Emptying the Haunted Air

Tony Abbott - Leader of the Coalition

I call the process Moncktification, and it can be applied to any picture that is wanting of eye-googliness.

So, Lord Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is visiting Australia to give talks on climate change, and also presumably to have his desiccated penis massaged by his staunchest allies in Australia. Alan Jones – who, in spite of multiple breaches of broadcasting code of conduct, has managed to keep his particular brand of bullshit on the air – was among them. The footage that was shown in the otherwise uninformative 7.30 Report, uh… report gave me a good idea of what this presentation was all about: basically a couple of hours of Lord Banana of Brenchley preaching to the converted, replete with PowerPoint slides and jokes.

From transcript:

(to audience) As you can see is the houses of Parliament would disappear, to which my saying is, and your problem is?
(audience laughs)

And I along with them!

Of course, the silliest thing about Monckton is still his charge that the global warming lobby is actually contriving to bring the world under a single government – Illuminati style. Unelected sponge that Monckton is, he even had the stones to emphasise the point that these shadowy rulers would be vilely unelected. All the drama around this – Monckton’s visit, Tony Abbott’s questionably-funded green policy, the stirrings of a Sceptic Revolution, of an empire on the brink of collapse – masks a fairly mundane political truth.

I don’t spend a lot of time going around talking to ‘the people’. Recently, in fact, I’ve spent most of my time talking to deliciously-animated space vixens. However, if gauging the public mood through politics is an endeavour that has any validity, it seems that things have changed a bit since before the Coalition leadership spill of late 2009. As a political issue, climate change is losing momentum. Here, Andrew Bolt might claim some sort of personal victory, attributing the stagnation to the daily truths that he ejaculates onto the face of Australian politics via his blog. He wouldn’t be entirely wrong, and an ALP federal election campaign that dodges the issue would be a major victory for sceptics.

But it’s not because the science is, somehow, ‘falling apart’. The relationship between man-made carbon emissions and the global climate remains well-founded, and scientists and researchers will continue their work in this regard for a long time. All we are seeing is an Australian public with a relatively short attention span getting bored of the politics, in a mediascape teeming with distractions.

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Forget Andrew Bolt – graphs on climate change are so 2009. Tony Abbott’s recent attempt to soften his public image with lewd and nigh-incestuous photographs has triggered a flurry of research into the alarming trend of skyrocketing silliness on the conservative side of politics. The findings of this research have been assembled into a handy graph:

Click Here: Silliness is on the rise in conservative politics!

"But wait, there's... Oh, no. There isn't really."

Naturally, I watched tonight’s Lateline interview with Ian Plimer and George Monbiot. It was, if nothing else, entertaining, and revealed nothing of the two men (or the issue of climate change) that we do not already know. The thing that stuck with me was the peculiar contrast of Plimer’s ‘I’m just a scientist’ argument, and the image of him holding up (on at least three occasions) a copy of his book, Heaven and Earth, in the manner of Tim Shaw with a set of Demtel steak knives.

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Ian Plimer stopped being a scientist the moment he set foot on the climate sceptic warpath. Which isn’t to say that he lost any of his credibility, or any right to speak his mind. But he is now effectively a politician and lobbyist, and his performance on Lateline (as well as one earlier in the year when he released his book) made this starkly apparent. A genuine scientist is a thrall to empirical evidence, and will change their findings to suit it, but Plimer’s reluctant to answer questions because, as a politician, he cannot concede any such territory – in the same way that Paul Keating could not admit to his broken promise with the LAW tax cuts, or Howard with the ‘children overboard’ deception. In politics, a concession to one’s opponents is a tangible step towards death. Whether he has put himself in this position, or because he has been hauled atop the shoulders of the climate sceptics, Ian Plimer is no longer a scientist, in spite of his regular assertions to the contrary.

What’s particularly strange – and my brother, who is far less inclined to take these debates in earnest, pointed this out to me – is that Plimer, aside from his corpulant appearance and slightly weak voice, resembles a classic pro-wrestling heel. From his ever-smug countenance, to the part of the interview in which he told Monbiot to mind his manners, “young man”, I can imagine him marching to the ring, in full suit-and-tie, holding high a copy of his book – all to the glorious boos of the audience.

