Emptying the Haunted Air

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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