(Above: Me playing at the Psychetect album release party)

Psychetect interview on the G-Spot

A couple notes:

1. I announce during the interview the upcoming City of Dead Toys EP, a collaboration between Skerror and me.

2. I’ll be opening for The Steven Losambras at The Parlour in PDX on April 30th.

HipGnosis is the recording name of the Des Moines based electronic musician Eric Young. In addition to producing, Eric also DJs the Glitch.fm online radio show Between Zero and One every Wednesday from 10PM-12AM (CST).

Klint Finley: How would you describe your music to someone who’s never heard it?

HipGnosis: Wow. Hmm. Experimental, psychedelic, electronic dance music combined w/ elements of hip-hop, classical, and plain weirdness.

I was classically trained, though I don’t play any “traditional instruments” any longer. Now I play a computer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sotantar Simrat Singh – Sun Gong

I listened to this all morning. Love it. (Not laying down for the proper “gong bath” experience, but lovely none the less.)

(via Arthur)

This is a video series by Unknownmathew22 exploring different styles of dark ambient music.

Dark Ambient, Example: Lustmord
Noise Ambient, Example: Aube
Clinical Ambient, Example: CircumLiver

Four more videos

Nightmare Kit

Build your own nightmare! The Nightmare Kit sample pack include nearly all the samples used to create both Nightmare Lab and Return to the Wasteland. You can use it to create your own tracks under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license.

(Image swiped from Kook Science Resistance – who knows where they got it from)

Update: You can also download it from the Psychetect web site if you don’t want to/can’t register with Freesound.

BUY NOW

(Album cover by Ian McEwan and Danny Chaoflux)

Return to the Wasteland is now available as a digital download f- 50 cents per track, or $2.50 for the whole album. It’s being released on a Creative Commons license, so you will be allowed to share it freely.

You can also download a remastered edition of my first EP called Nightmare Lab for FREE.

Physical CD copies will be available for sale at the CD release party. I’ll perform live, along with Soup Purse and Cult of Zir. Details:

The Parlour
2628 SE Powell Blvd
Portland, OR 97202
8:00 PM
2/16/10

I’ll also be playing at the Olympia Noise Festival:

Hall of the Woods
3712 Sapp Rd. SW
Olympia, WA 98512
March 3/6 – 3/7

I’ll be playing on Sunday March 7th, sometime during the afternoon “noise brunch”.

(Album cover by Ian McEwan and Danny Chaoflux)

Return to the Wasteland, my debut full length album, will be released at midnight EST on Tuesday February 16, 2010. It will be available as a digital download from bandcamp.com – 50 cents per track, or $2.50 for the whole album. It’s being released on a Creative Commons license, so you will be allowed to share it freely. Watch here, or the new (very much still under construction) Psychetect site for details.

Physical CD copies will be available for sale at the CD release party. I’ll perform live, along with Soup Purse and Cult of Zir. Details:

The Parlour
2628 SE Powell Blvd
Portland, OR 97202
8:00 PM
2/16/10

I’ll also be playing at the Olympia Noise Festival:

Hall of the Woods
3712 Sapp Rd. SW
Olympia, WA 98512
March 3/6 – 3/7

I’ll be playing on Sunday March 7th, sometime during the afternoon “noise brunch”.

So here’s a question/ observation – Ozymandias is based on David Bowie, right?

Maybe slight explanation – after going on a Bob Dylan binge at the end of 2008, and it really threw Watchmen into a new light for me. Watchmen is two creators in dialog with Dylan’s work – it’s as much an element of the piece as the Charlton characters. Aside from being littered with references to Highway 61 Revisited and Bring It All Back Home, the tone of the book owes almost everything to “Desolation Row”, all sickly mocking the apocalypse as it breathes down your neck and nervously cackling as the fires start across the street. Watchmen’s treatment of Dylan’s influence is a lot like the relationship between the Velvet Underground and The Sprawl Trilogy, less an influence but a dialog. So why wouldn’t the villain of the piece be David Bowie?

Read More – Supervillain: Stray Thought

RAB’s comment is key.

(via Blustr)

Researches conducted functional MRI brain scans on 6 skilled jazz musicians while they improvised to learn about the neuroscience of jazz improvisation.

The prefrontal cortex was characterized by a deactivation during improvisation, sensorimotor activity in the sensory cortex area were mostly activated, and a widespread deactivation of the limbic and paralimbic region during improvisation. These deactivation of limbic and paralimbic regions were seen in the amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus and other structures of this region.

The changes in the prefrontal cortex consisted of a deactivation in the lateral parts and activation in the medial parts of the prefrontal cortex. The medial part is thought to play a role in the complex phenomenon of the self, internally motivated self generated content and as such this activation can be explained by the fact that improvisation is also a way of expressing one’s own musical voice or story. The deactivation of the lateral part is explained by the occurrence of free floating attention, permitting spontaneous expressions without interference of self-monitoring.

