White Bit vs Afrofuturism

There’s not enough Africa in computers, Brian Eno once said. And the same could probably be said about computer users, especially those who claim to work with obsolete technologies. It seems like a quite, uhm, white subculture. Perhaps even the “total white music” like Burzum supposdely said. Urgh.

A few months ago I went to a shop in Stockholm that sells African art. There were chairs made from tyers, bowls made of telephone wires and other so-called appropriations of technologies. To make some conversation with the shop keeper, I said “it’s good to see that they’re re-using the materials around them”. But then I felt so white that I probably became red.

Because what’s the difference, really, between using wood or wires or bits? What’s the difference if it’s 5, 50 or 5000 years old? You take stuff and turn it into other stuff. Assemble it with other things, tweak it, bend it. There’s nothing new with that. We do it with complex digital and analogue technologies now. So what? It seems a bit arrogant to put more value into something simply because it’s a manipulation of a commercial product. The historiography of this needs to look further back than circuit bending in the 1960′s.

Dweller’s Amiga disk backup in Lego.

It is of course an understandable starting point for those who are focused on breaking free from a commodity culture:  a world where all of our tools are built with a consumerist logic. Perfect presets, intuitive interfaces, constant updates: the product is the medium. If you want to be an autonomous individual, you’ll probably get sucked into discourses like noise, indeterminism, retromania and appropriation. These so-called critical tactics seem to be just as normalized as many other counter-cultural ideas of the 1960′s. But maybe it’s time to move on? That’s what I feel. All that criticism is like 100 years old so its ideological base is sort of ideologically obsolete. :)

We’ve become rather similar to a cargo cult. We build strange myths and rituals around objects that we don’t understand. There’s all kinds of weird shit being thrown at us and we don’t really know why we’re getting them and what to do with it. Some people say that it’s part of a military conspiracy, others that it’s a democratic saviour. But we all use it.

There is a similar problem with art that criticizes copyright, patents and all that. It’s considered to be subversive to use copyrighted material (less everyday, but still). In the documentary Sonic Outlaws (1995), Negativland does this. They portray themselves almost as freedom fighters (which reminds me of Punishment Park). But in the same film, Tape Beatles don’t explain their methods as a problem. It’s just a common sense thing to do. Pracitical and fun. There’s nothing to it. Of course it depends on what context you are working in and so on. But the point is: there is a risk that these methods only reinforce the thing that you want to change.

Okay okay, but where do we go from here? Afrofuturism is an interesting field to draw from. Although I just started reading about, it seems to have very useful ideas about hacking, sci-fi (not just for the future) and the relationship between humans and machines. Afrika Bambaataa, listed as a musicin in afrofuturism, was very inspired by Kraftwerk. In all their robotnik romantikz he saw an understanding of themselves as already having been robots, argues Tricia Rose and continues:

Adopting ‘the robot’ reflected a response to an existing condition: namely, that  they were labor for capitalism, that they had very little value as people in this society. So it was a way to play with the idea of robots, but also to put on an armour against manipulation which Rammelzee (below) did so well with his low-tech body suit.

The armour is a good metaphor. Good things need to be protected. Turntablism and techno built a sort of armour around political struggle and highly competent techno-skills, by camouflaging it as dance music. People were dancing to the beat of resistance without even knowing it. There was no need for outspoken counter-cultural poetry, since it was all about the music and the machines. Frequencies.

Consider how pioneers like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash were working with new technological methods. Perhaps there was not much politics in the resulting music, but as a new form of assemblage of man-music-technologies-entertainment it certainly had political relevance. Now compare that to what Reed Ghazala did with his circuit bending. He seems to be aiming more for art and democracy. Bending becomes something for high-brow shoegazing, stoners and communist librarians who want to teach kids how to reclaim the commodities. /me ducks and covers

But isn’t it more relevant to be able to program than make noise? I’d say it is. Maybe because I’m not a programmer :). For some it comes more natural to simply use what’s available, and make stuff with it. And if it’s not such an introvert process, perhaps something more useful than counter-culture comes out of it. Sometimes, it’s because there’s no other way: acute solutions to a flood, lights without electricity and sometimes it’s just quick n’ dirty trixxx.

