The Null Device

2001/3/8

The Village Voice has an article about Disturbing Search Requests, one of the more amusing metablogs.

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Looks like the cat's out of the bag then... Actually, "all-night-long" is quite apt, though mostly because I tend to stay up until dawn working on things and/or reading whenever I can get away with it. Mornings have never been my thing...

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This evening, I went to the last What Is Music? show, at the Empress Hotel; it was more enjoyable than some of the previous ones I saw. Mostly because it wasn't comprised of people generating harsh noise/aimless burblings on their PowerBooks and relying on the fact that (a) if they don't explain, it must be profound, and (b) if you don't get it, you're too dependent on conventions (never mind, just go home and listen to your Britney Spears CDs), and instead had some listenable music. (Listenable experimental music; what next, you ask?)

I came in a bit late, and only caught the end of Rhizome's set, but the other sets seemed good. The highlights would probably have been David Haines' ambient-electronic set (done with Reactor on a PowerBook) and Minit's lovely ambient performance at the end (all done on an Akai S1000 with 2Mb of RAM, impressively enough). Oren Ambarchi was quite impressive in coaxing weird soundscapes out of a guitar, a bunch of pedals and a sampler-like gadget of sorts. Then there was Dworzec, which consisted of a guy playing an analogue synth, a woman abusing an accordion and another guy fiddling with a bunch of effects connected to a stationary guitar. In between sets, a guy named Private Benjamin scratched records through a delay, never letting them spin for too long, and at one stage did evil things to a Van Halen guitar solo and a Sesame Street songs record.

All in all, a fun night. Made me want to go home and play around with audio effects and synth patches. (Now if only I had more time for that kind of thing.)

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According to Sl*shd*t, some as yet unindicted felon/freedom fighter at MIT has written a DVD descrambler in 526 bytes of Perl. No link, as I don't want the site hosting my blog seized by the Federal Police. Go find it yourself.

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