the-inbetween.com

Harmonic 313’s Word Problems

Harmonic 313’s EP1 is an interesting, if brief, excursion into bleepy, old school “Detroit techno.” The record makes heavy use of retro Speak N Spell samples, which is probably one of the most sampled toys ever.

That little reference to the toy game isn’t restricted to the music though, it’s there through the packaging and website. All the track names are obscured behind a simple color coded substitution cipher. The website plays with this and makes a simple little interactive game out of it (with three lives and everything). The reward for completing it? A bonus unreleased track.

It’s all very simple stuff but this game adds a nice little reward and working your way through it is, in my mind, much more engaging and gives me a better sense for the music than any standard discography site with downloadable samples could ever provide. This is how to engage using the interactive medium. (Or, if you prefer more complex games, there’s Year Zero, as reviewed here.)

Playing mp3s In Browser

or, “The V in FLV Means ‘Video’”

The good thing about Flash becoming such a ubiquitous audio player online is that it has, essentially, killed off proprietary formats like ASX and Realmedia. Nearly every browser has Flash installed so it makes it easy for site operators to allow mp3 playback without having to worry about what players the user has installed or what the default download options are or whatever. You put up a simple Flash audio player and it works without any of the overhead that might scare away less computer savvy users. Additionally, Flash’s extensibility allows site operators to create players with the features and appearance that they want. They can’t do that with third party players unless they’re of the size of Microsoft or Apple.

Of course, these content providers want to have their cake and eat it too. They desire the ubiquity of flash and mp3 but they also want to restrict and contain the music, so that it’s not easily downloadable (Flash loads mp3s through the browser and if it can load them, the browser and the user can grab them too. Quite easily.) This has resulted in some overly complex mechanisms using tokens and sessions and other sorts of obfuscations, as seen in the above image. None of which work. These measures do nothing but add inconvenient speed bumps akin to the annoying “spaceball.gif” image overlays on Flickr and the old-school “do not right click” javascript popups. None of which ever worked.

Lately I’ve noticed a new trend, as seen in the imeem Player. Certain sites are now encoding all their audio as .flv, Flash Video, format. There’s no video, of course, since the format is being used as a wrapper for the mp3 audio. I understand why they do it. Their logic is that flv files can’t be as easily and freely distributed as mp3 files can (a lot of people wouldn’t know how to play an .flv file), but come on. Stop trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. There’s already a perfectly fine file format for playing back audio: mp3. Wrapping it up in some camouflage won’t work because it can easily be unwrapped.

Here’s a word of advice: if I can listen to your file in my browser it’s because it was already downloaded and it’s on my hard drive. This is how browsers work. Stop trying to put ineffectual roadblocks around this. If you are going to share it then share it. You’ll get more sales and promotion out of it. It worked for Nine Inch Nails and it’s hopefully working for Flashbulb. “Soundtrack To A Vacant Life” is a pretty solid album. Buy it.

Crystal Castles vs Creative Commons

Remember that time I wrote about the then new Crystal Castles album? My semi-review came from the perspective of someone familiar with the chiptune sound and annoyed by all the Pitchforkerati buzz proclaiming it “innovative.” I objected to those proclamations but, essentially, raved about the music itself and, essentially, admired Crystal Castles‘ nonchalance to the scene. They weren’t of the scene but they were of the same pop-culture zeitgeist, having grown up with 8-bit videogames, that created that scene. Synchronicity and all that.

As it turns out, they were full of shit.

One Crystal Castles quote from the previous post that bears repeating is the following:

That keyboard was made back in 2004 and then we learned about this whole 8-bit scene, which we don’t really have anything to do with. It’s a completely different world.

Which would be fine were it not for the fact that they have just been found to have been using unlicensed and unapproved samples from artists in the 8-bit scene, specifically Lo-Bat and Covox. Oops. It puts everything they have said in an entirely new light, especially when you consider the stink that they caused when it was revealed they used art on shirts and albums, that they found, without ever getting the artists permission.