Actually, I think this is what many artists are doing. It’s just that they are using the discourse of obsolete hacking in order to make a living from it (or sth). That’s great and I don’t blame them for it. We all make compromises, I guess. But what are they going to do when the hype is over?

Towards a Genre Materiality

This is a somewhat theoretical post meant to underpin future posts about something I call genre materiality atm. The point is to describe how screens have gone from passive transporters to active participants. Their qualities play an important role in media literacy and human taste. Screens are a good example of genre materiality, since they are still considered to be quite neutral whereas most other media are under the scrutiny of constructivism. It’s not as obvious as e.g sound storage media, or computers.

The screen used to be a syringe. Before the age of TV, academics thought that media consumers were injected with the message of the sender. Humans were seen as passive receivers, and the screens were like passive relays.

Fast-forwarding to the 1980’s, most things in the world was described as social constructions. Technology was considered to be shaped by culture and controlled by humans. Afaik, this perspective was applied much to screens (although the McLuhanites probably wrote something?). Even in the height of postmodern SCOT, screens were somehow able to be left out of the constructivism. And they still are. Screens are just, you know, showing what we feed them with. They don’t really affect the content.

But if you’ve ever been involved with printing, you know that screens are manipulative little bastards. People tend to blame the printers, but screens are calibrated differently and therefore the printers seem to print it wrong. There are professional calibrators out there, who come to calibrate your screen-printer-lifestyle. Then it’s smooth sailing from there.

Moving on to here and now, screen qualities have become crucial parts not only for hipster literacy and nerd aesthetics, but for pop culture at large. We interpret images differently due to the artefacts of the screen. It doesn’t take long for us to understand how old something is (supposed to look). We can feel a difference between CRT-screens and plasma screens. Right? Obviously, it’s easier to see the difference with production and storage technologies (VHS-camcorder versus 16mm film), but it’s there with screens too.

For example – modern TVs have a mode that doubles the framerate. It makes for a good sales pitch, since you can show soccer games to old men and demonstrate how smooth and clear the game is. But if you watch a movie in this enhanced mode, it totally destroys the atmosphere of the movie (atleast until you get used to it). The cheap interpolation algorithms used to create the new frames can make any movie look like a cheap camcorder class reunion party. I suppose that there are good aspects of it too, like the ability to make faster pans and tilts without revealing the framerate. After all, cinema has a pretty low frame rate, which likely has affected the genre of film.

So the screen becomes an active participant in the experience. Just like media consumers have gone from being (considered as) passive to active, so has the media themselves.

Some screen qualities can also be important for genres. In some cases, you can’t even use modern screens. If you create media-specific visuals and/or use machines that have an odd output signal (like a PAL C64 running in 50.125 Hz) you are likely to run into problems with modern screens or beamers, as I’ve written about before. More importantly though - you lose the qualities of the screen. Ian Bogost talks about e.g texture, noise and color bleed as important parts of the experience. This results in a very different experience from watching it in, for example, laser. Still, it is not all clear which is the most accurate representation: clear non-emulated pixels on a modern screen, or CRT-mangled images on a TV.

Even music could, with some effort, be connected to the screen. For platforms where the whole system is connected to the framerate of the screen, you would get a different tempo and tone with PAL and NTSC respectively. The music is tied to the raster beam of the CRT screen.

I will return to this in the future, and make something out of it. For now I have to go to a farm, and I’m also working on two texts that’ll hopefully be published later this year. Cowabunga, chipsters!

