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Monday, October 13, 2003
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Nasa flies a tiny model plane powered solely by an invisible laser beam from the ground, in an aviation first. [BBC | TECH]
9:52:11 PM  ;
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Still amazes me that you are allowed to publish a book on:
- how to crack safes
- how to break into hosues
- how to murder people with household items
- how to make atomic weapons
- how to smuggle drugs
but if you publish an academic paper that mentions that it's possible to bypass some lame-ass CD copy protection system by holding down the SHIFT key...
... now THAT gets you in trouble.
I don't get that either.
9:04:11 PM ;
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Detail - Music Hall in Portsmouth NH 
3:39:33 PM ;
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Car in Jacksonville, FL 
3:37:21 PM ;
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If you can't get enough low-end in your music, Skullcandy, the makers of those headphones that connect to both an MP3 player and a cellphone, has a new pair of special battery powered bass amplification headphones out called the Skullcrushers that actually have vibration subwoofer speakers built-in. Read [Gizmodo] I don't particularly like those boom-boom cars, why would I want to use a Skullcrusher? Why has North-America fallen in love with low-end, while Brazil for example loves high-end? Here you hear the bass pumping in a car....in Brazil you hear the ts, ts, ts, ts of a hi-hat from a hundred yards away....
12:28:48 PM ;
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My Tai Ji teacher Chungliang Al Huang asking us why we're all in such a hurry. Why we love efficiently (efficiency? - OL) and speed so much. If the end of the game is death, the most efficient thing to do is die. The point is to live.
[Joi Ito's Web] Chungliang Al Huang facilitated a performance by Jon Gagan (acoustic upright bass) and myself with a classical Chinese musician in Santa Fe several years ago. The very accomplished Chinese musician played the one string Chinese violin. We gave two performances to a small circle of people. The second one was quite remarkable and Chungliang Al Huang told me it was the very first time he had heard his friend improvise. During the first performance most of the melodies he played were apparently folk or classical Chinese melodies he adapted to our music, but during the second performance he "let loose" with improvisations, something that apparently never happens in classical Chinese music.
12:23:36 PM ;
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Telemarketers are suing the National Do Not Call Registry in the US, which is a place where you can register to block telemarketers from calling you. 50 million households have signed up. I think this is a good idea, they obviously don't.
In his column, David Barry of the Miami Herald published the phone number of the American Teleservices Association, a telemarketing company. It turned out that a lot of you were eager to call up the telemarketing industry. Thousands and thousands of you called the ATA. I found out about this when I saw an article in a direct-marketing newspaper, the DM News, which quoted the executive director of the ATA, Tim Searcy. Here's an excerpt from the article:
"The ATA received no warning about the article from Barry or anyone connected with him," Searcy said. ". . . the Barry column has had harmful consequences for the ATA. An ATA staffer has spent about five hours a day for the past six days monitoring the voice mail and clearing out messages."
That's correct: The ATA received NO WARNING that it was going to get unwanted calls! Not only that, but these unwanted calls were an INCONVENIENCE for the ATA, and WASTED THE ATA'S TIME!
I just hope nobody interrupted the ATA's dinner. Ha! This is great. The hypocrisy and the irony are truly monumental. The ATA changed their phone number, but the new one is 317-816-9336. Maybe I'll call them and ask them if they know about Stealth Disco...
Via The Daily Irrelevant and [Joi Ito's Web] Again, that new number is: 317-816-9336 - let's all call 'em!
12:19:40 PM ;
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Mon 13 Oct: New York NY - Day Off We left Wilmington after our show there and drove to New York. Somewhere we stopped and combined all ten of us on one bus for the drive into Manhattan. We arrived at the Paramount Hotel around 2am.
10am - first walk around. Manhattan is really a village on steroids. Overgrown, but still manageable on foot. I could never live in a city that I cannot manage on foot! Cologne is a city where you can get around on foot, same goes for Boston, where I lived 1979-1986. Same goes for all of my favorite cities.
