For my birthday, my wife sent me packing to New York City to see Peter Gabriel perform at Radio City Music Hall. The last time I saw him perform was in 2002. I was still in college, and he was performing with his band and his usual cast of props and effects. The current tour, called 'New Blood,' was completely different. About the only thing in common between these two tours was the presence of Peter and his daughter Melanie as a backup vocalist. This tour is based on the 'Scratch My Back' project, which is a set of 12 covers of rock bands old and new released earlier this year. Each song was arranged for voice and orchestra by John Metcalfe, a former member of The Durutti Column. The songs involved include the likes of Paul Simon's Boy in a Bubble, Lou Reed's The Power of Your Heart, David Bowie's Heroes, and The Magnetic Fields' The Book Of Love (from the Strictly Ballroom soundtrack) Each artist represented is also covering one of Gabriel's tracks. These will be released piecemeal as companions to each single from 'Scratch My Back' and later on a companion album called '...And I'll Scratch Yours'. The sole unfortunate exception is that David Bowie won't be performing a cover. Instead, Brian Eno will be performing a cover of Don't Break This Rhythm.

If you will allow me one indulgence, I would have liked to see Ryuichi Sakamoto and Underworld involved in this. Gabriel would cover 8-ball and either World Citizen or See-Through, Sakamoto would cover Here Comes the Flood or The Drop, and Underworld would cover Excellent Birds. God, I am a nerd.

Although the marketing for the tour claimed a total absence of drums, guitars, and opening acts, the show opened with a short two-song set from singer/songwriter/guitarist Ane Brun, who would later serve as the other backup female vocalist. The orchestra also clearly had a bass drum on stage. The orchestra for the NYC and Montreal shows was apparently the the Orchestra of St. Luke's, augmented by some additional players. (For example the OSL has no tubist but there was one on stage) Conducting was Ben Foster who apparently writes music for Doctor Who and Torchwood. They played through the entire 'Scratch My Back' album, followed by a short intermission and an hour of rearranged Peter Gabriel back catalog (setlist here). Apparently Lou Reed played his cover of Solsbury Hill the following night.

What an incredible performance. After nearly every song I was emotionally exhausted, especially during the second half of more familiar material. Unfortunately, for Signal to Noise there was no attempt made to replace the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's voice, either with a recording or another singer. Given that the song had dead space specifically to let him improvise, it fell a bit flat. This was more than made up for by the inclusion of Red Rain, a stunning duet adaptation of Washing of the Water, and Ane Brun's excellent interpretation of Don't Give Up (better than any save Paula Cole, maybe).

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Anyway, further musical goings on. I will be playing some records between live acts at the Megapolis Festival opening concert and then for the rest of the weekend, my installation, the Republic of Nynex will be showing in the lobby of WYPR Public Radio.

My daughter bought me a copy of Hiromi Uehara's album 'Place to Be.' What a precocious 11-month old! She can't even walk and she is such a great shopper! :)

Wednesday, my in-laws came down to our house, so that my father-in-law could assist with our bathroom remodeling project. From Thursday to Saturday, our only tub was ripped out of the wall and smashed to pieces, then replaced with a new one. The sink and cabinet were also ripped apart and are just now being replaced. New flooring is down as well. My father-in-law will be down Thursday with a friend of his to continue the project, putting up wainscoting over the old tile and to cover up the wall damage from both the earlier cabinet installation and the sledgehammer extraction of the bathtub. Also getting replaced are the shower and tub fixtures. Then we paint! Then we get an electrician to put in a new circuit so we can install the new lamp and fan.

Friday night was just about the worst night of babysleep since Em was born. The first night was marked by the overexhausted spasms of the only functioning part of my brain, which I think was the monkey part. Last night was also awful, because the only way the baby would sleep was a 2 hour drive up and down Route 1. We passed the Golden Banana three times in search of a 24-hour Dunkin' with a drive thru, then drove up to the Topsfield Fairgrounds, then through Arkham to Ipswich, and back down 1A to Salem.

For her naptime, we tried the car ride again. On the way, I picked up a present for my father-in-law's birthday (a bottle of The Balvenie's Doublewood 12-year, aged in sherry casks for part of its early life, and the following beers for the house:

• Dogfish Head Chateau Jiahu (Chinese proto-beer with hawthorne fruit, Muscat grapes, honey, chrysanthemum flowers, and flaked rice)


• Dogfish Head Sahtea (Finnish proto-beer with rye, juniper berries, tea, and spices)


• Dogfish Head Pangaea (with ingredients from every continent!)


• Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Urbock


• Pretty Things Baby Tree Plum Quadrupel


• High and Mighty Home for the Holidays Brown Ale


• Thiriez Bière de Noël Christmas Amber Ale


• Nøgne Ø Tyttebær Wild Ale with lingonberries


• Southern Tier Cuvée 2


• Stone Russian Imperial Stout (x3)


• Goose Island Bourbon County Stout aged in Bourbon Barrels

My yearly bonus came in :) I will be purchasing an Akai EWI4000s!

Assorted small updates, since it's been a while:

- Picked up some stuff at the Salem Record Exchange: Mr. G, Nitzer Ebb, King Crimson, Stewart Copeland, CTR, David Sylvian and Holger Czukay, SAW, Baby Ford, and DAF. Going through all the records strewn about my office. If I know what it sounds like, it goes back in the boxes, otherwise it gets played. Not all of my records are surviving this process. I will be selling some records on Craigslist soon, and for cheep.

- If you're a WZBC person reading this, I am still looking for people to do Test Pattern this summer. Contact me for more information. You can just leave a comment below if you like.

- Tomorrow is another grand cooking day. I have a 5 pound pork loin that will turn into pork chops and the magnificent apple-sausage stuffed pork loin, possibly on the grill if it doesn't rain. I am also making baked beans from scratch using the recipe from Peace, Love, and BBQ (minus the bacon). Although I would like the rain so I don't have to water the lawn (I won't bore you) I would love to finally get the chance to do some BBQ this summer for the first time since October!

- Baby is coming any day now. We've had a number of false alarms, but no actual baby yet, or there would have been an announcement.

- The next capoeira batizado is the weekend of September 24th.

eyeCalendar

eyeCalendar is my WordPress plugin project. It fetches iCalendar format files and merges the contents together, allowing totally custom formatting on the part of the site administrator. Until recently, it featured on the sidebar over yonder → aggregating Hydrogen Economy events with many other Boston events sucked down from Facebook, Going.com, a number of public Google calendars, and Upcoming.

A bug in eyeCalendar resulted in my PHP installation consuming all available CPU on its server. As of now, it's disabled until I fix the problem. I think the root cause is in the fetch code, but I can't be sure until I test and test some more. As such the widget is disabled until I fix that problem. Since the project has not seen an actual release, I'm sure nobody actually cares except me! There is one other developer attached to the SourceForge project but he hasn't done anything.

LoopCollector

LoopCollector is an audio effect inspired by an event described by The Custodian. It cuts source audio into arbitrarily long chunks and rearranges those chunks to form a rhythmic pattern. I created this project mostly to teach myself how to program AudioUnits and VST plugins.

I began by prototyping the algorithm in a Perl script. A second version of the Perl script followed. Neither was satisfactory. Currently I'm implementing a command line version in C++. These three are all totally dependent on sox to decode and encode audio. The perl scripts open up pipes to sox and I'm pretty sure the C++ version will too. I originally wrote the code so that it could eventually form the basis of both the VST and AudioUnit versions, so I used all manner of wacky C++ template crap so that I could write code that handles floats and ints and chars and shorts without rewriting anything. I've scaled back on the wacky templates since I realized that this all a prototype anyway and probably would require massive work to fit into a VST plug-in!

I haven't got any sound samples yet, because I haven't had any satisfactory results, but as soon as I do, I will probably post them.

Music

I have radio shows on May 29th (covering NCP part 1 from 7PM to 10PM) and June 5th (Test Pattern the subject matter of which I have not yet decided, so 6PM to 7PM)

Susanna from Rare Frequency is doing a Raster-Noton Test Pattern May 29th as a preview for the Alva Noto/Byetone appearance at Middlesex.

I have some actual ideas for some actual productions bouncing around in my head. I will get them out on some format if it takes me years. The InfiniteStateMachine series on the creation of the ISM label has only helped fuel my musical aspirations.

fs1rgen

I bought a Yamaha FS1r a number of years ago and I still don't have a clue how to program the damn thing. I originally bought as the sound module to a wind controller I never bought (although maybe some day I will purchase one of the new Akai EWI USB units). The front panel is far too tiny for all the options in a single patch, and the only available Mac OS X editor is complicated despite the larger screen. What I have decided to do is use the MIDI implementation described in the manual to create a genetic algorithm of sorts that can generate patches.

Because I haven't started coding yet, I'm going to write up a design here. I'll even put it under a cut so you can skip it. Continue reading "Assorted Projects Update" »