One time is, maybe, a careless mistake. Two, three, four times over is kleptomania. The worst part is that they distance themselves –a completely different world– from the very same community that they are influenced by. Chiptunes? Not cool. Asshole douchebaggery? Totally hipster! Put it on Pitchfork.

The 8-bit Peoples website has the “official” response as well as links that detail the situation some more: Crystal Castles and Chip Music Copyright Infringements, Chiptune Music Theft Continues; Crystal Castles Abuses Creative Commons License and chipflip: plagiarism. The best place for information, however, is the epic (now 23 page) thread on the 8bitcollective forums.

Fuck that, Crystal Castles is now permanently off of my radar. Go listen to some chiptunes .

Justice - “Stress”

French electro-hipsters Justice recently released a new video for their track “Stress”. [hi-res video link] It lives up to the title. The video follows a gang of banlieue thugs as they go on a rampage across the city. It’s violent and uncompromising, likely to never be seen on TV on this side of the Atlantic, and, to no one’s surprise, already quite controversial. In some ways, it’s a very condensed version of La Haine [trailer].

On a superficial level, the violence is gratuitous. These thugs go around beating up bystanders, tourists, old ladies and security guards without any retribution. That’s likely why so many people have a problem with this video: they get away with it. After being subjected to this stressful ordeal the viewer is never given the karmic release they likely expected. Not only do they lack that catharsis, but by the end of it the viewer itself becomes as a victim to the thugs’ rampage.

The video works because there’s a constant tension between the actions of the characters on screen and the viewer, represented as the film crew. This is established early on when you see a hand come out a wipe the camera. From this point on you know that this isn’t some imaginary third person view, this is seen from the first person perspective of the cameraman. The characters are aware of it, though in an uneasy sort of way.

As it goes along they become more conscious of the camera. They goad it along, as though their carnage is for show.

Soon enough, the authorities come and try to take them and the camera down. You see a guard come, palm raised, at the camera. The screen goes black. A moment later, we are saved as the thugs turn on that guard and beat the shit out of him. Everyone runs. It is at this point when we become more aware of the camera crew as we see the sound guy, holding his microphone, running away alongside the thugs.

The camera crew — the viewer — has changed from a detached observer into someone complicit in the violence. They are no longer detached observers. It is no surprise that they, too, become victims to it. It’s hard to feel sympathy for them. They — we — brought it upon ourselves. In this sense it is far more reminiscent of Man Bites Dog than La Haine.

So is the violence in this video gratuitous? Yes. But that shouldn’t be seen as a celebration or glorification of it. The only people that would see it as such are those that look at it at a superficial level, seeing a bunch of hooligans beating up innocent people and nothing more. There’s more to it than just that.

It is, then, very appropriate that the video was let loose during the same week that saw the release of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Chiptunes vs Crystal Castles

As a final addendum to my post on Crystal Castles, I present:

Yes, somebody did a pure chiptune remix of Crystal Castles. I love it; it’s so meta. A lo-fi 8-bit remix of a song that, itself, was a lo-fi remix of a song. At this point, I expect and hope that somebody brings down the bits even more and remixes the 8-bit version using Monotone.

Crystal Castles vs Chiptunes

Edit (May 5, 08): Hey, it turns out Crystal Castles are thieving bastards and full of shit. Read more.

Crystal Castles is the latest buzz-making indie band to emerge out of Toronto, which has been a relative hotbed of cool independent (and post-independent) music. It’s a scene that has spawned the likes of MSTRKRFT, Holy Fuck and, before them, Death From Above 1979 and Broken Social Scene and the multitudes of artists connected to them in every conceivable way (like Feist.) The two-piece of Crystal Castles, instrumentalist Ethan Kath and vocalist Alice Glass, comes out blazing with fully armed synthesizers and their primary weapon of choice is a modded keyboard with an Atari 5200 chip in it. Yes, they’re basically creating Chiptunes.

