This is a song I wrote nearly 4 years ago.  I think I’ve gotten all the arrangement down for it, and I’m happy with the sounds though I wonder if there might be a few things to finésse.  There’s a brief bridge in the middle of the song that I’ve sometimes wanted to re-record though perhaps it’s enough.

The other day, I got a nice text from my friend Jared .  He was listening to it while at the beach:)

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I came across an interesting post related to electronic music from a blog I’ve started regularly reading. Create Digital Music wrote about how hardware controllers for electronic musicians seem to be limited or never quite what we need. I feel that for the most part, the software seems to be pretty much ‘there’ in terms of customisability, but the hardware is still far behind.

Cost and findability of pieces for controllers still seem to be barriers for getting more people easily creating them.  Isn’t this the case with most technology?

This post talks about the rising creation of custom made hardware controllers and the lack of a ‘platform’ for developing them. Peter Kirn writes about the Machine Collective which specializes in the “design and production of custom control surfaces and kits for physical computing”.

Create Digital Music is an excellent resource for electronic musicians.  You can read Peter’s post and participate in the conversation here: MachineCollective: Open, DIY Modular Controller Platform Coming Soon.

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The Be The Media Project is a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world.

We’re (that sounds so nice to write:) developing a modular curriculum covering various topics on nonprofits’ use of social media. Right now, we’re covering: Why Should Your Nonprofit Embrace Social Media? (Or Not?) It’s pretty fresh.

You can contribute via the wiki. However, if wiki’s aren’t your thing, there are numerous other ways to contribute. You can read more about the project here.

Go ahead, contribute!

Technorati Tags: bethemedia

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Below, is my lifestream care of EscapeLoop.

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This morning, the latest issue of the Squealer came into my organization’s office and voila!  My piece got in!  It was nestled there amongst many other articles covering topics like social networks and corporate control, social media and global arts communities, and the importance of creating physical, tangible art to give away.

Interested in picking up a copy for yourself?  Check out Squeaky Wheel’s site here.

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I <3 Weird Techno was made after a night of obtuse raving in Tijuana, Mexico on the roof of a squatted parking lot. There were holes in the concrete roof with exposed rebar and rubble everywhere we danced.  With the intense laser show, 2 story high video screen and e’ed up kids everywhere,  I’m surprised no one fell in.   At the end of the night after our friends‘ dj sets, we sauntered back to our car and barely got out of Tijuana legally.  This mix, was improvised at their house the day after on very little sleep and lots of energy from the previous night’s ramblings.  Enjoy! TRACK LIST:

1. Plaid: Even Spring
2. Phoenecia: Grrl Trrbl (Memeshift Extended mix)
3. Phoenecia: Biorepo (Memeshift Extended mix)
4. Telefon Tel Aviv: Nothing Is Worth Losing That (Memeshift Pitchshift dub)
5. Memeshift: (some random beat)
6. Alex Brandmeyer & Morgan Sully: (untitled track)
7. Phoenecia: Grrl Trrbl (Memeshift Extended mix)
8. S.I. Futures: Move Your Body (Memeshift Swing mix)
9. Matthew Dear: But For You

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My work thus far has been on exploring the connections between my passions and actualizing them in my life.

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1. Maximize potential for happiness at any given moment.
2. Make more choices without overthinking the consequences too much.
3. Give time to recover/learn from said choices if outcome results in general feelings of guilt, nausea, despair or inadequacy.
4. Rejoice in said choices if result is empowering, healing, invigorating or generally positive.
5. Repeat and rinse with wine/music.
6. Adjust accordingly.

That’s it so far. Feel free to comment .

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MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Well.  I don’t have anything really important to say currently.  But if you are already here, you may as well watch this cool video.  

Genius.  

Really.


(his other work is AMAZING too. go to Blu’s site

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http://www.myspace.com/indonesianet

I didn’t feel like I had very much in common with the folks who’s profiles I perused and was most likely found by doing a keyword search.  I feel part Indonesian biologically, but not culturally. Indonesia is part of my biological heritage, but that messy ‘cultural’ part of it is far, far away in my childhood. I feel a good portion of my enculturation happened here in the United States.

Oddly enough, indie/emo music is pretty popular in Indonesia. Half the youth blogs/myspace pages that I visited (via the IndonesiaNet MySpace page) had music from this ‘genre’ on them.

While finishing my thesis in college, I grappled with this idea of memetic colonization of musical forms, assuming (in my anti-capitalist mindset) that it was a one way process. It goes both ways.

• Does anyone else ever feel ‘in between’?
  
• What about other people who - for whatever reason - relocated from their ‘home’ country?
  
• What does it mean to be ‘Indonesian’?
  
• If we are going to ask that, than what does it even mean to be ‘American’?

Leave your comments below.  I’d be particularly interested to hear from folks who are expatriates or whose parent were perhaps Indonesian citizens, but who themselves grew up here in the US.

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These categories just don’t fucking fit.
It’s like a tight sweater that you can never quite feel good in - a
trade off between style or comfort.

These categories make things all too easy…

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I don’t think this song is really connected to it. In fact, it’s not. I was feeling pretty mellow and simultaneously inspired.

Enjoy.

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drinking out of the carton

furlined house slippers

sushi

felt animals

coffee

Eric G.

my friends

cherry blossoms in the Sunday morning sunshine

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“what you want
when you want it
how you want it

MACHO MONEY”

money can be macho, apparently.