L-R: Ludvig Borga, Jerry 'the King' Lawler, Ian Plimer, The Repo Man, I.R.S, Yokozuna, Ted 'the Million Dollar Man' DiBiase

Sexy-smoldering Barnaby

The title is a reference to a Kurosawa Akira film, and the post isn’t about Barnaby Joyce – it’s just such a wonderful picture. I was just reading Andrew Bolt’s blog (which I do fairly regularly, in spite of myself) and wondering, for the hundredth time in my life, how a person can become such a wretched, conservative ideologue – or any ideologue at all, for that matter. The right wing/left wing spectrum is so ludicrously artificial, yet it remains a compelling way to pigeonhole those whose views about the world are passionate. Someone like Bolt selects his political causes as though completing a checklist in a Political Spectrum for Dummies book – he is a climate sceptic, an apologist for Israel’s foreign policy (and for the Howard government, as for Keith Windschuttle), and seems to have an unhealthy infatuation with Sarah Palin (I can’t quite work that one out). He posits himself diametrically opposed to ‘the left’, and presumably ‘the lefties’ as well.

I’ve often wondered whether the whole thing is self-perpetuating; that a person, through parental influence or a prejudicial stance on a particular issue, comes to adopt indiscriminately the values imposed by history and society. Or, perhaps the whole edifice is maintained by self-perpetuating mutual dislike. Bolt’s writing style is embattled and self-righteous; he’s no journalist, and doesn’t pretend to be, as he wages his daily assaults on a real-or-imagined enemy.

It’s either one of those two, or else there is some essential, philosophical characteristic that motivates an ideologue. An irrepressible awareness of, and sympathy with, all worldly things (that’d be the ‘bleeding heart lefties’, I suppose), or a complete lack of it in the case of Bolt. That is, an obsessive love for one’s own immediate locality – the foregone memories that create geography and culture. A fear to step away from it. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of fear, which I suppose is wholly natural and sensible, but it is a little pitiable. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to live without an expansive mind.

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Arcology

This evening’s report on that nirvana of news and current-affairs, Lateline, about population growth and urban sprawl in Australia’s major cities, made for bonerifically nifty viewing – and not only because it featured a debate between two of Australia’s most intelligent, erudite former leaders, Bob Carr and Steve Bracks, both of whom possessed the rare quality in politics of knowing when to jump ship.

The report was framed in light of comment Kevin Rudd made weeks ago, in which he expressed his idiosyncratic, bland pleasure about the forecasts for Australia’s population growth: 35 million by the middle of the century. He wants Australia to be a ‘big country’.

It is the geographic and social implications of this ‘big country’ that are at the centre of the debate. Carr was, as ever, doubtful of the necessity for feeding a population boom. The most interesting point he raised questioned the practice of boosting immigration to satiate skill shortages. New citizens bring co-dependents, who in turn create other skills gaps. Bracks was far more optimistic, speaking of the opportunities afforded by population growth. To this, Carr replied that population growth will increase urban density and sprawl.

It is in quarter-acre sparsity that Carr, and many others, it seems, locate Australia’s quality of life. The problem is, this notion has been living on borrowed time since the beginning of Australia’s port-WW2 migration program. Naturally, a decade of uninterrupted economic growth and countless government hand-outs and tax-cuts have acted as a sort of saline solution to this dying ideal, but the arguments to maintain it now seem really scant.

This is all really precious, coming from somebody who grew up in this lifestyle, so I leave the rest to city planners, environmentalists and economists. Watch the report. Suffice to say, now the most popular Prime Minister in Australian history has signalled that the Federal Government will take a bigger hand in city planning, the time has never been better to realise my dream of the Sydney Arcology!

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Coalition Fiscal Policy

The appointment of Barnaby Joyce to the Shadow Finance portfolio may well be Tony Abbott’s biggest mistake for the coming election year. Regardless of how many times the guy reminds us all that he’s an accountant, Joyce has the heart of a market interventionist. He has proven, time and again, that his loyalties lie only with his electorate, that he scarcely understands what a tax is, that he sees national debt as akin to household debt. The man is an economic illiterate – even if a thoroughly entertaining one – and he will really struggle against Lindsay Tanner. He’s never been one to tow the party line, either – his interview with Annabel Crabbe (linked above) showed us that he doesn’t quite understand that the price of promotion to the front bench is to limit your opinions to your own portfolio. It already looks like an Opposition with two leaders – far from a sound election strategy.

