Here is a soundtrack for your ears of wind and rain.

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Yesterday eve, I sprang forth from the pages of the Art and Science of Digital Compositing, and spied beams of sun setting through the crack above the blankets shielding me from the outside, through the pain of glass. Gripped by sudden aescetic cravings of exterior exposure, I groped for objects of anamnesis both photographic and calligraphic and was on my way. With bicycle in tow, I rode to a mound of dirt, and this is what I saw.

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This is a piece of music written by family friend David Lamb in memorial of the death of my mother’s father. It is played by my grandmother (violin) and her brother Greg (piano), who is now also passed away.

Hearing it again reminds me that life is short. I have not been making the best use of my time. I moved to the Bay Area nearly 7 months ago. Since I’ve been living here, I have done a little timid exploring, very little extremely timid socializing, and a whole lot of keeping my cognitive tendrils embedded in the extended reality of my computer, with its vast, tempting, and marginalizing wealth of information and connectivity. While enabling great feats of externalized memory storage and access, and augmenting capabilities of information processing, storage, and organization, it seems at times that living life so absorbed in this abstracted processing tool results in an overwhelming reduction of critical thinking ability and other aspects of intelligent behavior.
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Efterklang is an inspiring and amazing band who I first started listening to in 2005. They are from Denmark, and play a fascinating breed of music which blends folk, indie rock, electronic, and their own unique musical sauce into a compelling style of brilliantly dynamic, emotive, and beautiful compositions. I was fortunate enough to see them perform in San Francisco on March 10th.

I had the interesting experience of going to a club and seeing Tipper perform two nights before. For quite a while now, I have been excited by electronic music, and the potentialities for interesting new sonic and musical territories to be explored. All too often (as in many disciplines), I find the majority of electronic music to be uninteresting or even repulsive, because it strongly adheres to established patterns of style and form, is often rhythmically unsophisticated, does not experiment nor innovate, but instead self-congratulates and regurgitates itself endlessly.

As a relatively Anti-Sphexish human, I am predisposed to be repulsed by things that self-regurgitate endlessly. I tend to be interested and excited by things that push accepted boundaries and experiment, and that offer compelling, internally consistent, emotionally powerful, tantalizingly complex, and genuine (in the sense of sincere, profound, and non-cynical) “art”.
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I first heard Elsiane after discovering them on the Secret Music Box blog back in February 2008. I was immediately surprised and intrigued, and was soon infatuated with their unique sound, reminiscent of Trip-hop, with the organic addition of real drums, and beautiful, emotional, and complex vocal melodies that weaves through the arrangement of the music and gives it a life of its own.

I had the good fortune to see them live in Seattle on September 13th. They were opening for Delerium, and sadly played without video projections, and for only the short period of 28 minutes, however their show was amazing. Here is the 3rd song they played, “Mend”.

Elsiane – Seattle, 2008 – 03 Mend from Jed Smith on Vimeo.

You can download the full show in 720p MP4-AVC, or see the other songs from this show on vimeo.

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Maywa Denki are a group of artists and engineers in Tokyo, Japan. They are known for their creation of absurdly creative “nonsense machines“, and other works of electromechanical devices which are gloriously surreal in their purpose and functioning.

Here are some blog posts for further reading.

The Nonsense Machines of Maywa Denki
PopGadget – Maywa Denki
Suicide Bots – Maywa Denki
Hand Circus – Maywa Denki
Maywa Denki Homepage

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If you have have watched the Bleary Polka, then know, you have heard a chiptune. Following is a smattering of textual quotes from the Wikipedia article on Chiptunes:

Chiptune, or chip music is music written in sound formats where all the sounds are synthesized in realtime by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of using sample-based synthesis. The “golden age” of chiptunes was the mid 1980s to early 1990s, when such sound chips were the only widely available means for creating music on computers.

Generally chip tunes consist of basic waveforms, such as sine waves, square waves and sawtooth or triangle waves, and basic percussion, often generated from white noise going through an ADSR envelope controlled synthesizer.

Chiptunes were widely used in early video game consoles to synthesize music and sound effects. This style of electronic music has been an infatuation of mine for quite some time.
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