Blog Updates, 30 December 2007

Here are a few more lovely addenda to previous blog posts.  Enjoy!

Update - Finding The Music In Noise
You can usually trust the minimalists to make good use of otherwise nonmusical sounds in their compositions.  Steve Reich, patriarch and patron saint of New York's Cantaloupe Records, did a superb job of that with this clapping-only piece...it's like Philip Glass deconstructed himself and looped back into tribal ecstasy.  Or something.


Update - Visionary Instruments:  An Ode To The Chapman Stick
A glaring omission from my gallery of Chapman Stick players is Steve Adelson, who is without a doubt one of the biggest badass jazz musicians ever even without his awesome Chapman Stick chops.  But the fact is that he can do what he does on the Stick - a notoriously difficult instrument - as well as he does it on the guitar.  And he wrote the first Stick method book for Mel Bay, Stickology.  I'll say that again:  He wrote the book on this.  And it shows in this video - the first in a series of excellent swaggers he's posted on YouTube.  I highly encourage you to hunt down the rest, because each one has him demonstrating a totally different technique.  The ravey one (#4) is incredible.


Update - Psychoactive Vibes
Kind of irresponsible for me to leave dream machines out of the discussion in my fairly-comprehensive paper on the relationship between light, sound, and states of consciousness.  My buddy Tristan - who is a regular contributor to the excellent website Reality Sandwich - posted a short article about building your own light and sound machine, in the event that you'd like to catapult yourself into all manner of waking-dream weirdness without exogenous drugs.
Sweet Dreams:  Building A DIY Dream Machine, by Tristan Gulliford