The Hydrogen Project - Articles

Irony

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:28:47 -0400

This weekend is the Salem CultureFest, basically a small arts festival with some typical carnival attractions. Pretty much everything was of a multicultural bent: African instruments for sale, Japanese calligraphy demos, reggae band, drum circles, etc.

In the middle of yesterday's program was a demonstration by the K-9 unit of the Salem Police. Does this strike anyone else as a bizarre entry?

Crazy Spam

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:51:08 -0400

I think these guys have their religions confused. What the heck?

Sex For Christians - Hot Christtian Sex Techniques!

With prowess equal to that of the great indra, of hatred to the intelligent son of kunti. Indeed,.

Sex For Christians - Hot Christtian Sex Techniques! Learn more

Foremost of carwarriors, uttering a loud roar rattling of blocks and cordagethe first puff of feels no desire for any particular taste, after regenerate rishis, the sinless
kesava the god a large area is taken up with grave moundscommon know me now to have completed my vow.' uttara never enter the brahmana's heart for the brahmana none regarded the calamity caused by bhishma's son kripa, o king, began to afflict the son of by the name of atharvasiras. Thou art he who is immediately before. O thou of kuru's race, it inspired scriptures and oral traditions, mahomedanism.

WZBC Test Pattern Schedule Spring 2009

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:28:54 -0500

For those previously unaware, I handle the scheduling for WZBC's TEST PATTERN. Test Pattern airs every Friday from 6 to 7pm on WZBC, 90.3FM. Each week, a different WZBC DJ hosts a one hour show featuring the music of a particular artist, band, label, or scene of his or her choice. Here is the schedule from not until early June.

Jan 23 - Stephen - Situation Two
Jan 30 - Rob - The Strawbs
Feb 6 - James - Long Fin Killie
Feb 13 - Pip - LSD Acronym Songs
Feb 20 - Matt - Dirty Three tour-only releases
Feb 27 - Jim - Editions Brokenresearch
Mar 6 - Andrew - Ghost Box
Mar 13 - John - SXSW Music Preview
Mar 20 - MKB - Octave One
Mar 27 - James - Subject TBD
April 3 - Carrigan - Subject TBD
April 10 - James - Subject TBD
April 17 - Nick - Pulp B-sides and Rarities
April 24 - Tom - Subject TBD
May 1 - Peter - The Blake Babies
May 8 - Carrigan - Subject TBD
May 15 - Ryan - Flowers for Reagan
May 22 - Sarah - TBD
May 29 - MKB - TBD
June 5 - Susanna - Raster-noton

Ch Ch Changes

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:25:54 -0500

Wow, it's been a long time since I've updated this site. Over a month! For that I am sorry. I have a number of good excuses though.

The first is that I spent a lot of time in October trying to find a new job. I started this past Monday at Akamai Technologies, where I will be working on log processing. That may sound boring, but think about what Akamai does, and how much traffic they handle every day (6 million hits per second!) That results in some ridiculous number of terabytes of log data per day!

The second is that I have been preparing for my second batizado. I have never actually talked about capoeira on this site before, but I have been training in capoeira for the past two years, and I aim to keep going until I need to get joints replaced. A batizado is an annual event for a capoeira group where students who qualify move up in rank. I received my second cordao, which meant that I had to fight seven masters of capoeira until one of them finally got me on the floor. Maybe it wasn't seven; I lost count. :) I am spending today recovering my strength.

Anyway, I will be posting some old playlists here. I will also be writing more about computers and capoeira, since I don't actually write so well about music.

Richie Hawtin's Man-portable Borg Cube

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:02:36 -0400

*ahem*

Contakt is a series of events featuring more open collaboration between M_nus artists and a fancy WiFi hotspot that you can share files with. Also, it glows. Also, ridiculous photo shoot.

Philip Sherburne interviews Carl Craig for The Wire

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:59:38 -0400

Philip Sherburne interviews Carl Craig in this month's The Wire.

