swallowed another little fish recently. And while they could probably yawn and absorb much of the IT populations of small countries by accident, the tasty morsel that is ‘Sketch Up’ seems to fit nicely into their plans : it being a 3D application that allows integration of models into Google Earth.
Vat Ist Sketch Up Pro 5?
Aiming to ‘bridge the divide between design utility and fun’, Sketch-Up Pro 5 is a 3D application that allows quick and spontaneous exploration of 3D ideas, with the capacity to integrate these into other programs. Popular with architects, set designers, game developers and graphic artists for exploring conceptual ideas, it combines powerful features with an intuitive and easy to use feel. Easy enough to jump in without the manual and play, but with plenty of various techniques, shortcuts and features to grow into.
As Melbourne descends towards it’s version of winter, have been clicking through more online videos than usual. This German hiphop live video impressed with it’s visual flair, emcees projected onto, and standing against a back-lit screen – quite gorgeous sound-responsive work, made using the processing software. Also using processing, is this quite satisfying visualisation of turntable scratching found at createdigitalmusic.com , who also feature an overview of Johnny DeKam’s live video rig for a Thomas Dolby tour.
Steamshift in the UK ( who also maintains a good VJ related blog ), has a nice work in progress of a series of stacked shipping containers animating like an LED meter. Nice to see some lateral approaches to what sound-responsive VJ software can generate.
Nobukazu Takemura has quite a few well-made electronic albums under his Japanese belt. Apparently the music videos from his album Scope, all link together to form an experimental film ( directed by Corey Smith ). 160MB download ( via antville ). More Scope-film info @ archive.org. And a blog recently emerged dedicated to highlighting Japanese TV shows, in all their technicolour perversity.
New tools? Quartonian Mixer gets an update ( still free ). Jack for mac osx just released a new version of their software which allows audio to be routed between applications, and will apparently soon do the same for midi and osc. And there’s been plenty of hype about the ‘Red Camera’ on the horizon – a camera supposedly capable of recording ‘4520×2540 via a sensor large enough to adapt to standard 35mm lenses normally used by film cameras, at a price 10 times cheaper than its comparable 4K competitor Dalsa. Nice to see costs coming down, but it’s still a US$17K camera – am personally more interested in seeing how ingenuity can overcome budget limits, than what someone can make with $300 million. Unlike say, James Cameron who is thinking of a 3D remake of the titanic. Says he in a BBC article – “I won’t make movies for mobile phone screens”. The Eyecandy mailing list is a treasure trove for those who might wish to peruse endless arguments about whether resolution is the most important factor within VJing.
Conspiracy video for the weekend? Try ‘Pentagon Strike’ which fairly convincingly draws into question the actuality of what happened on the September 11 Pentagon strike. Found via stealth falk-er.
And breathing down my neck : a review / tutorial for using the 3ivx codec to compress movies for online viewing, the VJ Book : Live Cinema Unravelled review, and Sketch Up Pro review ( Pro version of the 3D software that let’s you insert 3D models into Google Earth, with some movie capturing capacity ).
Zap>>
After purr-chase by the Googlers, a free ‘Google SketchUp’ version has become available, lacking the Pro features, but still a free and powerful 3D application. Both the Google and Pro versions allow users to export their 3D models into Google Earth – the crazy 3D fly-through of the globe built from a database of satellite photos. You can even find your house on Google Earth, import the aerial photo and terrain into Sketch-Up and send it back to Google Earth. 