12:14:52 PM ;
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Defining music, musician and performance.... A classical orchestra musician plays notes written by a (usually dead) composer. He is judged by his ability to perform the notation.
A Jazz musician has memorized a standard which he performs verbatim except for certain improvisation sections.
A laptop replays a sound or loop that was performed earlier and which has been prepared by a musician or composer to interact with other musicians. The sound could be especially created or programmed for the particular piece, or could be a performance by another musician that has been captured and appropriated for this piece. The laptop is uniquely qualified to replay many different performances by different types of musicians performing different types of music. It is therefore ideal when used in the performance of multi-cultural music.
Something happens when software re-plays loops. It becomes a new sound. Every software interprets the digital bits a little differently. Every software sounds a little different. It therefore takes on a new character that is altogether different from a new human performance. In other words every drummer performing a certain part will have a slightly different feel than this software. I have used drum machines and loops since 1981, that is for over 20 years, and they have become part of my vocabulary.
In order to make my guitar sound as good as possible, we need to keep the stage volume to a minimum. These days I am refusing to use a pick-up altogether and the engineer has to rely on a clean microphone signal from my guitar. The more noise enters the microphone - define noise as anything that is not produced by my guitar - the more noise will get amplified, and the more muddled my guitar sound will be. The loudest element on stage are the drums and for a while (1996-2001) we used Roland drum pads. At first these represented a whole different set of problems: during soft sections of music people in the front row of a theater heard the sound of sticks hitting the rubber pads more than the resulting sound sample produced. Of course this was no longer the case when I had the big band as the band was overall louder than anything I had previously done and the horns and timbales created so much sound that the pads were not an issue. Nowadays the laptop makes no sound at all and yet it can reproduce the sound of a slamming acoustic drum set recorded at full volume - played back silently by the laptop...If I want to occasionally use slamming drum sets I have the choice between a shitty guitar sound, because I would have to use a pick-up on my guitar, or a solution like the laptop. And the sound of a pick-up on my guitar would depress me terribly and that is not an option.
Let's face it, I could be sneaky. U2 has 2 or more musicians underneath their stage, who add samples, extra guitars, back-up voices, synthesizers and the like with the help of computers and keyboards - but you never see them. Another band, Depeche Mode, used to travel with a 24track recorder that played back most of the instrumentation. Jazz guitarist Larry Carlton used backing tape during his shows as early as 1990 - yes, I was blown away when I found out that he had extra guitars and instrumentation coming from tape - it meant that all improvisations had to be of a fixed length, because the tape was the master - and of course he sounded much, much bigger than my puny little trio! Other bands use a keyboard to trigger samples or drum pads too trigger whole sequences. I am not going to play those games with you.
12:14:36 PM ;
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Sun 12 Oct: Wilmington DE - The Opera House The Opera is a beautiful building from 1871 in the heart of Wilmington which on a Sunday is deader than Santa Fe on Christmas day...there is nothing open and nothing going on...huge office buildings and empty streets...luckily there was some food on the bus for breakfast because one could parish here just trying to find a place to eat...
Smiles all around after our performance. I am undoubtedly playing better than ever with this band. Forget about the laptop already, I thought you are coming to hear me play guitar. Well, I love playing to these loops, and my playing is better than ever. I have played to loops or drummachines since my brother bought the first Oberheim DMX around 1981 or '82. Remember "Three Women walking" on Nouveau Flamenco? That's a drummachine. The percussionist couldn't give me the feel I was looking for - so I just programmed what I wanted. Well, the people here didn't seem to mind. Standing ovations at the end of the show and after the encore. I have to admit I do think the dialog about using the laptop is good. It makes us all think about how we define music, musician, instrument, performance etc.
From an article by the New York critic Bernard Holland: "The Concert experience is, or ought to be, a transaction between two imaginations: one that emanates from the stage, the other going to meet it from the seats". What a perfect description that is!!! He also writes: "Acoustics are to music what bookbinding and typefaces are to Faulkner. A beautiful cover is a delight to behold. The right page design is easy on the eyes. But if your minds are doing their work, Faulkner's voice will sound the same in the roughest, smallest and most unwelcoming old paperback as it does in he most luxurious special edition. It depends on how well we read." Yes, yes, agreed, but it is undoubtedly more fun when you can hear your instrument well, because that struggle of trying to hear your own work and the work of your band-mates is taken out of the equation and you are left only with trying to translate your thoughts into music....
