installation file:
wlsetup-web.exe
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Monday, December 30, 2013
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Saturday, December 28, 2013
music video for ‘inertia’
i'm sure this won't be the last traditional music video i put
together, although i don't have much respect for the medium and have no
interest in doing it as something mandatory.
this footage just struck me as very powerful, and fitting to the track.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdjPvgGh2qw
original video taken from here without requesting permission:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS_oLmWlG8s
this footage just struck me as very powerful, and fitting to the track.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdjPvgGh2qw
original video taken from here without requesting permission:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS_oLmWlG8s
(no subject)
well, then.
happy things. merry stuff.
weirdness prevails.
hey, check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdjPvgGh2qw
those images hit me sort of deeply, so i orchestrated them. there's such an ambiguous overlap between love and parasitism....the video wasn't shot with this is mind, but the exploration it presents of that overlap is just sort of wow.
i cried making it. are the images as powerful as i see them, or am i just insane?
wait, don't answer.
you should come visit.
j
happy things. merry stuff.
weirdness prevails.
hey, check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdjPvgGh2qw
those images hit me sort of deeply, so i orchestrated them. there's such an ambiguous overlap between love and parasitism....the video wasn't shot with this is mind, but the exploration it presents of that overlap is just sort of wow.
i cried making it. are the images as powerful as i see them, or am i just insane?
wait, don't answer.
you should come visit.
j
re: roach situation
From: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
To: the initial landlord
actually, i got one right away. it's in a plastic baggie - i guess i can bring this upstairs...?
i'm no entomologist, but it sure looks like a roach to me. again, it seems to have come out of the wall looking for water; i caught it near the shower. also, given the pattern i've seen, i suspect it may be the same one i saw a few days ago and let get away into the crack. i really don't think there's an infestation in the unit, but rather a high number near by. when one gets in, it runs around for a few days until i catch it and then i don't see another for weeks....
j
To: the initial landlord
actually, i got one right away. it's in a plastic baggie - i guess i can bring this upstairs...?
i'm no entomologist, but it sure looks like a roach to me. again, it seems to have come out of the wall looking for water; i caught it near the shower. also, given the pattern i've seen, i suspect it may be the same one i saw a few days ago and let get away into the crack. i really don't think there's an infestation in the unit, but rather a high number near by. when one gets in, it runs around for a few days until i catch it and then i don't see another for weeks....
j
i've constructed a two-tiered labeling system (or multi-valued function) that will converge with most releases from this point forwards. all releases will be given an inri number, whereas releases i deem "listenable" will be given a jam number. this is meant to separate out a few releases that are indicative of the age i was when i constructed them. up to this point,
***inri/young phase***
inri001 - first cassette demo (2xlp) [1996]
inri002 - second cassette demo (lp) [1997]
inri003/jam001 - inricycled A (lp) [1997]
inri004/jam002 - inrisampled (ep) [1997]
inri005/jam003 - inri (lp) [1998]
inri006 - eat my fuck (ep) [1998]
inri007/jam004 - inriched (lp) [1999]
inri008/jam005 - inrijected (ep) [1999]
inri009/jam006 - inrimixed (ep) [1999]
inri010 - gene-o's (single) [1999]
inri011 - pop music (single) [1999]
inri012/jam007 - warning (ep) [1999]
inri013/jam008 - inrimake (lp) [1999]
inri014/jam009 - inridiculous (lp) [1999]
inri015/jam010 - inricycled B (lp) [2000]
***end of inri/young phase***
***beginning of intermediate phase***
inri016/jam011 - deny everything [2000]
inri017/jam012 - accept nothing [2000]
i will be referring to releases from this point primarily by their corresponding jam number.
(aside: that's an impressive collection of inri wordplays :P)
inri010 & inri011 were both short "singles" (i still have the cd-rs from 1999) that were produced for different types of school projects. i'd rather not modify these as they are, although they both appear on jam009 and may be modified there.
jam007 is of a nature that modification would be difficult. it's not likely that i will modify it, but i will post if i do.
jam008-jam012 will require some editing, and that's where i'm moving to next.
***inri/young phase***
inri001 - first cassette demo (2xlp) [1996]
inri002 - second cassette demo (lp) [1997]
inri003/jam001 - inricycled A (lp) [1997]
inri004/jam002 - inrisampled (ep) [1997]
inri005/jam003 - inri (lp) [1998]
inri006 - eat my fuck (ep) [1998]
inri007/jam004 - inriched (lp) [1999]
inri008/jam005 - inrijected (ep) [1999]
inri009/jam006 - inrimixed (ep) [1999]
inri010 - gene-o's (single) [1999]
inri011 - pop music (single) [1999]
inri012/jam007 - warning (ep) [1999]
inri013/jam008 - inrimake (lp) [1999]
inri014/jam009 - inridiculous (lp) [1999]
inri015/jam010 - inricycled B (lp) [2000]
***end of inri/young phase***
***beginning of intermediate phase***
inri016/jam011 - deny everything [2000]
inri017/jam012 - accept nothing [2000]
i will be referring to releases from this point primarily by their corresponding jam number.
(aside: that's an impressive collection of inri wordplays :P)
inri010 & inri011 were both short "singles" (i still have the cd-rs from 1999) that were produced for different types of school projects. i'd rather not modify these as they are, although they both appear on jam009 and may be modified there.
jam007 is of a nature that modification would be difficult. it's not likely that i will modify it, but i will post if i do.
jam008-jam012 will require some editing, and that's where i'm moving to next.
Friday, December 27, 2013
re: roach situation
From: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
To: the initial landlord
they're easy to kill by hitting them with a kleenex box, they don't seem to react to humans at all until they're attacked, but it may be a while before i see another one. as mentioned, they seem to be in the walls rather than in the unit. they never stray far from the hole they came from and try to go back in the hole if you don't get them the first time. when i blocked them off in the bedroom, they went away for months. now that i've blocked the dead radiator, i haven't seen another. i'm not sure what other entry points might exist, but i'll keep an eye out.
j
To: the initial landlord
they're easy to kill by hitting them with a kleenex box, they don't seem to react to humans at all until they're attacked, but it may be a while before i see another one. as mentioned, they seem to be in the walls rather than in the unit. they never stray far from the hole they came from and try to go back in the hole if you don't get them the first time. when i blocked them off in the bedroom, they went away for months. now that i've blocked the dead radiator, i haven't seen another. i'm not sure what other entry points might exist, but i'll keep an eye out.
j
re: roach situation
From: the initial landlord
To: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
Happy Holiday, we have never had roaches but have had occasionally had bugs that are similar. They had appeared briefly from time to time and had originated from the storm sewer drain . I will contact my brother and he can use some product we might still have from a few years ago when we had a few bugs appear. Please try to capture one of the them so we can make a determination of what the bug is.
To: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
Happy Holiday, we have never had roaches but have had occasionally had bugs that are similar. They had appeared briefly from time to time and had originated from the storm sewer drain . I will contact my brother and he can use some product we might still have from a few years ago when we had a few bugs appear. Please try to capture one of the them so we can make a determination of what the bug is.
publishing inrijected (inri022)
this is a collection of rejected tracks from the inri/inriched period. it's just chronologically sequenced.
recorded over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synth, drum programming, lyrics, samples, loops, cool edit synthesis, digital wave editing
released feb 27, 1999
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrijected
recorded over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synth, drum programming, lyrics, samples, loops, cool edit synthesis, digital wave editing
released feb 27, 1999
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrijected
publishing inrimixed (inri023)
this is a collection of weird, glitchy remixes from the inri/inriched period that i meant to do something with and just never did.
the cover art is actually the waveform for track 2; similarities to the mirror reflection of the cover of any seminal eponymous records from the late 60s are purely coincidental.
constructed over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, synths, bass, drum programming, vocals, digital wave editing, cool edit synthesis, sampling, sequencing, loops
released feb 28, 1999
the cover art is actually the waveform for track 2; similarities to the mirror reflection of the cover of any seminal eponymous records from the late 60s are purely coincidental.
constructed over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, synths, bass, drum programming, vocals, digital wave editing, cool edit synthesis, sampling, sequencing, loops
released feb 28, 1999
yup. headphones cleaned and as good as new. in the end, i'm going to prove these things are indestructible.
mixes passed through multiple listening tests and the result is acceptable if not always perfect. minor existing problems are source related, and in tracks i'm not as attached to. moving on. finally....
i hope to have the reject cd done by the day, and maybe move into inrimake.
mixes passed through multiple listening tests and the result is acceptable if not always perfect. minor existing problems are source related, and in tracks i'm not as attached to. moving on. finally....
i hope to have the reject cd done by the day, and maybe move into inrimake.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
ugh. i just spent the last several days trying to figure out what the factors were around certain tracks buzzing only on the laptop, to realize they buzzed out of the pc, now, too - because the buzz is coming from the headphones. autechre and htda and even asmz are also buzzing, albeit at different levels. it's definitely the phones.
these are my beloved phones that i've had since i was a kid and that i just replaced the cord on. and was very excited about having in working order again...
on the one hand, i seem to recall them buzzing like this in the past. yet, they weren't doing this recently up until this week. it sounds like i blew a speaker and i'm sort of blaming myself for it. i was really blaring them.
there's an off chance it could be dirty, but i'm not really sure what to do if the speaker is actually blown. that's twice, now, that i've run up against these headphones being out of order. but i don't have $800 to blow on a pair of phones that are comparable. i don't even have $300 to blow on a downgrade.
the only other pair i have to mix on are a pair of "noise-cancelling" phones that designed for ipods, and they're just too synthetic to get a useful signal from. they're just not useful for this purpose. unfortunately, my previous backups (aiwas) seem to have gotten damaged in the move.
i'm going to try and clean them and let them sit for the night and go from there. it seems bad, though...
even blaring them is...i blared them for years...
i'm wondering if the cord had too strong a signal for the speakers, a different impedance. these phones are 20+ years old, the cord is for newer models. i used the cord support told me to use, but that doesn't really say much..
these are my beloved phones that i've had since i was a kid and that i just replaced the cord on. and was very excited about having in working order again...
on the one hand, i seem to recall them buzzing like this in the past. yet, they weren't doing this recently up until this week. it sounds like i blew a speaker and i'm sort of blaming myself for it. i was really blaring them.
there's an off chance it could be dirty, but i'm not really sure what to do if the speaker is actually blown. that's twice, now, that i've run up against these headphones being out of order. but i don't have $800 to blow on a pair of phones that are comparable. i don't even have $300 to blow on a downgrade.
the only other pair i have to mix on are a pair of "noise-cancelling" phones that designed for ipods, and they're just too synthetic to get a useful signal from. they're just not useful for this purpose. unfortunately, my previous backups (aiwas) seem to have gotten damaged in the move.
i'm going to try and clean them and let them sit for the night and go from there. it seems bad, though...
even blaring them is...i blared them for years...
i'm wondering if the cord had too strong a signal for the speakers, a different impedance. these phones are 20+ years old, the cord is for newer models. i used the cord support told me to use, but that doesn't really say much..
there's a young lady in the neighbourhood that's been bumping into me
repeatedly and coming up with excuses to try and start a conversation
with me. nervous hands, giggly voice. obvious; annoying, really.
unfortunately, anybody that is displaying any interest in any type of
interaction that is less than completely random and spontaneous is going
to instantly be put in my perpetual ignore filter. see, anybody that is
going out of their way to try and get to know me better is making a
gigantic mistake, the proportions of which they really have no grasp of.
it demonstrates bad judgment. to begin with, my first assumption is
cia, and that assumption isn't going to recede quickly. but, i'm
ultimately not willing to waste my time when the conclusion is
predetermined. it's better if others get the point quickly rather than
waste their own time. that's just time i could have spent by myself,
doing something i'm more interested in.
it got me thinking, though, as i was turning the corner a block early to avoid crossing paths. it's actually been almost 8 years, now, since i last had any kind of sexual activity. that's probably longer than most people in convents and monasteries (i don't really think most of them take those oaths all that seriously). practically speaking, i think i've revirginized myself.
i don't really think about it, or even really care. my level of cynicism about sex is probably clinical. like, in need of deep psychiatry - or so people would claim. whatever. the reality is probably that i'm absolutely right and the rest of the world is totally naive. i think i'm more likely to convince a shrink than the other way around. it's just a question of coming to terms with the futility of existence. maybe i'm being a little bit buddhist again; again, whatever.
but eight years is really impressive, considering it's just out of absolute disinterest rather than anything ideological or philosophical. i see no reason to think i won't go another eight...
it got me thinking, though, as i was turning the corner a block early to avoid crossing paths. it's actually been almost 8 years, now, since i last had any kind of sexual activity. that's probably longer than most people in convents and monasteries (i don't really think most of them take those oaths all that seriously). practically speaking, i think i've revirginized myself.
i don't really think about it, or even really care. my level of cynicism about sex is probably clinical. like, in need of deep psychiatry - or so people would claim. whatever. the reality is probably that i'm absolutely right and the rest of the world is totally naive. i think i'm more likely to convince a shrink than the other way around. it's just a question of coming to terms with the futility of existence. maybe i'm being a little bit buddhist again; again, whatever.
but eight years is really impressive, considering it's just out of absolute disinterest rather than anything ideological or philosophical. i see no reason to think i won't go another eight...
