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Reviews

Siouxsie – Mantaray

Siouxsie Sioux has been making music since1977 or so but Mantaray is her first solo album. Her last album with The Creatures, “Hai!”, was marked by meandering lyrics and over-produced vocals. Mantaray is a real return to form with much more focussed songwriting and a clearer voice.

Much has been made in reviews of the personal nature of the lyrics on this album compared to Siouxsie’s work with The Banshees and The Creatures. I’m not sure about that. If songs about bees and oceans are personal then songs about deceptive lovers and new found freedom might be impersonal. The album has all of these.

This is a good album but there are two things I would bemoan. Both are a product of the economics of this album, which seems aimed squarely at the American, probably college radio, market.

The first is Siouxsie’s newly Americanized pronunciation. She slips in and out of ts as ds on the same track and it detracts from the power of the vocals. I love both English and American accents but I prefer one or the other from the same person on the same song and from someone who has sung in the former for so long the latter can be jarring.

The second is the instrumentation. It is slick, polished, soulless content. I can see the producers brainstorming each track: “this one should be punky, this one grungy, this one a torch song”. Siouxsie’s vocals deserve much more than such safe corporate lullabies as backing.

This is a strong enough album that hopefully the next one will give Siouxsie the room to experiment that produced the sound that drew the corporate zombies on the mixing desk to her in the first place.

Compared to past glories this is only as good as Superstition, but much better than Anima Animus. Even just Siouxsie as content would be much, much better than no Siouxsie at all. And this is not just Siouxsie as content. A new found strength indeed…

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links

links for 2007-10-10

Categories
Free Culture Personal

My Ogg Player

yp-c1.jpg

Samsung YP-C1.

Closed firmware but good Ogg support.

Categories
Free Culture

radiohead in rainbows

An excellent case study in alternative funding models for cultural works. Radiohead aren’t making their latest album copyleft (maybe next time?) but it is available as DRM free downloads a week after it was recorded and mixed.

The site is currently down which is hopefully a sign of high demand. I paid four pounds (8 dollars) for the album plus credit card fees. It’s currently on my Ogg player.

Radiohead have released the album as downloads now and are taking orders for a deluxe package of the album in various formats in a couple of months. This is a smart strategy. They are getting what money they can from downloaders before the finished album can be leaked. And they are targeting collectors with a package that costs four times what a simple CD release does. This simultaneously captures value that would be lost to filesharers and unrealised with collectors if the tracks were released on a CD through supermarkets some time next year. This is all the value that can currently be captured for an album without alienating fans and thereby paradoxically reducing value by trying to maximize it.

One interesting effect I’ve seen is that the existence of the cheap downloads has driven some people towards the more expensive deluxe package. I’m sure economists and psychologists will have a lot to say about this.

Some commentators have complained that this strategy will create a burst of revenue but destroy long-term sales. I’d like to introduce these commentators to Napster, and more importantly to the stagnation of popular culture that has resulted from maximizing distribution of old recordings. Popular culture is meant to be disposable. If it creates something lasting, like the recordings of Elvis Presley, then these will keep their value however they are released. Elvis tracks in the public domain are now being profitably released in the UK.

Oasis, Jamiroquai, Ian Brown, The Charlatans and other UK acts are hot on the heels of Radiohead with plans to release music online. America’s Nine Inch Nails are, like Radiohead, now free of their recording contract and seeking to release music online and build a direct relationship with their fans.

Build a multi-pronged strategy and capture value in as many places as possible. Radiohead have put some good ideas into effect here:

  • Release early. Don’t wait for leaks and “pirates”.
  • Work with downloaders. Get any value you can from them.
  • Work with collectors. Release packages they will pay many times the odds for.
  • Build buzz and translate that into live performance revenue.
  • And take all this and see if any recording companies are smart enough to work with it.

Categories
Free Culture

Support the Commons | Creative Commons

Support the Commons | Creative Commons

Please help Creative Commons in their annual funding drive.

I have put time and money into supporting CC over the last few years (I’m not just a mailing-list-activist) because they are doing something positive for Free Culture. So if you are not a fan of NC and ND, and I’m certainly not, don’t let that stop you supporting SA.

I got a letter from Lessig suggesting some good ways to support the funding drive (centred around the theme of “five”) but I can’t find a copy online. Does anyone know if it’s out there anywhere? Lessig suggests:

  • Using 5 CC licenced works.
  • Licencing 5 new works (I say make them BY-SA!)
  • Introducing 5 new people to Creative Commons.
  • Giving 50% more to CC this year than you did last year

And spreading the campaign, which I’m doing here.

Support CC!

Categories
Free Culture Howto

Hipster Freedom 1 – Smooth Beats

You’ve got you MacBook Pro and you’ve taken a break from the conference to have a tall skinny decaf latte and listen to some music while you update your blog on the free wifi. You hipster, you. Could you be any cooler? Well, yes.

Your iPod and your iTunes library are proprietary software and closed formats. They are limiting your freedom. But there’s a Free alternative.

Ogg Vorbis is an MP3/MP4 replacement. You can use it in iTunes and on music players, so it isn’t inconvenient, and unlike MP3/MP4 it is Free and doesn’t limit your freedom. It sounds good too.

To rip CDs to OGG see here: http://www.vorbis.com/software/

To listen to OGG in iTunes see here: http://xiph.org/quicktime/

To get an OGG player see here: http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers

Or to use OGG on your existing player try here: http://www.rockbox.org/

Categories
Generative Art Projects

draw-something Current Output

drawing-20071005-202749.png

I’m very pleased with how draw-something is performing at the moment. The debugging that resulted from the improved logging and the pen parameters system means that it is now at least not working in the way it is meant to, rather than doing some things twice and others not at all.

The current look is due to the colouring system based on AARON’s new colouring system, the varied drawing styles enabled by pen-parameters, and the compositional tightness enabled by all forms being created from an initial, shared, set of points.

The colouring system needs more debugging and the composition system needs tuning up. In particular; colour application, particularly to the background, needs fixing. I want to add stars, non-self-intersecting random walk lines and circles to the repertoire of shapes. I want to make some shapes specifically smaller and larger, either growing to include nearest points or using only the points in a small area. And I want to limit kinds of shapes to various areas of the composition.

One of the things that is sorely lacking in draw-something is decision making. The actual drawing of outlines is a continuous process of deciding where the pen should go next, but the forms that the pen is drawing around are laid out randomly. In the long term I want draw-something to start with a few basic shapes and then build up from them, relating them and adorning them. But that is in the long term.

Categories
Generative Art Personal

draw-something updated

I have uploaded the latest draw-something code to SourceForge CVS (as part of rob-art), and updated the rob-art website at http://rob-art.sourceforge.net.

This version has a new drawing style system (“pen-parameters”) and more extensive logging. Much refactoring was required by pen-parameters, which has made the code cleaner. And much debugging was enabled by the new logging, which has made the code faster and stabler.

Grab a Lisp compiler, get the source and you can draw your own draw-something drawings, or have draw-something draw them for you.