12:14:22 PM ;
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Right now, your hard drive is serving as a Mani wheel, because there are several copies of the mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" on this page, and they are all stored on your hard drive in the cache for your browser.
His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, has said that having the mantra on your computer works the same as a traditional Mani wheel. As the digital image spins around on your hard drive, it sends the peaceful prayer of compassion to all directions and purifies the area. [BoingBoing]
12:14:15 PM ;
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Sat 11 Oct: Westhampton NY - Performing Arts Center Last night was a pleasure. First Jon and I had a great meal at a restaurant called Pesce Blue right across the street from the theater. The acoustics at the Music Hall in Portsmouth are great - although the stage is hollow and over-emphasizes the bass which can be disturbing. Nevertheless I think we all played very well and the audience was digging it. Ron delivered another stunning tabla solo during "Duende del Amor". He has told me he prefers performing the solo over the cajon loop in 6/8 (which still suggests the Buleria rhythm which is 12/8 devided into 3/8 + 3/8 + 2/8 + 2/8 + 2/8) as it clarifies what he is doing on tablas. You see, Indian (dot, not feather) rhythms are extremely complex and often he does stuff like playing 9/8 against the 6/8 loop (4 bars of 9/8 = 6 bars of 6/8 = 9 bars of 4/8 = 36) - which by itself is amazing, but is made much clearer by hearing it against the loop in 6/8....you hear where he takes off and how he comes back in...he does something different every night! Check out the complex pattern he repeats three times as the signal to stop!! No wonder so much coding is now done in India - they have the most mathematically complex music in the world. And India invented the zero (which they wrote as a dot) - how perfect is that!!!! Yes, you may have learned that Arabs invented the zero, but that is not correct. They learned that concept from India. Greece rejected the zero as they did not believe that nothing could exist. Their loss was the Arabs gain as their math, and subsequently their trading boomed...
Anyway, back to the Portsmouth show: it was sponsored by a Classic Rock radio station, which played some of the classics from our album"Little Wing", like the songs "Little Wing" and "Kashmir".
Westhampton...our show has been sold out for a month already...last year Adam Sandler was walking around the town, this year we hear Nicole Kidman is just around the corner...I am told there was a sea of Mercs, Jaguars and Hummers around the theater in the evening...and a lot of Bling-Bling everywhere...the audience is fantastic and they are having a great time. I think we did our longest and best version of Sao Paulo tonight!
12:14:05 PM ;
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Fri 10 Oct: Portsmouth NH - Music Hall We arrive in Portsmouth rather late after a long drive from Pittsburgh, but the crew gets us set up fast and we should soundcheck around 5pm. Portsmouth is a great little town and reminds me of Santa Fe or Bend, Oregon.
Jon and I have wonderful sushi at a Japanese restaurant on Main Street, not far from the theater. It is the best sushi I have had in quite a while as my favorite sushi restaurant in Santa Fe closed three years ago....Hm, I did have some great sushi in Vancouver in 2001....anyway we enjoy Portsmouth very much as always!
12:13:56 PM ;
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Boycotting.... I am not good about holding a grudge. Never been good at it. Even in Kindergarten if I told somebody "I'll never talk to you" it would only last about 30 minutes...I have tried to boycott China for their actions in Tibet, but nowadays everything is made in China. I can't keep track of all the different boycotts anyway. Then there are boycotts against certain companies that are doing this or that wrong. You could easily fill up your palm pilot trying to keep track of all of that info...I am not saying that boycotts do not work, I am just saying that I am picking my boycotts a lot more carefully these days....
12:13:33 PM ;
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© Copyright
2003
Ottmar Liebert.
Last update:
11/1/03; 9:39:17 AM.
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