ShockMD: The Neuroscience of Jazz

(via CC)

Awakening by Psychetect

It’s been ten years since I posted the first article to this site from the family computer at my parents house in Sheridan, WY. I was a senior in high school, the “Y2K” scare was already forgotten, and the dot-com bubble had yet to burst. I guess, for me, that’s where the 00s really started – with this site. It started out more like what Disinfo was like back then – with “dossiers” on various subjects. (Here’s what Disinfo looked like back then).

Since then I’ve gone a lot of places and experienced much. Evergreen State College, Burning Man, art squats in Berlin, Christiania, EsoZone… marriage. Just to mention a few things.

At year 7, I’d been doing Technoccult for longer than I was in high school and college combined. But a decade. Yikes. That’s really something. I even tried to quit last year, but, well, that didn’t work out. So you’re stuck with me, dear readers, and I thank you for sticking around.

As to what’s next… who knows. One thing I’ve learned in the past 10 years is that I can’t predict where my life is going. But I’m pretty sure I’ll be releasing my first full length album Return to the Wasteland next month. So for the Technoccult “birthday weekend” I’m putting up the first track as a free download on SoundCloud. Enjoy, and thanks for reading.

aDiatomea: ColonyI from MRK on Vimeo.

aDiatomea is an artificial life system that uses various methods and notions of a-life research. The basic principle of aDiatomea is that every aspect of it is entirely mathematically generated and thus it is not created purposefully as an art piece but as a complex system that takes a life of its own. These artificial organisms are based on actual unicellular organisms known as Diatoms. These beautiful microscopic creatures are constructed using the superformula, an equation that can reproduce organic forms. Granular sound is injected in these organisms, acting as their life-force, while they interact with each other and their environment. This film shows a recording of 36 seconds of evolution, pushing the boundaries of complex computer calculations.

Vimeo Gallery

Flickr Set

aDiatomea Site

(via Fadereu)

Multi-instrumentalist Joshua Ellis, who records under the name Red State Soundsystem, has just self-released his debut album Ghosts a Burning City. Ellis – whose music sounds like a cross between Paul Simon and Nine Inch Nails – recorded, mixed, and mastered the album himself. I caught up with him via instant messenger to talk about his music and DIY music production.

Klint Finley: Can you explain the name “Red State Soundsystem”?

Joshua Ellis: It started from a lame joke. When the band Cansei de Ser Sexy came out, I noticed everybody abbreviated their name to CSS. Being a Web nerd, I giggled.

I used to release stuff under my own name, but I dug the idea of having a sort of secret identity. Plus I wanted to maybe collaborate with various other people. So I wanted a band name. I started thinking about Web acronyms — HTML, PHP…RSS. What would be a cool name that could be abbreviated as RSS?

And it came to me. It just sounded cool and vaguely political and funny. Then I came up with my logo — the old red pickup truck in a field with bigass soundsystem speakers in the bed. And it just seemed perfect.
Read the rest of this entry »

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything’s going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil what they all have in common it’s a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‘oh my god, its all going down the tubes’, like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It’s also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They’re to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious.

The Observer: On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno

(via Zenarchery)

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Thee Psychick Bible (Part 2) from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

Update: The embedded video isn’t working right now, so try this direct link instead.

This is amazing.

Coilhouse has the rest embedded.

YouTube has stripped the sound from the last episode, but it’s easy enough to find a torrent of the whole documentary.

The hardcore continuum’s claim to pre-eminence has always been that it’s not just dance music. That’s no slight to dance music, but the truth is that there’s tons of it in the world, all different flavours, and if you fancied shaking your stuff in the noughties then you’d probably have been better off with hip-hop, or dancehall, or that hardy perennial house music. With jungle/garage/grime/dubstep, there’s always been something extra, an X factor that made it “dance music + _____”. The two main things that filled the blank were a) innovation, the idea that no other music around moved faster or mutated wider, and b) a relationship to “the real”, whether that was coded as “street knowledge”, “the dark side”, late capitalism/post-socialist Britain, etc. In the noughties, the danceability element even slipped somewhat: grime was more moshable than groovy, while dubstep could be a bit slow-skank sluggish and head-noddy. But more relevant to this survey is that the pulse of those X-tra factors seemed to grow fainter as the decade proceeded, or at least more indistinct and muddled. [...]

This year’s array of post-dubstep sounds are no longer chained to realness but are much more about garish hyper-reality. “Purple”, the buzz-term for the Bristol-based micro-genre created by Joker, Guido and others, is colour rich in psychotropic associations, from Jimi’s Purple Haze to the “purple drank” cough syrup that Dirty South gangsta rappers love to sip.

