Caribbean Day Eve Eve
It’s Labor Day weekend, and if you live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, it means a weekend of celebratory preparation for the West Indian Carnival or “Caribbean Day Parade” on Monday. (If you live anywhere in the NYC area GET DOWN HERE on Labor Day for the show.) In other words, this is a weekend full of jerk chicken, oxtail, sequined dancers, reggae, dancehall, and (for some reason) Guinness. (According to my neighbors, stouts are the brew of choice. I have yet to see anyone drink a single Red Stripe in my 3.5 years here.) My sister, Lauren, is also in town and I need to take her to the various festivities. Our neighbor already offered us goat soup this afternoon. We just ran into him again on our way home and he made me promise to meet him at a party down the block in a few minutes. So apologies for this short blog note, but I’ll make up for it with some Caribbean Day documentation in a later post.
Alright!
It’s Friday night, so I’m going to make this one short.
Earlier this summer I put together a project that I called “Wikimixing” for the Megapolis Audio Festival. Here is a blurb I wrote about it at the time:
“Mixing on a computer is usually a solitary endeavor: one person controlling one mouse and keyboard making one decision at a time. We’re going to try to fix that. Part workshop and part experiment in “crowd-sourced” audio art, this is like editing Wikipedia but with sound instead of text. We’ll … collectively mix and manipulate sounds as a group in real-time using a bunch of colorful customized keyboard controllers, all connected to a single computer. The idea is to get as many hands/ears/minds at once collaborating (and competing) on the same soundscape, so that whatever strange, beautiful, or frightening noises that emerge are the product of our group’s collective will. Everyone is in control at the same time and yet no one is!”
You can read more about the ideas and technical aspects of the project here. But for whatever reason, I never got around to posting the final mixes on my own site…until TODAY. So unless you’ve been to the Megapolis 2010 Archive, they’re NEW TO YOU!
My love for vintage keyboards knows no bounds
Look what I found while searching for the electricity meter in our basement a few months ago:
Who's obsolete?
It’s an Ensoniq EPS-16+ sampling keyboard from the early 1990s. Ok, so 1990 probably isn’t “vintage,” but it was one of the earliest (affordable) samplers capable of recording and playing sounds at 16-bit “CD quality.” For what it’s worth, it was RZA’s sampler of choice on the early Wu-Tang albums.
View all 5 commentsHere goes nothing…
I was in Minnesota a few weeks ago to see my friends Joel and Melissa get married (mazel tov!). We went to high school together–Joel and Melissa are high school sweet hearts of 10 years–and so the wedding was like some kind of awesome high school reunion curated by dear friends. While I was in town, a few of the other wedding guests, my buddies Ryan and Charles, invited me to “go running around the lakes” with them.
For any New Yorkers reading this, The Lakes are a chain of beautiful tree-lined lakes circumferenced by public parkland and nestled in a mostly residential neighborhoods of Minneapolis. Lake Calhoun is a mile or so from where Joel, Ryan, Charles, and I all grew up. Running around a lake is roughly equivalent to a lap around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, which, by the way, is something I haven’t done in a very long time. Lake Calhoun is about three miles around–not that far at all, but a fair distance if you’re not in shape (which I am not).
…but the bones are going to change into rocket ships??
(Cute outtake from a project I’m working on.)
The Future is Now!
A few months ago I mentioned I was working on a big sound design project but couldn’t really blog about it until its release. That day has arrived!
Future: News From The Year 2137 Trailer
But first, the plug: it’s available now for download from the iTunes store for $1.99.
In short, it’s The Onion’s parody of what news delivery will look (and sound) like in the future based on extrapolations of current trends in news production. And mainstream media outlets–CNN, the New York Times–seem to be paying attention…