No Fun photos, Wikipedia improvements and sharing rare music

No Fun photos

Missed the No Fun Fest? Denver-based noiseman and shutterbug Rasmussen has several pages of photographs and a pretty dense blogpost summing up his view of the festival. And of course, Mr. Rasmussen took pictures last year, too.

Wikipedia watchlist

The 'experimental music' page at Wikipedia has improved significantly since the last time we mentioned it here. Most importantly, the long list of experimental musicians has been separated off as its own page. As you might imagine, the list was heavily padded with red links (links that go to nonexistent Wikipedia entries) and non-notable entries. These problems have been cleaned up and the list is now a clean, high-quality document that serves as an abbreviated consensus-based "Who's Who" for experimental music.

Of course, experimental music and Wikipedia both being what they are, the list is most likely no better than 80% satisfactory for any given experimental music lover. Would you want it any other way?

(Oftentimes with better Wikipedia entries, it's one single editor that can be thanked for maintaining the 'finished' quality. In the case of the experimental musicians list, it seems that Doctormatt is our hard-working editor on the scene.)

The main 'experimental music' entry itself is much more readable, and therefore useful. Now it becomes clear that the Techniques section is interesting, but possibly incomplete and that the External Links section offers a lot of avenues for exploration.

Here's something odd, though. The disambiguation page for "experimental" begins with this:

Experimental can refer to...

* Experiment, it refers to ideas or techniques not yet established or finalized involving innovation. It is a practice of art and search.

A practice of art and search? That makes sense in a superficial kind of way, but certainly whichever nameless editor stuck that phrase in had much more in mind. Pardon the buzz word, but that phrase- "a practice of art and search" - could stand some unpacking.

Rare-music sharing blogs

The number of blog-based music sharing sites has been growing slowly, stymied in a serious way by the file-sharing sites that they must use. Rapidshare and Megaupload are the two major sites that these bloggers use to host the digitized albums and cassettes that they offer us. Unfortunately, both of these sites cripple their services for non-subscribers so that it's difficult to download more than one or two files per day from each. Considering that there may be a half or full dozen interesting recordings shared on any given day, music freaks around the world must endure the continuous frustration of seeing handsful of rarities evade collection.

Sharebee, a new service currently in beta, helps the situation somewhat by allowing uploaders to disperse their files among multiple file-sharing services. There are other benefits to Sharebee that are apparent mostly from the uploader's perspective, but it is this mirroring feature that is most significant to the downloader. Unfortunately, Sharebee is very much in its beta phase and has been subject to recent technical difficulties.

Meanwhile, it is possible that the individuals behind this music-sharing phenominon may be the victims of an RIAA-sponsored extreme rendition program:

"On a side note, I am troubled by Over the Moons disappearance, the man or woman behind the truly wonderful 194142434445. I don't even see him or her commenting at the blogs & forums that I frequent anymore. If anyone has any information or Over the Moon, if you’re out there . . . holler."

- panagiotis A. stathis @ "eat my art out".

194142434445

Mutant Sounds

Eat My Art Out

Jizz Relics

Experimental Music Blog Blogging Experiment

If you are reading this in RSS, then you might not see the rest of this post. If that's the case click here.

Can't Keep Good Man Down, Queasy Cannibal Claims

Well, I guess I'd better post something, before you all forget that I exist. This week (month?) I offer you two recommendations and a little bit of conspiratorial speculation...


1. Rare Frequency- No doubt readers of this 'blog don't need to be informed about the existence of the Rare Frequency radio program/internet site out of Boston, MA. Perhaps, though, you might need to be directed toward the very excellent live performance by Jay Sullivan that has been available for download for a couple (few) weeks now. Rare Frequency host Susana supplemented this podcast with an interview of Sullivan and a few nice pictures of him swilling microbrews and squinting thoughtfully into the distance. I found Mr. Sullivan's performance so appealling that I actually went to the trouble to burn it to disc, in order to try it out on various listening systems.

Listening to other episodes of Rare Frequency, it strikes me that there is something unusually tasteful about Susana's musical selections. So much of experimental music is challenging to the ears that filtering for listenability invites the chance that one might miss the genre entirely. The dividing line between "experimental" and "IDM" runs partly along that dry riverbed that we call "respondent value." It takes a delicate touch to find sounds that are both listenable and innovative. Susana seems to have that touch, and employs it mostly with success.

2. My Formica Table- I think I got an email about this in February, but I haven't mentioned it here because it's been tough. There's a sort of amiable impenetrability to the way this blog is organized. I have this weird need to understand things almost completely before I write about them. But in this case I'm going to dissociate myself from the discomfort of incomplete comprehension, and just slash my way through.

The music available at this blogspot site covers a wide range, not all of it necessarily experimental and not all of it exactly to my taste. But that's not to say that the music isn't good. This group of young people includes talented, skillful musicians with that kind of knack for pop composition that seems to be genetically special to natives of the British Isles. There's up-and-comers lurking here, and they do definitely take the risks and express the points of view that entitle them to be friends of Hollow Tree.

My personal favorite bits of content on the My Formica Table blog are from Philip Dorrell. Mr. Dorrell has contributed extensive passages to My Formica Table's "What is Music Project" to the point that there is an entire PDF book that you can download, titled "What is Music?" With chapter headings such as "2D/3D Theory of Music" and "Octave Translation Invariance" you can be confident of finding a new perspective here. I haven't read much of this, but a quick skim suggests that Dorrell is not blowing faux-intellectual smoke. He certainly has some interesting ideas, and they seem to be based on good information.

3. I've spent the past week trying to burn CDs. I thought it would be an easy task. Just assemble the wave files in a cd burning program, put a disc in the machine and press go. I was wrong. Today I wasted what must be the fifteenth disc since I began this process. Because I tried a new approach with each new disc, each attempt resulted in a new twist on the concept of failure. The most recent disc, the one that made me decide to quit for the day, was somehow born with the magical capability of crashing a Sony Discman. I have tried five different software packages, now. That includes Nero, which I can only seem to find as a thirty-day trial.

Back in the days of Windows 98, burning a disc was a nearly fail-proof endeavor. With Vista, though, disc burning seems to more a cure for low blood pressure than a way to get music onto a plastic wafer.

I'm beginning to fear that this is all intentional. It only seems in the interest of Microsoft and the recording industry for consumers to be unable to burn CDs at home. There are many many hundreds of tiny independent record labels around the world that release all of their products in the CD-r format. And of course, we all know that 'filesharing' has been blamed for the decline of the music industry.

Yes, as we've discussed a thousand times before, media distribution is changing quickly and radically. There are people in positions of wealth and power who must adapt or die, as the saying goes. The well-appointed do not often deal well with adapt-or-die situations, and often they invent a third option for themselves: fight like cornered animals.

I can't prove that consumer grade disc-burning technology has been crippled for the sake of entrenched industry types any more than I can prove that the discontinuation of microphone inputs in consumer electronics were discontinued for similar reasons in the 1990s. And even if I could, I wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

All I'm saying is, what if I started distributing music on thumb drives?

Etc. etc. etc.-
Zeno Izen, 6:52 PM 5/16/2007

Your mother!

For those of you who have or tend to be a mother, please accept a hearty Happy Mothers' Day from your good friends at Hollow Tree Experimental Design Studios.


Here's some inspirational reading for this auspicious day.