Space Oddity Music Video shot in Space

Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do…

Sublime Australian New Soul

This is Nakamarra by a Melbourne outfit called Hiatus Kaiyote.

Call it New Soul, New Jazz, whatever, just listen.

Support this great band and buy this track from your favourite source of musical bits.

Tetsuuuoo! Kaneeedaaaa!

Akira!

Epic Skateboard trip Sydney to the Gong

Check this Aussie’s story of skateboarding from Sydney to Wollongong in 12 hours.

Too cool.

My Skate of Mind

via Hackers News

Sunset with Simon Caldwell Featuring Herbert

If deep boogie mechanics sound appealing, put this radio show in your headphones. Each set is available on-demand, so there’s days of delicious back catalogue listening.

Mathew Herbert is currently touring downunder so part of this week’s show ran chronologically through some of his tunes under various aliases… Highlights : the sweet synth/ high-hat (77 mins into the show). Herbert – Shuffler [Phono, 1996]:

Followed by this little number from Doctor Rockit ‎– Café De Flore (2000) around 80 minutes in:

Sunset with Simon Caldwell plays on FBI Radio 96.9 in Sydney Australia, Monday evenings.

Buy it:

Ableton Push Shipped Globally Without Geolocking

Finally! I’ve been waiting for Amazon to stock this awesome digital music instrument. And what’s more you don’t need to worry about using a service like ShipItTo just to get it delivered to Australia.

The thing is magical. It has multiple key layout options for 64 pressure sensitive and velocity sensitive keys. You can set up scales so that you can’t hit a wrong note and you can use it to program drum patterns in the step sequencer. What I think is particularly great is you can do all this without touching the computer. The software, Ableton Live can be used for DJing, composition or live performance, controllerism style.

A lot of products that have standing agreements with local distributors will not be shipped globally by Amazon. This is usually because they can’t or choose not to pay the distributor fees for all those regions. Frequently there are contractual constraints for online retailers that make no sense in the internet age. Well Ableton presumably doesn’t have this huge network of distributors mouths to feed as hardware products are still a new product area for them. Software sales thankfully are often more sane, though famously to many Australians, not universally so.

The price is $599 on Amazon, about $100 cheaper than local retailers. Shipping for me is $28. My guess is it would cost more to get it delivered from a local retailer than from Amazon in the US.

I’m so getting one.

JS Dubstep Generator

So this is pretty cool. A dubstep generator

Ableton Major Lazer Tutorial

I’ve been following a lot of tutorials on how to use Ableton Live, the most popular and flexible music producer’s software today. Officially it’s only one of many in the category of DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). This is like saying Photoshop is a Digital Graphical Workstation. It’s a lame term to me.

Anyway Ableton version 9 is pretty new and many tutorials are covering the new features. One category of tutorials which are pretty useful for learning specific skills and understanding commonly used production techniques is when a well-known tune is disassembled and recreated from scratch.

The great thing about these tutorials is that they are forced to cover the full range of techniques used to produce a whole track. Other tutorials might focus exclusively on compression or mastering or EQ or particular plugins. It’s good to have a bit of each.

Here’s a fairly accessible two part tutorial which focuses on how to reproduce several main musical parts of Major Lazer’s incredible track Get Free, if you don’t know it, go watch the Get Free video clip now. It’s so fantastic.

Now, check the tutorial:

and part 2:

New Music by Sibot – Magnet Jam

Here’s a new track for you kids. This is sort of dubstep trap grime whatever style.

La La Land

This is an old one. Mental. Enough said.

Introduction to Strong Like Water Philosophy

Philosophy has been an undercurrent of Strong Like Water since its inception but we have resisted tackling it because it tends to use a lot of words, time and frequently fails to reach satisfying conclusions.

That’s only because it’s so slippery.

The hairball that is philosophy seems to come from the lack of common ground and common words people use.

Philosophy is full of declaration of what things really are, of revelations of truth or of declarations of fallacy.

It seems to me that most of the topics in philosophy over time, especially questions about the nature of the physical world, which have reached satisfying consensus are those which have been taken over by science and have ceased to be philosophical questions. I will provide examples in a future post.

In fact some of my least satisfying moments in studying philosophy have been occasions where the speaker, writer, professor or drunken student interlocutor has been ignorant of the relevant scientific evidence that bears on the question being debated.

