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DJ AR - Dubious Trip
01 - STL - Silent State (Original Mix)
02 - Minilogue - Animals (Beat Pharmacy’ Into The Wild Dub Mix)
03 - Forteba - Caliphone (Terry Lee Brown Junior Remix)
04 - Maetrik, Maceo Plex - Fused (Original Mix)
05 - Kilowatts & Tanner Ross - Kruger Fingers (Original)
06 - Michael Ho - Takeaway feat. JonJon (Sierra Sam Remix)
07 - Valmay - Distrust
08 - Alex Carbo - Identity
09 - Vincenzo, The Phantom Image - Thizz Izzz
10 - Ben Watt - Guinea Pig (M.A.N.D.Y. & Smallboy’s Musical Variation Remix)
11 - Giorgio Gigli - Tempo
12 - Moonface - Futurized Fears (Guy J Remix)
13 - David K - Fugu (Original Mix)
14 - Hobo 23:59 (Original Mix)
15 - DJ Sossa - Jurassik (Davide Squillace Remix)
16 - Kollektiv Turmstrasse - Luechtoorn (Dominik Eulberg Remix)

Ears and Brains - Article 2

the two halves of our brain work differently.  one article describes it this way:

the left brain is better at processing “rapidly changing sounds”
the right brain is better at processing “drawn out sounds, like music.”

sometimes in music there are not just drawn out sounds, but also rapidly changing sounds, so this artificial distinction between rapidly changing sounds and music doesn’t really hold.

but it does imply that a left ear and a right ear attached to the same brain hearing the same music might hear it differently - the right ear focused on rapidly changing sounds, the left ear on drawn out sounds.  (your right ear is attached to your left brain, and vice-versa.)

DJs tend to favor an ear for their headphones when mixing - the ear they use to check whether the beats are still matched.  does which ear a DJ favors say anything about them?  i recently started using both ears, out of paranoia.  it has also affected how i hear music. i find it gives me flexibility to switch brains depending on what i’m trying to accomplish.

being able to use both hands equally well is called ambidexterity.  what would you call being able to use both ears really well?  ambiaurality?  ambiphonerity?  switch listener?

how else you can use this information
- to increase the likelihood that someone will give you a cigarette when you ask for one:

Article 3 - Talk to my Right Ear

Article 4 - Sweet Sweet Cigarettes

www.goodfridayradio.com

Live broadcasts, downloadable mixes, podcasts.

We’ll be starting a mailing list for live broadcasts:

• Weekday afternoon live DJ sets broadcast to folks sitting at their desks
• Live transmission of the DJ set from one party to another party
• Live handoffs from DJ in location A to DJ in location B.

How ridiculous is that.

Podcasts start when we get a microphone.

www.goodfridayradio.com

think of a sculptor with hammer, chisel, and stone. or a painter with paint, brush, and canvas. these artists have the most analog of artistic experiences. their outputs are finely recorded. every muscle twitch is reflected in the artistic work. and the artist in turn responds to the behavior of their tools and materials. it’s a feedback loop.

(full disclosure: i recently switched as a dj from playing all vinyl records to playing mostly cds. the fact that my idea reflects this evolution is natural i suppose; analog, even, to my experience.)

imagine if you sat down at a computer and tried to sculpt something, and then programmed a robot to carve it out of some big-ass marble slab for you. that’s a nice simple example of what i would call a digital artistic experience. on the scale of relative analogicality, somewhere between sculpt-by-numbers and pounding out a marble slab by hand lies just about every artistic experience you can think of. including the artistic experience of the dj.

the dj’s interaction with the turntable is a very analog experience, compared with their experience of interacting with a dj cd player. a dj cd player has most of the same functions as a dj turntable. you can speed the song up, slow it down, make tiny corrections to keep beats aligned, cue songs. most dj cd players do much more, and can emulate just about anything you can do with a turntable.

but the turntable has a spinning, solid steel platter propelled by magnets at a speed regulated by a quartz crystal. the artist interacting with that spinning platter is having an experience very high on the scale of relative analogicality. the kinds of corrections you can make on a turntable are different than what you can do using a digital wheel, and at times they can truly become a desired part of the artistic output. with a cd player you can make corrections disappear. with a turntable, you can make corrections actually sound good.

but, of course, with great rewards come great risks. cd players are much easier to use to keep beats aligned, and they arguably allow djs to make better music, more often. so much for my theory.

okay but there’s more. the DJ doesn’t just stand in front of a spinning platter or cd player. they stand in front of at least TWO spinning platters and/or cd players, and whatever other gadgets they brought with them, and a mixer with at least a couple of channels and god knows what insane functions built into it, and a towering system of loudspeakers to carve their art into the air. from all these disparate parts emerges an instrument, and from it emanates art.

it does not matter whether any of the components of the dj’s instrument is digital. the power of the dj, at least the powerful one, is in their ability to create something greater than the sum of its parts. that function is analogous to what the cd player does with its laser as it reads ones and zeros, and it’s the same thing our brains do interpolating the, yes, binary information flowing into them from our senses. parts, my friends, is not always parts (Parts is Parts notwithstanding).

for a mixed-up treatment of analogous topics see also: What Google is Doing to Our Brains.

future post: emergence 101
future post: left brain - right brain : right ear - left ear
future post: music as a boundary of emergence: dancing “on the edge of chaos.”

the age-old argument. or at least as old as the loop machine, cd player, sampler, mp3.

how digital is something? how analog is it? does it matter?

which is better, vinyl or cds? it’s a sensitive topic sometimes among audiophiles and djs. maybe more sensitive than it needs to be.

usually the argument breaks down into which one sounds better. this is an important point when you’re amplifying the sound with thousands of watts of power for thousands, hundreds, tens of people.

after working through an initial bias over the years, i can safely say that both can sound good, and both can sound bad. and they definitely sound different.

you could argue that the vinyl record is more authentic because of the analog event, which allows for more information than just what’s in the groove of the needle to become part of the signal. this can be good (sometimes crowd noise creeps in, lending authenticity to a live recording), or it can be bad (evil low-frequency feedback corrupts live recordings). good or bad, it’s real-time, authentic-ass shit. but a laser reading digital information on a cd is also subject to external forces. if the dj gets too excited and bumps the cd player, it will skip - an analog event. there goes the theory.

you could argue that the sound of vinyl is more pure because its source information is, as it were, a direct analogue of the sound being played, whereas the source of the sound of a cd is ones and zeros, compiled into a stream of information that, by its nature, has gaps in it. but the gaps, assuming an appropriately high frequency rate in the signal, are inaudible to the human ear, and as such really make no difference. indeed, on the flip side, as it were, you could argue that the sound of the cd is more pure because it is far less likely to be corrupted by imperfections in the source information, or by other outside influences.

plus technically speaking the “true analogue” itself is based on friction, which can be boiled down to the atomic (read: digital) level. and on the receiving end, the sound information entering your brain is re-encoded from an analog signal (sound waves, eardrum vibrations) into a digital signal - electrical impulses firing through the tissue in your brain.

so in practical terms, digital and analog sound different, but neither necessarily sounds better than the other. and in philosophical terms, neither the nature of the source information nor the nature of the resulting sound necessarily results in a qualitative difference. i could argue all day long that the analog event, the needle tracking in the groove of the record, is by its nature better than a laser reading ones and zeros. that vinyl produces a sound that, by its nature, is better. but i’ve come to realize that philosophically it simply doesn’t hold, and that in practical terms it is just not true.