Mr. Sherburne plays records for Mr. Craig as icebreakers. They are almost all related to Craig in some way, which gives the interview a "This Is Your Life" feel (or a creepy stalker feel). [via]

From the archives - Ryan Kick, Sergio Santos, and Mo7s

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 21:41:51 -0400

I just happened to find this laying around on my hard drive. No idea on the tracklist or even the date. I've got more tapes and Minidiscs in my closet that have to be encoded to MP3, including more from this night.

Karlheinz Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:54:08 -0500

Karlheinz Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet

Background on this crazy piece.

Villalobos Intervew

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 10:39:21 -0500

XLR8R interview with Ricardo Villalobos, wherein he discusses many things.

My particular favorite answer:

Would you have the desire to come and try your infusion concept live?

If there is something special, of course. IÂ�ve been remixing Philip Glass, for example. But this is really abstract American music. If there is something I could listen to as possible for the dance hall then yes, of course. But American music is a mixture of so many things and cultures itÂ�s so hard to define. Even the electronic music of what we call Chicago and Detroit is a mixture of African and new technologies of string sounds and classical influences. ItÂ�s so mixed and difficult to define. ItÂ�s easier to say, Â�This is Gypsy music.Â� American music is everything, all the Latin influences, how Cuba and Puerto Rico went to New York and itÂ�s like a salsa. And itÂ�s wonderful.

LastGraph

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:03:20 -0400

Via Moodmat, LastGraph is a cool Last.FM toy that will graph the weight over time of your listening habits. It's purty.

You can share the generated PDFs and SVGs right from their site. Makes sense; your Last.FM listening history is totally public anyway. I am a bit depressed by the large lull for the entire month of September, but seeing the trends over the past few months is very weird. I listen to random subsets of my collection on shuffle, but there are pockets where I end up listening to one artist for a huge proportion that I can't explain.

My name is Zoom and I live on the Moon.

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:53:54 -0400

Now that we're moving into an actual house, my mom decided to pawn off this box containing artifacts from my youth. It has things like my baby book, cards written to my mom from her students when she left to have me, finger paintings from age 3, and the like. It also has birthday cards. One such birthday card was an unopened copy of a CAPTAIN ZOOM BIRTHDAY RECORD. It's a single-sided paper thin 7" record with a drawing to color in, some lyrics, and an order form. I was expecting to take a bunch of pictures and rediscover this obscure treasure, but it gets 302,000 hits on google and the makers still sell custom CD's with the same damn song, including a WEDDING version. (wtf?)

Some people considered listening to the Zoom song every year to be a tradition. Beware, flickery backgrounds ahead.

Fête de la Musique

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:05:36 -0400

Today is the world's best holiday, and it's too bad that we don't celebrate it here. The Fête de la Musique (Feast of Music) was conceived by the French government in 1981 and first held in 1982. To the outsider, it may appear to be a government-organized music festival. After all, local governments post schedules of officially-sanctioned events featuring music of all kinds. Performances are by no means limited to official ones. The government simply publishes a list of suggestions for organizing your own event. Noise ordinances are not enforced. Open container laws appear to be ignored as well. Public transportation gets packed beyond capacity and the roads are nearly entirely blocked by pedestrians.

When I lived in Grenoble 5 (!) years ago, I remember going to one of three separate techno parties in Parc Paul Mistral. I had roamed the city for a few hours before with a nice big 3€ bottle of Leffe. I saw a noise-punk trio using a telephone handset for a microphone, a cheap duct-taped keyboard and a busted guitar. A house party with a DJ had the windows open and speakers facing the street. Every kebab and tea shop had a traditional band playing. Salsa and merengue bands took over a different park in the city.

Maybe it's not as hectic when it's not on a Friday as it was last year, but I still think we in the US should adopt this celebration.

Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 10:50:15 -0400

This morning I dropped my wife off at work at 6:30 AM. She's headed to DC with her school until Saturday morning. To top it off, we only got four hours of sleep last night since we decided to go see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie and got back after midnight. You can imagine my annoyance when I see my neighbor from across the street standing in my driveway!

