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.

I recently went to a ‘lecture’ by Gerry Fialka, as recommended to me by my friend Will Erokan. This consisted of a whimsical introduction of sorts to some of the theories of Marshall McLuhan, centered around his ideas about the tools humans use and how they affect us. “We shape our tools and they in turn shape us.” This approach of Technological Determinism is an interesting one. It posits that humans create inventions and spur on the growth of technology, and then this technology in turn affects humans in ways we cannot understand or predict. McLuhan urged the importance of studying the effects of our technological inventions. This is not an easy challenge, but an important one, if we are to maintain enough self-awareness and self-knowledge to remain respectably intelligent creatures.

I just finished reading Glasshouse by Charles Stross. This book and the prequel of sorts, Accelerando, took me by surprise and got me all excited. Strossian speculative fiction forms a remarkably imaginative post-cyberpunk vision of future technology, building on the work of Stephenson and Vinge, and also more obviously extrapolating from contemporary technological trends. He grapples with the idea of the technological singularity, and imagines a potential and compelling post-singularity environment. Extremely interesting concepts are explored such as the augmentation of human sensorium and cognitive ability by means of integrated ‘wetware’, the abstraction of self and consciousness from physical identity by means of matter compilers and scanners, as well as the abstracting of reality by means of artificial reality subsystems so sophisticated as to be indistinguishable from ‘real.’

In his theory of anamnesis, Plato posits that writing is a device of artificial memory, both in its storage of knowledge through written language, and its ability to cement information in the memory through the act of writing itself. If writing is a device of artificial memory, the computer could also be considered a device of external information storage. However a computer possesses much more generalized and powerful capabilities of information storage than simply written language. It can capture and store audio and video, pictures, documents, books, magazines. In addition to this, when connected to the internet, it can easily function as a universal device to quickly find information.

I spend a lot of time on my computer, searching for specific things, finding things accidentally by association with other things I happen to be looking at, and reading about new things. Increasingly, I find myself depending on my computer as an external information storage device instead of committing things to memory in my own brain. For example, I will try to remember the name of a particular movie I recently watched, and can’t remember what the name is, but I can remember exactly what folder it is in on my computer, and what letter the name begins with — I have a generalized sense of the data’s location in my own mind, but I don’t have the data itself.

If you can access information in external memory storage, then why commit it to memory? I think this will only become an increasingly relevant question as technology progresses. Or maybe it will become increasingly irrelevant. It seems relevant now because there is such a large distinction between external and internal memory storage, but 50 years from now, this distinction will likely be irrelevant.

Then again, maybe it’s just how I’m using the computer that is causing me to become cognitively impaired. In Anathem, Neal Stephenson lays out a clear distinction between syntactics and semantics. In the world he creates, there is a separation between the Mathic order, and the Saecular powers. The Mathic world has willingly abstained from technology, yet is devoted to “theorics” (academic study of math, sciences, philosophy, and other disciplines). The outside Saecular world is abundant with technology, yet the users of the technology are primarily unintelligent. The allegory is pretty clear. The interesting idea is that there is a clear separation between academic study and the effects of technological advancement on people. The ideas — the concept and the meaning are always more important than the technology. The technology provides tools to implement the ideas. A syntactic device running by itself will do nothing interesting. Only through input structured by ideas will it output meaningful information. The ideas are what is important.

How technology affects people, the way that they think and act, their ideologies, and their culture, is a very interesting and increasingly relevant question. I find that often while working at my computer I become overwhelmed, and begin to multitask and to split off into iterative threads of distractment, until my original focus on a task at hand is nearly forgotten about. I will literally stop the furious clicking and typing suddenly, realizing that I have forgotten what I was supposed to be doing. Maintaining self-awareness and direction and focus is a difficult thing to sustain in the virtual realm of endless information, minimized barriers, and infinite distraction. There is much to learn, but the brain can only absorb so much at one time; that is, until computing systems and cognitive systems are more closely integrated.

The act just completed of finishing a book was a refreshing one, and I think gave me new perspective on this problem. Reading on printed paper engages one’s brain in a different way than reading webpages on the internet, and I think it might just be possible to understand this difference in thought process, and control it to one’s own advantage.

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”.

