Dendriet, Haags netwerk voor electronische muziek

The Electronic Hammer
Diego Espinosa | Henry Vega | Juan Parra
Percussion Computer Music
www.onds.com/ehammer
C O N C E R T S A N N O U C E M E N T
DisTronics______________________
Friday January 30, 21:30 hrs. 'De Effenaar', Eindhoven, NL
As part of the 'DisTronics' Festival.
More info: www.effenaar.nl
Tag__________________________
Thursday February 26, 20 hrs. Tag, Den Haag, NL
More info: www.tag004.nl

I received an interesting post by Michael D. Crawford in the iRate mailinglist. It contained a response to an article by journalism Professor Robert Boynton, titled "The Tyranny of Copyright?" published in the New York Times. (you can use "dendriet/dendriet" as L/P)

Michael D. Crawford wrote to Professor Boynton:
"My article also explores the idea that copyright is an idea whose usefulness to society has been superceded by the unprecedented ability of computers to faithfully and freely copy and transmit digital files. The section of the article called "Should Copyright Even Exist?" suggests the possibility that
computers and the Internet could create more benefit to society than copyright presently does, if copyright actually were eliminated."
Read more on his massive page that doubles as a interesting link archive.

(I dropped him the link to dendriet.nl :-)

Saturday the 31st of January Spanish sound art phenomenon Francisco Lopez is lecturing at STEIM in Amsterdam. Here is a nice quote I found on Lopez's site :

"Which are the most interesting spaces where you like to perform?

FL: I can tell you first which ones are the worst: music clubs. Probably a paradox caused by social behavior and its rampant non-respect for a non-utilitarian approach to music. It seems that a lot of people like to have some kind of "music" as a background for their activities, especially the ones that have to do with nightlife. Not that they care much for what they're listening to, but rather just one more element of the "decoration" of many places. Music clubs -even the ones featuring live music- have generally the worst sound systems. Systems designed to blast and overcompete the chattering of crowds; systems designed for traditional electronic instruments like guitars and amplified drums; systems designed for the traditional presentation of frontal sound coming from a frontal stage. Then it's the absurd separation between the ones producing the music on stage (the band or the artist) and the one controlling (the sound guy) what the band is listening on stage -through monitors- and what the audience is really hearing -through the main speakers, so the band never really knows what's actually happening with what they're doing, at least at a phenomenological level. This is an historically more or less direct translation from the tradition of opera/ theater onto rock/pop culture and then onto electronic culture (laptops/DJs on stage). And then it's the bar, which is obviously great for drinks, hanging out and chattering with friends, but too bad for music, at least the kind of music I'm interested in creating live.
Now, where can you find (or be able to get) a non-crappy, non-frontal sound system, a quiet dry environment, with flexibility for the set up and -what's even more essential- a focused mood in the audience?: modern theaters. Paradox again: the translation of theater conditions into music-devoted spaces gives rise to the worst conditions, whereas the incursion of music into the realm of modern theaters (meaning an open large space with flexible organization of the sound system and the audience) offers the best possibilities. To be sure, this is a very subjective perspective, based on my personal endeavour to create intense, rich, immersive experiences in sound, which optimally require surround systems, darkness, quietness and comfortable seats/matresses for the audience. This kind of flexible environment offers also the opportunity (although very few take advantage of it) of overcoming the classical separation of stage/sound board, by simply being in the middle of the sonic field, with the audience." (from loop, chile)

STEIM is located in de Utrechtsedwarsstraat in amsterdam.

After some time in osX several apple users in my surroundings are getting quite nostalgic about the apple menu from os9. I must admit, I still sometimes move the cursor into the upperleft corner and then at the last moment move down to the dock again..... Old habits die hard. Opinions anyone?

Since we are following the RIAA and stg.Brein quite intensly here on this website, I'll link you to the next episode in RIAA fight against downloaders. ALL US Internet Service Providers refuse to hand over the names and addresses of filesharers to the RIAA. The RIAA, in turn, will do the courtcase against 600+ i.p. addresses, hoping that - if they win - the judge will force the ISPs to open up. Fighting i.p. addresses... How close is that to fighting windmills?

I hope that xs4all is not the only morally strong ISP in .nl . But even they do not seem to have a strong position since the radikal case. Also, the dutch are well know for logging their citizens communication, so I bet they allready connected me to my i.p. numbers as well as to this site.

BTW: most of our mp3's are legal, except for the ones by buma members. Yet they are all here

an open dir with stereo mars images. They look like cellular automata prints. Maybe nice for input in an algoritmic composition.

We have a new commenting thingy here, which is supposed to contain all the previous comments as well. Any comments?

I wish all boids did.
Andah... The comments will all come back soon! (see the comments-webpage link under the posted below)

Diego Espinosa | Henry Vega | Juan Parra
Percussion Computer Music
www.onds.com/ehammer

C O N C E R T S A N N O U C E M E N T

Kraakgeluiden Overtoom 301, Amsterdam, NL
Monday 19, 21:30 hrs.
'Kraakgeluiden Werkplaats' Concert Series
Guest: Martijn van Boven, Live video.