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
excerpt from ‘soul of man under socialism’
we need less anarchist writing by economists and philosophers and more anarchist writing by artists. i know. i'll get to it.
i've posted this a few times. i don't absolutely identify with any single strain of anarchist thought, but this is really the closest thing i've seen to articulating my own viewpoints.
" Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere at all – well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control, to authority – in fact the authority of either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one’s own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions – one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England. Of course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That they should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley’s prose was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use it as best they can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/
i've posted this a few times. i don't absolutely identify with any single strain of anarchist thought, but this is really the closest thing i've seen to articulating my own viewpoints.
" Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere at all – well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control, to authority – in fact the authority of either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one’s own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions – one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England. Of course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That they should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley’s prose was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use it as best they can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
as that puts me at the end of my initial initial demo phase (i still have a year of inri material to work out), it's maybe a reasonable time to post the youtube playlist.
i don't know why it took so long to get my shit up on youtube, but here it is.
the difference between youtube and bandcamp is that bandcamp documents everything and youtube pulls out the stuff i think holds up independently outside of any context. what that means is that if you're worried about running into something that may offend the fuck out of you or make you cringe then checking out the youtube playlist is the way to avoid that - it's just the listenable stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3JSjmqp0cbv12RNZ8VDtPUXFnfloQvvj
i don't know why it took so long to get my shit up on youtube, but here it is.
the difference between youtube and bandcamp is that bandcamp documents everything and youtube pulls out the stuff i think holds up independently outside of any context. what that means is that if you're worried about running into something that may offend the fuck out of you or make you cringe then checking out the youtube playlist is the way to avoid that - it's just the listenable stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3JSjmqp0cbv12RNZ8VDtPUXFnfloQvvj
publishing first remaster & re-release of inriched (inri021)
and here it is, finally - done.
the editing here was much deeper than the first cd demo. while i was initially less excited about this one, the end result is comparable - there's one specific track, the 6th, that i just wish didn't exist.
in every way, it's a bit more extreme. the bad decisions were worse; in the sense that i've removed them, it doesn't matter, but in the sense that they remain they're painful. it's mostly related to vocal tracks. but where the first failed on content, this one fails more often on singing. thankfully, there's only two or three tracks that are painful.
the rest of it is actually pretty good. the noisy/experimental/glitch sections are more extreme. the techy parts are more elaborate. the ambient sections are thicker. the silliness is sillier...
as before, the record/demo bounces back and forth between "songs" and "experiments". on this demo, though, the songs are no less interesting than the noise.
the problem with the sixth track is explained on the page. i was being ironic, but not obviously, and it's kind of left me in the awkward position of identifying as queer and yet having a queer-bashing song. *shrug*. it's not queer-bashing, but it would be easier if it just didn't exist...
for the rest of it, i need to reiterate that it is valid, even when it's trite, because it's real. that is to say that it sounds like i'm 18 and less than well-adjusted. if it could be better than it is, it would lack the authenticity of being a demo produced by a troubled teenager. i might not articulate my feelings of being ignored at a very high level of thought or with much compelling poetry, but i'm certainly feeling them and that feeling certainly gets across in my unique and goofy sort of way. likewise, when i go into juvenile shock rock i am actually convincingly juvenile and convincingly shocking (unless i'm trying to be ridiculous, in which case i pull that off just as well).
that means you have to listen to it from a certain distance because a big part of what you're listening to is the spectacle of a demented child being demented, but when you do that it comes off as some of the most idiosyncratic leftfield synth pop i'm aware of. you've never heard anything quite like this.
so, if i could remove the 6th track without killing the flow of the disc, i would. beyond that, the edits that i've made have left me comfortable with throwing this out there as it is - under the existing caveats.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched-lp
==
this is very much a follow-up to the previous demo (there's a pun, here) and in fact is largely constructed of "leftover tracks" from that period. this demo may be a bit glitchier/noisier than the last one, jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp.
some of these songs are reworked versions of tracks i had recorded previously. in almost all cases, i consider the versions here (and on the previous demo, inri) to be the authoritative versions of these tracks.
the demo is consciously constructed to alternate between "conventional songs" and "experimental pieces", although both definitions are stretched. it generally takes the form of connecting passages. it's meant to give the record the feel of a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs.
lyrically, i'm still a teenager, but i'm starting to grow into myself a little more. there are some points of significant embarrassment on this recording, but it's really only the sixth track that makes me cringe to the point of regret. i was also experimenting with an "ironic distance" type of spoken word style that, in hindsight, doesn't come off so well.
the guitar work is one of the things that separates the sound from a typical industrial aesthetic. i've never been a fan of heavy metal and largely shied away from creating that kind of thing. yet, i found myself connecting more with psychedelic guitar at this point than punk rock. industrial psych generally implies something like trance, but it need not to. industrial hendrix? well, maybe it ends up sounding more like synth pop, which has historical roots in psychedelic music and progressive rock. the point is that the music does manage to carve out a unique space between industrial music and synth pop that i don't know of any clear comparisons to. people have suggested mid-period swans, the legendary pink dots and nine inch nails - only the last of which was a significant influence, and none of which are really that close. a better comparison, although still not a significant influence at this time, would be joy division - who would become a significant influence after this phase. my actual influences at the time would have been more like brian eno (through his 70s and 90s work with david bowie, as well as his work with u2), early prog (genesis/floyd/crimson), peter gabriel, the beatles, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, REM, sonic youth, the tea party and a bit of contemporary electronic music (prodigy, nin, coil, foetus, autechre, nitzer ebb, ministry, econoline crush, gravity kills, stabbing westward, skinny puppy and side projects). the sense of humour is coming from frank zappa and matt groening, if they are not actually the same person. i wasn't listening to much tears for fears, i don't think, but you can hear them lurking underneath everything.
this material was recorded throughout 1998 and the very beginning of 1999, but some of it was written as far back as 1994. unfortunately, i decided that the songs sounded better in mp3 and consequently compressed everything before burning. i understand now that i was hobbling together a crude mastering process, but it means (unfortunately) that the closest thing i have to the finished tracks are low quality mp3s and a cd-r. these tracks were taken off of a cd-r and run through digital post-production in dec, 2013 in a process that also included minimal editing (mostly the removal of badly placed samples, but also the removal of some vocal sections where it was possible). as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, digital wave editing, vocals, cool edit synthesis, production, found sounds, strategies
released feb 10, 1999
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched-lp
the editing here was much deeper than the first cd demo. while i was initially less excited about this one, the end result is comparable - there's one specific track, the 6th, that i just wish didn't exist.
in every way, it's a bit more extreme. the bad decisions were worse; in the sense that i've removed them, it doesn't matter, but in the sense that they remain they're painful. it's mostly related to vocal tracks. but where the first failed on content, this one fails more often on singing. thankfully, there's only two or three tracks that are painful.
the rest of it is actually pretty good. the noisy/experimental/glitch sections are more extreme. the techy parts are more elaborate. the ambient sections are thicker. the silliness is sillier...
as before, the record/demo bounces back and forth between "songs" and "experiments". on this demo, though, the songs are no less interesting than the noise.
the problem with the sixth track is explained on the page. i was being ironic, but not obviously, and it's kind of left me in the awkward position of identifying as queer and yet having a queer-bashing song. *shrug*. it's not queer-bashing, but it would be easier if it just didn't exist...
for the rest of it, i need to reiterate that it is valid, even when it's trite, because it's real. that is to say that it sounds like i'm 18 and less than well-adjusted. if it could be better than it is, it would lack the authenticity of being a demo produced by a troubled teenager. i might not articulate my feelings of being ignored at a very high level of thought or with much compelling poetry, but i'm certainly feeling them and that feeling certainly gets across in my unique and goofy sort of way. likewise, when i go into juvenile shock rock i am actually convincingly juvenile and convincingly shocking (unless i'm trying to be ridiculous, in which case i pull that off just as well).
that means you have to listen to it from a certain distance because a big part of what you're listening to is the spectacle of a demented child being demented, but when you do that it comes off as some of the most idiosyncratic leftfield synth pop i'm aware of. you've never heard anything quite like this.
so, if i could remove the 6th track without killing the flow of the disc, i would. beyond that, the edits that i've made have left me comfortable with throwing this out there as it is - under the existing caveats.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched-lp
==
this is very much a follow-up to the previous demo (there's a pun, here) and in fact is largely constructed of "leftover tracks" from that period. this demo may be a bit glitchier/noisier than the last one, jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp.
some of these songs are reworked versions of tracks i had recorded previously. in almost all cases, i consider the versions here (and on the previous demo, inri) to be the authoritative versions of these tracks.
the demo is consciously constructed to alternate between "conventional songs" and "experimental pieces", although both definitions are stretched. it generally takes the form of connecting passages. it's meant to give the record the feel of a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs.
lyrically, i'm still a teenager, but i'm starting to grow into myself a little more. there are some points of significant embarrassment on this recording, but it's really only the sixth track that makes me cringe to the point of regret. i was also experimenting with an "ironic distance" type of spoken word style that, in hindsight, doesn't come off so well.
the guitar work is one of the things that separates the sound from a typical industrial aesthetic. i've never been a fan of heavy metal and largely shied away from creating that kind of thing. yet, i found myself connecting more with psychedelic guitar at this point than punk rock. industrial psych generally implies something like trance, but it need not to. industrial hendrix? well, maybe it ends up sounding more like synth pop, which has historical roots in psychedelic music and progressive rock. the point is that the music does manage to carve out a unique space between industrial music and synth pop that i don't know of any clear comparisons to. people have suggested mid-period swans, the legendary pink dots and nine inch nails - only the last of which was a significant influence, and none of which are really that close. a better comparison, although still not a significant influence at this time, would be joy division - who would become a significant influence after this phase. my actual influences at the time would have been more like brian eno (through his 70s and 90s work with david bowie, as well as his work with u2), early prog (genesis/floyd/crimson), peter gabriel, the beatles, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, REM, sonic youth, the tea party and a bit of contemporary electronic music (prodigy, nin, coil, foetus, autechre, nitzer ebb, ministry, econoline crush, gravity kills, stabbing westward, skinny puppy and side projects). the sense of humour is coming from frank zappa and matt groening, if they are not actually the same person. i wasn't listening to much tears for fears, i don't think, but you can hear them lurking underneath everything.
this material was recorded throughout 1998 and the very beginning of 1999, but some of it was written as far back as 1994. unfortunately, i decided that the songs sounded better in mp3 and consequently compressed everything before burning. i understand now that i was hobbling together a crude mastering process, but it means (unfortunately) that the closest thing i have to the finished tracks are low quality mp3s and a cd-r. these tracks were taken off of a cd-r and run through digital post-production in dec, 2013 in a process that also included minimal editing (mostly the removal of badly placed samples, but also the removal of some vocal sections where it was possible). as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, digital wave editing, vocals, cool edit synthesis, production, found sounds, strategies
released feb 10, 1999
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched-lp
jessica amber murray
....and, now, to attempt to have a few drinks without smoking any cigarettes. considering the temperature outside (along with my absolute aversion to indoor smoking), i think i'm likely to do well. we'll see.
regarding the smoking thing...
the packs have been almost entirely cut out. i've bought probably around ten packs, total, since the beginning of september. what i've been doing instead is falling back to these single cigars that can be picked up at the corner store for around $1 whenever i'm about to crack. it's a little more costly on the face of it, but it's a good shot of nicotine so it works for a while. one of the problems quitters will run into is that when they crack once they want another one almost right away; the cigars seem to mitigate that. more importantly, it has broken me of a lot of routines, like smoking after meals. to me, that's the harder part. i know nicotine is a physical addiction (meaning that coming off of it will produce physical effects, like drowsiness) but i don't really feel hooked on that level. it's more about breaking routine...
