deltasleep- Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys Also, here are some 8x10's I recently picked up at a thrift store. I haven't modified them in anyway- except my crappy scanner. There's nothing I love more than finding this kind of stuff! They're like sparse poetry or something- they make you generate most of the real interest. Who are these people? "Invisible Bike" works on the same angle. (not my image, by the way.)
I am so boring sometimes. There's a discount food store not far away from me that I'd really started enjoying going to(House of Bargains in Lebanon, TN). We've become spoiled at my house- getting things like Tahini, San Pellegrino, Cashew Butter, Porcini Oil, and high quality pasta sauces for 50 cents a piece. I often just buy something because it sounds good- whether I'm sure what it is or not. When I get home, I google the product to find some recipes with the ingredient in it. Today, this incidentally bumped me into a hilarious review of Almond Butter(which incidentally, also clued me in to just how expensive this item really is! )
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Apparently, this paranoia that "non-organic" food contains parasites is widespread. My wife is typically more familiar with these sorts of things, and didn't see this as surprising at all! She claims to have worked with and known several individuals and families who believe this to be true. Playing on parasite anxiety is certainly far from new- any older American will tell you about the bevy of disgusting de-worming tonics and medicines they were subjected to. Here's the cover of a pamphlet from 1938. It's remarkably similar in tone to much of the material given to those susceptible to "holistic" quackery. The pamphlet was free, presented as science, and entirely an advertisement for products made by this company (Dr. D. Jayne and Son, Inc. whose headquarters in Philly was reputed to have been one of the most flamboyant in the city at its time)
People were umpteen times more likely to have a parasite during this era- and I'll bet it wasn't because of the high tech fertilizer and pesticides used on their crops- or the genetic modifications made to the foods. The fact is, food paranoia appeals to some deep-seated survival instinct in people. Behaviors related to food safety are base instincts found the same in lower mammals. Taste Aversion being a good example of this: even when you know that you are sick, throwing up a food that you know is completely safe can make you not want to eat that good again for months- or for those who eat until they vomit, never. For most of us, it takes months for the logical part of us to overcome that survival behavior of avoiding Witness the response you are certain to have to this video, which alleges that pork is full of worms:
You know it's probably not true- but it's scary. I am thoroughly convinced that there is no notion, no lie, no belief more attractive than those that fall along the lines of "everything you know is wrong." And by the way, this video is entirely bogus. Calm down. But so called "organic foods"(organic in scientific terms just means any compound containing carbon) are not subjected to the very measures that hundreds of years of commercial agriculture have developed as a means of making foods safer and easier to cultivate. Ignoring many of these procedures and practices might make your food taste better- repelling pestilence can actually make produce more nutritious. But I think its a long, long shot to say that NOT using pesticides makes food less likely to have pests in it. Thats just dumb.
Luckily, there's now(finally?) a USDA Organic certification. I cannot imagine the complexity of developing or enforcing such a body of rules. Really, you can just view these as better quality products. If they taste better, eat them. We're lucky enough in the Western World to have people who get paid to check out our food. People who have spent a decade in school studying chemistry so complex it's beyond your wildest New Age fantasies. I am beginning to really hate the holistic health and new age movements for their preying upon people who are uneducated or mentally ill- but that seems to be the norm for medical quackery in America. Many mental illnesses come with phobias of being poisoned, or of food contamination. Perhaps it's this tendency thats got the moonmaidens of the world pouring peroxides in their peanut butter, and coke on their pork.
I have just had my mind blown by the latest addition to google maps. It now features STREET LEVEL three dimension viewing! Think of the amazing amount of energy that went into collecting this data! I can only imagine that the task involved a lot of driving around with a GPS unit and a panoramic camera of some sort. Anyways, it's amazing. Look around Times Square or Las Vegas- lots of places are now available. Its terrifying and amazing. Also, Las Vegas is a nasty dump of a town. Here's a car in a driveway in Oakland- you can read the license plates! WOW
I did this cover in response to a recent discussion with some friends, during which we accidentally doomed music. I still believe in music, even if theres never a dime in it again. This is a cover of a hopelessly hippie song. I Believe in Music
This collection of 10 videos is exactly why I think youtube is ten times the public service that public television or really public libraries are! Also, he reminds me of Mike Meyers so much... Apparently this was dubbed from a 1985 VHS tape, two years before Pastorius's death.
Found in a WebMD magazine in a doctor's office several months ago. This has been on my refrigerator since then, and my wife and I still laugh about it.