 

Al Warka and the Iraqi Home Computer Scene

The history of home computer hacking seems to be very centered around Europe, US and Australia. But it’s important to not forget other regions. I’ve previously written about C64 cracking in Argentina, but there’s lots more to research about e.g Asia, Africa and the Middle East. After reading this blogpost I got in touch with Salwan Asaad, who told me more about the early days of home computing in Basrah, Iraq. As it turns out, it was similar to what I grew up with: platform wars, competitions, floppy swapping and meetings. Salwan:

Annual school competition on a local and national level in students developed demos [..] Gaming circles: I met many enthusiasts back then at the arcades, we used to gather up and go to arcades to play, talk, and exchange floppies. The last such gathering took place around 2001

While other arabic countries settled for the MSX-computers, which Salwaan refers to as “the enemy”, Iraq developed a unique series of computers called Al-Warkaa (or Al-Warka), named after an ancient babylonian city in Iraq. There were two popular models, which were both based on Japanese home computers. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any photos of them but Salwan told me that it looked like the NEC-ones, but in white instead of black. (photo from old-computers.com)

The Al-Warkaa PC-6002 was the Iraqi version of the Japanese NEC PC-6001 Mk2 SR. Soundwise, it used the the common AY-soundchip but I found a similar model that had a built-in speech synthesis (yeah!). It was probably the first home computer that could sing (my YouTube-playlist).

The Al-Warkaa, unfortunately, didn’t have this feature. Instead, it offered an extra soundchip (probably FM, judging from what Salwan says) with 3 voices. It had 12 preset sounds and also the ability to make custom sounds. A home computer with both FM and PSG built in! It seems that the NEC also was able to combine FM and PSG, just look at this great demo!

The Al-Warkaa PC-6002 had seven different BASIC-versions built in. One of them (mode 7) was the Arabic text mode - a complete arabic text editor with abilities like searching, replacing, printing, and could even format floppies, according to Salwaan.

Unfortunately, Salwan doesn’t know of any text art on the Al Warkaa. I haven’t seen much arabic text-mode stuff at all, actually (if you know of any, please get in touch). To get an idea of the possibilities though, here’s a chart showing how the characters looked in the MSX-computers (copied from msxblue).

The platform battle in Iraq was between MSX and Al Warka. Atari also released arabic computers (and ROM-upgrades for hebrew), like the rare Najm 65XE from which the first picture is from. The most popular MSX-version in Arabia was the MSX 170 which was called Al-Sakhr (“the rock”). While MSX was popular in many different countries, the Al Warkaa was mostly found in Iraq. MSX-users had professional Arabic manuals at hand, but the Warkaa’ers relied on photo-copied English manuals that were mostly focused on BASIC. Salwaan writes:

That’s kinda how Warka guys ended up losing in most head-to-head competitions to MSX guys, the best we can do is draw stuff using BASIC commands and may be binary-load an image from disk to accelerate displaying bitmaps a little. They were doing hardware-sprites and full-motion graphics…

If anyone reading has more knowledge about arabic demos or text-mode things, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail info at goto80 dot com. Finally, a big thanks to Salwan Asaad for sharing this!

New Bruce Sterling According to Aesthetics

I read something that Bruce Sterling wrote about New Aesthtics. It seems to be rougly an aesthetics that occurs inbetween man and machine. Lots of infographics, glitches, cybernetics, physical computing and all that.

I wasn’t aware that this was a thing. I’ve been following the Tumblr ever since it featured 2SLEEP1, which I made with Raquel Meyers. I don’t know, but perhaps what I do has something to do with new aesthetics?

Reading his text was quite interesting, to start with. I think he’s managed to pin down some rather ‘contemporary things’. But when he dissed 8-bit aesthetics he lost me. Of course. Sterling writes that retro ’80s graphics are sentimental fluff for modern adults who grew up in front of 1980s game-console machines.

Yes, sometimes it is. Probably most of the time. Just like almost anything else can be dissed as being ‘nostalgic’. It’s too easy to disregard ’8bit’ as anything with large pixels. That’s not really the point. Not to me anyway. I’ve become accustomed to this style of expression, just like he is accustomed to books, magazines, records, or whatever he’s into. Most 8-bit graphics are pretty boring, just like most books are. But I wouldn’t diss books as being nostalgic fluff, would I?

For me, his primary mistake is to try to separate man from machine, culture and nature, object and subject. New aesthetics is about exploring the exact opposite to that, I thought? When it all comes together. When irrogation creates patterns that look like text art from space. Or when your own camera has a better view of a concert than yourself. Also, I’m not sure why aesthetics has to be only about images. If anything, it should include sounds too?