...and not drinking. i've always been a social drinker, so no people has meant no drinking. i mean, i spend most of my time reading, and i'd rather be sober for that. i prefer marijuana as a creative aid. what i'm about to do is uncharacteristic.
so, i can't claim i'm nicotine-free. but i *have* broken the routine, to the point where i can honestly state that i'm not a habitual smoker anymore.
which is all i really wanted to accomplish in the first place. i don't mind being a social smoker that specifically smokes around alcohol and marijuana. what i no longer wanted to be was a solo smoker. on that point, mission accomplished.
(meaning i'm not going to get too mad at myself if i buy a pack on christmas, just like i didn't get too mad when i bought a pack a few weeks ago when it was over 10 degrees, just as an excuse to hang out outside for the day. stuff like that is enjoying the drug, not being a slave to it.)
mom
Wow! That's Great!...Wish, I could have that much self-control!
jessica amber murray
i don't think it's a question of self-control so much as it's a question of doing what one wants. i kind of strongly believe that smokers smoke because they want to, not because they're zombies. the physical withdrawals are coercive, no doubt, but it comes down to wanting or not wanting to quit.
mom
Addiction Stinks!....And in the end it WILL TAKE CONTROL!.....DENIAL is an addicts BEST FRIEND.
jessica amber murray
well, sure. but the semantics break down when you speak of control. what i'm really doing is giving myself permission to indulge, not controlling myself from indulging.
i guess i have a level of broad consistency in my concept of "self-control" that goes into a lot of areas and that my perspective regarding drugs is more of a consequence of how i see things more broadly. consider governments and this idea that their laws dissuade anti-social behaviour, the idea that laws act as disincentives to control people's desires. this is an idea that is, i think, very wrong. sure, on the one hand, you have the logic of poverty that often triumphs over the laws of social order. circumstances where property crimes exist are often circumstances where it's logical for an impoverished person to steal something or otherwise break property laws. governments can produce laws to catch people when they do this, but the laws don't actually succeed in preventing property crime. they merely succeed in criminalizing poverty. rather, eliminating that sort of crime requires a lot of social work to both eliminate the conditions that lead to it as logical and to create a populace that sees it as morally wrong. once you get to that ideal point, preventing crime is less of a process of people controlling themselves from committing crimes and more of a process of people choosing not to behave in a way that is anti-social. that's the ideal.
the way we treat addiction is sort of a cop-out. i mean, i'm not denying that addicts need to admit their addictions. i agree that acknowledgement is the first step. but actually working through it is a process of transcending the desire, not repressing it.
i think it's possible to use drugs without abusing them.
with alcoholism (and for random readers, that's not something i feel i have a problem with), the way to get beyond it is not to have the "self-control" to avoid it but to develop a desire to be sober.
(and i think i'm being a little bit buddhist, but it's something i connect to accidentally and intuitively rather than consciously)
in a moral sense, i find buddhism more rational than western religion. in the west, we've fallen into a sort of false dichotomy between "master morality" and "slave morality". the irony is that the dude that developed that false dichotomy is also the dude that transferred a lot of eastern ideas into the western sphere. he completely missed the obvious synthesis that was sitting right in front of him.
you need to be careful studying buddhism in the west, though, because most of the literature is misinterpreted hippie nonsense. there's a danger of turning into a new age weirdo.
for example, avoid anything that tries to connect buddhism with science.
i kind of like the idea that "only lost people require religion". which is to say that walking into a church or a temple or a synagogue isn't likely to find you people that understand how to behave morally on an intuitive level, but people that are struggling with it. people that "get it" find the whole thing boring and trivial.
not to put myself above it or anything. not declaring myself perfect. but there's a lot of truth to it. and if one can separate the social help from the control and brainwashing [which is difficult, especially for people in fragile states], i'll accept it could have some value.
what i'd rather see, though, is a resurgence of secular social institutions that strip out the brainwashing. i think there's a really open space here for socialist thinkers to walk into and am not really sure why they haven't, given that it connects quite well to the idea that "the social revolution must come first".
....and, now, to attempt to have a few drinks without smoking any cigarettes. considering the temperature outside (along with my absolute aversion to indoor smoking), i think i'm likely to do well. we'll see.
regarding the smoking thing...
the packs have been almost entirely cut out. i've bought probably around ten packs, total, since the beginning of september. what i've been doing instead is falling back to these single cigars that can be picked up at the corner store for around $1 whenever i'm about to crack. it's a little more costly on the face of it, but it's a good shot of nicotine so it works for a while. one of the problems quitters will run into is that when they crack once they want another one almost right away; the cigars seem to mitigate that. more importantly, it has broken me of a lot of routines, like smoking after meals. to me, that's the harder part. i know nicotine is a physical addiction (meaning that coming off of it will produce physical effects, like drowsiness) but i don't really feel hooked on that level. it's more about breaking routine...
...and not drinking. i've always been a social drinker, so no people has meant no drinking. i mean, i spend most of my time reading, and i'd rather be sober for that. i prefer marijuana as a creative aid. what i'm about to do is uncharacteristic.
so, i can't claim i'm nicotine-free. but i *have* broken the routine, to the point where i can honestly state that i'm not a habitual smoker anymore.
which is all i really wanted to accomplish in the first place. i don't mind being a social smoker that specifically smokes around alcohol and marijuana. what i no longer wanted to be was a solo smoker. on that point, mission accomplished.
(meaning i'm not going to get too mad at myself if i buy a pack on christmas, just like i didn't get too mad when i bought a pack a few weeks ago when it was over 10 degrees, just as an excuse to hang out outside for the day. stuff like that is enjoying the drug, not being a slave to it.)
mom
Wow! That's Great!...Wish, I could have that much self-control!
jessica amber murray
i don't think it's a question of self-control so much as it's a question of doing what one wants. i kind of strongly believe that smokers smoke because they want to, not because they're zombies. the physical withdrawals are coercive, no doubt, but it comes down to wanting or not wanting to quit.
mom
Addiction Stinks!....And in the end it WILL TAKE CONTROL!.....DENIAL is an addicts BEST FRIEND.
jessica amber murray
well, sure. but the semantics break down when you speak of control. what i'm really doing is giving myself permission to indulge, not controlling myself from indulging.
i guess i have a level of broad consistency in my concept of "self-control" that goes into a lot of areas and that my perspective regarding drugs is more of a consequence of how i see things more broadly. consider governments and this idea that their laws dissuade anti-social behaviour, the idea that laws act as disincentives to control people's desires. this is an idea that is, i think, very wrong. sure, on the one hand, you have the logic of poverty that often triumphs over the laws of social order. circumstances where property crimes exist are often circumstances where it's logical for an impoverished person to steal something or otherwise break property laws. governments can produce laws to catch people when they do this, but the laws don't actually succeed in preventing property crime. they merely succeed in criminalizing poverty. rather, eliminating that sort of crime requires a lot of social work to both eliminate the conditions that lead to it as logical and to create a populace that sees it as morally wrong. once you get to that ideal point, preventing crime is less of a process of people controlling themselves from committing crimes and more of a process of people choosing not to behave in a way that is anti-social. that's the ideal.
the way we treat addiction is sort of a cop-out. i mean, i'm not denying that addicts need to admit their addictions. i agree that acknowledgement is the first step. but actually working through it is a process of transcending the desire, not repressing it.
i think it's possible to use drugs without abusing them.
with alcoholism (and for random readers, that's not something i feel i have a problem with), the way to get beyond it is not to have the "self-control" to avoid it but to develop a desire to be sober.
(and i think i'm being a little bit buddhist, but it's something i connect to accidentally and intuitively rather than consciously)
in a moral sense, i find buddhism more rational than western religion. in the west, we've fallen into a sort of false dichotomy between "master morality" and "slave morality". the irony is that the dude that developed that false dichotomy is also the dude that transferred a lot of eastern ideas into the western sphere. he completely missed the obvious synthesis that was sitting right in front of him.
you need to be careful studying buddhism in the west, though, because most of the literature is misinterpreted hippie nonsense. there's a danger of turning into a new age weirdo.
for example, avoid anything that tries to connect buddhism with science.
i kind of like the idea that "only lost people require religion". which is to say that walking into a church or a temple or a synagogue isn't likely to find you people that understand how to behave morally on an intuitive level, but people that are struggling with it. people that "get it" find the whole thing boring and trivial.
not to put myself above it or anything. not declaring myself perfect. but there's a lot of truth to it. and if one can separate the social help from the control and brainwashing [which is difficult, especially for people in fragile states], i'll accept it could have some value.
what i'd rather see, though, is a resurgence of secular social institutions that strip out the brainwashing. i think there's a really open space here for socialist thinkers to walk into and am not really sure why they haven't, given that it connects quite well to the idea that "the social revolution must come first".
Monday, December 23, 2013
roach situation
From: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
To: the initial landlord
hi.
i just want to say things are going well here. and merry christmas.
there's actually not what i'd call a "roach problem" in the unit itself. i've seen a few here and there, exclusively where there are cracks in the wall. that is to say that i don't think there are roaches in the unit, but it is certainly the case that sometimes roaches wander into the unit from elsewhere in the building. i saw one the other day near the dead heater in the kitchen, and hadn't seen one before that since about october - when i had seen a few near the hole for the pipe in the closet. when i covered up the pipe, they went away. so, i've filled the cracks around the dead heater up with a pile of old hole-ridden socks i had hanging around for rags and expect that will keep them out of there. it seemed like the roach i saw in the kitchen was actually looking for water, not food. it was attracted to the sink. i'm very careful to ensure all the food in the unit is in the fridge - even like bread and stuff.
i do, however, feel a responsibility to point out that there are roaches in the building. my perspective regarding that is that there are bugs everywhere; i'm content to simply patch up holes when i see them and keep them out that way. but, as a tenant, i think i have a responsibility to inform you that they do seem to have a nest in the building somewhere.
j
To: the initial landlord
hi.
i just want to say things are going well here. and merry christmas.
there's actually not what i'd call a "roach problem" in the unit itself. i've seen a few here and there, exclusively where there are cracks in the wall. that is to say that i don't think there are roaches in the unit, but it is certainly the case that sometimes roaches wander into the unit from elsewhere in the building. i saw one the other day near the dead heater in the kitchen, and hadn't seen one before that since about october - when i had seen a few near the hole for the pipe in the closet. when i covered up the pipe, they went away. so, i've filled the cracks around the dead heater up with a pile of old hole-ridden socks i had hanging around for rags and expect that will keep them out of there. it seemed like the roach i saw in the kitchen was actually looking for water, not food. it was attracted to the sink. i'm very careful to ensure all the food in the unit is in the fridge - even like bread and stuff.
i do, however, feel a responsibility to point out that there are roaches in the building. my perspective regarding that is that there are bugs everywhere; i'm content to simply patch up holes when i see them and keep them out that way. but, as a tenant, i think i have a responsibility to inform you that they do seem to have a nest in the building somewhere.
j
mom
Hi J....How are you? I am fine(fucked up, insecure, neurotic, emotional)...lol. Oh Well....Hate this time of the year! For Sure! Anyways....Did you ever activate that XP? Just wondering? I have a friend that I was going to give it to, if you haven't, of course...Although...I am hearing from a few different people that when it is a home edition...One can have multiple activations of it?? Not sure? You would prolly know for sure...
jessica amber murray
the purpose of activation is to ensure that the purchased product key is used on one, and only one, computer. i'm not currently using it, and don't really see how i could use it, to be honest. i'm running pirated versions...
mom
So, it would be safe to give it to my friend then? But, if you feel that you want it, I will not give it to him.
jessica amber murray
no, go ahead.
mom
K...Thanks!...It will be his Christmas gift then. Just a friend. Not a boyfriend...Very nice older fellow...He just hates his windows 8, and was wanting a copy of XP.