The experience of seeing Tipper, Beats Antique, and Anten-nae at the Ten15 Club in San Francisco was an ambivalent one for me. I was excited by the environment of the experience. The 1015 club is truly quite impressive in regard to its light and sound technology. Entering the club was an experience akin to what stepping into the future might feel like. You know when you’re watching a movie, and they have a scene in a nightclub that is intended to evoke “future”? Like that. The ceiling is made of illuminated and animated color, there are projections of abstract patterns sweeping the floor and flaring in your eyes. In the middle of the main dance floor, the sound system is so precisely tuned and so powerful that it sounds amazing, does not hurt, and has close to the most insanely intensely powerful bass I have ever experienced.

With things that impress at first however, often the initial awe breaks down as the experience continues. The show that I saw here was primarily “DJ Entertainment”, meaning that there was a corner of the room with a guy behind a large stack of complicated electronic sound devices and a laptop computer, who (depending on the ‘performer’), would occassionaly wave an arm around or rhythmically adjust headphones on his or her head.

Electronic music is a strange phonomenon. Usually when you go to a concert (historically speaking), you are expecting a performance. You stand facing a stage, on which there are musical performers that you idolize performing songs that are ingrained into your musical memory. This breeds an excitement and an experience of anticipation and release, which is … enjoyable.

With a DJ Performer, there is a disconnect that happens, because while there is a person there making the sounds happen, said person is not necessarily performing said sounds in the concretely recognizable way that a person playing a guitar and singing performs his songs. Additionally, there aren’t individual songs, but rather a long continuous evolving musical structure. The music itself becomes as much of an attraction as the performers being physically present. What then is the difference between sitting in your room alone listening to the music on a home stereo system, and going out to a club and listening to a DJ set? Most notably, there is a sense of camaraderie in being with a large group of other people enjoying the same music as yourself, and dancing. Also the sound system is a lot better than your home stereo. Still, it seems like there is an important difference between a ‘traditional’ concert, and a ‘DJ set’.

In my limited experience of such things, it seems that in the culture of those who go to electronic music shows a lot, the primary attraction is electronic music, dancing, and drugs. Often the experience of the dancing and the “party” atmosphere seems to be considered more important than the music itself, and the quality of the music suffers. Some people might not care, but this environment is not an attractive one to me.

In the last year or so I became relatively enamored of the underground Bay Area ‘crunky’ ‘glitch-hop’ style electro dubstep characterized by the music of edIT, Ooah, Boreta, Bill Bless (Squarnch, Heyoka), Skeetaz, EPROM, and others. edIT’s amazingly nuanced and beautifully emotional album Crying Over Pros With No Reason was one of the records that got me interested in electronic music in the the early days (Summer 2005). His newer music (Certified Air Raid Material) forms an interesting hybrid of the DJ set style of performance and the more traditional song-based structure. He and a group of like-minded musicians have been touring together under the name The Glitch Mob, using an interesting performance structure where they play each others songs in a linear structure, but there is preserved a nearly improvisational performance structure, where the core rhythmic and textural components of the songs are in place, but the structure and the nuances of the songs can be varied each time. There is something compelling about the fact that music is being created on the spot in a performance, and The Glitch Mob come closer to this notion of “performance” than more traditional ‘rave’ or ‘discotech’ style events.

There still seems to be an aura of the “dance party” mindset to even this marginally avant-garde collection of underground electronic musical stylings which I find to be distasteful however.

The real subject that this post is about is the Danish band Efterklang. Efterklang embody just what I love to see in electronic music. Their music is fundamentally constructed around the idea of compositions — songs that are structured in such a way as to have emotional dynamics, crescendos, harmonies, and real depth of feeling. The electronically generated or manipulated sounds are treated as just another instrument with new expressive capabilities, and exists with a larger structure of many other instruments; guitar bass and drums, piano, violin, trumpet, flute, homemade whistle and rattles, and vocals. This plethora of instruments are utilized each in their own uniquely expressive way to create a whole that is beautiful, complex, powerful, and affecting. Much of the purely electronic music I just described is lacking in this “whole”, and relies too much on rhythmic repetition of simple musical ideas, which may be good for dancing too, but to what end does one dance?

The point of this post is actually not to pontificate at length about the intricacies of musical preference and politics, but rather to post some of the Efterklang concert that I recorded on 2009-03-10 at the Bottom of the Hill pub in San Francisco, California.

Here are a couple of songs from the show. If you want to watch it all, there is a youtube playlist. Be warned there are some audio synch issues with youtube and the mpeg4-avc files I uploaded there. I have been too lazy to fix it so far. You can also download the show in 720p files, split by song.