Sterling writes that machines are not our friends or art critics. At the risk of sounding naive — I’d say that they’re getting pretty close. If all your Facebook-friends were bots, would you know the difference? If the plays, likes and downloads of your works were all performed by bots – would it make you sad?

Sterling says that machines lack cognition, ethics and taste. I say: how would he know, and even if it’s true, who cares? For me that’s irrelevant. It seems a lot more interesting to explore the area inbetween human concepts and machinic concepts (whatever that would be).

I guess Sterling is responding to some sort of debate that I’ve completely missed. Also I admit that I haven’t read much of his texts at all, so perhaps I’m ignorant of the context. Anyway. I do agree with some of the things he says, such as:

An intellectually honest New Aesthetic would have wider horizons than a glitch-hunt. It would manifest a friendlier attitude toward non-artistic creatives and their works. It would be kinder with non-artists, at ease with them, helpful to them, inclusive of them, of service to them. It’s not enough to adopt a grabbier attitude toward the inanimate products of their engineering.

Engineers are great. But not even them can predict what a machine will be able to do in the future. With some good feedback from humans, they can do some fuuuckkedd uppp shiiit maaaan.

PS. My own works are heavily based on manual work. Just listen to 2SLEEp1. I’m perhaps more interested in the human craft side of new aesthetics. Still, I find Sterling’s humanism pretty retro-nostalgic.

What happened in 2006?

Time for some statistic disco! Four years ago I thought that the term chipmusic was doomed, because chiptune was so popular. Let’s have a look if things have changed.

This graph from Google Insights shows the increase in the amount of searches for chipmusic. The increase is probably caused by the launch of chipmusic.org (in early 2010, right?). I believe that Blip Festival switched from chiptune to chipmusic around the same time, but I could be wrong. So, it seems like chipmusic is back! Right?

Wrong! You see that little blue line at the bottom? That’s chipmusic. Now look at the red line at the top, flying lying a killer hawk in the skies. That’s chiptune. Well, atleast it stopped its increase during 2011. Micromusic (in orange) is now about as popular as the term chipmusic. “Chip music” (in green) shows a very similar development to micromusic.

So why is there such a huge difference between the tune and the music? Since Insights doesn’t go further back than 2004, it’s hard to say. We can’t see how the McLaren bonanza affected things, for example. (If anyone knows how to search -2004, let me know). But it’s clear that in 2005 the terms were rather equal. They were battling it out. But chiptune won. In 2006-2007 it was taking off. So what happened back then?

The first Blip Festival happened at the end of the year. That probably made chipmusic a lot more popular in the US. And once something is big in the US it probably gets big elsewhere too, right? It’s the freedom virus! ^__^ But what else happened that could have caused this? Several artists got attention outside of the scene. David Sugar, Bodenständig 2000, Nullsleep & Bitshifter with their big tour, Paza and those 8 bit rappers (via Beck), DJ Scotch Egg. Hopefully I made some impression aswell – I made three gigs and one release every month in 2007 :). But perhaps it was the dawn of 8bitcollective (as music.gameboymall.com) that made the difference? Any ideas?

Btw - USA is not the country where chiptune is the most popular search term. It’s not a European country either. And it’s neither Japan nor China. Not Australia either. And it’s not somewhere in South America. It’s Indonesia!

For those of you who don’t know, Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world. And the people who Google in Indonesia, they like chiptune twice as much compared to Norway (which comes in second). To put it in a weird way. I remember when this guy called Jar-Wo contacted me in 2006/2007. At that time there wasn’t much going on, but he was one of the people who got it started. Big up, Jar-Wo! (and rest in peace)

Update March 17: As Optiroc pointed out in the comments, it’s also interesting to see how “keygen music” relates to these.  It has quite steady (relative) amount of Google searches. For the past years it’s been 4 times as popular as chipmusic/chip music/micromusic – and 4 times less popular than chiptune: http://is.gd/1uTBs7.

Progress – Are You With It or Against It?

Technological progress has become second nature. It’s generally assumed that technology becomes better all the time. It used to mean that more quantity led to higher quality (more pixels, bytes, options, etc). Nowadays it’s often the opposite. Quality comes from stripped down interfaces, curated collections, filters, etc.