But, You didn't answer me about how you are!?....This time of the year kinda sucks a bit(more than a bit!)...I am living in the bottom of a brown bottle right now...I know....Pathetic!....I have a few left and then am going to go through a bit(more than a bit) of horrible with-drawl...And then will be going to my friends place(his name is Paul)(He is the one I want to give my XP to,(but only if you are sure you don't want it) to cook up the Traditional Christmas Dinner...Nanny&Leo are coming too...Will be soooooo nice to see her(not so sure about Leo though)..LOL... Do you have any plans for that Annoying Day?
jessica amber murray
i actually haven't been to a christmas dinner in a few years, now. for me, it's just wednesday. if anything, i'm irked that the recycle doesn't come until friday, because i couldn't get it all out last pickup.
i'll probably have a sandwich and listen to music.
mom
That sounds quite peaceful to me.... I kinda wish I could just do the same...I have spent more than a few Christmas Days the same...And rather enjoyed it that way. I am a little stressed about my Christmas Day this year. Just hate that feeling!
jessica amber murray
i just have no patience for religious holidays or hallmark holidays. it's merely a wednesday.
mom
I hear you for sure!...Feeling quite the same!.....The only thing I am looking forward to is the yummy turkey dinner(as I am going to be the one cooking it!..And, I do make a yummy dinner for sure!)...What, I am finding that I am feeling a bit stressful about, is that...They are ALL depending on ME to get my old(fairly undependable ass) over there to prepare it!...LOL...What if, I decide to change my mind!(I won't, of course)...Just hate the feeling of it all.
Hi J....How are you? I am fine(fucked up, insecure, neurotic, emotional)...lol. Oh Well....Hate this time of the year! For Sure! Anyways....Did you ever activate that XP? Just wondering? I have a friend that I was going to give it to, if you haven't, of course...Although...I am hearing from a few different people that when it is a home edition...One can have multiple activations of it?? Not sure? You would prolly know for sure...
jessica amber murray
the purpose of activation is to ensure that the purchased product key is used on one, and only one, computer. i'm not currently using it, and don't really see how i could use it, to be honest. i'm running pirated versions...
mom
So, it would be safe to give it to my friend then? But, if you feel that you want it, I will not give it to him.
jessica amber murray
no, go ahead.
mom
K...Thanks!...It will be his Christmas gift then. Just a friend. Not a boyfriend...Very nice older fellow...He just hates his windows 8, and was wanting a copy of XP.
But, You didn't answer me about how you are!?....This time of the year kinda sucks a bit(more than a bit!)...I am living in the bottom of a brown bottle right now...I know....Pathetic!....I have a few left and then am going to go through a bit(more than a bit) of horrible with-drawl...And then will be going to my friends place(his name is Paul)(He is the one I want to give my XP to,(but only if you are sure you don't want it) to cook up the Traditional Christmas Dinner...Nanny&Leo are coming too...Will be soooooo nice to see her(not so sure about Leo though)..LOL... Do you have any plans for that Annoying Day?
jessica amber murray
i actually haven't been to a christmas dinner in a few years, now. for me, it's just wednesday. if anything, i'm irked that the recycle doesn't come until friday, because i couldn't get it all out last pickup.
i'll probably have a sandwich and listen to music.
mom
That sounds quite peaceful to me.... I kinda wish I could just do the same...I have spent more than a few Christmas Days the same...And rather enjoyed it that way. I am a little stressed about my Christmas Day this year. Just hate that feeling!
jessica amber murray
i just have no patience for religious holidays or hallmark holidays. it's merely a wednesday.
mom
I hear you for sure!...Feeling quite the same!.....The only thing I am looking forward to is the yummy turkey dinner(as I am going to be the one cooking it!..And, I do make a yummy dinner for sure!)...What, I am finding that I am feeling a bit stressful about, is that...They are ALL depending on ME to get my old(fairly undependable ass) over there to prepare it!...LOL...What if, I decide to change my mind!(I won't, of course)...Just hate the feeling of it all.
on the question of john mclaughlin's underacknowledged importance in the development of guitar rock
deathtokoalas
only the levee breaks would stand up in court. except it wasn't plagiarism 'cause it was a cover.
page is definitely guilty of ripping off mclaughlin and clapton and beck. and plant was definitely trying very hard to do the aretha thing. there's no need to make things up.
gonzocurt
Yeah, and Clapton, The Stones and Beck "ripped off" B.B.King, Freddie King, Chuck Berry, Elmore James, Robert Johnson, etc. Or was it they just loved that stuff so much they had to play it? And it influenced their musical language just like you pick up accents etc. In most cases, they worked their own creative process on it and honed it into something the young whites of the time loved.
deathtokoalas
well, it's sort of exaggerated, really. my point was that page wasn't really a guy that copied black artists, he was a guy that copied white artists that were heavily influenced by black artists. the synthesis had already been established by the time page came along...he built his sound on top of a fusion that had already happened....
but, to the extent that those other players were copying? there's a far stronger "cultural appropriation" accusation leveled at the rnb sound of the stones, the early beatles, etc than there is at the heavy blues of cream, yardbirds, zeppelin or sabbath. they operated in the same (lack of) theoretical space, sure. but cream didn't steal any more from robert johnson than jimi hendrix did. they were both working with extrapolations of a pre-existing sound, but they were also both entirely unique. delta blues simply doesn't have a psychedelic quality or a baroque quality, or any influence from eastern music.
MICHAEL HAMILTON BERRY
mclaughlin ? Page was on recordings long Before he was even heard of....what do you have to offer about music history ?
taking some one Else's song and presenting it as your own is dishonest and is actually theft of intellectual copy write. It is Illegal and morally wrong .
I like Led Zep but I think this is a rotten thing they have done over and over again.
The other poor bastards are probably broke and dead with nothing to show for a life in music. nothing to pass on to us and their descendants.
THATS why if is a ROTTEN thing to do !
deathtokoalas
i hate led zeppelin, but it's not because of the plagiarism (that doesn't truly exist), it's because robert plant is just not enjoyable to listen to. it's really a shame that page decided to work with such an annoying vocalist.
mclaughlin was even page's biggest influence, at least in the sense of who we understand jimmy page as today. mclaughlin actually gave jimmy page guitar lessons in the mid-60s. he's the architect of the sound.
page started off doing session work for country musicians, while mclaughlin was playing for graham bond. graham bond's rhythm section was made up of ginger baker and jack bruce, who would later form cream with eric clapton. this is where the fusion sound developed; mclaughlin did some early jazz recordings with bruce & baker....
when baker & bruce formed cream, clapton was very much their replacement for mclaughlin.
davis wanted hendrix to work with him, initially. hendrix couldn't commit. so, he picked mclaughlin. not page. not clapton...
page first intersected with mclaughlin when they were doing (uncredited) session work for the rolling stones. mclaughlin was the primary session guy, page was the second. there are apparently mid 60s stones tracks where mclaughlin is playing lead and page is playing rhythm.
i'm not adding anything to music history, i'm merely teaching it to somebody who doesn't know it.
only the levee breaks would stand up in court. except it wasn't plagiarism 'cause it was a cover.
page is definitely guilty of ripping off mclaughlin and clapton and beck. and plant was definitely trying very hard to do the aretha thing. there's no need to make things up.
gonzocurt
Yeah, and Clapton, The Stones and Beck "ripped off" B.B.King, Freddie King, Chuck Berry, Elmore James, Robert Johnson, etc. Or was it they just loved that stuff so much they had to play it? And it influenced their musical language just like you pick up accents etc. In most cases, they worked their own creative process on it and honed it into something the young whites of the time loved.
deathtokoalas
well, it's sort of exaggerated, really. my point was that page wasn't really a guy that copied black artists, he was a guy that copied white artists that were heavily influenced by black artists. the synthesis had already been established by the time page came along...he built his sound on top of a fusion that had already happened....
but, to the extent that those other players were copying? there's a far stronger "cultural appropriation" accusation leveled at the rnb sound of the stones, the early beatles, etc than there is at the heavy blues of cream, yardbirds, zeppelin or sabbath. they operated in the same (lack of) theoretical space, sure. but cream didn't steal any more from robert johnson than jimi hendrix did. they were both working with extrapolations of a pre-existing sound, but they were also both entirely unique. delta blues simply doesn't have a psychedelic quality or a baroque quality, or any influence from eastern music.
MICHAEL HAMILTON BERRY
mclaughlin ? Page was on recordings long Before he was even heard of....what do you have to offer about music history ?
taking some one Else's song and presenting it as your own is dishonest and is actually theft of intellectual copy write. It is Illegal and morally wrong .
I like Led Zep but I think this is a rotten thing they have done over and over again.
The other poor bastards are probably broke and dead with nothing to show for a life in music. nothing to pass on to us and their descendants.
THATS why if is a ROTTEN thing to do !
deathtokoalas
i hate led zeppelin, but it's not because of the plagiarism (that doesn't truly exist), it's because robert plant is just not enjoyable to listen to. it's really a shame that page decided to work with such an annoying vocalist.
mclaughlin was even page's biggest influence, at least in the sense of who we understand jimmy page as today. mclaughlin actually gave jimmy page guitar lessons in the mid-60s. he's the architect of the sound.
page started off doing session work for country musicians, while mclaughlin was playing for graham bond. graham bond's rhythm section was made up of ginger baker and jack bruce, who would later form cream with eric clapton. this is where the fusion sound developed; mclaughlin did some early jazz recordings with bruce & baker....
when baker & bruce formed cream, clapton was very much their replacement for mclaughlin.
davis wanted hendrix to work with him, initially. hendrix couldn't commit. so, he picked mclaughlin. not page. not clapton...
page first intersected with mclaughlin when they were doing (uncredited) session work for the rolling stones. mclaughlin was the primary session guy, page was the second. there are apparently mid 60s stones tracks where mclaughlin is playing lead and page is playing rhythm.
i'm not adding anything to music history, i'm merely teaching it to somebody who doesn't know it.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
heavy dream...
i wish people would be a little less coercive in enforcing conformist concepts that reject being square. being square is a personality trait, but it's also often a reaction to events. the quality of being square exists at the core of a square person's individuality.
square people exist.
so, instead of enforcing norms through insults and coercion, why don't we just accept that people have different value systems?
i'm consequently reclaiming the term.
i wish people would be a little less coercive in enforcing conformist concepts that reject being square. being square is a personality trait, but it's also often a reaction to events. the quality of being square exists at the core of a square person's individuality.
square people exist.
so, instead of enforcing norms through insults and coercion, why don't we just accept that people have different value systems?
i'm consequently reclaiming the term.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
publishing first remaster & re-release of inri (inri015)
so, this is completely, totally done now, no going back to it. i boosted the bass in a few places and actually reverted back to the cd rip for a few of the sound collages. i think it sounds pretty good, actually, for the most part.
there's one specific track, the 8th, on the second demo that is causing me headaches. the mix is just so saturated and muddy that i'm constantly getting information overload listening to it. i'm having a hard time building reference points. i want this done with by the end of the day, so i can move on, so soon.
====
it took a little longer than i wanted it to, but i've finally got this cleaned up to a final state.
