After another hour and a half of psyching myself up and watching and waiting and getting pushed around by the break, Ally asked, “what would you want to accomplish that would make you feel good about today?” My response: to have one ride out beyond the break and back. I took a deep breath, walked my rig far upwind, watched another rider go, and launched just after him. I reached the whitewater and kept everything steady. The first small break came and I sheeted in and weighted the tail to bring the nose up to let the wave under the board, and remembered to lean forward again to unweight the tail to keep the speed up. Three more waves, each getting more powerful, but I was holding on. I had made it this far in my last attempt, but had lost power in the sail and couldn’t make it over the last wave in the set, and had ended up in the washing machine. This time the wind stayed steady and I gritted my teeth as I picked up even more speed, rushing at the three foot high wall of water. No turning back now. Somehow I kept everything together and timed the tail step, lean-forward moves well enough to plough over the top of the wave. I had made it through! I was sailing on the open ocean!

I was surprised at the feeling of sailing on the waves beyond the break as I hooked in and reached planing speed. Like riding up and down gentle hills. Overlapping the complete and utter thrill of having made it into the ocean was a feeling of crazy, unbridled terror of being on the open ocean. What the hell was I doing here?! Luckily this fear was fleeting as I focused on sailing, and on the deepest, most vibrant blue I’d ever seen.

“I really should turn back now,” I thought, as the wind was much stronger further out, and my speed was picking up even more. But first, a bit of showing off. I spotted a perfect jumping wave and took off. My plan was to make this little jump, and then find a nice flat section to jibe on and return to shore. But ocean waves are different from bay waves, and I was completely unprepared for the unprecedented height of this jump, and the wider spacing of the waves. Where usually the landing area would be just behind the takeoff spot, here was empty air in the trough between the waves. My weight was far too forward and I crashed sloppily into the cold, cold Pacific. The kind of cold that forces you to exhale all the air in your lungs. At least as cold as the Bay was in February. But I was having so much fun, that I just started laughing. Briefly. My mind went to large marine predators with sharp teeth, at which point I waterstarted quickly, and headed back to shore.

Another windsurfer passed me, then a kiter, who was rather close with his lines, but he seemed to know what he was doing. As the new guy, I was just hoping I wasn’t violating right of way with anyone. At this point I realized I’d be heading back into the frenetic zone of the shore break from the other side and had not much of an idea of how to sail through it. A second windsurfer passed me and I followed his path. I had imagined I’d be surfing on a curling wave at this point (or swishing around in the rinse cycle), but it was more like being gently pushed along by a rippling carpet. I reached the whitewater and saw another break gaining on me. I sheeted in and outran it, since I didn’t know if it would knock me off balance. I hopped off when my fin started dragging in the sand, picked up the rig and ran onto the beach. I set the rig down and threw my hands up in victory. Ally walked up to me with a great smile and gave me a high five and a kiss. Life is good.

Music: Get your hands off my unimog by Implosion Quintet.

Although other windsurfers continue until they disappear as tiny specs in the distance, I decide it’s better to not venture too far across the bay. I look behind me to make sure nobody is following too close, unhook from the harness line, and perform the complicated dance called a carve jibe. In the space of 5 seconds I carve the board downwind, shuffle my feet (briefly looking like I’m trying to plié), flip the sail around and grab it on the other side, and end up on the opposite tack. This move, which essentially amounts to simply turning around, has taken four months of intense practice (with many spectacular crashes along the way) to get right. It’s still a joy when I complete it, and I still crash half my attempts. I let out a “whoo hoo!” and carve a path toward shore.

In three short weeks the engine that generates the San Francisco Bay wind will shut down for the winter. My friends will see more of me and I’ll start mountain biking again, mainly to stay in shape for the beginning of the next wind season in March. By the beginning of February I’ll be jonesing so much for my next windsurfing fix that I’ll write a blog post just to relive the last one.