I don't usually do this kind of thing, but my wife was looking at stupid cat websites when she called me downstairs laughing about how bad this site was. Take a look around, if you can figure it out, or you can stand it. It's the most geocities thing I have ever seen. http://www.geocities.com/prydelande2002/
Heres a cover I did today of a classic country song. I was going for that blurry and sore feeling you get when you've been on the road too long. I've been working on my chicken shack guitar licks, trying to go for maximum cheese in terms of tone and playing. Watching 60's biker movies will do this to you. The guitar is run through guitar rig 2, the bass is just run direct to my mixer through a DI. And yes, I know the ending was distasteful, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I cringe every time a new Microsoft OS comes out, and I shy away for the first year as a matter of course. But Vista seems like it may be a little less buggy than say, the dreaded Windows ME. In a nutshell, heres what I've found out about whats different for multi-track, low-latency DAWs in Vista. Remember, I'm no expert.
1. Your GPU is now assigned more tasks than previously. This means that you'll be losing less CPU cycles to the flashy graphics and animations that come embedded in most DAWs, like meters, clocks, automation animations, and your GUI in general. What I hope this means is that Windows Vista will also use your GPU to run all the eye candy that comes with the OS. I always hated super-flashy OSes, like OSX and Vista, because I thought I was probably using too much of my CPU on the graphics that were there to sell the OS to general purpose users. Supposedly, Vista scales to the hardware it's installed on, meaning that slower PCs or PCs with weaker GPUs will have less animation in the OS. Personally, I could deal just fine with NO animation in my OS.
2. Finding things: easier. I probably don't have to tell you this, because its been one of the most touted features of Vista. The new native search function in Vista claims to be almost instantaneous, providing results with each keystroke, a lot like the search in the latest firefox does. The idea is, this will help people move away from the file-folder sort of logic thats dominated computing for 20 years. As hard drives get bigger and cheaper, this makes good sense, but I'll still be using plenty of folders in my audio apps at the very least.
3. Driver Hell: I don't have to tell you this either. Since computers are currently standing on the fence between 32-bit and 64-bit OSes, you'll have that many more drivers to accidentally try and install. The 32-bit driver, and the 64-bit driver(signed and unsigned). Here's what the manufacturer of my audio card has to say about the issue:
M-Audio has been keeping pace with changes to the Windows Operating System since the release of Windows 95 nearly 12 years ago. We are very excited about the opportunity to offer continued support to our Windows customers as the Windows Pro Audio community begins the gradual transition to the Vista era. Over the past year, we have worked directly with Microsoft’s Vista team to prepare for this release.
Currently, M-Audio does not offer Vista drivers or Vista software updates (beta or otherwise). As soon as Vista drivers or updates for any product are available, this FAQ and other portions of our Web site will be immediately updated to reflect this. Due to the nature of software and driver development, we are not able to provide exact dates or timeframes for when specific drivers will become available—but please rest assured that supporting Vista is a top priority for us.
Gee thanks, guys. I feel like I can really "rest assured" now. Other manufacturers have been a lot better, so I'm sure this is probably not going to be a big deal. But its going to be a hassle for the first year, like it is with every major OS change. From what I can glean from microsoft's site, just switching to Vista is not going to improve or diminish your audio performance. But if your soundcard manufacturer does choose to release drivers that take advantage of the new Vista audio architecture, you could experience better performance.
4. You're going to approve a lot of things. UAC(User Account Control) is the default mode in Vista.
With User Account Control in the new Windows Vista operating system, you can reduce the risk of exposure by limiting administrator-level access to authorized processes.
Right! And I can click allow for about a million separate applications. I get the feeling that this is going to become a lot like firewalls are to your average user: this annoying box that just keeps popping up asking you to approve things until you just become so frustrated that you click them all the instant they come up. Whether or not these things will pop up and hang audio applications remains to be seen.
Is anybody out there using Vista for pro-audio and willing to comment on how its going?
Here's a few interesting Biotech related videos, I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. This first one has the added bonus of having the Forbidden Planet soundtrack.
More creepy monkeys with robot arms. Note the caption in this one: "Reenactment"
The fact that heavy metal has begun to address biotech related issues is a sign of its coming relevance to everyday life.
Naturally, people who oppose the science tend to be morons and ideologues- like the morons who oppose nanotech, nuclear power, and other related spooky sciences that your average joe cannot understand. How can you tell someone who's starving or making a living on their crops that they should use crops with lower yields?
Enjoy the vitriolic comments from people arguing for the rights of cockroaches to be free and unfettered by robotics experiments.