....and now that it is mastered decently and has had a handful of bad decisions removed, i have to say it holds up fairly well. when comparing it to other late 90s electro-rock hybrids, it carves out a really unique space in it's exploration of more abstract electronics. i'm not content to recycle depeche mode or new order yet again; i want to mix in elements of glitch, throw in sound collages and even get a little proggy sometimes. really, i wish there were more people working in this removed a space, both then and now. it's really rather refreshingly creative.
the record/demo bounces back and forth between "songs" and "experiments". while some of the songs are more compelling than others, the more consistently interesting material is actually the experiments.
where it drags is in the vocals, but only to an extent. the eighth track is indefensibly bad; incoherent to the point that i don't even remember what it was about, if it was about anything at all. the rest of it is valid, even when it's trite, because it's real. that is to say that it sounds like i'm 17 and less than well-adjusted. if it could be better than it is, it would lack the authenticity of being a demo produced by a troubled teenager. i might not articulate my feelings of being useless at a very high level of thought or with much compelling poetry, but i'm certainly feeling them and that feeling certainly gets across in my unique and goofy sort of way. likewise, when i go into juvenile shock rock i am actually convincingly juvenile and convincingly shocking (unless i'm trying to be ridiculous, in which case i pull that off just as well).
that means you have to listen to it from a certain distance because a big part of what you're listening to is the spectacle of a demented child being demented, but when you do that it comes off as some of the most idiosyncratic leftfield synth pop i'm aware of. you've never heard anything quite like this.
so, if i could remove the 8th track without killing the flow of the disc, i would. beyond that, the edits that i've made have left me comfortable with throwing this out there as it is - under the existing caveats.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
====
my first cd demo represents a dramatic shift in sound that, at the time, was meant to be permanent but that ended up being merely a step in a long journey. on one hand, the shift in sound reflected my changing tastes away from alternative rock and towards industrial music. on another level, it was a return to my childhood roots in 80s synthpop. i was also expanding my tastes into glitch, noise and what could be called "musique concrete".
the shift to using drum machines was dominant in the new sound, as was the reality that i had a synthesizer available to me starting in the beginning of 1998. another major factor was the use of a pc. however, my main songwriting tool remained the guitar and these are still mostly guitar-driven pieces.
the guitar work is one of the things that separates the sound from a typical industrial aesthetic. i've never been a fan of heavy metal and largely shied away from creating that kind of thing. yet, i found myself connecting more with psychedelic guitar at this point than punk rock. industrial psych generally implies something like trance, but it need not to. industrial hendrix? well, maybe it ends up sounding more like synth pop, which has historical roots in psychedelic music and progressive rock. the point is that the music does manage to carve out a unique space between industrial music and synth pop that i don't know of any clear comparisons to. people have suggested mid-period swans, the legendary pink dots and nine inch nails - only the last of which was a significant influence, and none of which are really that close. a better comparison, although still not a significant influence at this time, would be joy division - who would become a significant influence after this phase. my actual influences at the time would have been more like brian eno (through his 70s and 90s work with david bowie, as well as his work with u2), early prog (genesis/floyd/crimson), peter gabriel, the beatles, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, REM, sonic youth, the tea party and a bit of contemporary electronic music (prodigy, nin, coil, foetus, autechre, nitzer ebb, ministry, econoline crush, gravity kills, stabbing westward, skinny puppy and side projects). the sense of humour is coming from frank zappa and matt groening, if they are not actually the same person. i wasn't listening to much tears for fears, i don't think, but you can hear them lurking underneath everything.
some of these songs are reworked versions of tracks i had recorded previously. in almost all cases, i consider the versions here (and on the follow-up demo, inriched) to be the authoritative versions of these tracks.
the demo is consciously constructed to alternate between "conventional songs" and "experimental pieces", although both definitions are stretched. it generally takes the form of connecting passages. it's meant to give the record the feel of a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs.
lyrically, i'm still a teenager, but i'm starting to grow into myself a little more. there are still some points of embarrassment, but it's really only the 8th track that is causing me any serious grief. my singing style has changed quite a bit though - most of the lyrics here are in a spoken word style, rather than sung. it's partially the result of insecurities with my voice, but it's mostly due to the shift to something electronic. i found the dead pan vocal delivery more appropriate. it's something that stuck with me though until relatively recently.
some of this material was written as far back as 1994, but was only sequenced in the second half of 1997 and recorded in the first half of 1998. unfortunately, i decided that the songs sounded better in mp3 and consequently compressed everything before burning. i understand now that i was hobbling together a crude mastering process, but it means (unfortunately) that the closest thing i have to the finished tracks are low quality mp3s and a cd-r. these tracks were taken off of a cd-r and run through digital post-production in dec, 2013 in a process that also included minimal editing (mostly the removal of badly placed simpsons samples). this is my first official record; as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, vocals, cool edit synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, found sounds, strategies, soundraider, hammerhead, sound design, metronome, digital wave editing, production
released june 20, 1998
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
there's one specific track, the 8th, on the second demo that is causing me headaches. the mix is just so saturated and muddy that i'm constantly getting information overload listening to it. i'm having a hard time building reference points. i want this done with by the end of the day, so i can move on, so soon.
====
it took a little longer than i wanted it to, but i've finally got this cleaned up to a final state.
....and now that it is mastered decently and has had a handful of bad decisions removed, i have to say it holds up fairly well. when comparing it to other late 90s electro-rock hybrids, it carves out a really unique space in it's exploration of more abstract electronics. i'm not content to recycle depeche mode or new order yet again; i want to mix in elements of glitch, throw in sound collages and even get a little proggy sometimes. really, i wish there were more people working in this removed a space, both then and now. it's really rather refreshingly creative.
the record/demo bounces back and forth between "songs" and "experiments". while some of the songs are more compelling than others, the more consistently interesting material is actually the experiments.
where it drags is in the vocals, but only to an extent. the eighth track is indefensibly bad; incoherent to the point that i don't even remember what it was about, if it was about anything at all. the rest of it is valid, even when it's trite, because it's real. that is to say that it sounds like i'm 17 and less than well-adjusted. if it could be better than it is, it would lack the authenticity of being a demo produced by a troubled teenager. i might not articulate my feelings of being useless at a very high level of thought or with much compelling poetry, but i'm certainly feeling them and that feeling certainly gets across in my unique and goofy sort of way. likewise, when i go into juvenile shock rock i am actually convincingly juvenile and convincingly shocking (unless i'm trying to be ridiculous, in which case i pull that off just as well).
that means you have to listen to it from a certain distance because a big part of what you're listening to is the spectacle of a demented child being demented, but when you do that it comes off as some of the most idiosyncratic leftfield synth pop i'm aware of. you've never heard anything quite like this.
so, if i could remove the 8th track without killing the flow of the disc, i would. beyond that, the edits that i've made have left me comfortable with throwing this out there as it is - under the existing caveats.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
====
my first cd demo represents a dramatic shift in sound that, at the time, was meant to be permanent but that ended up being merely a step in a long journey. on one hand, the shift in sound reflected my changing tastes away from alternative rock and towards industrial music. on another level, it was a return to my childhood roots in 80s synthpop. i was also expanding my tastes into glitch, noise and what could be called "musique concrete".
the shift to using drum machines was dominant in the new sound, as was the reality that i had a synthesizer available to me starting in the beginning of 1998. another major factor was the use of a pc. however, my main songwriting tool remained the guitar and these are still mostly guitar-driven pieces.
the guitar work is one of the things that separates the sound from a typical industrial aesthetic. i've never been a fan of heavy metal and largely shied away from creating that kind of thing. yet, i found myself connecting more with psychedelic guitar at this point than punk rock. industrial psych generally implies something like trance, but it need not to. industrial hendrix? well, maybe it ends up sounding more like synth pop, which has historical roots in psychedelic music and progressive rock. the point is that the music does manage to carve out a unique space between industrial music and synth pop that i don't know of any clear comparisons to. people have suggested mid-period swans, the legendary pink dots and nine inch nails - only the last of which was a significant influence, and none of which are really that close. a better comparison, although still not a significant influence at this time, would be joy division - who would become a significant influence after this phase. my actual influences at the time would have been more like brian eno (through his 70s and 90s work with david bowie, as well as his work with u2), early prog (genesis/floyd/crimson), peter gabriel, the beatles, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, REM, sonic youth, the tea party and a bit of contemporary electronic music (prodigy, nin, coil, foetus, autechre, nitzer ebb, ministry, econoline crush, gravity kills, stabbing westward, skinny puppy and side projects). the sense of humour is coming from frank zappa and matt groening, if they are not actually the same person. i wasn't listening to much tears for fears, i don't think, but you can hear them lurking underneath everything.
some of these songs are reworked versions of tracks i had recorded previously. in almost all cases, i consider the versions here (and on the follow-up demo, inriched) to be the authoritative versions of these tracks.
the demo is consciously constructed to alternate between "conventional songs" and "experimental pieces", although both definitions are stretched. it generally takes the form of connecting passages. it's meant to give the record the feel of a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs.
lyrically, i'm still a teenager, but i'm starting to grow into myself a little more. there are still some points of embarrassment, but it's really only the 8th track that is causing me any serious grief. my singing style has changed quite a bit though - most of the lyrics here are in a spoken word style, rather than sung. it's partially the result of insecurities with my voice, but it's mostly due to the shift to something electronic. i found the dead pan vocal delivery more appropriate. it's something that stuck with me though until relatively recently.
some of this material was written as far back as 1994, but was only sequenced in the second half of 1997 and recorded in the first half of 1998. unfortunately, i decided that the songs sounded better in mp3 and consequently compressed everything before burning. i understand now that i was hobbling together a crude mastering process, but it means (unfortunately) that the closest thing i have to the finished tracks are low quality mp3s and a cd-r. these tracks were taken off of a cd-r and run through digital post-production in dec, 2013 in a process that also included minimal editing (mostly the removal of badly placed simpsons samples). this is my first official record; as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, vocals, cool edit synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, found sounds, strategies, soundraider, hammerhead, sound design, metronome, digital wave editing, production
released june 20, 1998
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
Friday, December 20, 2013
how you know you're doing the noise thing right: every frequency isolates as static. instruments? what are those?
i should have known this was going to take longer than i wanted and that it was going to be painful. the core of these two initial cd demos of mine, inri and inriched, is actually pretty impressive once certain things are taken into consideration. objectively. it stands up well when compared to the other electronica/rock hybrids of the period. i'm a better guitarist than most of those bands had and i go more into contemporary electronic strains - sample art, happy hardcore, glitch - whereas they were all just ripping on depeche mode. it's a more complete and a more informed synthesis. there are certain syncretic approaches that i don't think anybody has yet to really follow up on...
unfortunately, and i really wish i hadn't, but i absolutely managed to really successfully ruin them, in ways i can't entirely reverse. but there's a lot of things i can do.....and i'm nearly done doing them.
random samples are mostly gone. i've swapped out a few vocal parts for instrumental versions. a lot of effort has been put into boosting mids (often guitar distortion) and fattening basses. what's left is what it is, and usually works in the way it was meant to.
they're both nearly salvaged at this point. i mean, i'm a 16-18 year old kid and that implies certain things (and a lack of certain things). compensating for that and being lenient with myself to the point of understanding the immaturity as actually being a part of the art, there's only one really painful track on each. that's a failure rate that's really entirely manageable. it's a lot more than i would have said about these demos before i started with this.
so, it's painful, but i'm happy i'm doing it. i'm happier that it's nearly done. a few more hours. i'll post a few updates when i get there.
i should have known this was going to take longer than i wanted and that it was going to be painful. the core of these two initial cd demos of mine, inri and inriched, is actually pretty impressive once certain things are taken into consideration. objectively. it stands up well when compared to the other electronica/rock hybrids of the period. i'm a better guitarist than most of those bands had and i go more into contemporary electronic strains - sample art, happy hardcore, glitch - whereas they were all just ripping on depeche mode. it's a more complete and a more informed synthesis. there are certain syncretic approaches that i don't think anybody has yet to really follow up on...
unfortunately, and i really wish i hadn't, but i absolutely managed to really successfully ruin them, in ways i can't entirely reverse. but there's a lot of things i can do.....and i'm nearly done doing them.
random samples are mostly gone. i've swapped out a few vocal parts for instrumental versions. a lot of effort has been put into boosting mids (often guitar distortion) and fattening basses. what's left is what it is, and usually works in the way it was meant to.
they're both nearly salvaged at this point. i mean, i'm a 16-18 year old kid and that implies certain things (and a lack of certain things). compensating for that and being lenient with myself to the point of understanding the immaturity as actually being a part of the art, there's only one really painful track on each. that's a failure rate that's really entirely manageable. it's a lot more than i would have said about these demos before i started with this.
so, it's painful, but i'm happy i'm doing it. i'm happier that it's nearly done. a few more hours. i'll post a few updates when i get there.
on the middle class nature of socal punk
happyhooliedaze
Punk is punk and has nothing to do w/electonic or hiphop.
deathtokoalas
i'd say punk has a lot to do with hip-hop, politically. further, this is a type of punk that was popular in california; rave/industrial was a type of punk that was popular in england.
happyhooliedaze
real punk is rebellious and libertarian,NOT political .Rave has NOTHING to to w/punk.Ravers are a bunch of drugged up rich kids that listen to talentless.pre-programmed garbage. Don`t talk about u don`t know as its obvious,ur "standin` on the outside,lookin` in".
deathtokoalas
the reality is that most punk, especially socal punk, was also put together by upper middle class kids. bad religion were centered around rich mommy's basement. they wrote most of their lyrics as a criticism of wealthy white culture from a first person perspective. great band, don't get me wrong, but bringing class politics into punk rock has always been perilous. joe strummer was actually an aristocrat.
rave is derived directly from industrial, which was an offshoot of punk. this is a question of historical fact. it's not a matter for debate.
ron paul is not a libertarian.
the major thing libertarians don't understand is that markets are inherently coercive. they base their ideas around concepts of freedom from the responsibility to contribute, rather than freedom to choose how to contribute responsibly. the end result is a freedom to exploit, rather than a freedom from exploitation.