The first track of Amoral Mayor Earwig EP, how a hot air balloon works, starts out straightforwardly enough. Some quiet acoustic guitar plucks, repeating and slowly adding some more layers of guitar. Sure, there’s some digital delay but mostly it’s just guitar. Some bitcrushing distortion eases into the left speaker just enough to raise an eyebrow, but it keeps with the guitar thing. Oh nice, some drums. Maybe even live. Strange processed guitar in the background, almost voice-like. A single reversed cymbal, very quick. Drum break. Quite distorted. Wait, how did we end up here? By the time the second track, i saw two of me, starts our hot air balloon has caught the jet stream. No turning back now.

Amoral Mayor Earwig EP and Bishop-Whitney EP could be two sides of a single album. I tend to listen to these together. El Hacedor is perhaps a little more mysterious, a little mellower. All three are intriguing and highly enjoyable.

Links

Beak on MySpace (bonus downloadable track, Limozeen)

This is part of a series of netlabel reviews.

Yuki Yaki’s blurb for Heavy Weights has this fanciful description: The tracks will take you on a dive cruise, each of them has its own little valley and its own moon. So: Take your time. This is exactly how I feel about it. The underwater aspect is suggested by the cover, which looks like a Shogun trilobite, and continues through the tracks with glossy, undulating textures. When this album starts I feel like I’m returning to a space that has continued to exist in my absence.

A couple of months after finding Heavy Weights, Vate (released on the 1 bit wonder netlabel) popped up in the archive.org feed. I literally cheered when I saw that there was more Glander to experience. Vate shows how dialed in to his technique Glander is, without at all being formulaic. The same masterful use of repetition is there but there’s a slightly grittier edge to the textures, and I almost get the sense that the camera has a wider angle lens, as bizarre as that is to say about music. These tracks are funkier, too. For instance, listen to the syncopation in the second track, Hmbrg, or the staccato gurgles in Drift. While Heavy Weights is a deep sea dive, Vate is a swooping flight through an urban landscape.

I’m still trying to understand why Glander’s use of repetition is so satisfying. On closer listening, the repeating textures are actually continually varying in small ways, and the different layers flow in and out of the foreground, creating complex interactions. There’s also a constant, but subtle, change in the surrounding space. Sometimes the textures will echo, and then it’s like they come close to you and have a very focused feel, and then drift outward into a cavernous space. There will be long stretches where you might not have noticed even that there were no drums, and then the kick will return at just the right moment.

Both of these albums, along with the bonus tracks available on Glander’s site, reward close listening as well as zoning out and using as background to working and working out.

Links

Glander (download individual tracks that have been on various compilations)

This is part of a series of netlabel reviews.

Homer Everyday

I knew this was a parody of some something but I didn’t know what. Today while eating lunch I was goofing off, clicking on random videos on the YouTube main page and stumbled upon the parody-ee:

This is a timelapse video of this guy’s (Noah Kalina) life, one photo per day for six years. The music was composed for the video by Carly Comando, which, combined with the dedication of doing this for six years, takes the YouTube meme thing to a whole new level. Incidentally, check out Noah’s photography portfolio. Really interesting, surreal use of lighting, often in mundane spaces (which adds to the surrealism).

Speaking of surreal, I wonder what it’s like to have one’s concept immortalized by Homer Simpson.

In 1995 British modern music magazine Wire sent Stockhausen some tracks by electronica acts (Stockhausen was an early pioneer of electronic music), including Aphex Twin and asked for his response. The article was called Advice To Clever Children. Here’s part of his response:

I wish those musicians would not allow themselves any repetitions, and would go faster in developing their ideas or their findings, because I don’t appreciate at all this permanent repetitive language. It is like someone who is stuttering all the time, and can’t get words out of his mouth. I think musicians should have very concise figures and not rely on this fashionable psychology. I don’t like psychology whatsoever: using music like a drug is stupid. One shouldn’t do that: music is the product of the highest human intelligence, and of the best senses, the listening senses and of imagination and intuition. And as soon as it becomes just a means for ambiance, as we say, environment, or for being used for certain purposes, then music becomes a whore, and one should not allow that really; one should not serve any existing demands or in particular not commercial values. That would be terrible: that is selling out the music.

Clearly this was a man who took his art seriously! I wonder if he disliked Satie, the originator of ambient music (”furniture music,” as he called it).

