Forgery League

The dust’s settled on 2007 at last, and does it ever feel like a new year now. Here’s a few highlights, including some stuff I didn’t write about the first time round:

January: Spinglobe moves into a brand new office in a neat building in the east end. One of the first projects is a music video for the Mahones. It’s a takeoff on that Fellini scene where la Saraghina dances the rhumba on a Mediterranean beach - except it’s January, on Ashbridge’s Bay, and the warm spell of the previous week is most definitely over. We should have called the production Minus 8½. We freeze our collective asses off, but the video ends up looking pretty darn fine.

February: Played in the band for a musical revue put on as a fundraiser by some friends - my first time playing Broadway style is a fun challenge; I stress way about it more than I have to. Reconceived long-running audio drama idea as a podcast; later in the year would reconceive it again as a comic. Expect it to morph into a novel, a musical extravaganza and finally a series of haiku in 2008.

March: In the studio with Ellen Carol to record bass tracks for her new CD, produced by Don Kerr. Restarted work on Flickershow CD; we get some solid demos done and some cool results on a trip-hoppy new song called “Hold Up Donny”. It doesn’t last, however; I end up firing myself as producer later in the year. If all goes well we’ll be recording with Don in 2008.

May: Played with Flickershow at the Sammy Sugar Day Festival, the kickoff for Ellen’s fundraising bike tour of Eastern Canada. Finally launched a site for Presonance, a collaboration with Rezo Largul.

June: Attended OpenCities, an “unconference” about the convergence of civic engagement and the open source movement. Among the topics are the waterfront revitalization, public space, DIY electronics and public art, dancing in the streets. Coincidentally, the next day, Flickershow played at Pedestrian Sundays, a monthly car-free event in Kensington Market (other events occur in Mirvish Village and on Baldwin Street); our first outing with keyboard player Rich.

Later in the month, Sean’s mom comes up from Pennsylvania for a visit. Tuesday we’re at work while she takes it easy; she’s out having a smoke on the front porch when lightning strikes a tree two doors down, and a gale-force gust of wind tears off branches for several blocks. We return home to find our street a maze of police tape, tree limbs and downed power lines. Neighbouring streets are almost unaffected. “I didn’t do it,” she pleads.

July: Played Newmarket and Brampton - our only out-of-town gig prior to this was our TVO appearance taped in Parry Sound. First steps toward developing an analog-to-MIDI interface using that splendid new toy, the Arduino.

August: Cottage outing with co-workers. Lots of laughs, plenty of good food and drink, and some cool photographic exploration of natural forms and painting with light.

October: A week from hell. Two or three clients go through reorganizations, and a number of key projects go on indefinite hold. Contractors removing a cellular tower break a sprinkler pipe and flood part of our office. None of this registers, however, because our co-worker’s 21-year-old brother has just died in his sleep. Things are very quiet for several days.

November: Two good friends of ours invited us to play a song at their crazy cabaret-style lesbian wedding. The only question was what to wear. (As MC for the evening, Sean had no such dilemma, since they’d put him in a rather lovely kilt and feather boa.)

At the end of the month, a beautiful, awe-inspiring, mad trip to Marrakech with Sean, his mom and stepdad, and a new friend, the irrepressible and energizing Katie. We stayed in the heart of the medina, a maze of winding alleyways full of people, tiny shops, mopeds and stray cats. A handful of local kids kept asking for money; Sean juggled for them instead (years ago he did it for a living in Dallas) and became an instant hit. Later, we drove through the Atlas Mountains to ride camels into the desert and sleep in a tent. Beautiful country, lots of wonderful people. And occasional strange family moments.

December: The partners make the tough decision to sell the company to a bigger firm. Some of us move over, the video business splits off (taking on the name Robotnik Films), and I start looking for work. I’ll miss the place, and I’ll miss working with the Spinglobe crew. But it’s a huge opportunity, both to find work in a field that’s important to me and to have some actual free time again. Here’s to the new year!

I may have spoken too soon, in that little outburst the other day. Wrapping up final projects for work has been taking up a huge amount of time. Having most of a weekend to mull things over helped, but I still have a lot of thinking to think. More about this soon.

In the meantime, some things I have learned over the past few weeks.

• The Arabic alphabet actually isn’t that hard. I’d always wanted to learn it, because I like alphabets and lettering - not to mention the fabulousness of Islamic calligraphy... but for some reason I’d expected it to be tough, probably because it’s joined up and reminded me of Gregg shorthand. During our trip I started to decode some place names and brand names.
• On the other hand, the Arabic language? Oh man. I just found out that numbers not only have gender, but for the numbers 3 through 10, they have polarity - if the noun they refer to is masculine, the number is feminine and vice versa. Perhaps I’ll work on mastering French first and move on when I’m feeling brave enough.
• Peel-top cartons of yoghurt do not travel well in a backpack.
• Do not watch the video for the Shins’ “Phantom Limb” moments before a meeting. Crying in front of a client can be awkward.
• “The Weight” by The Band is more complicated than I remembered, especially after half a pint.