Philosophy walks a tightrope between science and mysticism.

The Strong Like Water philosophy is presented as a reflection of existing ideas from history and the present day, bundled and spun, maximized for fun and utility.

This is the way I hope to avoid using excess time and attention on your behalf and it’s a system you can use to keep me honest. Now let me clarify this “utility”.

Utility is usefulness, but without the assumption that the use is a great need. A buggy whip has utility because it can be put to work as a tool. When you drive your buggy to town, you give the horse a little signal with a flick of the wrist.

It’s not useful, however because nobody drives a buggy in the 21st century. A bike pump would be very useful but never more than when I have a flat tyre to inflate. Its utility is similar to its purpose, though not the same. Purpose implies design. Like purpose, however, a thing’s utility is unaffected by my need, while its usefulness is really where its utility and my needs align.

So to conclude this first post, I think the approach I recommend with philosophy, at least how I present it, is to consider this: what can I do with this philosophy? How does it change the possibilities I see before me if I adopt it?

It will sometimes be difficult to approach a novel or unfamiliar idea (which is where the pay dirt is) without resolving all the inconsistencies that it infers when trying to incorporate all the many thoughts that seem to fight for the same mental real estate. But do you need to resolve them for it to be fun or have utility?

If you can fall back to the yardsticks of utility and fun, you can cut straight to the chase: is it worth thinking about?

File Under Disco – Make It Acid

This is the Idjut Boys Mix. You can buy it on Juno Downloads

Check the 303 on that one!

Skrillex Oh My Gosh Girl Update

Every sample has  a story. Does it really?

Yes, Oh My Gosh!

Frequently misheard as “Yes Oh My God”,  excitable teenager Rachael Nedrow couldn’t have imagined how far her exuberant cry would travel when she first uploaded it to YouTube.

Skrillex warps the space time continuum, well at least he does on this site. I see in my web site logs that the Skrillex Sample Yes Oh My Gosh post is one of our most popular. Lots of people search google for the origins of the sample. Then they come here – do they find what they want?

Maybe they want to do a Skrillex remix. Maybe they want to use the sample in their own music. Maybe they just want to know the story behind the sample.

Maybe what they want to know is the story of Skrillex going to meet Rachael Nedrow.

Rachael clearly has contributed to Skrillex’ success. Having said that, I believe Skrillex, ex “screamo” band “From First to Last” front man Sonny Moore would have been a huge breakout success without Rachael, and, at least in the cup stacking world, Rachael didn’t need all the Skrillex-related fame she has been showered with. Plus Rachael is clearly driven and talented – it seems she’s a rising tennis star now.

Here’s Rachael’s current twitter avatar:

Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites is a really stand-out track for Skrillex, and the sample is a real high point. Rachael’s frenetic triumph comes through and lends a lot of energy to the track at the edge of the monster drop. And yet, her comments on her involvement in this have been very humble. She hasn’t (as far as I know) commented publicly on whether she thought Sonny owed her something for the sample.

My guess is, she won’t.

Sampling in music is not illegal. However, copyright means that reproducing a piece of someone else’s sound may require specific permission from that person. Without that permission, they can take a musician to court over breach of copyright. There are many sound recordings which are already offered with a license to use for samples. Having a license is not the same as having copyright, normally a license says what you can and cannot do with the sample.

Getting the rights to use a sample is known as “clearance”.

So if Skrillex did not have clearance from Rachel before, my guess is he has one now. He went to visit her at her Oregon home and their meeting was clearly friendly. I bet he ponied up and the autographs went in both directions.

I wonder how much cash changed hands. Rachel, Sonny, any comment? Oh – er – and can I use that photo of you two? Thanks.

How sick is this dubstep?

Answer: This dubstep is somewhat/rather/irretrievably sick.

This track is Gorilla Force by Distance, a UK DJ and producer who also runs the label Chestplate. I recommend checking out the podcast here: http://www.chestplate.co.uk/

Kill the Buddha

This is basically my first track. I’ve dabbled in the past but I’m putting a fork in this one and calling it done. Funny, because I had no plan to make a track like this but the main melodic theme just took over. To be honest I was trying to make a fugue but I got distracted by the actual sound.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.

If you like it, like it