About Aphex Twin he said he should immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, change tempi and at least have a direction if there had to be repetition. For each of the artists, he recommended a piece of his own to listen to for ideas. Aphex Twin’s response was irreverent and humerous:

I thought he should listen to couple of tracks of mine: Didgeridoo, then he’d stop making abstract, random patterns you can’t dance to.

The article is funny and it’s easy to dismiss Stockhausen as not understanding the context of electronic dance music, but I think it’s to his credit that he took the exercise seriously enough to think about their works as compositions to be critiqued instead of dismissing them outright. What’s fascinating is that in ‘95 Aphex Twin was making fairly repetitive drum machine-based loopy tracks and over the next few years became more and more abstract to the point sometimes of alienating all but the most dedicated listeners. I don’t know if he just got bored with what he was doing before or if he took Stockhausen’s advice to heart after all. Stockhausen’s aversion to machinistic repetition are put into relief by this quote from the well written Guardian obituary:

Stockhausen recalled how as a boy he heard marching songs played incessantly on the radio [in Nazi Germany]; an experience which left him with an abiding hatred of regular repetitive rhythms in music.

To be thorough, I should say that while this may be true, it’s also been part of the zeitgeist of avant garde music since the beginning of the 20th Century, or at least since World War I, when composers reacted against the atrocities they had experienced as well. It would be interesting to follow the schism where dance (that is, non-modern, popular dance) was left behind by the avant garde and taken up by the rest of the music world.

I’m not sure how I’ve been influenced by Stockhausen. I have only a couple of recordings, one of which is the Helicopter String Quartet, performed by the Arditti String Quartet. Musically it’s not something I return to often, but the idea is magnificent: each member of the quartet plays aboard a separate helicopter (yes, in flight!) and the audio and visuals are shown on stage for the audience on the ground, including the sound of the rotors. It’s such a crazy idea and spectacle — the very fact that it could be pulled off is amazing to me. It certainly showed me how the barriers we construct around the concert can be broken in dramatic fashion. I think his influence on me has been indirect, as he was tremendously influential on previous generations of composers, especially in his feeling of the importance of music in society, and in striving to create something new.

The highest calling of mankind can only be to become a musician in the profoundest sense; to conceive and shape the world musically. — Karlheinz Stockhausen

Photo: Stockhausen Publicity photo 1975. Chrysalis Records

The Helicopter Quartet (excerpt) as performed by the Austrian Ensemble for New Music.

After years of my photo gallery on this site having a completely different look, I’ve finally integrated it with the theme of this blog (oh-so-cleverly named Nightcappuccino). Thanks to some hard work by Billy Bullock, who ported the k2 theme to Coppermine, it just took a few tweaks to get it to look right. I put just in quotes because it took me most of the afternoon to get it to look right, but that’s no fault of Billy’s. This is just very tweaky work. And sometimes I wonder if I should stop fighting with the trend and move over to flickr. But for now I like having more control over how my photos are presented.

I’m still trying figure out what to do with the main proppe.org page. I have half a mind to just redirect it to this blog page. Or do I just have half a mind?

Now I just need to start shooting again and add some more photos.

Update: Now there’s an RSS feed of the last 10 image uploads.

Homeosis Slideshow

This is the way of Indie Mac development. Create a tool that either does something (one thing) new or does something old in a new, easier way. Make it beautiful and fun to use. Take advantage of the APIs Apple provides, like Core Animation. Make a slick web site with a forum, blog, and user-contributed content, put a screen cast showing how cool the app is, provide a demo and charge a reasonable price for the full version. Finally, create a silly, punny company name. Like atebits. Heh.

via tuaw

Konterkonzept EP

According to Lagerfeld, “it was created by exclusively using hardware synthesizers to set a counterpoint to the prevailing approaches of laptop and software.” He seems to be onto something. This stuff just crackles with energy from the first few seconds and carries through to the end.

While the requisite minimal techno repetition is there, it exists simply to lull you while subtle surprises slink in and out of auditory view. Lagerfeld knows how to take his time and explore an idea, and then move into territories that at first are unexpected, then seem inevitable. This is true of the structure as well as the sound design.

Note: for some reason archive.org’s stream of this EP is playing back at a slower speed. Preview this one from the mp3 downloads instead.