Guardian: Simon Reynolds’ Notes on the noughties: Grime and dubstep – a noise you could believe in

(via Chris23)

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Thee Psychick Bible from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

From Dangerous Minds.

It looks like this was actually released in 2003, but it’s new to me:

Expanding on an article he’d written for Musician Magazine, Lester Bangs decided to expand and expound on the curious subject that is art-rock legend Brian Eno. Including not just an overview of Eno’s life and recording career, Bangs did extensive interviews with Eno also, accompanying him to shows and recording sessions. This work was meant to be a chapter in a book mirroring A.B. Spellman’s Four Lives In the Bebop Business, focusing on other artists such as Marianne Faithful, Danny Fields and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The tentative title for the book was Beyond the Law: Four Rock ‘n’ Roll Extremists.

Sadly, the book itself was never completed though the chapter on Eno was finished around 1979/1980. Never published until now, this thorough examination of Eno’s work during the ’70’s is a lost treasure that shouldn’t be buried or lost.

BRIAN ENO: A SANDBOX IN ALPHAVILLE by Lester Bangs

(via Fadereu)

Schmidt served as the music adviser to curator Jasia Reichardt for the landmark exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at London’s ICA in 1968, and his selection of computer music for the ICA show proved extraordinarily prescient. Schmidt had long been intrigued by electronic music, systems, and their connections to the visual arts. “Cybernetic Serendipity” showcased pathbreaking work by hundreds of artists, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Jean Tinguely, and was a huge success for Reichardt and the ICA, drawing somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 viewers and foreshadowing multiple major trends on the interfaces between art and technology. “Cybernetic Serendipity” also galvanized the interest in systems-based art. “The very notion of having a system in relation to making paintings is often anathema to those who value the mysterious and the intuitive, the free and the expressionistic, in art,” wrote Reichardt in 1968. “Systems, nevertheless, dispense neither with intuition nor mystery. Intuition is instrumental in the design of the system and mystery always remains in the final result.”

Rhizome: Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics

A mainstream newspaper writing about an academic conference on the subject of black metal:

You can imagine several orders of hostility toward “Hideous Gnosis,” a six-hour theory symposium on black-metal music that commenced on Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Not just because plenty of people like to make fun of academics discoursing on youth culture but because the subject was something like the music that dare not speak its name. [...]

One commenter on the online-forum page of the metal magazine Decibel summed up a certain kind of black-metal fan’s attitude toward the symposium. This music, the contributor wrote, “has nothing to do with being intellectual and everything to do with not wanting to try and break every little thing apart” for analysis. [...]

Was the afternoon humorous, ridiculous or at least ludic? Not really. (It could have used a few more dozen spectators and a temperature boost of about 15 degrees.) To the contrary, it felt necessary. Despite what black-metal musicians might proclaim — Ovskum, an Italian singer and guitarist, was quoted in one of the symposium’s lectures as saying, “my music does not come from a philosophy but from a precritical compulsion” — their work is basically philosophy. It is theoretical, a grid for looking at life, with ancient roots. It could use a critical apparatus, and though the afternoon’s many citings of Continental philosophers like Lacan, Derrida and Bataille might have seemed ludicrously distant to the practice of black metal, such writings relate to the subgenre’s big subjects: death and time.

New York Times: Thank You, Professor, That Was Putrid

(via Coilhouse)

DJ Spooky/Paul D. Miller’s next large scale multimedia performance work will be an acoustic portrait of a rapidly changing continent. Sinfonia Antarctica transforms Miller’s first person encounter with the harsh, dynamic landscape into multimedia portraits with music composed from the different geographies that make up the land mass. Miller’s field recordings from a portable studio, set up to capture the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms, reflect a changing and even vanishing environment under duress. Coupled with historic, scientific, and geographical visual material, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica is a seventy minute performance, creating a unique and powerful moment around man’s relationship with nature.

DJ Spooky – Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica

(Thanks Josh)

Mustard interviews Alan Moore about his new magazine Dodgem Logic and he reveals that he is doing the libretto for their next opera and they will hopefully be contributing a few pages to the magazine:

Then the issue after that we’ve hopefully got Gorillaz onboard. They came down to Northampton last week because we’re planning for me to do the libretto on their next opera project. Being an opportunist, I of course asked them if they’d be prepared to contribute some pages to Dodgem Logic. Rather than just doing an interview with them, I thought it would be interesting to hand over a few pages for them to curate.

Mustard: Alan Moore talks Dodgem Logic

(via 24 Bit via Joe Matheny)

Update: Moore now says this has been overblown.

Gadgetto: Crystal Radio

Sabbath Assembly reënactment: the Processional. Music by the Sabbath Assembly Band (Imaad Wasif, Jex Thoth, Kevin Rutmanis and David Christian).