Misc.
• The Best Par30 LED light bulb with a very pleasant color, AND also the least expensive.
• Peak 6.0 has some bugs, but is a great upgrade!
• I love the felt laptop sleeve I bought at Working Class Heroes.
Beyond the Beyond
I am in downtown Houston | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com
I am in downtown Houston
By Bruce Sterling EmailMarch 28, 2008 | 8:18:41 AM
I bet these skyscrapers used to be really impressive before the Chinese and Arabs got going.
Yep, I went back in…
Yesterday morning I went to see Michael Motley in town. The album artwork is coming along great.
In the evening, under the cover of darkness, I went back in and made adjustments on four mixes. Changed the roll-off on this EQ, adjusted that reverb by a shade… you know, these are the things I might not even notice a couple of months from now. Correction: I will not even notice a couple of months from now… :)
It’s Friday morning and I am drinking tea and… yes, listening to a CD of the album in my kitchen – an activity also known as the cheap speaker test. Answered an email from Stevo just as his wonderful electric guitar solo on “Silence” came on the speakers. I am listening to song #7 now and haven’t heard anything that bothers me. Glad nobody can see me playing air-guitar. Does Paco play air-guitar when he is alone in the kitchen? I bet Stevo plays air-guitar and makes great faces doing it. There it is: 10 songs with a total time of 74 minutes and 29 seconds. Maybe I should change that to 74:25? I am not going to say that the album is finished, because it is finished when it’s on the way to the manufacturer…
Two Years Ago
Click opera – Ubiquity is the abyss
Music is a good thing. Of course it is. I’m a musician, I’ve dedicated my life to it, and I know few better things. Music can be sacred, mysterious, otherworldly, intimate, moving, extraordinary. But, increasingly, music is the opposite of those things. It’s profane, banal, public, shared, irritating, ordinary and ubiquitous. It’s in every restaurant and every cafe and every car and every office and on every computer and on every website. It’s in each ear, snaking in on a thin white wire. You listen to music all day, every day. Time without music is downtime. It’s the triumph of music! Or is it? Maybe ubiquity signals quite the opposite; music’s defeat. For music, ubiquity is the abyss.
I have thought about this many times. What was it like when any bright color could send a person into a different state of mind, because in their daily life they encountered mainly muted earth-tones. What was it like when the sound of a musician playing his instrument made everyone in a village drop what they were doing to run and listen? When everything sacred becomes profane and banal, does it mean that nothing is sacred – or does perception simply shift. Maybe it is how we become more sophisticated. We hear ubiquitous music and quickly determine whether it is banal and irritating or mysterious, intimate or extraordinary. When music is everywhere, music with more depth and mystery has to be created in order to move us.
Restaurants like to create an atmosphere by playing music over speakers. It is a quick fix designed to take attention away from other problems. I generally do not enjoy music in restaurants. To me it feels like bringing dinner to a concert. It is equally disturbing. That said, it seems to become harder and harder to find restaurants where the music is played softly and even harder to find restaurants without music altogether.
Wednesday
The record being finished I cleaned up the studio and opened the skylights, which I keep shut during the mixing process. The jury is still out on the mastering. A few people were given access to two versions of three songs, and were asked to give me their gut-reation to them. Tomorrow I will go into town to work on the cover with Michael.
Here is the SSRI CD-release schedule as it looks right now:
15. April: In the Arms of Love
20. May: Up Close (the binaural album)
17. June: The Scent of Light