It’s been a hell of a week at work - hell of a month, really, which is partly why updates here have been so scarce. There’s been no time for music, electronics, or much of anything else. And so I finally snapped and had to find something new to add to my usual music playlist. Out of curiosity I started catching up on more grime from the UK (favourite track so far: Dizzee Rascal’s “Everywhere”) and eventually happened on Lady Sovereign.

I’d first heard her months ago in a remix of “Fit But You Know It” by the Streets and wondered who she was. A tiny white girl from London, it turns out; named for the ring she wears prominently in many of her performances.

A brief digression: I’ve always been intrigued by the sounds of Jamaican dancehall (quite apart from the lyrics and culture, which are pretty notorious for being shallow, oversexed and sometimes violently homophobic - I won’t get into that here). There’s something gripping about the texture of it all: relentless, dissonant, ominous, with vocals delivered in a kind of bellowed sing-song. Often the vocals are double-tracked too, adding an even more unsettling edge.

Sovereign borrows some of these elements and adds her own spin: these, along with her winningly bratty persona, are very much in evidence on “Random” and “A Little Bit Of Shhh” (links are to YouTube).

Her best video so far, though, is “9 to 5”, which I won’t ruin by describing. I’ll just mention that I alarmed my co-workers with my giggling. (Of course, that could also be a sign of a nervous breakdown due to stress.)

Speaking of giggling, as well as cute and irrepressible female vocalists, not to mention music in comics - Sugarshock!

Dark Horse Comics are publishing a series of free webcomics on MySpace, and this one’s written by Joss Whedon, of Buffy fame. Sugarshock is a band consisting of three peculiar young women and a robot, who get the chance to play in the ultimate “battle of the bands”.

The comic lives up to its name, too - without the need to carry on a bigger story or ground his characters in the everyday world, Joss serves up 24 pages of concentrated, hyperactive silly with an extra helping of Whedonisms. That’s all there is for now, but there’s been talk of bringing the characters back somewhere down the line. AUSPICIOUS!

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3 (Flash interface)

From the What I Been Listening To department:

For unfathomable reasons, I’ve been hooked on a show called Blue Jam. Aired in the late ‘90s, it was the brainchild of Radio 1 enfant terrible Chris Morris, whose earlier pranks had included a discussion of ludicrous methods to obtain a legal high, and most famously, the “non-announcement” of the death of a still-living cabinet minister. After the latter incident, BBC censors clamped down hard; why they ever let him back through their doors is a mystery.

Blue Jam is a deeply disturbing show, but utterly hilarious. Sketches and monologues drift in and out amid music of all sorts, starting with an always-different introduction delivered by Morris in a sinister monotone (“When thrapping door-knock brings not chums with cakes, but friends of Sweaty Fred, full madding because you failed to sell… welcome in Blue Jam…”) and quickly descending into a nightmarish world of misfits and psychopaths.

Almost every character we meet is unhinged: the doctor who amuses himself by humiliating his patients and prescribing useless treatments; the parents who belong to a baby-fighting ring; the avant-garde artists who disembowel a man and put him in a display case (much in the fashion of the art-murders on David Bowie’s album Outside). Some favorites: Maria, the four-year-old hardened criminal, Rothko the doberman, and the inexplicable club-scene and style roundups from Michael Alexander St John.

Some of the best sketches were spun into a six-episode series on Channel 4 called simply Jam, and lots - probably most - are up on YouTube. I’m almost afraid to link to any, but here’s a typical opening, and a sketch about a television repairman. Browse the Related Videos at your own peril. Expect mayhem, blasphemy, dead babies, dead dogs, sexual deviance and bad language.

UK radio comedy review site radiohaha offers this appreciation of Blue Jam. Torrents of it and other Chris Morris shows are available at the fan site Cook’d and Bomb’d.

I’ve been listening to a podcast from last year featuring Will Wright and Brian Eno, talking about generative art, and it gave me an interesting idea.

There have been a lot of attempts at so-called “fractal music” (here’s a bunch of links to several such projects), but all the ones I’ve heard just take a chunk of data from, say, the Mandelbrot set, and map it to one musical scale or another. It’s hard to really hear any self-similarity happening.

Which seems a lost opportunity. Think about it: sound waveforms themselves have fractal properties, because phenomena like vibration, resonance and oscillation happen on all physical scales. Speed up a thumping rhythm far enough and eventually it turns into a tone. And any waveform can theoretically be expressed as a mix of sine waves of different pitches. Fractal generation software lets you zoom in and out to see different fractals in near-infinite detail. What if we could do the same by speeding up or slowing down a piece of audio?