Paul Boisvert
First off, all of your facts are correct and I'm sure others can agree on that. Also I completely agree with your opinion of Libertarian ethics. With that said, the subliminal opinion within your comment displays a vast amount of Class Envy. I think that your opinion of this band's writing material and your own personal beliefs make no sense because the lyrics to these songs can give you the proper information to fuel your conflagrations against the Upper-Middle/Upper Class. Also, your general thesis on discontent for Class Politics involved in Punk Rock music into a rant on Class Politics was completely hypocritical. I'm truly not trying to throw any hate in your direction because I can admit to suffering from Class Envy as well, of course those of us who have been truly affected by this recession have many of the same beliefs in that specific area. Good luck to you!
deathtokoalas
i was responding to a previous comment, which was a response to a previous comment of mine. the privacy settings that have come with these new youtube/google+ rules have created the problem of not being to reply to replies on your own comments. i think the context would clear things up.
but "class envy" is sort of a weird concept from a leftist perspective, where the aim is to abolish class. i think all leftists have something that is sort of like class envy, but that that isn't a very astute way to articulate it.
i mean, "class envy" is sort of the same concept as "distributive justice". i don't want to completely discard it as nonsense. it's just that, envy is an almost comical way to describe the process of recognizing the injustice of inequality.
Marios Laskaris
Who told you their parents were rich? They were shopping clothes from Walmart from what I know. I am not saying they were starving, but they were not rich either. Writing generic stuff without having done your research is unacceptable and far more off putting than middle class 17 year olds writing songs about what they think is wrong with the world!
deathtokoalas
i don't know or care where brett & friends shopped before they became very wealthy from epitaph records, but if you had done that basic "research" yourself, you'd realize that this entire genre is the reaction of upper middle class suburban white kids - and that, yes, bad religion is a band that mostly operated out of upper-middle class garages.
to be clear: these were guys that lived with their parents well beyond any socially normal cut-off point. they fit any conventional definition of the word "loser". self-releasing records isn't cheap, and they partially offset the cost of that by not taking responsibility for paying for living expenses like rent. if you share the mindset, you realize why climbing up social hierarchies isn't important to some people. but, socal punk as a reaction to suburbanite living (and this is a distinct thing from other kinds of punk) couldn't have happened otherwise. that's exactly what this is.
which is fine. i'm not really criticizing them for this, i'm just correcting somebody's flawed perception of punk having this kind of ghetto hip-hop romanticism. that's not true. the prominent, influential bands were mostly rich kids, which reflects our social reality. it would be a remarkable triumph of capitalism if kids could actually climb out of the projects with socially relevant art projects!
the reality is that it's how most of the audience connects with it. i grew up in a project, but by the time i was in my mid-teens i was living in a white, upper middle class reality. there were a lot of things i didn't like about that. socal punk bands like the offspring, the dead kennedys, bad religion and others helped me make sense of this upside-down reality i was living in and work my way through it's contradictions. upper middle class white kids are humans too; they need ways to cope with reality like everybody else. they may see some problems with the composition of the current system (even as it privileges them). more importantly, they may very well reject it on it's axiomatic basis. it's those upper middle class white kids that this was written by and for.
in a sense, understanding bad religion (and socal punk in general) is very simple: teach a generation of kids a moral code when they're growing up, then tell them to go out and break it in order to be "successful" and finally watch them react in confusion and horror when faced with such daunting contradictions worked into the basic process of survival. this whole cycle of events - from the moral teaching, to the opportunities revolving around being "successful" to the freedom to rebel - is a reflection of the privilege that socal punk was birthed within.
so, rather than reject the idea of these bands coming from wealth, you'd be better off to look into it a little further. it's kind of a vitally important aspect of actually understanding what this is/was all about.
Marios Laskaris
Upper middle class can be punk too. As Graffin says and I totally agree, a girl from an affluent religious family who consistently shows up to church on Sunday with her green mohawk and "Fuck Jesus" shirt is punk. But so is a biology professor who claims that Charles Darwin's ideas were wrong and has his own. Going against the grain is punk.
And what you're asking for/your idea of the "proper punk band" is impossible. You're asking for a bunch of 17 year olds that have no money to somehow aquire guitars and drums and convince Atlantic records (since epitaph would not exist in your "punk world") to release their album! Not possible! Most punk bands had to "create record labels", because no one would release a punk album from an unknown band back in 1975-1980. And if epitaph was not created, offspring, pennywise and NOFX and so many other punk bands probably wouldn't exist now and I definately wouldn't have been able to listen to them/discover them over here in Greece. So thank f**k for that! You need to think about reality too and not just theory!
I'll help you get an idea of their world back then. Sure they were not living in the streets like bums, but they were not living an untroubled life either:
''In 1976 I moved with my mom and brother to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Like millions of other victims of divorce in the 1970s I had to deal with the fact that my father was now living far away (in Racine, Wisconsin) and I would not get to see him as much as most other kids see theirs. This pain was compounded by the bewildering alienation I felt as a Wisconsin boy at Junior High School in the Los Angeles unified school district. I had entered a landscape unlike anything I experienced in my 11 years of life. I had dark brown fluffy, wavy hair, unfeatherable, impossible to mold into the cool rock-and-roll hairdos of the 1970s that were so popular. I wore velour kids shirts from K-Mart, and corduroys and because they were less expensive than jeans and we didn't have a lot of money. I had cheap shoes, usually also from K-Mart or Payless, always worn out, with goofy logos that emulated the real popular brands that all the other kids wore. I could see fellow 7th graders come to class with squinty eyes and euphoric smiles reeking of pot smoke. If you went along with the flow, unquestioning and complacent, you were accepted and rewarded with social status. If you questioned the norm, or went against the grain in any way, you were in for a rocky ride down the social ladder.
I came to be friends with a particular class of people who were labeled geeks, nerds, kooks, dorks, wimps, and pussies (or "wussies" if you combine these last two). We hung out together and did creative things after school...''
deathtokoalas
as pointed out in a previous comment, i was responding to a previous comment about prominent punk musicians and class. i've never presented an ideal of a punk band, or criticized anybody for the class they were born into. i was merely rejecting the idea that punk (and especially socal punk) had any kind of inherently "lower" class politics, for the sole reason that it just simply isn't true.
lukmruk
"ron paul is not a libertarian." oh sure he is randroid
deathtokoalas
right-wing libertarians tend to reject rand and objectivism. it isn't very good with ideas like the nap. and paul is racist, homophobic and sexist - ideas that tend to be weak in libertarian circles. libertarians tend to be in favour of gay marriage, to the extent that they acknowledge marriage at all. not paul. libertarians tend to be pro-choice on abortion. not paul. and libertarians tend to be "colour blind", they don't write up racist newsletters to try and control a white supremacist voting demographic.
paul, like rand, is just a peculiar type of american conservative. there's no value in analyzing him more deeply than that.
miaumiaucatmagician
you're making very good comments all the way
mattlaureys
here are some words from greg himself from "no direction" :
"a righteous student came and asked me to reflect
he judged my lifestyle was politically incorrect
I don't believe in self important folks who preach
no Bad Religion song can make your life complete"
Alfredo Rodriguez
The reality is, you have no clue. You weren't there when they wrote this, and fuck your political agenda. Fuck Joe Strummer, he wasn't even in a punk band. Sorry, but I can't even think of his useless bands name right now. Dance music, isn't punk rock, go rock the cashbah on the dance floor.
deathtokoalas
i don't really enjoy the clash, either, but there are a lot of other early punk bands (like the buzzcocks) that double very well as dance music. again, i don't know where people are going by disconnecting punk from dancing. what's the motive for that kind of revisionism? hardcore was something else, but it was as much of a reaction against punk as it was an evolution of it.
i also don't know why there's so much hostility to rave culture. ignoring the historical connections, just the similarities in outlook should be enough to see a set of political allies. they're both dead now, but rave was arguably more successful than punk in building a viable counter-culture. i guess there were punks that hated hippies, too, but they must have been no less close-minded.
randomusername987
I agreed with the first part, but how the hell was all the rest relevant?
deathtokoalas
i think it follows from the conversation. i mean, can you be more specific?
randomusername987
Well i was referring to the original post. What does ron paul etc have to do with Suffer?
mattlaureys
what are you even ranting on about ? that guy was making solid points and you start going on a rant talking about things that are completely insignificant. the reasons people disconnect genres from eachother is because they are diff genres and completely diff music duh. you're just ranting and linking everything to punk. and you say "they're both dead now" punk is very much alive tons of punk bands still making music and rave is also , still plenty of raves going on. you like to bash on punk don't you ?
Alfredo Rodriguez
I guess Bad Brains was also a rich band of white kids from the "burbs" as well. All these bands come from blue collar working families. Greg and Brett's parents are educators. Teachers don't make much money. Fuck Ron Paul fucking racist piece of shit!
deathtokoalas
the last time i checked, bad brains weren't skate punk from southern california. further, it's rather insensitive for you to suggest that teachers don't make a lot of money. relative to who? doctors? it's a certain sort of cluelessness that would argue that teachers are not comfortably in the middle class.
as mentioned repeatedly, that has nothing to do with what i was talking about. i really couldn't imagine dropping a bad religion record off at a mcdonalds and expecting the employees to connect to it. the songs do not discuss issues that are of relevance to the most desperate members of the working class. rather, they discuss topics that are of concern to the middle class children of teachers.
Sam steinhauer
Average yearly salary for a public school teacher in the US is about $50,000. However, Greg's parents were Professors which is most certainly an upper middle class job. Still don't get why this should change my opinion of the band.
deathtokoalas
i at no point suggested it should....
Punk is punk and has nothing to do w/electonic or hiphop.
deathtokoalas
i'd say punk has a lot to do with hip-hop, politically. further, this is a type of punk that was popular in california; rave/industrial was a type of punk that was popular in england.
happyhooliedaze
real punk is rebellious and libertarian,NOT political .Rave has NOTHING to to w/punk.Ravers are a bunch of drugged up rich kids that listen to talentless.pre-programmed garbage. Don`t talk about u don`t know as its obvious,ur "standin` on the outside,lookin` in".
deathtokoalas
the reality is that most punk, especially socal punk, was also put together by upper middle class kids. bad religion were centered around rich mommy's basement. they wrote most of their lyrics as a criticism of wealthy white culture from a first person perspective. great band, don't get me wrong, but bringing class politics into punk rock has always been perilous. joe strummer was actually an aristocrat.
rave is derived directly from industrial, which was an offshoot of punk. this is a question of historical fact. it's not a matter for debate.
ron paul is not a libertarian.
the major thing libertarians don't understand is that markets are inherently coercive. they base their ideas around concepts of freedom from the responsibility to contribute, rather than freedom to choose how to contribute responsibly. the end result is a freedom to exploit, rather than a freedom from exploitation.