While this techno-progressivism grew alongside consumerism, there was an opposing idea within art and academia. They opposed this development, usually from the perspectives of critical theory. There was already a long history of anti-modernism anyway.

Today it’s still popular to talk about critical uses of media. I’m not sure what it means, but it usually implies a better use of technology. It can be smarter (hacking) or more stupid (dadaist circuit-shocking) or even mainstream (spectacle subversion). And it’s been like that for atleast 50 years?

They are two sides of the same coin. They need eachother to survive and they sustain eachother. The expression “creating something new with the old” is one example. This is relevant to say because of the wide-spread misconception that cutting edge ideas require new technologies. But they don’t. The retrofuturistic hauntology – going back and exploring forgotten paths – is another example. These paths are not old. They are new!

The argumentation here is far from solid. It’s a bit explorative. So I appreciate comments. But it feels like these things somehow confirm techno-progress as second nature. It takes it for granted and makes it stronger. But is it possible to avoid that? Is it something to strive for? I’m not sure. But here are three suggestions.

If you don’t like planned obsolescence, don’t talk about it all the time. And stop calling my tools obsolete. What’s your agenda, soldier? They are obviously not obsolete. Retromania is commercial. Old media are expensive. New media is trying to catch up with the qualities of their ancestors. Teletext has everything that the webb lacks!

Stop talking about limitations. It doesn’t matter if you use quotation marks – you’re still saying the same thing. Every medium has unique potentials (theoretically, atleast). It’s not a bug it’s a feature. Always!

We like friction! It seems pretty popular. Tumblr and Twitter have pretty bad interfaces, right? Instagram is described as quirky, iirc? People want odd interfaces – we’re not really looking for invisible and ultimate interfaces anymore. If we spend time and effort to do things (instead of some automatic super solution) we feel good! We don’t want Newton, we want DIY. He he.

Where Did Free and Open Ever Get Us?

The Dutch theorist Geert Lovink has a long history of activistic academia – often talking about tactical uses of the media. Here he discusses several issues that I’ve been thinking about lately.

“In these times of ongoing financial crisis we can no longer afford to celebrate ‘free’ and ‘open’ as the default on the Web and pretend that it is everyone’s private business how they are going to make a living. [..] We need to politicize this situation and not presume that ways of making an income is a private matter”. For me this is spot on. Artists think too much about themselves. Why is there so little politics in electronic music? Why is it normal to use corporate tools to make, distribute and archive music into eternity? Perhaps “The main enemy is our own naïve passion to forget the politics of the tools that we fall in love with, time and again (Technikvergessenheit)”. How many people died to build your computer?

“Free software and creative commons never created confrontational situations— and that should make us think. As alternatives they have created their own modest niches but never created antagonistic situations. After 20-30 years it is time for the cybersubculture to publicly discuss these strategies”. Creative Commons makes little sense to me. When Swedish radio used my CC-licensed music for jingles, the license made no difference. The point with CC is more to encourage others to remix. But eh, who needs that?

“The free and open rhetoric needs to be dismantled. Instead we should promote a discourse which states that it is cool to pay. Sharing for free is boring and in the end a nihilist act. What we need are those bloody ‘alternative revenue models’”. Lovink has a point. Even if it’s a boring one. If you want there to be money in music, you need to talk about revenue models. Personally, I don’t make a living from music anymore, so I don’t bother. But on a structural level the whole free/open/CC-discourse hasn’t really mattered so much, right?

“Stop with the free services as they will screw you”. Yes. And we like it.

Why Chipmusic Is Not Retro

Here are seven points about why chipmusic is not retro. These ideas apply mostly for chipmusic as medium.

1. Unrecorded audio. Even if music can be nicely generative like Icarus (who I remixed once, btw) or performed live, it’s usually distributed as recordings. That has rubbed off on chipmusic, but there are hundreds of thousands of chiptunes that are performative: Each execution is unique. Chiptunes are to music what theatre is to movies; a different ontology. Especially with dodgy chips like the SID. And this is futuristic, simply because there’s no other large scale music like this.