In other news, I composed a song about Christmas beetles! All in AudioMulch; loops of recordings from my modular synth, granulators, and pulsecombes, which I’ve only started using recently. The pulsecombe’s rhythmic possibilities are incredible – it’s just a shame that you can’t program LFO-like contraptions to modulate parameters, because I still find the automation system a little clunky. There are no words, but then again I’ve never heard a Christmas beetle sing.

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Uh… Some kind of a pun there. On Miller Puckette, whose achievements warrant more than the measly Wikipedia entry about him. Perhaps it is appropriate, for its humility mirrors that of the man himself, who named the Max programming environment after yet another amazing pioneer of computer music, Max Mathews.

Max for Live came out recently – as in, yesterday. It is bloody good value for people who already own Live 8 and Max/MSP 5, and includes a fairly nifty assortment of effects:

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(I will not put another track on this site that includes the amen break, I promise.)

‘Nifty effects’, in this case, just means stuff that tears the shit out of any signal you process. I’m eager to see the sort of patches the community starts to build, because I find these first bunch a little underwhelming. As for the second clause in my post title; there isn’t a thing I could say about the past week in Australian politics that hasn’t already been expressed by thousands of others. It has been truly astonishing, seeing the Coalition fracture so dramatically, and with such blatant disregard for the public’s perception of their conduct. Quite simply, it’s every man for himself, Tony Abbott being the most recent MP to reveal himself as an opportunistic turncoat, along with Nick Michin and Eric Abetz. It is a battle for the heart of the Liberal Party (forget the Coalition), and although a person like me fancies politics as the grand arena for ideological conflict, it really isn’t very flattering to actually see it take place. There’s just a lot of blood, and you’re not exactly sure of the purpose.

Suffice to say that the Coalition are giving the government the trigger for a double dissolution, and squandering their electoral chances at the same time. The road to renewal is going to be long and agonising.

Jourmedian – a delightful coalescence of the words journalist and comedian – refers to the twats who present the new ABC TV show, Hungry Beast, while also indicating its structure and tone. It combines didactic (albeit occasionally informative) journalism, lame sketch humour, ill-conceived blog-style rants and general wankery into half an hour of incomprehensible television. This evening, viewers were treated to a sketch about discrimination against vampires in Sydney. At least, that’s what I thought it was – I stopped watching at this stage. Perhaps it was hilarious.

Harmony in Ultraviolet - Tim Hecker

Instead, I went and played around a little in AudioMulch. Then I stopped, and watched John Safran’s splendid Race Relations. Looking at the site for the first time, I see that’s it’s been designed in HTML to resemble Facebook. Not quite sure why they did that, besides it being a bit of a laugh. Like everything done in Safran’s inimitable style, it dances around serious issues, then retreats from making a coherent argument, preferring to succumb to its own twisted, internal logic. It’s wickedly funny stuff – there’s nobody else quite like him.

After this, I went back to Mulch – again. I was thinking about what I wrote yesterday. Of the middle ground between drones and breakbeats for which I’m searching. There are, of course, many who already compose in this sort of territory. Autechre have always enthralled me with their music, but sometimes I have felt their music is always beats with drones, or beats then drones, or drones then beats, rather than a weaving together of the two. Quaristice was their strongest album in this regard. However, what it lacked for me was the drama of a track like Eutow, from Tri Repetae – drama that Eutow loses after three minutes of a propulsive industrial beat. (It’s probably the best example of a song that I only listen to for a minute before stopping.) Tim Hecker is a master at lacing music with such drama. Sometimes I get frustrated – angry even – that he hasn’t ever composed for film.

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So, all that being said, here’s what I came up with. It’s based around the Amen break. I wanted to imply rhythm, but have it threaten to fall apart at any given moment. If nothing else, it’s reminded me of the need to get into a more traditional, timeline-based DAW, so I can edit more easily after I have recorded the Mulch performance.