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i got this email from my good friend Alex the other day and we had some good correspondence (Alex is currently researching audio/music cognition in Holland - and yes, we do call each other baby):

“hey baby,

i’m reading this crazy neuroscience book right now, which is all about how rhythmic and oscillatory patterns of activity in the brain serve as the main organizing patterns for cognition. the idea being that the earliest organisms with nervous systems (sponges) didn’t even have any senses, just simple neural loops that generated rhythmic activity. through the course of evolution, these simple mechanisms evolved to serve more complex functions, but the same basic oscillatory circuit
was still the basis.

you are a giant set of fancy oscillators!”

To which I responded:

“I had a feeling about that. I’ve also thought that these neurobiological oscillators are in tune with larger cosmic frequencies and cycles of events that happen over time. Before I read anything about Terrence McKenna or Daniel Pinchbeck’s book, I had a sense of this happening - timewave zero:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

A lot of it seemed to come to ahead right around 9/11. My thoughts and cognitions of the world/life and the universe started to ‘peak’ right around my junior year in college too (2002). I think it was simply just me resonating with the universe.

Humans might just be a giant patch of white noise, but I think that there are choruses, in tune, that sometimes emerge from the fabric of our existence - like little temporary autonomous zones ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone )

manadalas I think get at this. ‘ohm’ - the sound of the universe gets at this. and i think this communication happening between us is simply an action potential - a beautiful microcosm of what happens everyday, every moment, visible and not.”

He then wrote back:

“yes exactly, the ohm is a sort of feedback loop! your thoughts entrain themselves to the sound as you begin to relax, and the actual EEG signal you record from someone meditating or toning shows much more synchronous oscillatory activity than that of someone who is in a ‘normal’ alert state.

hehe i also recently ended up on the ‘technological singularity’ wiki page recently… did you send me something or did my own weird internet surfing take me there?

actually, we aren’t white noise, we’re pink noise (i.e. scale-free, fractal noise)! the idea is that out of this type of noise, spontaneous order (choruses/harmonies/resonance) can emerge!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise

i wanna make music with cool VJ imagery that gets at these concepts! gotta go start filming old school oscillator displays…”

I love him.

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What are some ways that YOU might maintain your fluidity?

The YouTube post below was taken from the show “Light of the 3rd Millennium”. Pictures are from among various artists like Alex Grey, Mark Henson and Google. Music is by one of my favorite artists, Murcof.

Blogged with Flock

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This is an image that I have had in my head and heart for a long time.  It’s like a personal icon and for me and represents what I would like to see in the world.  There is so much strife as we float and drift about life.  I think if each of us can connect with that flame inside, it can be a guide for others.  We need to do our best to tend to it, so it doesn’t go out.

Others may count on us more than we know.

What kinds of personal symbols do you have?  Do you share it with others?  Is it in alignment with the way you live your life?

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“So there was this woman and she was on an airplane, and she was flying to meet her fiancé seaming high above the largest ocean on planet earth. She was seated next to this man she had tried to start conversations, but the only thing she had really heard him say was to order his Bloody Mary. She was sitting there and she was reading this really arduous magazine article about a third world country that she couldn’t even pronounce the name of. And she was feeling very bored and despondent. And then suddenly there was this huge mechanical failure and one of the engines gave out, and they started just falling thirty-thousand feet, and the pilots on the microphone and he’s saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh my god… I’m sorry” and apologizing. And she looks at the man and says “Where are we going?” and he looks at her and he says “We’re going to a party. It’s a birthday party. It’s your birthday party. Happy birthday darling. We love you very, very, very, very, very, very, very much.” And then he starts humming this little tune, it kind of goes like this: 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4

We must talk in every telephone

Get eaten off the web

We must rip out all the epilogues in the books that we have read

And in the face of every criminal

Strapped firmly to a chair

We must stare, we must stare, we must stare

We must take all of the medicines too expensive now to sell

Set fire to the preacher who is promising us hell

And in the ear of every anarchist that sleeps but doesn’t dream

We must sing, we must sing, we must sing

It’ll go like this:

While my mother waters plants

My father loads his guns

He says death will give us back to God

Just like this setting sun is returned to this lonesome ocean

And then they splashed into the deep blue sea

It was a wonderful splash

We must blend into the choir

Sing as static with the whole

We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul

And in this endless race for property and privilege to be won

We must run, we must run, we must run

We must hang up in the belfry

Where the bats and moonlight laugh

We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past

And in the caverns of tomorrow

With just our flashlights and our love

We must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge

And then we’ll get down there, way down to the very bottom of everything

And then we’ll see it, oh we’ll see it, we’ll see it, we’ll see it

Oh my morning’s coming back

The whole world’s waking up

All the city buses swimming past

I’m happy just because

I found out I am really no one

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This is hands down, one of the most moving pieces of media I have ever seen. Poetic, profound, inspiring and beautiful. I live to see things like this created in the world.

This piece (taken from YouTube obviously) was created by Kai Ling Xue and submitted to the Media That Matters Film Festival.

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Totally for fun.  Sent to me from my good friend Alex in Holland.  It’s hard not to feel happy seeing people get down.

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there is an infinitexisting (v.)
beneath, within, throughout
but do not speak.

for we
are the fragile vessels
the hope and future,

of those coming after us

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