Posts by Tom Beard
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I thought the app was ridiculously expensive at first, but then I thought about how much Eno I'd listened to in the past couple of years on Spotify and YouTube (as well as albums I've had for years), and I realised that for me, he'd earned it. It has the same strengths as the album, with some subtle combinations that I don't think turn up in the fixed version. It's supposed to vary in balance and detail at different times of day, but I can't say I've noticed that. Nevertheless, I must have had it playing (as distinct from "listened to it") for more than 12 hours already, and I'll probably keep doing that.
One thing that puts me off is the occasional sine wave swoop/whistle that gets very grating in the upper octaves. Eno has a nice analogy for generative music: it's like looking at a river, which is always the same and yet never exactly the same. In these terms, that whistle is like watching the lazy vortices of a river, and just when you get into a nice mellow state, a bloody great dragonfly flies up and slams into your face.
I'd love it if the app had a few options, just so that you could balance some of the parts. If I could turn down these swoops a bit, then the app would be much more useful for one of the main things I like to use some of Eno's music for: as a "nap facilitator". But I know that creating a generative music system is far more difficult than just writing a track (it's far from the lazy option it's often seen as), so such options could easily destroy the balance that Eno's clearly worked so hard to achieve.
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Hard News: Practically jokers, in reply to Russell Brown,
apparently partly caused by "astological events"
Astology, noun. A branch of histology specialising in studying the part of the human anatomy from which Colin Craig plucks his policies.
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In cultures that only value sex for its procreative potential, the definition of virginity is "have they done nothing that could lead to babies?" That's still prevalent among conservative Christians, for example the letter writer who claimed that same-sex marriage is an oxymoron because marriages need to be consummated, and gay sex isn't real sex because it can't make new life. Yeah, logic isn't their strong point.
That doesn't explain why non-fundies still get obsessed about vurginity. I guess it's partly cultural hangover, partly dudebro p-into-v fixation, and partly a sense that p-into-v carries the extra risk of pregnancy, so has a greater degree of difficulty than other means of getting each other's rocks off. As if sex were ice dancing.
The most thought-provoking way to define "having sex" that I've read comes from The Ethical Slut. Something along the lines of "If you and your partner are wondering whether you're having sex, you probably are."
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Hard News: Friday Music: Punk rock and…, in reply to Hebe,
Hey! I actually really like it! Though not as much as The Quietus does.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Punk rock and…, in reply to Hebe,
Oh, we're doing Xmas music now, are we? :-)
I give you a mediaeval carol, in Latin, sung by Erasure:
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I was going to say that the following track was about as un-punk as you could get: Nils Frahm, a classically-trained Berlin pianist with electric piano and synth arpeggios.
But then look at the way he fucks with the innards of that tape echo, and feel the way that he rides the very edge of control. It's kind of ambient, but it would give you very strange dreams indeed.
Having only just been introduced to Frahm's work, he's very hard to pin down. A bit of classical, quite a bit of minimalist, the odd Berlin-school bass riff chugging away, often ambient, the occasional hint of jazz, but with chord changes that are pure heart-tugging pop. But the reason your post made me think of him was the phrase "people can play now". Jesus, this guy can play! I love the piece above, but if we could embed Vimeo here, I would have embedded this piece. Once he stops playing his piano with toilet brushes (from about 1:50), it goes very Reich/Riley, but with the sort of structures and lush harmonic dynamism that purist minimalists would eschew. Even knowing that delays and loops are part of the sound, his two-piano attack is a jawdropping piece of musicianship.
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more than a quarter of New Zealanders look at "sites with sexual content" at least occasionally
Or perhaps more accurately, "admit to looking at".
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to john Drinnan,
why aren;t people talking about the rape rather than how important it was to get rid of two people who were crap at handling a discussion about it
A) Yes, people bloody well are talking about the rape. But here, this is a discussion about "free speech" and "boycotts", so the discussion on this post will concentrate on that.
B) "crap at handling a discussion" is so much of an understatement that it sounds like a deliberate missing of the actual point. This wasn't just a botched interview, it was bullying. And their relentless attempts to discredit, belittle and humiliate a friend of victims, and the victims themselves, can only be seen as an attempt to justify and/or deny the rapes.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Well, wouldn't it suck if the majority decided that your speech was dangerous, and shouldn't be allowed?
Do you recognise any difference between "allowed" and "given a prominent and privileged platform"?
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Ok I think this might have gotten to me a little.
Shh, calm down, Bart. Then we can get back to the important topics, like what Rob Ford thinks of Bunnings.