I love chiptunes. It’s an aesthetic that has great modern and nostalgic appeal to me. The first music that I payed any attention to in my life was generated by an NES sound chip, and the last album that I listened to wasn’t very different. In the last five years I’ve been to two live shows: one was a friend’s band and the other featured bit shifter. So yes, it’s a sound I have a certain nerdy affinity to. I’m not the only one as it’s a thriving scene. There’s a countless number of artists, numerous labels, a full-on four day music festival (Report part 1, part 2) and even a documentary or two.

Crystal Castles in Toronto, courtesy of Charlyn.

Crystal Castles, whose sound I would describe as “The Knife if they were on 8-bit peoples, with a touch of Atari Teenage Riot“, doesn’t identify with that scene at all. Hell, their name isn’t a reference to the Atari videogame (as I first thought), it’s a reference to She-Ra. It’s not the world they came from. In an interview with Exclaim!, they say as much:

It was only to create annoying sounds. That keyboard was made back in 2004 and then we learned about this whole 8-bit scene, which we don’t really have anything to do with. It’s a completely different world.

That’s fine. That’s great. Music history isn’t a linear path; influence happens in parallel. The kids that grew up with the SID chips and the Atari and the NES, now in their twenties and thirties, all have personal experiences with that nostalgia and it will manifest itself in ways unique to them. It’s not synchronicity, it’s culture. What irks me about this isn’t the band, it’s the media writing about the band.

It’s not my intent to start a “my subculture is better than your subculture” pissing match — we’d lose, the indie army is far crazier and more numerous — but I hate how the oft ignored, under the radar and frequently dismissed 8-bit aesthetic that defined the chiptune world years and years ago is now seen as this great and novel innovation. It’s hyperbolic articles like this one that stir my shit. Attaching a classic game system sound chip to a keyboard makes for a totally unique and new sound? They are the most exciting and original band in the world right now? Really?

Tracks like “xxzxcuzx me” and “Love and Caring” and “Alice Practice” have been described by some as “8-bit terror”. It’s mosh-pit music for the Nintendo generation and the crowd reactions to their performances reveal as much. Suburban ghetto music writes:

The pit was open and as the ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches washed over me I was inspired to run in, fists waving, until I was pushed out by three different people roughly twice my size. Usually I am one to shy away from the actual ‘moshing’ but repeatedly I was going for it, especially when killer track ‘Alice Practice’ came on.

That “killer track” is oft described by Crystal Castles as an “accident.” What’s even more telling is that they seem rather ambivalent to that glitchy sound. In interviews they say that they did it to be annoying:

We like to use sounds that annoy people. Especially in the earlier songs, like “xxzxcuzx me” — that was just to annoy everyone. It’s really strange when people tell us it’s their favourite song.

That annoying sound — the very same one that is getting all the praise for being “innovative” and “something completely new” — is the very same sound that has been previously derided as nerdy nostalgic noise with no musical value. Look no further than Paul Ford’s “Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s” for proof of this dismissal. There are threefour chiptune artists on that list and they all have one circle ratings. Aonami is described as “8-bit gunk” and Receptors gets the snarky “Can they win the boss level?” treatment. If anything, it proves that reviewing music is no different than reviewing the last time you masturbated: immeasurably personal and subjective.

That’s not to say that there isn’t any value in that — there is — it just depends on the context that is brought to the review. Paul Ford dismisses Receptors as noise; I hear Kraftwerkian lo-fi bit-pop. That’s my experience with it, no doubt fueled by the knwoledge that the man behind Receptors is the man behind 8-bit Operators, the chiptune Kraftwerk cover album. An album that is notable for being published by a “mainstream” label, AstralWerks. And when he hears as “8-bit gunk”, I hear a head bopping mix of nostalgia and awesome.

It’s a matter of perspective. When those not familiar with that chiptune “8-bit terror” sound hear it coming from Crystal Castles, and they like it, they like it because it’s something new and fresh and innovative. For me, however, it’s a sound that I’m already intimate with. I enjoy it because I know it. I have a frame of reference to it. I know of other acts and performances and songs with which I can compare their aesthetic to. When I hear about the mosh-pits to songs like “Alice Practice” and “xxzxcuzx me”, as mentioned above, I think about this performance by Hally at the Blip Festival.

