Enlaced - now streaming at last.fm

link: http://www.last.fm/music/red_robin

Enlaced - 'limited edition' single

I put together a composition for family members this Christmas - a nice bit of vinyl ambience entitled "Enlaced". It was backed with an excerpt of a long improvisation, "Hansa Variations".

Now you can have it! Complete with your choice of exciting artwork colour tones! If you decide to renege on the 'white' option, the colour versions are Photoshop .psd files allowing you to customise your own artwork however you like - change the colour, warp the image, add images, whatever. Providing you have Photoshop of course.

These files will be available for download until the 10th January 2009.

Download audio (128 kps, 15.4 MB): here
Download artwork White (jpg, 230 KB): here
Download artwork Yellow (psd, 1.3MB): here
Download artwork Orange (psd, 1.3MB): here
Download artwork Hot Pink (psd, 1.3MB): here

Liner notes:
redrobin: ENLACED
Issued 27th December 2008

1. Enlaced (10:36)
2. Hansa Variations (5:37)

(to be read and discarded or copied and pasted into notes in your iTunes or similar media player)

Information:

"Enlaced" recorded on the 24th of December 2008
redrobin: single vinyl record, turntable, mixer & laptop.

"Hansa Variations" recorded sometime in November 2008.
redrobin: three vinyl records, turntable, mixer & laptop.

Both tracks recorded at home, Unley, South Australia in the midst of clement weather systems.

Harold Pinter (1930-2008)

British writer, poet, playwright and actor.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/25/harold-pinter-dies

I first came across Pinter's work sometime during 2005. It got stuck on me and never left. His work in all its formats channelled life experiences and observations into stories, poems, essays and plays that resonated with the fragility of the human condition (love, death, conflict) and the world around us. Pinter was passionate, raging, fiercely political and quintessentially human.

Now he's gone and there's a void.

Death May Be Ageing (April 2005)

Death may be ageing
But he still has clout

But death disarms you
With his limpid light

And he's so crafty
That you don't know at all

Where he awaits you
To seduce your will
And to strip you naked
As you dress to kill

But death permits you
To arrange your hours

While he sucks the honey
From your lovely flowers

The Gifting!

Tiefurt's taking too long to finish, so I made a nice little single for family on top of the obligatory Kris Kringle.

A fistfull of 10

My top ten albums for 2008 are as follows:

10.David Byrne & Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
A highly unexpected offering from dome head and Byrne nearly thirty years after their first collaboration My Life in The Bush of Ghosts. The early sampling techniques, exotica and one chord grooves which typified that first release couldn't be further away from this collection of pop songs about exploding cars, global warming and big nurses. The cover art and package design is the most clever and thoughtful I've seen all year.

Case In Point: Strange Overtones

09.Jenny Lewis - Acid Tounge
The girl with the most sultry voice on Earth makes a debut album that feels pretty inconsistent at first but eventually gets under the skin with all its sweetness and gristle. Its a good mish-mash of soul, folk and (alt)country with some pretty awesome songwriting.

Case In Point: See Fernando

08.Panoptique Electrical - Let The Darkness At You
My second travelling companion (Lauren was first and foremost) accompanying me on a recent European sojourn was the first release by Adelaide-ite and good chum Panoptique Electric, otherwise known as Jason Sweeney. Moody moody electronic droney music that's perfect for in-transit train rides through the gloomy Hinterland.

Case In Point: The Photographer

07.Sound Unbound - Various Artists
2008 was the year I got converted to the remix - its philosophy, aesthetics, politics and application. Paul.D.Miller's (aka DJ Spooky's) compendium of essays from all kinds of people was an ambitious (if somewhat over-reaching and strained) attempt at summing up digital music in the 21st Century, however the accompanying CD sold the deal for me. It mixes up everything (Allen Ginsburg, Duchamp, Xenakis, Cage, Sonic Youth, etc.) into one post-modernist broth, which is as entertaining as it is an interesting exercise in re-contextualisation and reappropriation.

Case In Point: THE WHOLE THING

06.Beck - Modern Guilt
Beck is Beck and Beck probably wont ever be as good as Beck was in 1996, though this is his most coherent album in years. Wish he would cheer up a bit though.

Case In Point: Chemtrails

05.Philip Jeck - Sand
I got into using a turntable this year because of a Philip Jeck gig I saw in Adelaide earlier this year. Whilst I'm now making an attempt to distance myself (or more appropriately: avoid plagurising) his style of layering vinyl textures and creating hypontic loops, Jeck's untouchable - he's got an amazing amount of control, restraint and discipline to his technique. He's also created some of the most beautiful stuff I've heard this year.

Case In Point: Unveiled

04.Calexico - Carried To Dust
Whilst Calexico won't ever top 2003's Feast of Wire this comes close that masterpiece of tex-mex/rock/dub/latino mash-up. Their show that we saw in Berlin back in October was wonderful, replete with an encore of 'Crystal Frontier' in the crowd.