Those roaches are enormous.
Also, heres a totally overhyped presentation of interesting video of the Braingate NI. Once again, the comments section has anxiety about robot overlords transmitting Fox News directly to your brain. Also, bionic men.
Of course, theres no shortage of people who are willing to call all of biotech the coming of an "apocalypse" or of the "end times." But tell that to the paraplegic and the starving. I love a wacko as much as the next guy, probably more, but anti-scientific thought is so potentially popular that its extremely toxic to our society.
For the three of you out there who may still pay attention, I have not died. I am in the middle of a busy semester of my senior year at MTSU. I really, really do not enjoy my classes, and they are sucking up all my time with stupid, silly, pointless busy work. My wife has been out of work for about 3 weeks, which means I have had no time to myself for music in almost a month now. I'm not dead, but I might be going crazy. I can't work on music with somebody over my shoulder, or even in the house. Not that I've been a fountain of good ideas or anything- I don't think I've been able to come up with anything decent in 6 months. Its a depressing creative drought, but I've been getting a lot better at technical skills. I've been building a large sample library and listening to a ton of music. I've almost got another mix ready, this time on a very specific theme: space race related records. A lot of crazy children's records and general cold war anxiety. Should be really fun. Going to the moon was such a big deal, and there were so many records about it. Anyways, I just wanted to tell you all to hang in there.
Since I had the day off today from school I made it my mission to record some of the 45s I've been ignoring for so long. There has been a little kid screaming bloody murder outside today every time anything bothers him, so I needed something to drown out the noise. Speaking of annoyances, I registered this week for my next-to-last classroom semester. After that, its on to student teaching, and then on to trying to find a school system that will pay off my loans. Strangely enough, metro Nashville will, but metro NYC will not. So in celebration of my seeing the ending the misery that is "undergrad," heres a few 45s I dug out. I love the sound of a 45, so crunchy and scratchy, over compressed, the fact that its only a song long. Theres some psychedelic crap in here - some of its horrible, some of its entertaining. There are a few spoken word bits, from a depressing insurance sales box set of 45-sized records, a kids science fiction advertising soundsheet. Also a little bit of surf- and let me tell you, having surf and psychedelic stuff on a 45 makes a man feel wealthy- the stuff is getting high prices if Nashville's record shops are any indicator. Mostly the only thing these songs have in common is their relative unpopularity. or sometimes, their stupidity. I have a handful of 45s of awful country like the piece here that I bought from an entrepreneur at his garage sale outside of Nashville- apparently he used to record and press 45s for individuals who were going to sell them at shows, etc. Whats weird though, is that some of them are from the 1990s- and I have no idea what good a 45 would be then. Anyway, enjoy another collection of gems scraped out of our culture's audio dumpster. 45s I Have Loved
Every once and awhile I go through an agonizing drought where any attempt to make music just ends in a lot of banging my head against the wall. I try to keep a positive attitude about these phases, and just consider them developmental...and I don't think that's unrealistic at all. In reality these phases are just a continuing series of crises- what I want to make versus what I am able, what I can arrange versus what I can imagine, what I can conceptualize versus what I can make concrete, etc. During these phases I learn a lot of new tricks by dissecting songs I really like, and with each of these phases I try and tackle songs of increasing difficulty and arrange/dissect them. Some songs are so simple that I just have to find out what it was about the production that makes them work so well. This time, Thriller is that song. It's definitely some combination of how cool LinnDrum bongos sound, and that synth bassline. I spend a lot of my listening time in headphones while my wife is asleep. I know a mix is really onto something when I take the headphones out of anxiety that perhaps I've not turned the speakers off and I've been playing Thriller at deafening volume on repeat at 5:45. That wolf-howl sound does that to me every single time. Everything about the mix is layered, compressed, and punched just right. If you take the mix apart by left and right channel you'll be surprised to find that the backing is surprisingly noodly. The only things the stereo image has in the center are the portions that are rock solid in terms of timing, and its careful to only allow oneelement that stage at a time. Otherwise, the mix stays busy on the outside edges. Somehow this comes out to the absolute perfect balance of funk and precision. This mix is probably only surpassed in my mind by Don't Stop Till You Get Enough. It's a real bummer that the 1979 state of the art sounds so much better than the 2006 state of the art. And don't get me started on how well the drums are recorded. I can't wait to start making a living so I can build a completely vintage hi-fi setup. The deafeningly loud 4 foot tall speakers kind that distorts when you slam it. My uncle had a pioneer rig like this in his garage when I was a kid, and I don't think I've