As with everything else, it’s all been done before. David Sugar mixed nanoloop-powered Gameboy chiptunes with hip-hop over a year ago.
Beck did his thing three years ago with Ghettochip Malfunction on the Hell Yes EP. And Welle:Erdball have been doing it for over a decade. None of that matters though. Whether they’re seen as “innovative” or indie cool or as chiptune artists doesn’t change the fact that their music is fantastic. Their take on that 8-bit aesthetic is distinctly theirs. It’s personal. It’s good. It’s recommended. A fine addition to the chiptune canon.

Their debut self-titled album comes out this week.

Szomorú Vasárnap

The ubiquity of YouTube is a wonderful thing. For every one four million view video on the site there’s another forty thousand videos with a hundred views each. This, as Alex Juhasz ^[1]calls it, “niche-tube” exists below the radar of YouTube’s popularity and is often a treasure trove of weird and specific videos that only appeal to small subset of people. Some of it is prime research material.

Take “Gloomy Sunday” for example. The so called “Hungarian Suicide Song”, which has many urban legends around it, was mostly popularized in English by Billie Holiday. Originally written by Rezso Seress (lyrics), it was promptly rewritten to be less depressing by poet László Jávor (lyrics). It was that version that was later translated into English by Sam L. Lewis (lyrics) and Desmond Carter (lyrics). Carter’s version, performed by Paul Robeson (who has his own interesting history), was the more accurate translation but it proved to be the less successful one. After a bunch of performers, Lewis’ version was eventually recorded by Billie Holiday with a new third stanza that tries to take even more weight off the original meaning of the song by implying that it was a dream. It was this version of the song that persisted, eventually being covered by the likes of Elvis Costello, Bjork, Sarah McLaughlin, Sinéad O’Connor and others. It is this version, three iterations from the original, that is mostly known as “Gloomy Sunday.”

Now this is all well and interesting written out, but a quick YouTube search will reveal all this history in all its aural glory. YouTube is a great cultural library for this media and while copyright issues will always plague it, at this point I doubt they will ever stop it. How can you go back with all this culture a click away? Here’s an audio/video history of the previous paragraph:

Read the rest of this entry…

Two Piece Rock Band

Well, I finally jumped on the Rock Band tourbus. Partly because I’m just about done with Burnout Paradise and partly because it was overdue and partly because the disc (not the complete package) can be had for cheap and partly because the latest downloadable content releases were “March of the Pigs” and “Perfect Drug” by NIN (in time for the new digitally distrubuted album release).

I am enjoying it — so much more than Guitar Hero 3 — but I do feel as though I’m missing out by only playing it on guitar in my lonesome. The possibility that I’ll be able to put a four piece band together is pretty slim so it’ll always feel as though I’m not getting the full band experience. But there is a solution: downloadable content!

How does that solve anything? Well, create a pack of only two piece rock bands. It’s easier to put together than a three or four piece band, though it does mean that someone (not I) would have to take double duty with the microphone. Here’s some suggestions for songs that would work and be fun to play (but will likely never show up because they would exclude full bands, to my dismay):

• White Stripes - Little Cream Soda — probably the most well known modern two piece band. So many songs to choose, but I think this one off of their latest album would be fun to play.
• Death From Above 1979 - Romantic Rights — yeah they don’t exist anymore but their rock endures.
• Local H - Bound for the Floor — was a minor hit back in the 90s.
• Inbreds - Any Sense of Time — was a minor Canadian hit back in the 90s.

Legion of Rock Stars

YouTube is a treasure trove of cover artists, remixers, parodies, mash-ups and everything else. On occasion you might hit the jack-pot and find a hidden gem amidst all the usual quality content. Something that transcends bad. Legion of rock stars, as can be found in fibbocs video channel, is one such stand-out. It’s a “cover band” that does such lousy job with the source material that it becomes oddly hilarious. And it’s a mother lode: there’s 178 of these videos.