2. Media materialistic music. There are several problems with a technical definition of chipmusic (= anything from a soundchip is chipmusic). But perhaps it will be more common; perhaps the aesthetic crisis in pop culture (retromania) will be followed by a renewed interest in tools and instruments. From language to object, if you will. You know, bye-bye to genius authors and sonic genres – hello to software virtuosity, digital materialism and folklore, artifacts, and live performance.

3. Audiovisualism. Music and visuals are interlinked. PAL/NTSC connects them technically (the available tempos are normally extracted from the framerate) and the low resolution connects them aesthetically. It seems obvious to me that music and visuals will grow stronger connections in the future, and chipmusic seems to have pioneered that.

4. Remixability. Chipmusic was concerned with remixing music already in 1951, 1961 and 1970. But during the 80′s and 90′s the sampling, ripping and reverse-engineering of music spawned a unique music remix culture in the demoscene. It could thrive outside of law and economics, since the scene had their own network infrastructure (BBSs, swapping, etc). And the mod-format for music was (and still is) superior to MP3/etc for a LEGO-style remix culture like Manovich writes about here. No copyright, no creative commons, no laws, no money — just good data and angry teenagers making up their own rules. Definitely futuristic.

5. Originality. It is made from scratch, manually. It’s not pomo remixism. Read more about that here.

6. Archive fever. The chipmusic archives that exist are meticulous works by enthusiasts. They are not threatened by copyright claims, and can usually offer almost everything. The music is also very searchable, since it’s not stored as recordings. For example, you can make powerful search engines to search for specific notes and instructions, like the SID theme finder. Definitely better than the centralized ultra-corporate options of today.

7. Unused potentials. There’s still so much to be done! Where’s all the interactive music players, generative visuals, auto DJ:ing, database explorers, etc? Syphus’ ChipDiscoDJ is only the beginning! If anyone is interested in getting involved with coding for such projects, let me know.

The Working Class of Computer Art?

I recently talked to a demoscene musician who had just started studying electronic composition at university. He liked it, but felt out of place there. All of them knew sheet music, had parents who liked “high culture” and they actually liked Stockhausen and Cage.  When teachers or students ask him about his past, he no longer talks about the demoscene. It’s just not worth the effort to explain it every time you talk to someone, because they probably won’t care anyway. In music universities anyway.

Elsewhere, like in advertising and programming, demoscene skills can get you a job. Some companies have even grown out of demoscene groups: Dice from the Silents, TAT from Yodel and haxx from Horizon. In the pirate biz there’s also a few sceners like Peter Sunde at Pirate Bay and the Megaupload-guy. But in the arts? Goodiepal springs to mind, but… yeah.

It’s a bit funny. I’ve argued before that demos are works of craft, not art. Demos are made for showing off and winning a compo. It’s about going to parties and not giving a fuck, screaming at dancing PETSCII-characters from 1992. It’s like rock before art/theory defined and confined it?

Is the demoscene the opposite to art? Well, many important things of software art (interactivity, generative systems, process) are almost completely missing in the demoscene. These things are going mainstream too, but still hasn’t really reached the demoscene. What artists and sceners share though, is the desire to do the impossible. There is an obsession with transgression in the new media art world too (going beyond the ‘system’), but the demoscene is so much ahead of everybody else that nobody gets it. Hehe.

I think that the scene is interesting to art people too. Interesting. But not relevant. Perhaps it sounds unbelievable to them that there’s been a network of A/V hobby hackers since the 1980′s. Maybe they feel stupid for not knowing about it. Or it’s more simple than that. They think that demos are boring crap. I’m bound to agree, especially from an art perspective. Although some things are definitely works of art (Deep Throat, Notemaker Demo, Rambo – A Chronicle of, Robotic Liberation, etc), that’s not the point with the demoscene. (besides, art is pretty boring too)

What is the point? Well, I really like the freedom of the copy party. Think of it as a hackerspace disco with lots of man-beer and old music. There’s no money and no bullshit. You don’t have to network with the right people and explain your work on their terms. It’s an odd soup of CEOs, graffiti writers, headmasters, schizophrenics and academics that is hard to find elsewhere. Some people are just quiet and make music, others are fixing some hardware while the Finnish BBS-d00d is puking in the closet. Then they all crash on the floor, covered in data noise. It’s like being 16 again all over, except for the SD-cards.

