VJ Heaven

Here’s how to embed album artwork in Scratch Live 2.0, no need for another tagging program anymore.

vj clips and loops extracted from the cultish salad fingers series. download the vj album at www.thewetcarpet.com. this preview video is all clips back to back.

preview of VJ album with loops of mr man clubbing , download it at thewetcarpet.com

Preview of collection of VJ loops with blinking disco pixels. download them all at thewetcarpet.com

Mr Man vj loops feat. Rock Your Bones and lots of flowers. download at thewetcarpet.com

This VJ album is a collection of 20 AVS presets created by the VISBOT.net artists which we selected for the Bangkok’s Queer Techno nights, recorded in HD and edited into VJ loops. It’s always better to use AVS for live performances when you can as it adds the real-time reaction to the music and rhythm, but these recordings can open access to these beautiful graphics for anyone without the computer power needed to render them live. You can download it from theWetCarpet.com The music for the preview video is from Les Ziris – 2008 Fainst DJ SET Minimal Techno and the tracks are: 12 – Justice – DANCE (mstrkrft rmx); 13 – Dusty Kid – The Kitten; 14 – Anthony rother – Don’t Worry (Xenia beliayeva).

vj clips and loops extracted from the cultish salad fingers series. download the vj album at www.thewetcarpet.com. this preview video is all clips back to back.

((PLEASE DONT LEAVE MEAN AND NEGATIVE COMMENTS)) Travis Malloy, VJ & Junior in rehearsal singing one of our favorite worship songs…(Singing our arrangement of it)……Written by Jamel Strong! GET OUR ALBUM ON ITUNES, CDBABY & DIGSTATION

Swarm Music Album Black Allegheny from Evan Merz on Vimeo.

We’ve heard albums made by singular compositional minds and by bands. What would an album sound like if composed by swarm intelligence, by computer evolutionary models of individual agents or bots? That’s the question asked by composer Evan Merz in his new, full-length album “Black Allegheny.” (At top: the composer explains in a video.)

Western musical and creative tradition is steeped in linearity, from the forward motion of the music staff to the mythos of Aristotle’s Poetics.

So, maybe it’s little wonder that generative music – music that may not have linearity, or a beginning, middle, and end – hasn’t exactly been a big hit with the kids. Pioneers like Brian Eno have helped spread the gospel of generative music, but apart from lots of interesting experiments, there hasn’t been a lot of actual musical content. If you were to make a stack of generative music albums, your listening list would be fairly short.

All of that could be about to change. Programming code, the essential medium in which such models can be developed, is more accessible than ever. It’s also more visual, thanks to the popularization of tools like Processing, which can help make the abstract rules of generative music easier to grok. Merz, for his part, has taken on the challenge with his own Java-based software.

Saying the bots “compose” the music may be a little misleading. Generative music needs rules to operate. Before Eno, there was John Cage, whose “chance” compositions were as much defined by choices of materials as by ranges of indeterminacy. Merz makes a nod to Cage’s notion of a “gamut,” a collection of raw musical elements used as the input in the chance system. Here, though, Merz is aided by something Cage didn’t have: a swarm of intelligent “agents” can navigate those materials via simple rules, giving the music form and substance. Because they aren’t aware of the big picture, the music evolves more naturally, rather than being subjected to an over-arching narrative.

Or, as Merz puts it, “the tiny ant on the ground knows only what it sees around it.”

So, that’s the theory — what does the music sound like? Far from “ennui,” as Merz puts it, to me the results are organic. The structure is emergent from its materials, sounding almost like a natural physical process, like watching ice melt. The content ranges based on the gamut; like a lot of generative music, some sounds a whole lot like Brian Eno’s work. Others borrow from minimalist composers (Reich’s music itself might be seen as partially generative), and others take on an edgy urgency. The models that determine the bots are based on a popular, simple mathematical predator/food model, one often used in these works. Sometimes, you might imagine that evolutionary struggle playing out in the music.

You can read more about the process of developing this tool and the compositional ideas behind it at Evan’s blog:
Black Allegheny, Swarm Generated Music [Computer Music Blog]

For more explorations of sound and composition, check out Noise for Airports, which recently featured the work:
http://noiseforairports.com/

And you can stream the album or buy it for yourself for the light price of US$5 — though I’d like to see a software release, since that would mean each playback could be different. (Eno released an album in software form in the 90s, though tracking down the software now is evidently impossible – anyone with tips?)
Black Allegheny @ Bandcamp [Stream / download purchase]

Swarm Controlled Sampler – Becoming Live from Evan Merz on Vimeo.

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The Internet is supposedly about quantity over quality – endless releases of every sound a computer can spit out, limitless choice and access, albums as prolific and disposable as Twitter updates. Of course, whether it actually is that or not is, as always, up to the creators.

Netlabel Feedback Loop, based in Lisboa, Portugal, has some self-imposed discipline. They release only three or four editions a year, with tracks carefully curated to represent only the best. The initial EP is free, released in high-definition audio if desired; if successful, a paid full-length is the follow-up.

The latest release is an ideal selection for focusing your thoughts and musical energies on this Monday. “Kuss” is a selection of six exceptional tracks from the Guildford, Surrey (UK)-based artist Ambienteer. (I’ll let you guess his musical genre of choice.) The cuts off the EP are to me a perfect balance of organic and synthetic sound, always imbued with a sense of intention and change; there’s never the static quality ambient releases sometimes have. Gorgeous sound design combine with thoughtful, meditative composition. And that’s all I’ll say about it, because you should really just listen – in 320k MP3, FLAC, and other formats. (Bless you, Bandcamp. We deserve you, after all that suffering with MyS****.)

Download, plus more info from curator Leonardo Rosado:
http://feedbacklooplabel.bandcamp.com/album/kuss

And for other releases from the netlabel:
http://feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com/

A side note: this comes to us by way of our friends at another exceptionally-fine netlabel, PublicSpacesLab. (Previously on CDM) I’m saddened to learn that the co-founder of that label, Alejandro Mendez, passed away last month. Condolences to his friends, family, and his colleagues at the label.

RIP Alejandro Mendez

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