Bear edge of the Iowa River., a photo by chaircrusher on Flickr.

There’s a frisbee golf course at the edge of the Iowa River on the Iowa City side that wanders into the woods at the water’s edge. This is a little shallow backwater. It was full of tadpoles.

You’re Welcome a photo by chaircrusher on Flickr.

You can’t bring guns into the Co Op any more.

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When I did the OS X build for PaulStretch, it became the most popular and enduring blog post I’ve ever done.

Paulstretch has kind of a funky user interface, but the way it sounds, and the sound variations it is capable of are fantastic. And it’s free. It also can take a 3 minute song and turn it into a week-long ambient drone. The dude who wrote it (Nasca Octavian Paul) shows up on the web every 5 years ago and drops a piece of interesting software, then disappears again. He’s never returned my e-mails, and I’ve maintained the OS X port!

Anyway, this is Paulstretch operating on “Mal Hombre” by the legendary Lydia Mendoza
Download audio file (LydiaMendoza-MalHombre-PaulStretched.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/LydiaMendoza-MalHombre-PaulStretched.mp3

The original. I should mention that Lydia Mendoza is absolutely fantastic. A pioneer of Norteño music, the popular music of Mexican-Americans in the United States, she plays that music kind of like what’s playing in Mexican Restaurants, only she’s as fearless a singer as Aretha Franklin. She can bring me to tears, and I don’t even know Spanish.
Download audio file (LydiaMendoza-MalHombre.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/LydiaMendoza-MalHombre.mp3

Waking The Dead is a BBC Crime Drama that I watched a lot of last weekend. It is basically the UK version of “Cold Case” but is a lot less gimmicky and a lot more hard-boiled. It’s not quite Prime Suspect but it’s rather good.

I usually watch TV and pay attention mostly to whether I enjoy it, without a lot of deep interest in the craft of how it was made. But I watched the first 2 minutes of the Episode Deathwatch and the sound was so badass I backed up and played it again. Every detail of how this is put together — the slamming of doors, the sliding of the cabinet between the waiting room and the gallows room, the occasional sub-bass drop added for drama, and most of all, the faint, subliminal bird calls in the background.

I heard this and immediately thought ‘there’s an entire track in those samples!’

Download audio file (WakingTheDead-S2E2-Opening.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/WakingTheDead-S2E2-Opening.mp3

Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza, who were jailed for being openly gay in Malawi. News reports say they’ve considered leaving Malawi. I say, “come to Iowa!” You can get married here! People are nice! I’ll put up $100 to help you get here! Who’s with me!

Since going to my sister’s wedding (a week ago today) I have yet to ‘catch up’ on all the blog feeds & such I have in Google Reader. And this morning I just started marking ‘all read’ entire categories.

I feel like I no longer have the appetite to ‘keep up.’ Of course, the Internet is a giant time-sink, and makes newspapers (which were derided as ‘fish-wrap’ back in the day) look like engraved stone tablets by comparison.

It’s all so ephemeral. When I was going to sleep last night, I was thinking about this, and also about quantum physics (and no I’m by no means deep) and all the fizzing and nattering on the Internet made me think of virtual particles in a vacuum, that keep popping into existence in particle/anti-particle pairs. They only exist for the tiniest moment before annihilating each other.

Now unlike protons and anti-protons, all this gabbling on the net actually tries to mean something, and insofar as the Internet is the public commons for this age, and is where everyone carries on political discourse, it’s important.

But even as I have some desire that people pay attention to ME, out of vanity or whatever, do I have any particular obligation to pay attention to the Internet? Any more, I think I like listening to NPR better — no commercials (well …) and precisely one person at a time is talking to me.

Of course, you can’t beat Björk the bear shaking her cub out of a tree.

I had a not-enough-coffee moment this morning, where I wanted to look up something about Traktor and instead went to Traktor.com which is a company of film-makers who among other things make commercials. It’s worth going to the site for the demo reel that plays automatically. It’s structured as a movie trailer, but since it packs in “trailer moments” from something like 50 short films, it makes your head reel to construct a mental model of the non-existent movie it promotes.

And their individual films are pretty great too. This one tells a story that needs no words:

I noticed DJ Pierre tweeting about “Los Niños Del Parque” by Liaisons Dangereuses, and checked out the Youtube video that was making the rounds. This is apparently a miniature Twitter phenomenon, so I’m jumping on a bandwagon yet again. Oh well…

Anyway, I went looking for some place to buy the music, and it turns out Hit Thing has re-issued it, so I ordered it. In the meantime I found it on the Internets. Below is my ‘refix version’ — I tweaked the EQ and compression for modern DJ’ing, and warped it to steady 116 BPM. The original was a fairly constant 114, but I think there are a couple of clumsy tape edits or stretches in it to throw it off here and there.

Download audio file (LiaisonsDangereuse-LosNinosDelParque.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/LiaisonsDangereuse-LosNinosDelParque.mp3
LiaisonsDangereuse-LosNinosDelParque.flac

1. Load some audio into a slot.
2. Select ‘Beats’ for the warp mode.
2. Select Transient mode for the Grain resolution
3. Select ‘Off Mode’ for the Transient Loop Mode — icon looks like ‘->|’
4. Dial Transient envelope down to zero

It ends up sounding like a gate effect, but it can be further confused by, for example telling it to use 16th notes instead of transients for the Grain resolution.

The track below is entirely comprised of Ableton Live time stretching abuse of various sorts….

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-MessedUpStrings.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-MessedUpStrings.mp3

Lackluster “Portal EP”

This is a collection of tracks that was supposed to come out on another label that closed up shop. I offered to do a Creative Commons release for Lackluster. He located the masters (on backups, and backups of backups!) and I mastered them.

Lackluster has been one of the most well regarded artists in the genre known (controversially) as IDM. With a discography going back 10 years, he has released music on Merck, Monotonik, deFocus and many others.

Graphic design by Matt Seeman

God bless those teutonic DSP elves at NI. Guitar Rig is part of Komplete 6, and it’s tons of fun to screw around with.

I of course, went straight for the extreme noise
Download audio file (Chaircrusher-GuitarRigTest.mp3)