Paul Boisvert
First off, all of your facts are correct and I'm sure others can agree on that. Also I completely agree with your opinion of Libertarian ethics. With that said, the subliminal opinion within your comment displays a vast amount of Class Envy. I think that your opinion of this band's writing material and your own personal beliefs make no sense because the lyrics to these songs can give you the proper information to fuel your conflagrations against the Upper-Middle/Upper Class. Also, your general thesis on discontent for Class Politics involved in Punk Rock music into a rant on Class Politics was completely hypocritical. I'm truly not trying to throw any hate in your direction because I can admit to suffering from Class Envy as well, of course those of us who have been truly affected by this recession have many of the same beliefs in that specific area. Good luck to you!
deathtokoalas
i was responding to a previous comment, which was a response to a previous comment of mine. the privacy settings that have come with these new youtube/google+ rules have created the problem of not being to reply to replies on your own comments. i think the context would clear things up.
but "class envy" is sort of a weird concept from a leftist perspective, where the aim is to abolish class. i think all leftists have something that is sort of like class envy, but that that isn't a very astute way to articulate it.
i mean, "class envy" is sort of the same concept as "distributive justice". i don't want to completely discard it as nonsense. it's just that, envy is an almost comical way to describe the process of recognizing the injustice of inequality.
Marios Laskaris
Who told you their parents were rich? They were shopping clothes from Walmart from what I know. I am not saying they were starving, but they were not rich either. Writing generic stuff without having done your research is unacceptable and far more off putting than middle class 17 year olds writing songs about what they think is wrong with the world!
deathtokoalas
i don't know or care where brett & friends shopped before they became very wealthy from epitaph records, but if you had done that basic "research" yourself, you'd realize that this entire genre is the reaction of upper middle class suburban white kids - and that, yes, bad religion is a band that mostly operated out of upper-middle class garages.
to be clear: these were guys that lived with their parents well beyond any socially normal cut-off point. they fit any conventional definition of the word "loser". self-releasing records isn't cheap, and they partially offset the cost of that by not taking responsibility for paying for living expenses like rent. if you share the mindset, you realize why climbing up social hierarchies isn't important to some people. but, socal punk as a reaction to suburbanite living (and this is a distinct thing from other kinds of punk) couldn't have happened otherwise. that's exactly what this is.
which is fine. i'm not really criticizing them for this, i'm just correcting somebody's flawed perception of punk having this kind of ghetto hip-hop romanticism. that's not true. the prominent, influential bands were mostly rich kids, which reflects our social reality. it would be a remarkable triumph of capitalism if kids could actually climb out of the projects with socially relevant art projects!
the reality is that it's how most of the audience connects with it. i grew up in a project, but by the time i was in my mid-teens i was living in a white, upper middle class reality. there were a lot of things i didn't like about that. socal punk bands like the offspring, the dead kennedys, bad religion and others helped me make sense of this upside-down reality i was living in and work my way through it's contradictions. upper middle class white kids are humans too; they need ways to cope with reality like everybody else. they may see some problems with the composition of the current system (even as it privileges them). more importantly, they may very well reject it on it's axiomatic basis. it's those upper middle class white kids that this was written by and for.
in a sense, understanding bad religion (and socal punk in general) is very simple: teach a generation of kids a moral code when they're growing up, then tell them to go out and break it in order to be "successful" and finally watch them react in confusion and horror when faced with such daunting contradictions worked into the basic process of survival. this whole cycle of events - from the moral teaching, to the opportunities revolving around being "successful" to the freedom to rebel - is a reflection of the privilege that socal punk was birthed within.
so, rather than reject the idea of these bands coming from wealth, you'd be better off to look into it a little further. it's kind of a vitally important aspect of actually understanding what this is/was all about.
Marios Laskaris
Upper middle class can be punk too. As Graffin says and I totally agree, a girl from an affluent religious family who consistently shows up to church on Sunday with her green mohawk and "Fuck Jesus" shirt is punk. But so is a biology professor who claims that Charles Darwin's ideas were wrong and has his own. Going against the grain is punk.
And what you're asking for/your idea of the "proper punk band" is impossible. You're asking for a bunch of 17 year olds that have no money to somehow aquire guitars and drums and convince Atlantic records (since epitaph would not exist in your "punk world") to release their album! Not possible! Most punk bands had to "create record labels", because no one would release a punk album from an unknown band back in 1975-1980. And if epitaph was not created, offspring, pennywise and NOFX and so many other punk bands probably wouldn't exist now and I definately wouldn't have been able to listen to them/discover them over here in Greece. So thank f**k for that! You need to think about reality too and not just theory!
I'll help you get an idea of their world back then. Sure they were not living in the streets like bums, but they were not living an untroubled life either:
''In 1976 I moved with my mom and brother to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Like millions of other victims of divorce in the 1970s I had to deal with the fact that my father was now living far away (in Racine, Wisconsin) and I would not get to see him as much as most other kids see theirs. This pain was compounded by the bewildering alienation I felt as a Wisconsin boy at Junior High School in the Los Angeles unified school district. I had entered a landscape unlike anything I experienced in my 11 years of life. I had dark brown fluffy, wavy hair, unfeatherable, impossible to mold into the cool rock-and-roll hairdos of the 1970s that were so popular. I wore velour kids shirts from K-Mart, and corduroys and because they were less expensive than jeans and we didn't have a lot of money. I had cheap shoes, usually also from K-Mart or Payless, always worn out, with goofy logos that emulated the real popular brands that all the other kids wore. I could see fellow 7th graders come to class with squinty eyes and euphoric smiles reeking of pot smoke. If you went along with the flow, unquestioning and complacent, you were accepted and rewarded with social status. If you questioned the norm, or went against the grain in any way, you were in for a rocky ride down the social ladder.
I came to be friends with a particular class of people who were labeled geeks, nerds, kooks, dorks, wimps, and pussies (or "wussies" if you combine these last two). We hung out together and did creative things after school...''
deathtokoalas
as pointed out in a previous comment, i was responding to a previous comment about prominent punk musicians and class. i've never presented an ideal of a punk band, or criticized anybody for the class they were born into. i was merely rejecting the idea that punk (and especially socal punk) had any kind of inherently "lower" class politics, for the sole reason that it just simply isn't true.
lukmruk
"ron paul is not a libertarian." oh sure he is randroid
deathtokoalas
right-wing libertarians tend to reject rand and objectivism. it isn't very good with ideas like the nap. and paul is racist, homophobic and sexist - ideas that tend to be weak in libertarian circles. libertarians tend to be in favour of gay marriage, to the extent that they acknowledge marriage at all. not paul. libertarians tend to be pro-choice on abortion. not paul. and libertarians tend to be "colour blind", they don't write up racist newsletters to try and control a white supremacist voting demographic.
paul, like rand, is just a peculiar type of american conservative. there's no value in analyzing him more deeply than that.
miaumiaucatmagician
you're making very good comments all the way
mattlaureys
here are some words from greg himself from "no direction" :
"a righteous student came and asked me to reflect
he judged my lifestyle was politically incorrect
I don't believe in self important folks who preach
no Bad Religion song can make your life complete"
Alfredo Rodriguez
The reality is, you have no clue. You weren't there when they wrote this, and fuck your political agenda. Fuck Joe Strummer, he wasn't even in a punk band. Sorry, but I can't even think of his useless bands name right now. Dance music, isn't punk rock, go rock the cashbah on the dance floor.
deathtokoalas
i don't really enjoy the clash, either, but there are a lot of other early punk bands (like the buzzcocks) that double very well as dance music. again, i don't know where people are going by disconnecting punk from dancing. what's the motive for that kind of revisionism? hardcore was something else, but it was as much of a reaction against punk as it was an evolution of it.
i also don't know why there's so much hostility to rave culture. ignoring the historical connections, just the similarities in outlook should be enough to see a set of political allies. they're both dead now, but rave was arguably more successful than punk in building a viable counter-culture. i guess there were punks that hated hippies, too, but they must have been no less close-minded.
randomusername987
I agreed with the first part, but how the hell was all the rest relevant?
deathtokoalas
i think it follows from the conversation. i mean, can you be more specific?
randomusername987
Well i was referring to the original post. What does ron paul etc have to do with Suffer?
mattlaureys
what are you even ranting on about ? that guy was making solid points and you start going on a rant talking about things that are completely insignificant. the reasons people disconnect genres from eachother is because they are diff genres and completely diff music duh. you're just ranting and linking everything to punk. and you say "they're both dead now" punk is very much alive tons of punk bands still making music and rave is also , still plenty of raves going on. you like to bash on punk don't you ?
Alfredo Rodriguez
I guess Bad Brains was also a rich band of white kids from the "burbs" as well. All these bands come from blue collar working families. Greg and Brett's parents are educators. Teachers don't make much money. Fuck Ron Paul fucking racist piece of shit!
deathtokoalas
the last time i checked, bad brains weren't skate punk from southern california. further, it's rather insensitive for you to suggest that teachers don't make a lot of money. relative to who? doctors? it's a certain sort of cluelessness that would argue that teachers are not comfortably in the middle class.
as mentioned repeatedly, that has nothing to do with what i was talking about. i really couldn't imagine dropping a bad religion record off at a mcdonalds and expecting the employees to connect to it. the songs do not discuss issues that are of relevance to the most desperate members of the working class. rather, they discuss topics that are of concern to the middle class children of teachers.
Sam steinhauer
Average yearly salary for a public school teacher in the US is about $50,000. However, Greg's parents were Professors which is most certainly an upper middle class job. Still don't get why this should change my opinion of the band.
deathtokoalas
i at no point suggested it should....
Thursday, December 19, 2013
thoughts regarding a repressed memory
it's amazing how repressed memories can just throw themselves back at you. i remember this clearly, now. which is remarkable, because i couldn't have been older than 2.
i'm sitting in a high chair, eating chocolate cake. which means it was probably my birthday. i've long deciphered the language that these humans around me are using. i'm struck by their deep corruption, and ultimately frightened by them. i understand that my safety in their presence is never certain.
somebody, perhaps my mother, tells me that once i learn to talk i'll be more like them. i can't remember the language, i can only remember the reaction, which was horror.
it was probably something parents or grandparents reflexively say on early birthdays. getting big. be talking soon.
my decision not to speak as a child, which lasted for several years, was a fully conscious attempt to keep myself pure from what had been identified as the source of human corruption: language.
...and i can now also remember myself walking around the hospital in circles, kicking a toy around the waiting room, and weighing the pros and cons of keeping my innocence by maintaining my silence, which i would, of course, eventually break.
for whatever reason, i've never told anybody this.
apparently, what the doctors determined is that i was disinterested in human interaction - not autistic, but simply highly introverted.
there was more to it than that.
and i'm not sure i've changed much.
existential dread is usually measured in terms of "teenage angst", but i wonder if anybody's studied it in toddlers.
i was saying "g-houst", with a soft g like j, but i interpreted gh the same way as ch or sh - always soft and never hard.