A big challenge, of course, would the problem of resolution. Whether you’re working with analog or digital audio, as you slow it down you’ll eventually start to lose detail in the high frequencies, until it all goes muddy. It’s akin to blowing up a photograph, until all you can see is the grain, or a bunch of great big pixels - or conversely, shrinking it until you run out of photograph. You could always pack in more data to describe a chunk of sound, but you’d end up with a gigantic file, and you’d always hit a wall somewhere. For best results the sound from our hypothetical audio-fractal would have to be computed on the fly.

Not a new idea, but as far as I know no one’s done it yet. There’s an entry for something called “All-Music-Set Player” at Halfbakery (a “communal database of original, fictitious inventions”) which is pretty close to the mark. I’m not interested in generating all music, just creating interesting sounds to explore.

Controls: speed, perhaps other parameters like density or default shape. It’d be interesting to work in some sort of “scrub” control too.

Issues: what language to write such a thing in? How do you describe the waveform? (some sort of generative grammar that sums wavelets?) How do you set up such a generator so that you can calculate a value for a sample at an arbitrary point on the time axis? Is it even possible? The fact that I can’t find any examples of fractal audio generators makes me wonder if the obstacle is simply one of processing power…

(The podcast that sparked all this, by the way, is from a seminar series put on by the Long Now Foundation: Ogg | MP3 | text summary I’m afraid of Spore. I think it might eat me.)

One of the comics I’ve been keeping up with online is Sordid City Blues. It stands out among the throngs of webcomics out there, with a cast of smartly written and charmingly drawn characters wrestling with issues of love, faith and art. The author, Charles Schneeflock Snow, is taking a few weeks off to work on other projects, and recently put out a call for guest artists to fill in for him on the web site. So I chipped in with a page, and went for the most obvious subject: Luther and his bandmates. (Luther’s the one in the blue hat - the central characters in SCB are colour-coded.) Here it is!

There are some references to earlier stories - particularly Chapter 43, which deals with the origin of the mural. The conversation about the bass is one I’ve had several times (the Fury LS-4 I play has an unusual headstock which tends to attract the attention of gear nerds) but also, Barkey does play a rather odd-looking bass.

(Like SCB? The first collection of stories is available in book form… help support independent artists!)

I’ve played around with comics before but never in a big way. And I’ve used Adobe Illustrator for years, but this is one of the few times I’ve actually been using it for hand-drawn illustration. Lessons learned: use layers. Lettering using a tablet is a pain in the ass. Background detail really helps a panel to spring to life (as was the case with the graffiti and cinder-block wall in the second panel). Also, it’s really freeing to write in a different voice for a while, and play with someone else’s characters. I did my best to capture a little of SCB’s look and its rhythms.

For quite some time I’ve been tossing around some story ideas, but I’ve never settled on a satisfying way of telling them. The format and characters keep shifting around on me - first it was a series of radio plays, then it was going to be podcasts, or maybe just short stories, and now I’m thinking of doing it in comic form. It may end up being a combination of all of the above. This has been a good chance to test the comics waters, and see if I’m really up to the task.

Some of the characters I’m developing are musicians as well, which means that at some point there will be music played. Which brings up the fascinating question of how to represent music in a silent, static medium. Usually comic artists just resort to a sprinkling of eighth-notes and some lyrics. But what about taking a crazy graphical approach, one that breaks out of the usual rhythm of panels, the way a big number in a musical jumps out of the “real world” of theatrical/cinematic structure?

The example that springs to my mind at the moment is Hot Jazz by the ever-wacky Hunt Emerson. I don’t know a whole lot about comics history, so I’m sure there are others… Any suggestions? I should probably look into some Matt Howarth, for instance.

In the meantime I’ve been hunting through The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (see here for images, mostly the ones by Alan Aldridge). I’ll have to have a look for What The Songs Look Like too, which does the same for Talking Heads… and I wish I had a copy of More Dark Than Shark, a collection of artworks created by Russell Mills inspired by Brian Eno’s early “rock” albums, now out of print and hard to find.

My next comic-related project, then, is going to be this: pick a few songs that really inspire some visuals, and do one or two pages for each one. Strong contenders for the first couple: Stereolab and the Pixies.

Every once in a while, one of those music memes sweep through the blogs I read: put your music-player software on shuffle mode and list the first 20 tracks that come up, that sort of thing. Here’s a twist: keep track of the songs that are in your head at the moment you wake up, and post a list. Here’s mine over the past few weeks. Make of them what you will.