Case In Point: Red Blooms

03.Portishead - Third
Enough said.

Case In Point: The Rip

02.M83 - Saturdays = Youth
I've followed M83 for awhile with their teenage-y post-rave soundtracks. This sounds straight out of Donnie Darko, and it's all fucking brilliant.

Case In Point: Kim & Jessie

01.Lambchop - (OH) ohio
My most adored band (alongside The National) released a beautiful album this year. The band's been stripped back to seven members from the fifteen that played on 06's Damaged and it's given the album a less lush and more immidiate feel than anything they've done since 1997's Thriller.

Case In Point: I'm Thinking Of Number Between 1 and 2

Quiet at last

What a peaceful couple of days it's been! The last two weeks preceding this balm of a weekend have been hectic, stressful and mind-numbingly boring in periods of downtime. My 'real-job''s to blame for this, though for the sake of avoiding a rant that topic stops here. There's been so much on my mind art-wise as well.

The EAF (Experimental Art Foundation) show for next year Private Invocations has been readied for the 2009 program following some editing and refinement to the original proposal and solidifying the roster of contributing visual artists. The incoming EAF director (replacing the long serving Melentie Pandalovski in April 09) seems like an ideal candidate for the role.

The new release Tiefurt has inevitably been held up as well, after listening to the track sequence in various scenarios (at home, ipod, good speakers/bad speakers) I'm still having some quibbles over the quality of the sound in parts and whether I should pare down the extensive sleevenotes which will accompany the album.

It's been a refeshing (albeit guilty) coule of weeks away from the thesis and general research as well, the Xmas break from work will allow for some time on these things.

My various tinkerings in the early hours have been productive and revelatory in some cases. I've become converted and a bit obsessive over the creative and compositional potential of wireless interfacing via my iPod Touch using OSC controllers (Open Sound Control), which has been evident in a couple of posts documenting the Touch OSC application. I'm currently exploring the Sonic Life application which uses Conway's Game of Life algorithm, which is useful for triggering toggles in Max/MSP. I've been promising video documentation of these activities for a while, so I hope to post something soon.

Oh yes, the Xmas single will be recorded in the next couple of days and posted here for download forthwith.

Controlling Max/MSP with Touch OSC

Today I finally got around to customising one of my patches so that its parameters can be controlled using the iPod app Touch OSC.

I wanted to find a suitable way of controlling the parameters of the old Sumimatic loop module patch. The parameters of each of the Sumimatic's four modules are controlled using the sliders and toggles on the Simple OSC template:

Vertical slider 1: Playback speed
Vertical slider 2: Pan
Vertical slider 3: Volume
Horizontal slider: Biquad frequency range (i.e 1500Hz)
Toggles 1-4: Select module to control



There's still plenty of refinement to do with this, especially sending data back to the iPod in order to keep values synched between the two devices. If there's one little gripe I have at the moment, it lies in the somewhat limited templates that come with OSC. You might have a patch with five parameters you want to control, but you've only four sliders on your interface, etc. It would be great to have a feature where you can customise your own templates.

Still, I shouldn't complain too much, it's already pretty good and this is new territory for me. I haven't really scratched the surface now that I think about it.

I'll post a video of this once I line up the OSC with some vinyl-ing on The Arouser.

Save The Net

I have posted a link to this online petition as it is of particular importance to artists, creatively minded individuals as well as those who like freedom of speech.

The Federal Government's newly proposed Internet censorship regulations are frankly, myopic and draconian. I urge you to support this petition.

http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet/442

The release from Get Up!:

The Federal Government is planning to force all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block any material the Government deems ‘inappropriate’. Under the plan, the Government can add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist.

Testing has already begun on systems that will slow our internet by up to 87%, make it more expensive, miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and accidentally block up to 1 in 12 legitimate sites. Our children deserve better protection - and that won't be achieved by wasting millions on this deeply flawed system.

Controlling Max/MSP with an iPod Touch

The other night at the Earpoke concert, Christian Haines got me onto a recent application for the iPhone/iPod Touch. TouchOSC is a touch interface that transmits data over a WIFI network (such as numerical values.) The application features dials, sliders, toggles and matrixes for controlling such values. After gettin hold of it last night, I decided I would spend my day off grappling with its exciting potential and my limited skills with Max/MSP. After some assistance from Christian and the OSC website, within a couple of hours I was controlling a simple oscillator patch with the lappy in the backroom and myself (with Touch) on the front porch.

Excitement he quoth!

The OSC Route MSP object can be downloaded at: http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/downloads



Now my attention's turning to the potential for existing patches of mine such as the Sumi_matic (loop module) and the Arouser. I'm also very excited about the possibilty of using this interface to test installations and site specific projects remotely.

Expect videos soon.