Highly recommended: Mother, Total Eclipse of The Heart, You Sexy Thing, Ghostbusters, Sweet Dreams, and Evenflow.

Legion of Rock Stars‘ site describes their style as:

Legion of Rock Stars (LRS) pioneered Pure Pleasure, in which the band listens to original recordings of classic rock and pop songs on 30db noise-blocking headsets, and then plays along.

Freed from the shackles of practicing, LRS focuses instead on bringing the excitement of a large stadium rock show to the intimate arenas in which it performs.

I’m excited, but mostly for this cover of the The Good, The Bad and The Ugly theme:

My Favourite Music of 07

I’m not generally the most up to date with new releases. Some of my favourite and most played albums of this year came out last year (hell, one of them came out in 1969.) Out of the 2007 releases that I did manage to catch, for whatever reason, the top five stand-outs are:

Somatik - Learning the Colours. I think I was reading reviews for Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble (one of those 2006 albums) when I came across a beyond jazz review for Somatik. From there, I listened to some samples on his site and I was instantly hooked. Interaktion is quite possibly my most played track of the year.

Holy Fuck - LP. Hey, a local band! It was the wacky, animated video that introduced me to the band. I purchased the album on the strength of that one song (blind chance!) A kind of “flangey” electro-indie rock mostly instrumental band. The lyrics they do have tend to be distorted and distant, less about singing and more about texture. And at 36 minutes, the album is short enough to not overstay its welcome.

Frank Bretschneider - Rhythm Rhythm is a good name for the album because that’s about all there is. Everything else is stripped down to its bare circuit board essentials. Minimal computer music? Yes. Sterile? So totally not and I so totally can not explain why. Here’s a crappy YouTube video showing what to expect.

Venetian Snares - My Downfall. His last album, Rossz Csillag Alatt Született was one of my favourites albums of 2005 and My Downfall is essentially a continuation and follow-up of that. It follows the same formula as Rossz — classical strings (and samples) mixed with intense bouts of broken gabber beats — but is a lot more low-key in its construction. The majority of the album (10 of 14 tracks) consists of short, somber interludes which make the occasional cathartic releases that much more impactful. It doesn’t dull you with constant pounding like Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole does but it never bores you either.

Burial - Untrue. Honestly, I still don’t know what makes “dubstep” dubstep. Classifying music into the multitude of genres, especially the electronic kind, is not a strength of mine. Not when the differences between the genres are so subtle and minute. “Untrue”, however, is entirely its own thing. It’s one of those albums that doesn’t fit into a genre but defines it. In some ways it reminds me of Massive Attack’s “Protection”, if it were recorded using Sound Forge on a laptop inside a dark, haunted cave. This is a good thing.

If anything, these kind of lists serve as good sign posts for where my tastes have been and where they’re going. This year has been more laid-back, more IDMish, jazzier, less aggressive and more minimal, rather than heavily layered, than previous years.

E4 Obsessiveness

I was reading some of the criticism of Every Extend Extra Extreme and the bulk of it consists of: it’s too easy, too repetitive and too long. I don’t dispute that; it really is. As I was reading those I realized that for nearly the last hour I had one song playing on repeat over and over again*. When it comes to music I like I tend to be obsessive compulsive about it. If I like it, I like it a lot. I listen to albums on repeat over and over again. I go through back catalogs. I play a single favourite song on repeat a dozen times over. I do this until I get bored of that artist (or even that style of music) and move on to the next thing. It might not be the best way to consume music but it’s the way I do it.

That’s why I like Every Extend Extra Extreme and Lumines so much, they appeal to my OCD. The fantastic music these games have is one of the major draws (Lumines 2’s less obscure artist selections were my biggest criticisms of that game.) It’s what keeps the repetition from feeling repetitive. I realize that these games aren’t for everybody — especially E4 — but they’re totally for me.

* That track on repeat was Interaktion off of Somatik’s “Learning the Colours”, an album that I consider one of the “top releases of 2006 that I didn’t hear until 2007.”