Hand[le|el](s) with Care

Back in the day, Mac programmers had to deal with what their tattered copies of Inside Macintosh called handles: doubly indirected pointers to data structures. Handles made memory management easier — the actual data structures can be created anywhere, and moved around, without software authors having to explicitly deal with garbage collection and other memory management issues. Good Mac programming involved always working on objects only through their handles (^^PictRect for example). Back to digital media: the progression {unique original to instance of clones, to pointer to — not originals — but architectures in flux, constantly being revisted and tweaked …

Putting Digital Music to Rights

Music, through the imminent DRM format wars, will become increasingly ghettoised through branded delivery mechanisms — already iTunes and Sony software insist on transcoding from one expedient but lossy format to another if you want to play tracks on competing players. And there seems to be a lot of pressure from all involved to pass off such low-quality formats as worthy of purchase and collection, presumably to create a profitable market of low-res, ‘throw-away’ copy-protected music, and to encourage ongoing waves of repurchase as listeners demand better quality or support of later playback technologies. I think these effects result from …

Dearth

Such dearth. Bus[i|y]ness prevails. Rummaging through the old things, an old favourite: a Quicktime implementation of Music for Airports 2/1.

Early Musics

Couple of things from yesterday. Laurie Spiegel posted a comment to an earlier posting, to let us know that her Harmonices Mundi is now avalaible on limited edition transparent vinyl. You can get it at (amongst other places) Forced Exposure. While elsewhere in the musical past, Jerry Nilson has posted tantilising excerpts of some live early performances by Eyeless in Gaza. Play loud.

9B

For a couple of years, my main CD source has been my Theta Data Universal Transport — a laserdisk/CD player from the early 90s. Fed through a Meridian 518 for dejittering and upsampling to 24-bit, it has always sounded good through my Yamaha DSP-AX1 amp. But recently, I’ve started to feel it’s been missing something at the top end. Conversely, CDs played on my Arcam FMJ DV27 have sounded mechanical, with a lack of warmth in the bass, and overbright, unrefined treble. Assuming that the Theta’s failings at the top were probably simply masking the limitations of the Yamaha’s power …

Degraded Audio and Its Promotion

Compressed digital formats (mp3 and its ilk) are expedient: they save storage space and download time. But there’s something rather disingenuous about MusicMatch — the software accompanying iPod on the Windows platform — misrepresenting 128kbps mp3 as ‘cd quality’! There is a certain aesthetic to degraded digital audio — classic 12-bit samplers sell at inflated prices on eBay for their ‘authentic hip hop sound’ — but the post-Napster generation is being sold a lie by the music industry about the quality of the music they’re being offered by the ‘legal online music revolution’. It’s certainly quicker to download a compressed …

What Painting Is

I’ve been reading James Elkins’ (yes him again) What Painting Is. The book is about painting as the act of doing things with paint: the work towards the Work, as it were. Not about Art or Representation, or even stories about painters: the book tackles the viscous, tactile, impossible task of making something sublime through actions with oil, water, stone, pigment. There aren’t, he argues, art-critical ways of talking about painting at this level, and the book draws broadly from the language and practice of alchemy to navigate its way around these unspeakable things. Elkins’ face-to-the-canvas discussion of the physical …

Imber

Imber is a village on Salisbury plain, requisitioned by the Army during WW2 for street-fighting exercises and never handed back to the displaced inhabitants. After much negotiation and some mine-sweeping, the Army recently gave Artangel permission for a one-night performance there, with music by Giya Kancheli. There’s lots of detail on the Artangel site, including an interview with Kancheli. I’ve no idea how I managed to miss this. There’s a review on the Independent site, which makes a point about context: The fact is, we weren’t focusing on the real tragedy – unmentioned in the advance publicity – which lies …

Retro Patina

They’re still making stylus-free laser turntables in Japan. I’ve never heard one, but look at its immodestly chunky styling: it must sound fantastic (and evidently it does). And just over $10,000 for the basic model. Still, it seems the only way to experience that retro vinyl patina without degrading the media at the same time. But isn’t that cheating? Part of the vinyl experience is the harrowing of the grooves with each playback, surely.