Senile at 26

Today there was a record fair here in Stockholm, and as usual I went. I had low expectations regarding actual records, but planned to spend plenty on protective plastic sleeves for vinyls and other assorted "spare parts". I did find a few records too, but nothing overly exciting. Now to the senility bit - I packed my 25 spare "disco sleeves" and 300 12" plastic sleeves into my record bag and all the spare CD cases etc in two plastic bags. Somehow, while looking through the remaining stands, I managed to completely forget about the two plastic bags. I mean they weren't even in the same cosmos as my mind any longer - it wasn't until I had been home a good hour and a half and long since unpacked everything that it struck me. Now how the hell did that happen? I could live with having forgotten them for, say a minute or ten, but 90? Like when I sat in the subway waiting for the train to take me home, I spent at least five minutes looking through everything I'd bought, and yet the two missing bags didn't even cross my mind.

This leaves me upset in several different ways; First, for practically tossing the money away - not that it was all that expensive, but it's so totally unnecessary. Secondly, how on EARTH could I be stupid enough to forget them? I fucking hate it when I don't have control over myself, and I must obviouslt have been totally lost for a long period of time there. It feels extremely unpleasant knowing that my mind can just disconnect like that without me noticing. And third, I'm also very upset that fucking noone noticed! Couldn't someone have seen me leaving the bags somewhere? I bet some fucktard did see it, and then snatched the bags right after I left.

I need to smash something to pieces now.

MRI scanner TV commercials?

This is driving me crazy, and I must know. Please please post a comment if you have any idea. To the question:

Why on earth is Philips doing TV advertising for their new MRI scanner? It's not exactly something the average homeowner decides he needs to the garage or toolshed, now is it? Or are people going to be clearing out their pool rooms now, to have some beers and a brain scan with their mates friday night? And of all the channels they air it on, why OH WHY did they chose Eurosport? I'd be very grateful if anyone could exmplain this to me, because it makes absolutely zero fucking sense.

post recycling: is the DJ obsolete?

Here's a posting on the topic of automatic track mixing using software, from the PsyNews forum:

[...]beyond the very basics of beatmatching, you'll need a human...

There are so many aspects to take into account. Like song selection - sure you can have a database of all the tracks with different info on their characteristics that would let you auto-generate fairly decent tracklists, but there will be no innovation or creativity and the song selection will still be controlled by variables in the data set by a human being. So it's basically just more work, with no real benefit.

Then there is crowd interaction - both in terms of stage appearance (although that's not necessarily the most important part of DJ'ing) and where to take the set - if the crowd isn't up to the craziness you're playing - tone it down. If they want it harder - push up the BPM and pick another route with the set. Doing this with computer-generated mixing would be very difficult, since you'd need to send some crowd appreciation paramter live to the software. And how would you do that? Sounds like a job for... a human being.

Some variations of mixing technique could be hard-coded into the program, but when to chose them and how to apply them would be very hard to get right. A program might flag two tracks as incompatible due to their respective key modes or sound styles, but a gifted DJ could work around such things.

But maybe what you were going for was something like an automated mixer? So that there is still a human on stage (or wherever) selecting the tracks, but that just the actual mixing is handled by some piece of technology? In a way we are already there with some of the DJ tools available. But even though this may be a progress in some respects, the DJ will be more limited in terms of mixing technique, which I find to be a very negative thing.

An auto-mixing program will make a crappy DJ suck less, but will cripple a good DJ. Making mediocricy prevail isn't much of a step forward I think, just look at what happened with the software revolution in music production - now everyone can have a "studio" and make music, and unfortunately they do. A DJ that needs a mixing software isn't one I'd like to hear. Not everyone should be a DJ.

post recycling: mission statement

Since the risk of me losing interest in this blog is overwhelming, I thought I could at least fill it with something before I give up. So I thought I'd dig up old forum postings I've made on various topics and stick them in here as an archive, sort of. It could also be neat to have a backup in case some of these forum sites go belly-up, which they inevitably will do. Now I'm not saying this will be very interesting for any of you imaginary readers, but that's your problem anyway.

test!

This is my second attempt at a blog. The first one, created in the spring of 2003, got a single test posting before I abandoned it. I'm too much of a realist to expect this to go any better, but I'll give it a shot at least.

I'll try to stick to english here - it's a tough choice since I enjoy writing nonsensical word-play stuff in swedish, but my utopian dream to write insightful bits about music sort of requires english to reach any sort of audience at all.

But I still need to go against those good intentions in this very first post and mention some swedish word-play stuff; My girlfriend and I have, as do most couples I guess, a lot of internal jokes and weird twists to our communication. One thing we do is speak poor english on purpose. It could perhaps have originated as a parody of stale swedish middle-aged businessmen, but today it's just linguistic doodling - adding swedish conjugations to english words, switching all but a word or two in a sentence to english or just messing with the grammar or spelling. Anyway, to the story - while at the post office (to pick up my new scanner), my girlfriend reminded me that I need to drag her out of bed early tomorrow morning since she has an important phone call to make, and it needs to be done early. The swedish word for drag in this context is "släpa", so when my mental auto-pilot anglified the response to "Yes, tomorrow I will släp you up", it probably didn't sound right to the other people waiting in line.

The title of the blog, "paroxysmal discharge", is taken from a track by Aube on Evocation. The record is made entirely out of processed signals from an electroencephalogram, and since this is a blog for random noise from my brain, I thought it was quiet fitting.