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I’m well and truly back into AudioMulch, to the extent that I feel frustrated just looking at Ableton Live, and its big stupid grid of grey rectangles.

The truth is that Mulch and Live represent my two distinct tastes in music – on one side, Tim Hecker, Chihei Hatakeyama, Stars of the Lid. On the other, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Battles. I like Live because of the flexibility you get to work in the rhythmic domain, and within traditional musical scales. I like Mulch because it lets you tear apart and emaciate these rhythms, and linger between semitones. To consider these tastes of mine divergent is over-simplifying, and doing a slight injustice to the versatility of each artist, but the fact remains that the sonic territory I want to explore lies somewhere between these styles of music.

Which is a problem because, whether due to my ability of my process, I can’t make Mulch or Live do exactly what I want. I can’t turn what I hear in my head into music. I’m hoping that Max for Live will allow me to experiment more, in this regard. Mulch-style granulator effects on the send and master tracks, and a 5Combs filter effect to produce string sounds out of anything I can imagine.

Or, perhaps I will always be content to jump between these vastly different musical paradigms, forever chasing that refreshing feeling of rediscovering an old love.

Blue-blooded

It’s a joke! About the BNP!…

…The British National Party? Blue – as in blue-blooded British! Anyone? You know that Eiffel 65 song from 1999?

Ah, forget it.

I’m watching an episode of the SBS’s Dateline about the BNP, and it’s all rather concerning, especially since the scale of their democracy makes the issue – an apparent rebirth of fascism in the UK – seem like a revolution. Indeed, hearing these people talk about bizarre (and utterly uneconomical) re-settlement policies is bewildering. Their xenophobia, pitiable.

One of the first points that comes up in the Dateline report, however, is about the socially disaffected – the working poor – who have turned away from the mainstream parties, and the British Labour Party in particular. It reminds me of the rise of Hansonism in Australia from 1996-98, and how it was born from very similar conditions, and from a similar electorate. One-million voters from NSW and Queensland, north of the Murray River, felt they had been left behind by the economic reforms of the 1980s, and hit hard by the early 90s recession. Unemployment was high. They felt disenfranchised, ignored by the major parties. George Megalogenis quotes John Howard:

“Here was this slightly inarticulate woman, struggling in a very Australian accent to get her point across… It had enormous appeal.” (p. 206, Megalogenis, G. 2006, The Longest Decade, Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.)

Howard also made another point (again, from The Longest Decade): “I thought it was quite wrong to just attack her as being an extremest or a Nazi. There aren’t a million Nazis in Australia, but almost a million people voted for her” (p. 208). Eventually, these voters were reclaimed by the major parties. Pauline Hanson’s involvement in Australian politics ended in spectacularly penal, all singing, all dancing fashion.

A decade of low-inflation growth had begun, its bounty shared for all to feast upon. (Except, perhaps, the criminally under-paid migrant communities who made the Hansonites so vewy fwightened.)

I’m guessing (and hoping more than a little) that the same thing will happen in Britain when their economy starts to improve. Politicians are, by and large, intelligent, caring and humane people. So are most citizens, when they have little to complain about.

Careful of the random voltages, PIP-Boy!

Now, to other matters – I have invented a new form of digital synthesis!

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I call it Rapid-Wavetable Synthesis ™, RWS for short…

…It’s not really a new form of anything – I just made that up. Basically, I just took really long samples (like ten seconds of audience clapping that I recorded at Liquid Architecture 10) and played them back with the AudioMulch loop player at 500 bpm. So, the sample becomes a wavetable of sorts with lots of harmonic content, and the loop player becomes an oscillator.

It really is just regular wavetable synthesis, and doesn’t produce anything you couldn’t get from lots of other digital synthesis techniques that allow you to modulate the shit out of an already harmonically-complex waveform. Tame the sound with a few filters, and you basically get a few interesting colour-gradations of noise. Yummy, yummy noise.

The only reason I’m writing about it, and not making this post succinct and political, is because doing this reminded me of why I love AudioMulch so much. You can do stuff like this, and still craft rhythms within evolving compositions, independent of the master clock. I should stop using Live for a bit, and get back mulching…

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