I see this guy a lot. He is typically either sitting on his front steps or pacing back and forth on the sidewalk in front of his house. Sometimes he laughs maniacally. He gets picked up by the MBTA RIDE so I figure I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and drive around the block. Maybe he'll be gone when I get back. Otherwise I call the cops.

I take my car past the high school, which usually isn't open this time of the morning. Oddly, there are a lot of people hanging around on the soccer field. Soccer practice in the morning? Unlikely, it's raining, and most of them aren't high school age. Plus, they're just walking around aimlessly.

Maybe I'm just sleeping.

I pull around back to my driveway. My neighbor is gone, but his RIDE pickup is sitting on the street. Empty, with the headlights on and the driver's door open. What's going on? I'm going inside. I unlock the door, but before I lock up, I unlock the bikes and take them inside too. Something isn't right, and if there's some messed up gasoline crisis riot, I will need transportation that's faster than walking. I'm too tired to process right now. It's naptime.

I wake up, not to my alarm, but the noise of my cats hissing and growling at the door. They've been fighting more than usual lately, so I head over to break it up, only to find that they're not hissing at each other. There's an ARM reaching through my mail slot! A bloody arm! What is going on? I start to call the cops as I head back upstairs. (someone getting murdered on the front stairs freaks one out) The other end picks up and I start to tell him what is going on. Immediately my mind goes back to the empty RIDE van, so I run to the front porch and take a better look. There's now a bloody trail leading from the empty van to my front steps, and the arm belongs to someone in a T uniform! I can see my neighbor walking towards the high school soccer field. His hands are bloody, and then he stops. He turns, slowly, and I can see that is mouth is bloody, too! Did he BITE the RIDE guy to death?

Evidently not, because the body is moving.

As I continue relaying this information to the police, I start hearing screams and gunshots over the phone. The line goes dead. Below, I can hear the moaning of the RIDE driver and I realize the situation.

Fuck.

Zombies.

I curse my delay in buying firearms, but wait a minute. Flames are better against zombies anyway! Mental catalog of flammable items in the house: Old newspapers, gasoline, paint, drain opener, nail polish, bug spray, rubbing alcohol. Carpeted cat tree. I have a lot of knives, too. Those can kill a zombie with a head shot, right? If not, my landlord has a garage full of landscaping equipment.

OK, first things first. Get the RIDE zombie off my porch. I can safely cut his arm off without risk of a bite. I grab a cleaver, open the inner door, and take it off it one shot. Zombie bones are brittle. The thing reaches its other arm through, and that one gets chopped also. Hopefully that will stall them, as I don't trust the deadbolt. Our foyer has a big, heavy shelf unit. I bar the door with that.

I have enough food stocks for a couple days for myself and the animals. If the power goes out, I just might need to cook on a fire of zombie flesh. First plan, destroy the two zombies in the front yard, then siphon the gas out of the cars while the coast is still clear. My landlord is a cop. I'm sure he's well armed. His wife and kids are not at home, and he may not have made it out of the police station alive. Next step, armor the bicycles, grab everything flammable, and start looking up plans for flamethrowers. I am not going down easy.

Source

Hope this never happens to me

nospam@example.com (mkb) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 11:05:36 -0400

From the Tech house list:

So a local environmental group was throwing an open air concert over the
weekend, "Heather Nova and Friends."

One of the friends of Heather Nova was a German DJ named ATB - I guess he's
huge in the Europe / Eurotrance scene (You can hear a sample of his music
and info on the environmental group here:
http://www.greenrock.org/nova/index.php?page=atb but be warned this is
SERIOUSLY bad music.)

Anyhow, he cancelled last minute and so they booked me. The concert was a
great success, more of a family event.

The best part is that even though I was last to play, there were still lots
of kids there, and by coincidence I packed my "Sesame Street Disco" record,
so I got to play Robin Gibbs' version of "C is for Cookie" and the kids went
nuts! The rest of the set went really well too.

The worst part: Everybody thought/thinks I'm ATB. I had people cheering
"ATB" after the set and asking me when I got in from Germany. I had a girl
come into the booth and tell me how she saw me play in Ibiza. Even the
paper says I'm ATB.

Arrrgh!