• Dexys Midnight Runners - “Come On Eileen”
• Franz Ferdinand - “What You Meant”
• Massive Attack - “Risingson”
• Peter Gabriel - “Steam”
• XTC - “Limelight”
• Little Eva - “The Loco-Motion”
• Bruce Springsteen - “Dancing In The Dark”
• Steelye Span - “Bachelor’s Hall”
• King Crimson - “Dinosaur”
• Rowlf the Dog - “Cottleston Pie”
• Komeda - “Elvira Madigan”
• The Shins - “Phantom Limb”
• David Bowie - “Life On Mars?”
• Mashup: Depeche Mode - “Get The Balance Right” vs Franz Ferdinand - “Jacqueline”
• Jazzanova - “Mwela”

About half of these are things I was listening a day or a few days previous… but the more interesting ones are the ones that seemed to come out of nowhere, like “Dancing in the Dark”, or “Cottleston Pie”, which I hadn’t heard since I was a kid. (And by the way, here it is on YouTube. A lot faster than I remember - my mental recording seemed to be more wistful.) “Loco-Motion” and “Bachelor’s Hall” are in there too, certainly.

Try it! It’s a cross between “what you’ve been listening to” and “where’s your head at”.

Dorkbot Toronto, the local chapter of the network of “people doing strange things with electricity”, has a new slate of presentations, and last night was the first.

Patricia Rodriguez presented some of her video work using all sorts of cameras - film, video, digital - and taking advantage of each one’s unique features and most interesting ways of failing.

Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir’s work is about breaking down the perceived borders between nature and the human-made world, using electronic media installations in unexpected places. Wild Information Network, a solar-powered streaming audio server installed deep in the woods of the Catskills, plays sound pieces submitted by various artists, all with the notion of humans broadcasting to the broader environment, or vice versa. It and other pieces are catalogued on their site: EcoArtTech.net.

Stan Krzyzanowski showed his time-lapse work, ranging from handheld still camera shots, to mesmerizing animations created from successive sections of wood and other materials (notably vegetables and marbled cheese), to his recent projects involving cones from various sorts of tree. Pine cones, see, open up as they dry and fold closed again if you get them wet. And when sped up, the waving of a big pine cone’s scales takes on an eerie, almost animal aspect.

It’s beautiful stuff. Interval is a rather huge archive of all his experiments - click some of the “special sets” on the lower right. Most of the best stuff is on the “Favorites” page.

The sessions are held at InterAccess, a gallery at Queen and Ossington devoted to electronic media art. They offer a very cool series of workshops on topics like microcontroller programming, introductory electronics, pinhole photography, and hacking your bike to turn it into a mobile piece of sound art. I’m hoping to attend the ones on Pure Data and creating “resilient outdoor works”.

Behold the two-digit display for the Box-O-Knobs (also seen here with its breadboarded ancestor). Each digit is run by one 74HC595 IC. Resistors everywhere. The reverse of the board is a bit hideous, I’m afraid, thanks to my still-amateurish soldering skills.

The vacated breadboard now sports five knobs (50k rotary pots), a MIDI socket and a photocell, which I’ve got controlling the sixth analog pin on the Arduino. A change on any input sends a MIDI controller message. The Evolver already has provision for reading in mod wheel, channel pressure (aftertouch), breath controller and foot pedal information, so I’ve got those wired in along with pitch bend and volume.

Next steps:

• figure out how to cut the appropriate slots in the top of a case
• wire up six slide pots as controls
• external input jacks that override the faders
• buttons!
• calibration and MIDI settings editable by the user, without having to recompile and upload new firmware.

Two new toys, and no time to play with them…

One is that Evolver I mentioned. It’s the desktop version, a monosynth with no keyboard. First impressions:

Sturdy metal case. Knobs are rotary encoders, i.e. the clicky digital kind, and are a little dodgy - maybe this will improve with time? Cleverly designed interface cuts down costs and space by packing dozens of parameters into a matrix so you can adjust them all using eight knobs: hit a button to select a row, then turn the corresponding knob. It takes a little getting used to, especially since half of the parameters also require you to hit the Shift button to get at them.

It can make pretty analogue sounds, and glittering digital sounds, and frightening noise. It has two audio inputs for use as a signal processor, and it can do some wonderful spacy things to a fretless bass. Here’s one minute of me goofing around, using it as a bass synth, a ghostly lead, a crunchy bit-hacked rhythm, and some other effects. A bit of echo, reverb and compression added in Logic.

2007_0612_Evolved.mp3

The other toy: an Arduino USB board.

Essentially, it’s a little computer processor on its own board. You can program it from a Mac, Windows or Linux box using a simple language based on C. It has a whole bunch of digital input/output lines, and six analog inputs that can double as pseudo-analog outputs (pulse-width modulated and not suitable for audio, but they work fine for dimming LEDs, for example). If you don’t need the USB interface, there’s a tinier, even cuter version.

More sounds and updates to come.