The demoscene is underground because it doesn’t fit anywhere else. Even if many sceners have high education, income, cultural capital, etc – the things that they produce don’t have the same status. Demos are more like folk culture, than “high culture” (which Dragan would say too, I guess). But compared to other folky computer things – GIF-animations, general midi music, ASCII, silly javascript effects – the demoscene never became part of the repertoire of post-ironic-retro-dirt-style clip-art ding dong net.art.

There are exceptions like Low-Level All-Stars. But the demoscene is tricky to use in the art world. When Rhizome (the sort of #1 digital art place) had a demoscene week, they had to invite others (like me) to write, which I think is rather telling.

The demoscene is the eternal underdog of computer art. It does a lot of low-level work (manual labour in computer land) but the skills to do this are not valued higher up in the hierarchy (e.g among the institutions that provide the $). Of course it can give credibility in some situations, but if you want to be an artist the demoscene is essentially a waste of time. Skills like tracking, pixelling and assembly coding are useful for many things, but they don’t give you any extra credit in the art world.

If this is true (it’s a bit speculative), there’s nothing wrong with that. Of course it’s frustrating that the demoscene talents get so little attention, but that’s the way it is. Eventhough other people should care, we’re quite happy with being left alone too. Then we can keep on voting for fart jokes and petscii porn without worrying what all you lamerz think. See you at Datastorm this weekend! DATAAAAA!

Musicians Are Spammers

I recently read an article about about how to choose between Soundcloud and Mixcloud. The author chose Soundcloud, and the final argument was: the music gets more plays.

It’s a common opinon but it’s pretty lame, isn’t it? Is the amount of plays really the most important thing? When I quit Myspace in 2007, some artists said “I would like to follow you, but it’s just not possible for me in my position”. Despite the epic crapness of Myspace, artists used it because … well, everybody else did! And now they’re using something else, for pretty much the same reason I suppose.

But Myspace wasn’t replaced by one, but several sites. A real musician today should be on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify and Bandcamp. Atleast. Because a sensible musician has to be easily available: quick access in as many places as possible simultaneously. If you’re not making yourself available, you’re either stubborn, stupid or lazy.

But content is everywhere these days. It’s like running water, except that it’s not necessary for survival. If it’s good we don’t really care so much, and if it’s bad we look for something else. It’s pretty much expendable. Right?

Modern distributors (such as iTunes) make money from ‘indie artists’ because they feel like they have to be there. And why? Because we are egocentrics who search for recognition and dream about fame, or money, or recognition, or something else. But if you look at it statistically, it’s not going to happen. Ever. It helps for promotion, you might say? Probably not, I’d say. Why would it? You don’t get promotion by “being on www”, do you?

A sensible solution is: use your own distribution channels and work on your communication skills. Inform the right people about your work, at the right time/place/blabla. Do quality work but remember that form is often more relevant than content, unfortunately. Don’t get bitter, just realise that all the smart kids think in terms of PR – intentionally or not – and so should you if you want to “succeed”.

The hardcore solution is: anonymous music distribution. Do you really need personal recognition for what you do? Maybe not? Put your music on 5TFU and feel the freedom of anonymity. Use silly aliases and troll your way through life. Fuck money and fame, just do it for the lulz. Have fun. Piss on social media and burn the flag.

A good example of  ’troll distribution’ is to hide the music within videos. I found that a f ew years ago. The artist had interlaced an mpeg-video and an mp3 audio file. If you played it in VLC you’d see the video (with gaps every know and then) and if you played it in Winamp you’d get the music (with gaps). The music was some kind of beepy funk electronica.

It sounded great when I first heard it. Almost magically cool. Secret music! I still don’t know who did it. And you won’t know it if you find it either, I hope. What made it even better though, was that the video was an episode from Beverly Hills 90210. Original version, yo. Season 3, I think.

Yeah, I watch 90210. Hmm. Well, atleast I’m not using Spotify! :D