I am sceptical of the “data-driven approach” to cultural discovery. It reifies statistical artifacts, filter bubbles and faces seen in clouds.
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Choreography about architecture.
I am sceptical of the “data-driven approach” to cultural discovery. It reifies statistical artifacts, filter bubbles and faces seen in clouds.
Read MoreA detailed examination of why music industry Blockchain (capital B) dreams are not going to work out.
Read MoreApart from revitalising the torrent sites, but everyone seems to have noticed that bit now.
Read MoreWith cites that they know this money doesn’t actually exist yet.
Read More“Can music journalism exist at all?” “Do Music Journalists Matter Anymore?” I mean, if you have to ask …
Read MoreThere is no “cloud”, there’s just someone else’s computer. Will we find a listener who cares?
Read MoreFifteen to twenty years ago, Winamp was the MP3 player that everyone used. It was the first MP3 player not to suck: playlists, shuffle, convenience. And you can still download the last version.
Read More3D technology has been the next big thing for only the last sixty years. It offers amazing improvements over ordinary moving images: darkness, muddier colours, blurriness, headaches from watching for more than twenty minutes and slower action sequences so the viewer doesn’t bring up their last meal.
Read MoreThe sound with the Pearl becomes lighter and has less impact and detail compared to the Supra. Stereo image shrinks, but more obvious is a reduction in detail. Changing to Cinnamon with only one switch in my network produces a surprising result.
Read MoreThere’s a lot to be said in favour of massive copyright violation in the interests of cultural preservation, but “fixed targets are stable and sustainable in a world including the record companies” is not any of it.
Read Moreaestheticblogging basically taught me to have feelings, that werent anger.
Read MoreThe blockchain book I’m writing; a couple of short excerpts from the music section I drafted about half of today.
Read MoreDeath in Rome do neofolk covers of pop. And what’s neofolk? Well.
Read MoreI don’t often see it noted just what was happening with early hip-hop and English and European synthpop in and from the post-punk era. Hip-hop histories gloss over it, and the reconstructed histories of techno somehow jump straight from about 1988 back to Kraftwerk, as if all that stuff from 1978 to 1984 never happened.
Read MorePost-punk’s favourite writer, who didn’t listen to music himself. It’s all about the imagery.
Read MoreA retrospective on Rocknerd’s 2013 one-hit wonder “Culture is not about aesthetics. Punk rock is now enforced by law.” What musicians are now faced with.
Read MoreOne of the finest conspiracy theories in popular culture is the claim that Theodor Adorno, a main figure in the Frankfurt School of “cultural Marxism” fame, secretly wrote all the Beatles’ songs.
Read MoreThe mass media have suffered the effects of the Internet much in the manner of the record industry, as consumers, conclusively sick of their shit, withdraw their attention. Their worry has gone from piracy to … being ignored.
Read MoreThe music industry occasionally forgets that entertainment is an optional expense, consumer confidence is a critical material condition for what they do, and when times are tough people stop spending.
Read MoreRowland S. Howard plays his albatross “Shivers” on ABC TV Studio 22, 25 November 1999. The band is Rowland with Brian Hooper on bass, Mick Harvey on drums and Edward Clayton Jones on keyboard. And a lot more stuff.
Read MoreAt approximately 10:20pm BST on Sunday the 20th of September, 2015, the image of the Daily Mail‘s Monday front page hit Twitter. And Britain exploded.
Read MoreThis purports to be the story of the last twenty years of the record industry, told by one of the kids who collected MP3s in his college dorm just before Napster. It isn’t the story of the MP3 revolution, but it is some stories, only one of which is seriously important to the claim in the title. But the details mostly aren’t wrong.
Read MoreEvery field has its standard ways to fuck up.
Read MoreThe thing that really struck me about Hugo vote-stackers the Sad Puppies was founder Brad Torgersen’s lament that he could no longer tell from the cover of a science fiction novel what it was about.
Read MoreWitch House is a made-up genre that became real. It was invented as an in-joke and now goth DJs claim they play “witch house”. Perhaps the secret ingredient is the gr▲†u‡†Øu§ Un‡cØd3.
Read MoreSometimes you see a piece of modern music journalism and you wonder why these people are allowed fingers.
Read MoreConsumer markets, a nice Patricia Morrison interview and the 1938 Novachord.
Read MoreStrap On Halo are a goth rock band from the goth scene. This is unfortunate, insofar as not even current goths are interested in current goth music — it’s a subculture of new clothes and old music.
Read MoreBack in the ‘90s, sociologists and students seemed desperate to find anything resembling a subculture to write about. I ran a fanzine, remember, and was fending off calls regularly. They were a plague. This was just before Nirvana hit big. It was blindingly obvious to everyone in indie rock that someone was going to hit super-big at some point.
Read MoreIf you’re going to suffer unresolved literary trauma, you should get it from a title like that, which you will be unsurprised to hear is far and away the best thing about the book.
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