Here is an older song called Chapter 6.
[See post to watch Flash video]

This is a new song roughly titled “Piano Song”.
[See post to watch Flash video]

Here is a professionally shot video of Jojo.

This is what Efterklang’s music really sounds like.

The show was recorded with a Canon HV20 HDV camcorder. I had never been to this venue before, but managed to find a good spot for recording perched on the drink counter at the edge of the room. It was a good spot for video recording, but unfortunately near a subwoofer, and in a bad spot for capturing the midrange PA speakers. I recorded audio with an iRiver H120 + binaural mics also, but the audio from them turned out overdriven and unusable. The HV20 mics actually did a really good job (with ATT turned on). The audio you here is just the straight camera audio, with a bit of multi-band compression to bring out the highs. The video was shot in 24F HDV captured with Final Cut Pro, edited, and brought into After Effects, and exported at 1280×720 23.976p as Avid DNxHD, and then encoded using Mpeg Streamclip and x264 as dual-pass 3000kbps video and AAC audio at 192kbps.

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.

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

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.

Today for the first time, I downloaded a piece of software which can actually create music of this sort. Such software is termed a Tracker, which is basically a musical sequencer that allows the arrangement of sound samples across a number of channels. These samples are stored in the module file format that chiptunes are often saved as, and then referenced by the sequencing data. The module file format is similar to a MIDI file, in that it contains sequencing data and produces the sound based on that data. However, unlike in midi files, where the sound is synthesized on by the computer’s sound card, modules files contain the (low bitrate) sound samples that it uses to produce the sounds natively inside the file. This means that unlike midis, they will sound the same no matter what computer they are played on. Module files are still very small however, averaging anywhere from 50KiB to 2MiB for a full song.

There is a rather large and active group of music being made currently that is inspired by the archaic digital stylings of chiptunes. A notable collection of artists and releases, most of whom have released their music under the Creative Commons license, can be found at the 8bitPeoples Discography.

The aforementioned piece of software, MadTracker, is able to function as a ReWire device, so it will be able to interface with the Digital Audio Workstation that I will be working with in the production of my soundtrack. Renoise is another alternative that functions as a VST plugin. So does the Skale Tracker and the Buzz Tracker. This will enable at least some sort of a chiptune-slant’ to a portion of my soundtrack, probably the middle-to-latter section, which will grow increasingly digital and mechanical and rhythmically crazy, following the evolution of the subject-matter.

Right now which software this DAW will be is up in the air between the Sony Acid pro 5, Adobe Audition 2.0, Cubase SX 3.0, or a combination of those. I’m leaning towards Audition because of how well it integrates with Premiere Pro and After Effects, the softwares on which I will be conducting the majority of the video editing. The other software I will be interfacing with the DAW through both ReWire and VST plugins will be Native Instruments Reaktor 5, Propellerhead’s Reason 3.0, Ableton Live (probably used for sequencing and/or arrangement), and the aforementioned Tracker. This is certainly a non-definitive list which will evolve as I continue this process of madness.

I am actually slightly concerned at the amount of time the soundtrack is probably going to take. I don’t think I allowed myself as much time in my Schedule as I realistically should have. Hopefully I will be able to pull something acceptable together, or I shall be forced to resort to using some of the excellent Creative Commons licensed electronic music out there. That will be a last resort though, as I definitely want to create something myself for this project.

I have also been exploring Pure Data as an alternative to Max/MSP/Jitter. It seems that it has most of the functionality of the latter, even while being open-source. I am debating about whether or not the increased complexity resulting from clunky design is worth the savings of $60 in cost. I am unsure as of yet.

Unlike a narrative hollywood film, in my project, the stylistic format comes first and foremost, and is exceedingly “hardened” (to use Linux terminology). Regarding the corrollary of this idea, that the subject matter is still fluid, I have been reconsidering and cognating on revising and augmenting the conceptual themes that my subject matter and hoped mode of “dynamic spectatorship” might possibly suggest. Beyond just matters of the corporeal, I am considering adding an element of conflict: the mechanical. It seems like this will give a needed element of struggle, rather than complacency and apathy (which would make for a boring video), and will fit in nicely with the progression from representation to abstraction with a simultaneous evolution from biological to mechanical. I am still considering this idea in all of its magnanimous possibility. More thoughts and a broader and far more brutal expounding will follow.