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Chances are that you are looking for more information about one Christopher F. Smith. Good guy, from what we hear. Smart fellow. You'll probably want to learn more about him through the links below. Or I guess you could take a spin through his blog. There's some good stuff in there, too.

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Requix Ante Pennot, v2

Oh, indeed. It's not like I don't read 'The Trades' we all like to talk about so much - with equal parts envy and disgust. "It's a vision thing" I guess someone who is inclined to make statements like that would say as they licked the half-dry foam off the too-dainty spoon that accompanied yet another $4.75 cappaccino. Because we all had nowhere to go and we were determined to get there in some manner of style. And if that meant posting up at the Krazy Kat Koffee Klatch (the new location off frontage road, not the original-and-since-burned-down location where the pawn shops used to be) and gazing around with such an insufferable and wholly unearned hubris; lobbing flaming spears of thin and derivative affection to townies


and tourists alike. Fuck it, man. I EARNED this seat in the fading afternoon sun. Out-waited that portly grocery store manager type over there. Yes... over there on the shattered fiberglass bench under the near-dead Dogwood tree that still - STILL - has that fucking plastic bag in it. I thought it would be gone by now; blown out of its knotty twisted prison and freed upon the dry swirling updrafts delivered as scheduled by the Santa Ana Climatic Moving Service. Perhaps when the bag works up the courage do disentangle and disappear, I too, will allow whatever furtive and fierce Manifest Destiny that so fucking obviously runs things around here to push me down the sharp-edged staircase...tumbling head-over and arms-askew and the change fell out of my pockets (Whoa! A $1 coin?) and the blurs got too painful to take and the spin-n-bounce progress made it clear that it was never going to be a comfortable ride. And my dainty spoon was left behind. And the big words from small people snapped off and spun away.

The Origin of the Term 'Lukewarm'

BurstCore v1

I've been kicking this idea around for about decade or so. The general premise is that people have a reservoir of accumulated audio cognition that lies just beneath the surface. From constant exposure, much of this is almost hard-wired into our brains. We know the crispy riff from 'Sweet Child O' Mine' or the weird moaning-ish racket at the end of Duran Duran's 'Hungry Like the Wolf' or the cold, hard keyboard from Robert Palmer's 'Addicted to Love' from hearing it over and over and over again for years. (Yes; this is a pop/American-centric version of the theory.)

And, my guess is that humans are designed to immediatly try to peg the familiar. If we hear something that we know - even if we don't know that we know it - our brains recognize it and attempt catagorizations. Think, think, think - without thinking. "What was that?" BOOM - an inadvertant flood of memories and cognition. 

Of course, we've been sampling stuff for decades. Nothing new there. But I think if you were to gather enough deep-resonance-snippets (DRSs? Sure.) that you could create a meta-levelled musical experience that eclipses current work. Instead of two or three samples, I'm talking 50-60. And each just the most recognizable slice of a track. Audio krill for the baleen whale listener.

With BurstCore, the basic idea is to overload a listener with so many familiar (and unfamiliar) samples as to have them continually off-balance and constantly wondering on the sources. Flood the listeners with familairity and drown them in fractured recall - and all the while have them tapping their toes to a damn infectious beat.

I think some kind of hypnotic effect can be achieved through the constant bombardment of deeply familiar sounds that never reach any kind of climax. A sustained vague familiarity that never touches down. A meta-referrential aural pastiche that teases at the known and comfortable but veers away before any kind of concrete definition.

It's a work - an idea - in progress. 

Colour Arcs

CRASH!

As Associate Producer of the new feature film from Shadow Angel Films, I have to be ready for anything. Last weekend, that meant a stint as a stunt driver.

Here we see an incredibly dangerous stunt in which a cement mixer loaded with lead and set on fire careens down a steep city street and SMASHES into my car.

There was nothing in the budget for a helmet.

(And how the hell does one get a .gif to loop endlessly? Kind of ruins the effect. Reload!)

It Sounds So Familiar...

So, about that trend of DJs taking on interesting names that are simply famous names with the lead letters transposed... It's interesting in that when you read/say the name, it feels both famililar and jarringly out of place. (And it has a name: Spoonerism) Apparently, it's a convention that is becoming annoying to Music Kids but I kinda dig it.  

For example:

• MORD FUSTANG
• COM TRUISE
• ROLLY MINGWALD

Cairo - Cairo

UPSTREAM COLOR - A Tweet Review from Hammer To Nail

Kris is derailed from her life when she is drugged by a small-time thief. But something bigger is going on. She is unknowingly drawn into the life cycle of a presence that permeates the microscopic world, moving to nematodes, plant life, livestock, and back again. Along the way, she finds another being—a familiar, who is equally consumed by the larger force. The two search urgently for a place of safety within each other as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of their wrecked lives.

Shane Carruth’s sensuously directed and much anticipated sophomore effort (his feature debut, Primer, won the Sundance Film Festival 2004 Grand Jury Prize) is a truly remarkable film that lies beyond the power of language to communicate while it delivers a cohesive sensory experience. With its muscular cinematic language rooted in the powerful yearnings felt before words can be formed, Upstream Color is an entirely original, mythic, romantic thriller that goes in search of truths that lie just beyond our reach. - Sundance 2013. Dir: Shane Carruth. Starring Amy Seimetz. 2013. Digital. 96 mins.
 

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UPSTREAM COLOR will be at the Roxie in San Francisco April 12th. 

What's Your Favorite Dance Move?

Close Your Eyes To Fly