ever heard anything sound better. When I get this, I am listening to every disco record I own. I've also been working out an arrangement of Love's The Daily Planet by ear and recording bits and pieces of it. Some songs you just hear and you know how to play- (thinking about the Kinks here) and some songs really don't . When I started dissecting this record I immediately realized that its about ten times as simple as I thought it was, and really only relies on the use of simple fingerings and chords in really awkward combinations. I now understand a lot more about what makes this record feel so original 40 years after it was made- its got a really unique approach to guitar, and a lot of the guitar work seems to be built around the limitations of a self-taught(or at least idiosyncratic) guitarist. I had also never thought about listening for the notes that shouldn't be in a chord to inadvertently sound as a technique for trying to sort about what fingering is being used. Dissection of the record has been one epiphany after another...I never knew that the use of a major chord in the right place could sound so... exotic. Oh yeah and then theres this annoying school in my life getting in the way of listening to records and playing guitar. Teaching a literature group to some fifth graders, its fun and I enjoy it, but I'm trying my hardest to get as good at music as possible...hoping somehow that I can pan it out into something. How does anybody make a living in that industry any more? Even Tower records is dead. Major labels are like a super-morbidly obese patient falling out of bed and screaming furiously at a nurse to pick them up. All I know is that I want to leave some good records behind me, and the way I do anything else begins with a lot of reading, writing, and listening. I don't know where my next record is going, I don't know when I'll get my head out of this phase, but I've got that feeling I always have about music, that I'm about to do something I'm really going to love.
deltasleep's Totally Vapid Halloween Collection Running time: 35:27 VBR mp3, 34.16 MB Here's a recording of a lot of things from my record collection that I find to be somewhere between creepy, brilliant, and unlikely. I focused this time on what I refer to as "light psychadelia" -records that feature strange instruments or effects in an otherwise mundane song, and that little bit is just enough to make it all feel strange. The closest this gets to stereotypes you probably hold about psychadelia(and that term is almost entirely meaningless) is the mystic moods orchestra. You can hear the beginnings of bands like AIR, Bertrand Burgalat, and every other recent imitation thereof. Hopefully these songs will give you as much inspiration and energy as they gave me. These are genuinely creepy records because they push things like delays and phasers in environments you don't expect to find them. They are used sparingly, and the results almost always catch the listener off guard. To top it off, they are used on a quality of recording thats completely unmatched today. The more I listen to records engineered and produced by people like Enoch Light, Arif Mardin, and Hugo Montenegro, the more I am blown away. A lot of these songs will require your patience for a moment, but think of it as a crescendo, or a tension building device. Wait for the weird synth passage, trust me. Some of them I admit, are just so effervescent that its creepy- like the ultra rarity among rarities that sounds just like the Free Design singing "Kites are Fun" except its actually Tony Mottola's Warm Wild and Wonderful instrumental version of the song. Featured on this record in some sort of order are the LPs: Muzak: Stimulus Progression, Mystic Moods Orchestra: Love Token, Switched on Bacharach, Les Baxter: Hell's Belles, Out of This World with the Richard Marino Orchestra, Enoch Light: Charge!, Honky Tonk and Percussion(also known as Will Someone Please Bring a Tuner to the Next Session) Hugo Montenegro: Lover's Collection, Tony Mottola: Warm, Wild, and Wonderful, Enoch Light: Spaced Out. Luxuriamusic.com says that they have no DJ slots open, I was really bummed. That would be a great way to get my mixes like these streamed. I'll show them, though. I am hoping to do this at least monthly, hopefully way more often. Enjoy this genuinely haunting and beautiful collection of songs that might have died if I hadn't saved them from the thrift store. One of them, "Enoch Light: Charge" is a bit tattered in one corner because a .40 cal round flew through the thrift store front window and through the glassware, through the record bin, and into a computer monitor in the back room. If that bullet had even so much as a slight change in trajectory, you would not be enjoying the first song on this mix. Was that inches away from this record being lost forever? It's possible.
Just a quick note to those of you who may only pay attention to my RSS feed that I have officially launched a real webpage on deltasleep.net Its still a work in progress, but the progress left is just fine tuning the size of the graphics to work with a wider variety of screen resolutions, and typing up a more in depth bio since that seems to be a popular request from a few college stations that have expressed interest. The CD should be done within a month, pending the availability of some student loans. I hate student loans, but I think I can make my money back selling the record, so it won't be quite so painful paying that portion back as it will the other portions. I'll also be investing in some stickers to spam my campus with.
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