DisTronics
Friday 30, 21:30 hrs. 'De Effenaar', Eindhoven, NL
As part of the 'DisTronics' Festival.

"The Gulf Tour" March 14 - April 8 2004
Havana (Cuba) - Mexico City (Mexico) - Houston (USA) - Denton (USA)

With the support of:
Gaudeamus foundation
The Institute of Sonology
Mexican Embassy in The Netherlands

warprecords just put their whole back catalogue online. No apple, no major, just the artist, the distributer, and the high quality mp3 files (~205kbps VBR). And: "Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals - DRM is easily circumvented and just puts obstacles in the way of enjoying music."

Any track you ever uploaded to mp3.com can be used for shopping centres and elevators now. Any song? Yes. Unless you opted out. Their FAQ is an interesting read. They present it like a feature, rather then abuse. but...
14. Will I still retain rights to my song?
As always, you maintain complete control over your song. You are free to promote it in any other way.
Interestingly enough, this is not a "yes"! Rights=/=control. And even that 'control' is limited, see question 11:
11. How will I know if my song is selected?
Currently, the only way of knowing if your song has been selected for use in a playlist is by receiving a quarterly royalty payment.
So you'll need to hang around in us-elevators a lot to check if they tell you the truth.

Complaining is so m$. They give you tons of boxes that tell you cannot do what you want. "you may not click here" and all you can do is say/click "ok", and they call that a dialog screen. Reminds me of the the computer game we used to play that told us many a time that the foliage was much to dense for us to pass through. We new it was. Just ignore we said "west", and write the comment in a f*cking log. "told them the foliage is much to dense for them to pass through" for the 322nd time on 12-3-1986 @ 00:25 CET."
Safari writes in its statusbar: "Completed opening the page with 1 error (see Activity window for details)".

See how you can obtain a dendrite cd for free!

Since our comments-server is down, I switched on autocommenting:
[autocomment #1]Burning cd's like this is a common habit we picked up years ago, I know. Nothing new.[/autocomment]
[autocomment #2]Yeah, but this one comes with a nice picture[/autocomment]
[autocomment #3]The pic sucks[/autocomment]
[autocomment #4][removed]following comments were deleted on the grounds that they violate the good name the internet has.[/autocomment]

The thing with the comments being offline is making it impossible to view this log with microschoft hinternet exploder. At least on my system (mac OS 10.2.8 using exploder 5.2).
Safari is not complaining....

There are two major unsolvable issues with speakers. a) the box resonates b) the speakercone is to heavy, and thus resonates.
We are now thinking of speakers of a different kind: Plasma is nice near-weightless stuff. Leon found a nice idea for a tweeter and woofer (just tune the mf to 63Hz), so I was thinking of a two way speaker. A teslacoil would make a nice full range speaker. A jacobsladder alone would make a nice speaker for my basssynth. What a bright sound! And those sparks look like dendrites! But doesn't it hurt?

Het stond hier in de comments, maar nu heb ik er een webpagina van gemaakt:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~krooshof/muziek/devierdewand.html

Due to the fact that the server that hosted the comments thingy is offline, the javascripting on this page triggers error messages in stead of calling content. I expect the comments to come online soon, so, so I'll leave the code alive for the time being. Sorry about the errors.

I visited the sonology discussion concert last night (for the first time as EX-student!!).
Juan Parra played his tape piece "Tellura". A real nice one !!! Basic material was taken from (underwater) sonar recordings from the pacific ocean that Juan got from a friend in south america. And material from seismographic readouts of earthquakes.
Another name to check is Yutaka Makino. With his (untitled) live piece for two laptops (+ max/msp) and a small mixer he managed to show us his sense of dynamics and epic build ups. He took his time, started very minimal and at the climax point he sort of reminded me (in sound texture!!!) of Merzbow and Xenakis (as far apart as these people may seem...).
As always the beer was nice and cold !!

The comments were hosted here. I do need other scripts that upload the shit to my serverspace at xs4all. they never lost a byte. more here: http://www.bighar.com/blogspeak/

I'm currently emailing the guy who hosts c.q. lost the comments.
Meanwhile, a nice osx read.
comment about the movies: Geil (@ernst, that comment was in German, not in dutch.) Die muzik in die andere films sind sehr shitty. bummer.

Leon just showed me a very cool fractal algorithm based movie it is here:fleischfilm.com
NO Dave, despite of what the URL suggests IT IS NOT **P**O**R**N !!!
The film's maker is called Thorsten Fleisch.

musician/composer/scribent/performer Lucas Simonis has just opened, or at least spammed for, his new website. There's some Dutch leesvoer there as well.

I wrote an article in Dutch, posted here as a comment to this entry, about a cognitive dissonance that occurs in the brains of people whatching a (pop)music performance. Comments are welcome, from all points of view: musicians, audience, sound- as well as light technicians.

I would just like to send you all greetings and a good new year from Norway! It is by now finally snowing... aaahh real winters still exist!!!

This is how you do it: Cheap (5 euro), international, and available for downloading. This way, you are sure the mp3 files that will fly around, meet your quality standards. (Now let's hope Funxiun is not a Buma member)
Get your electro-shot here, as mp3 or disk...