(i hadn't yet seen words like 'chromatic')
the day-to-day pronunciation of "ghost", as in "ghostbuster", struck me as a populist fallacy. i was certain that true poltergeist experts in the actual field would pronounce it correctly, correctly meaning in a way that conformed to my understanding of phonetic rules - gh must be just like sh and ch.
what was actually driving my insistence was a fallacy of precedence. i seem to have believed that words existed inherently in written form first and were only later taken up in speech. as such, they are defined by the rules of phonetics first and foremost and then corrupted by human speakers who impose populist fallacies upon them. i know now that it's actually the other way around, that written language is designed to capture the sounds of human speaking and that when humans change how they speak, written language changes as well.
i do, however, have specific and clear memories of what i'm saying.
i probably arrived at that fallacy of precedence (which is actually some kind of platonism, funnily enough) through experience. i mean, it's not like i had it formally postulated, but it seems to be the not-thought-through assumption i was working with because it's how i approached it: i was reading before i was talking.
the concept of the unwashed masses being too ignorant to pronounce 'ghost' correctly, gh clearly being just like sh or ch, must have also been an example of the fallacy of generalizing the specific.
so, i do fully admit to relying too much on deduction and not enough on experience and coming to some faulty conclusions as a result of that. in my defense, i'll state that i learned the value of scientific thinking very early - PRECISELY due to making deductive errors very young.
again, though, i specifically remember wrestling with the idea of whether i should talk or not and going through a long period of not talking due to rejecting it.
but, yeah, that's what i was thinking: ghostbusters was just watered down pop-sci for the masses, whomever put it together screwed up the pronunciation, and real ghostbusters that had advanced degrees in the topic would know how to pronounce it properly because they would understand that gh must be just like sh and ch (which i had never seen in a hard usage).
just to put it more in context, a word like 'zucchini' would have deeply bothered me as well. i would have argued until i was blue that it should be pronounced 'zook-cheen-ee", and then proceeded to phonetically deconstruct the word in a perfectly reasonably demonstration of that fact. i would have used phonetic rules that i only vaguely remember today, like the first i making the second long and the double cs making the u long. it would have actually been pretty complicated and impressive - and completely correct, in the sense of a formally logical deduction from first principles. i would have then accused anybody that maintained the popular, fallacious pronunciation as being functionally illiterate.
in other words, i would have not just expected there to be an underlying theory of pronunciation, i would have thought myself well-versed in it's rules, and then expected people to follow those rules. i would get very upset when people denied those rules and denounce them as pretenders and anarchists. my universe was very ordered through strict rules of structural logic.
of course, in time, i learned this isn't true. it was a valuable learning process.
ultimately, i wanted the world to be easily analyzable: i wanted everything around me to be understood through logical deduction. that way, i could say "this is why things are like this". the why, and the knowing why, and the knowing how to know why, was very important to me.
suggestions that the universe was different than this, that there were exceptions that could not be understood deductively, bothered me very deeply and would put me into temper tantrums.
the way to convince me, btw, would have been to argue with me on a phonetic basis, rather than simply tell me what is true and what isn't on an authoritarian level. and i think that's what eventually ended up happening. somebody explained to me that i had the 'gh' sound wrong, phonetically, that it's not soft before a vowel as one would expect by analogy through ch, and i went from there.
in fact, i remember that this person was my grandmother.
i'm sitting in a high chair, eating chocolate cake. which means it was probably my birthday. i've long deciphered the language that these humans around me are using. i'm struck by their deep corruption, and ultimately frightened by them. i understand that my safety in their presence is never certain.
somebody, perhaps my mother, tells me that once i learn to talk i'll be more like them. i can't remember the language, i can only remember the reaction, which was horror.
it was probably something parents or grandparents reflexively say on early birthdays. getting big. be talking soon.
my decision not to speak as a child, which lasted for several years, was a fully conscious attempt to keep myself pure from what had been identified as the source of human corruption: language.
...and i can now also remember myself walking around the hospital in circles, kicking a toy around the waiting room, and weighing the pros and cons of keeping my innocence by maintaining my silence, which i would, of course, eventually break.
for whatever reason, i've never told anybody this.
apparently, what the doctors determined is that i was disinterested in human interaction - not autistic, but simply highly introverted.
there was more to it than that.
and i'm not sure i've changed much.
existential dread is usually measured in terms of "teenage angst", but i wonder if anybody's studied it in toddlers.
i was saying "g-houst", with a soft g like j, but i interpreted gh the same way as ch or sh - always soft and never hard.
(i hadn't yet seen words like 'chromatic')
the day-to-day pronunciation of "ghost", as in "ghostbuster", struck me as a populist fallacy. i was certain that true poltergeist experts in the actual field would pronounce it correctly, correctly meaning in a way that conformed to my understanding of phonetic rules - gh must be just like sh and ch.
what was actually driving my insistence was a fallacy of precedence. i seem to have believed that words existed inherently in written form first and were only later taken up in speech. as such, they are defined by the rules of phonetics first and foremost and then corrupted by human speakers who impose populist fallacies upon them. i know now that it's actually the other way around, that written language is designed to capture the sounds of human speaking and that when humans change how they speak, written language changes as well.
i do, however, have specific and clear memories of what i'm saying.
i probably arrived at that fallacy of precedence (which is actually some kind of platonism, funnily enough) through experience. i mean, it's not like i had it formally postulated, but it seems to be the not-thought-through assumption i was working with because it's how i approached it: i was reading before i was talking.
the concept of the unwashed masses being too ignorant to pronounce 'ghost' correctly, gh clearly being just like sh or ch, must have also been an example of the fallacy of generalizing the specific.
so, i do fully admit to relying too much on deduction and not enough on experience and coming to some faulty conclusions as a result of that. in my defense, i'll state that i learned the value of scientific thinking very early - PRECISELY due to making deductive errors very young.
again, though, i specifically remember wrestling with the idea of whether i should talk or not and going through a long period of not talking due to rejecting it.
but, yeah, that's what i was thinking: ghostbusters was just watered down pop-sci for the masses, whomever put it together screwed up the pronunciation, and real ghostbusters that had advanced degrees in the topic would know how to pronounce it properly because they would understand that gh must be just like sh and ch (which i had never seen in a hard usage).
just to put it more in context, a word like 'zucchini' would have deeply bothered me as well. i would have argued until i was blue that it should be pronounced 'zook-cheen-ee", and then proceeded to phonetically deconstruct the word in a perfectly reasonably demonstration of that fact. i would have used phonetic rules that i only vaguely remember today, like the first i making the second long and the double cs making the u long. it would have actually been pretty complicated and impressive - and completely correct, in the sense of a formally logical deduction from first principles. i would have then accused anybody that maintained the popular, fallacious pronunciation as being functionally illiterate.
in other words, i would have not just expected there to be an underlying theory of pronunciation, i would have thought myself well-versed in it's rules, and then expected people to follow those rules. i would get very upset when people denied those rules and denounce them as pretenders and anarchists. my universe was very ordered through strict rules of structural logic.
of course, in time, i learned this isn't true. it was a valuable learning process.
ultimately, i wanted the world to be easily analyzable: i wanted everything around me to be understood through logical deduction. that way, i could say "this is why things are like this". the why, and the knowing why, and the knowing how to know why, was very important to me.
suggestions that the universe was different than this, that there were exceptions that could not be understood deductively, bothered me very deeply and would put me into temper tantrums.
the way to convince me, btw, would have been to argue with me on a phonetic basis, rather than simply tell me what is true and what isn't on an authoritarian level. and i think that's what eventually ended up happening. somebody explained to me that i had the 'gh' sound wrong, phonetically, that it's not soft before a vowel as one would expect by analogy through ch, and i went from there.
in fact, i remember that this person was my grandmother.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
some people are asking about software.
in the 80s and early 90s, there were three (well, more than three, but three competitive) types of computers on the market: your typical macs and intel machines, along with something called an atari. due to issues that exist in reality (such as price), the atari machines became standard amongst diy electronic musicians in the late 80s and early 90s. the computers used by bands like autechre, ministry, skinny puppy, kmfdm, etc for sample editing and sequencing were mostly ataris, using software written for atari.
probably the most well known software atari daw was cubase, which enjoyed a run as a popular windows/mac daw in the 90s before being dismantled by, i think, yamaha, in the 00s. the vst interface was not developed until 1996, but it was built on top of previous technology.
all that to say that there were probably "plugins" used on the album, but you'd need an atari emulator to actually use them.
another piece of relevant history: one of autechre's contemporaries, rdj, aka the aphex twin, almost single-handedly popularized software synthesizers. if you'd like to hear some early vst plugs, the aphex twin is a better place to look than autechre.
if you really want to capture the spirit of this type of 90s techno, though, you'd better learn to program in C. a lot of these artists programmed their own software. for a (not so) gentle introduction to this approach to music, i'd try a program called MAX.
young people that are interested in seeing some old (but very modern) computer software running in real-time (it's an early version of pro tools) can also consult the 'gave up' video by nin, 1992: watch?v=yVpw1SwJRBI.
in the 80s and early 90s, there were three (well, more than three, but three competitive) types of computers on the market: your typical macs and intel machines, along with something called an atari. due to issues that exist in reality (such as price), the atari machines became standard amongst diy electronic musicians in the late 80s and early 90s. the computers used by bands like autechre, ministry, skinny puppy, kmfdm, etc for sample editing and sequencing were mostly ataris, using software written for atari.
probably the most well known software atari daw was cubase, which enjoyed a run as a popular windows/mac daw in the 90s before being dismantled by, i think, yamaha, in the 00s. the vst interface was not developed until 1996, but it was built on top of previous technology.
all that to say that there were probably "plugins" used on the album, but you'd need an atari emulator to actually use them.
another piece of relevant history: one of autechre's contemporaries, rdj, aka the aphex twin, almost single-handedly popularized software synthesizers. if you'd like to hear some early vst plugs, the aphex twin is a better place to look than autechre.
if you really want to capture the spirit of this type of 90s techno, though, you'd better learn to program in C. a lot of these artists programmed their own software. for a (not so) gentle introduction to this approach to music, i'd try a program called MAX.
young people that are interested in seeing some old (but very modern) computer software running in real-time (it's an early version of pro tools) can also consult the 'gave up' video by nin, 1992: watch?v=yVpw1SwJRBI.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Monday, December 16, 2013
welcome to oblivion, alright
i wrote a lengthy sort of psycho-analysis of trent reznor when this came out that has largely been rendered inaccurate by the new nin disc.
i think i'm developing a theme out of 2013: creative artists going back over some of the ground they developed around the same time as trends have developed around the sound they created once upon a time, but in a way that is more like connecting with roots than following trends. this is either reznor's attempt to sound like fever ray [although it never falls into a space that is nearly as poppy as fever ray] or it's pretty hate machine v 2.0, !now with ableton!.
i don't care about any of that.
it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between trent reznor and atticus ross mimicking trent reznor. that's also secondary, except to point out that the disc crosses the line to self parody. it's like...you've used that fucking sample in about 20 songs now, trent....maybe you should stop doing that now....
this could have been something, but it's too consciously structured as a marketable product. listening to it with a little space from it, and with better headphones, is still leaving me with the same basic reaction: this record is painfully constrained by a set of artificial boundaries that are far too limiting to capture the potential that the songs hint at, and it's enraging because what they hint at is an extrapolation of trip-hop into a level of abstraction that the genre never actually accomplished.
so, it'd be great to hear this remixed by some off the wall younger electronic musicians (doldrums, born gold, lingouf) but, nowadays, reznor is more likely to go after pitchfork picks than hang around the fringes looking for new shit. i'd expect remixes from mgmt and lopatin, if he were to bother. it's easy to forget that this is the guy that distributed warp records in north america, or that this band is named after a coil record. fwiw, it sounds more like cabaret voltaire remixing a collaboration between peter gabriel and kate bush.
i could go on; i'll stop. it's just frustrating....as has been the expectation for far too long...
i think i'm developing a theme out of 2013: creative artists going back over some of the ground they developed around the same time as trends have developed around the sound they created once upon a time, but in a way that is more like connecting with roots than following trends. this is either reznor's attempt to sound like fever ray [although it never falls into a space that is nearly as poppy as fever ray] or it's pretty hate machine v 2.0, !now with ableton!.
i don't care about any of that.
it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between trent reznor and atticus ross mimicking trent reznor. that's also secondary, except to point out that the disc crosses the line to self parody. it's like...you've used that fucking sample in about 20 songs now, trent....maybe you should stop doing that now....
this could have been something, but it's too consciously structured as a marketable product. listening to it with a little space from it, and with better headphones, is still leaving me with the same basic reaction: this record is painfully constrained by a set of artificial boundaries that are far too limiting to capture the potential that the songs hint at, and it's enraging because what they hint at is an extrapolation of trip-hop into a level of abstraction that the genre never actually accomplished.
so, it'd be great to hear this remixed by some off the wall younger electronic musicians (doldrums, born gold, lingouf) but, nowadays, reznor is more likely to go after pitchfork picks than hang around the fringes looking for new shit. i'd expect remixes from mgmt and lopatin, if he were to bother. it's easy to forget that this is the guy that distributed warp records in north america, or that this band is named after a coil record. fwiw, it sounds more like cabaret voltaire remixing a collaboration between peter gabriel and kate bush.
i could go on; i'll stop. it's just frustrating....as has been the expectation for far too long...
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