I have blogged about Blu’s previous works of art here. I absolutely love the sound design and music too, inspiring stuff. I could not find much info about the sound artist, Andrea Martignoni, but here is some more of his work on a different project.
I saw this video a while back and it really tickled my funny bone. I would be hard pressed to even give you a detailed rundown of what I did last Tuesday let alone events one thousand years distant.
I am currently half way through Jaques Barzun’s epic historical roller coaster ride “From Dawn to Decadence” and it is absolutely fascinating to read about famous-at-the-time but now completely obscure poets, artists, musicians, statesmen and Natural Philosophers who have fallen outside the narrow spotlight of our historical gaze but have exerted enormous influence on later works of art and science and the course of the modern world.
At first it seems absurd that these satirical “historians” in the video don’t simply watch archived clips of YouTube or consult Google or Wikipedia to get their “facts” straight – we are after all living in an age of hyper documentation that the Beatles easily fall inside – but on second thought, especially with Barzun’s book in mind, historical recollection is incredibly fallible. A few arbitrary tags here and there, a lazy archivist or straight up computer glitch may wreak havoc on data systems trying to sort and file the data for later extraction.
Given one thousand years to self replicate and self repair with little to no human intervention you can easily imagine some weird connections and aggregations being made.
Add to this the sheer scale of information these future historians would have to sift through and the probability that unrelated and inaccurate data become conflated rises algorithmically. Not to mention that the difference between a .jpeg and .wav are entirely human constructs, computers merely shifts galaxies of ones and zeroes back and forth and in the end it is humans (or alien archeologists) who will have to make sense of all the data in the end.
Finally and most chillingly of all digital media is integrally dependent on electronic devices to be stored and retrieved, what happens when cataclysmic events or wars disrupt our current mediums?
How will an alien archeologist read data from a memory stick or plastic DVD buried in the sand? At that point a printed TV guide from Japan would be of more use and what kind of a world would they construct from a weeks worth of Japanese TV?
I love drums and drum solos.
A good drummer for me must have the best of all nuances, funk, syncopation, rhythm and most importantly dynamic range.
I am not into Top Ten lists or notions of “Best of Anything” these are just some wicked performances I really enjoy watching and listening to again and again.
First up Vincent Colaiuta, Steve Gadd and Dave Weckl share the stage.
Then Tony Royster JR when he was just twelve years of age. He has tons of stuff up on YouTube and has grown up a lot since then but this remains my all time fave. Yeah that he is so young is a novelty but I feel it wears off after the first minute when you just know that he knows what he is doing and well damn, it’s amazing for a kid to belt out a live solo of this calibre.
The jam he busts out at around 6:10 just feeds my need.
After that I love this interview with Danny Carey from Tool where he plays along with Lateralus and talks about his influences. It’s great to get a peek into the playing style of one of the most innovative rock drummers in the last 20 years.
He also talks about the art of tuning drums and playing them “open” as opposed to damping them with tape and pillows.
And just for the insanity of it all Terry Bozzio. Words… I can’t even…
And Terry Bozzio playing the legendary Frank Zappa (careful LOUD MUSIC) composition The Black Page (solo)
And in Context.
And with that we have a neat little circle of some cool drumming.
Fantastic film for the track “Scissors” by NYC band Liars.
Liars “Scissor” from A Bruntel on Vimeo.
