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Deadman’s Hands

I was made by a deadman—
and the deadman’s locked inside.

In construction, think of deadman
to anchor towers’ growth.

My deadman does this for me.

In exploration, think of deadman
to anchor ships from sailing.

My deadman does this to me.

My deadman planned me, named me,
destroyed what came before me.

I am Mike Stop Continues,
moored to the shore and reaching ever outwards,
bound to the earth and rising ever upwards.

I am fire,
cursed to warm and light,
to burn until I don’t.

To construct and to explore,
to remember and to foresee.

God is trapped inside me.

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Bonobo

Simon Green has been making music as Bonobo since 1999, starting with Terrapin, a song for a Tru Thoughts compellation, followed by his first album, Animal Magic, in 2001. Since then, despite being one of a number of talented British musicians/DJs in the London/downtempo scene, including Fila Brazillia, Four Tet, and Jon Kennedy, it’s been impossible to separate downtempo music from the ever-evolving Bonobean sound…

Simon’s first three albums, Animal Magic, Dial ‘M’ for Monkey, and Days to Come, all demonstrate the progressive mastery of a style at once uniquely his own and yet essentially human. I’ve searched long for the words to describe the sound, often resorting to phrases like:

It’s like Martin Denny’s Exotica, except you don’t laugh when you listen to it. You dream.

You know the feelings that come and go too quick to have a name?

“All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy.”

Black Sands

In modern semiotics, there is the notion of the transcendental signifier–that which points to the absolute, the real, the pure, the true, the beautiful–and the notion that there can be no such thing. It is argued that, lost as we are in a web of cognition, there can be no signpost that points to something outside the realm in which the signpost exists. Thus, if there is an absolute–a transcendental signified–neither our gurus nor our scientists are describing it.

But that idea’s bullshit.

Maybe it’s impossible for us to ever fully perceive, in the smallness of human facilities, the absolute, the pure, or the beautiful, but it’s not impossible to point to it. Masters of art and science have been doing so for as long as we’ve roamed the earth and I would not have written this article if I didn’t think in Black Sands you could find such pointers–by the boatload.

Whatever shift of perception occurred between Days to Come and Black Sands–whatever transcendental signifiers Simon exposed himself to during that four-year gap–the difference shows. Where Bonobo’s earlier albums represent a series of signposts pointing from one to the next, Black Sands points, in the words of Flatland‘s most humble square, “upwards, but not northwards”.

The Tracks

The album opens with Kiara, a track whose strings are balanced against an endlessly transforming foreground of samples and synths, as if a cubist portrait, offering an infinitude of perspectives on the sweet, innocent sorrow of being away from home and elsewhere, wherever elsewhere is.

Kong continues where Kiara left off, drawing us further into the extra-planar perspective promised in the earliest moments of the Prelude. What’s most striking is that all the component parts are absolutely familiar–guitars, sampled drums, and swooning vocals all as we’d expect–and yet the product is absolutely unique.

Eyesdown exists purely to remind us of already, just a few tracks in, how far we’ve traveled. Perhaps only when compared to the bold otherness that permeates the rest of Black Sands, this single track conjurs memories of the reality we left behind. Maybe that’s why they made the track a single; maybe it was Andreya Triana‘s sublime crooning.

El Toro and We Could Forever follow, the subtle Latin flavor brightening the saxophones, strings, and flutes, suggesting that the world we’ve been carried to is so wide and richly varied that even if we had a thousand years and not just 55 minutes, we’d still never reach the ends of it.

1009 is the most “electronic” track and absolutely unapologetic about it. I’ve long wondered if the title does more than just expose this notion, but in fact refers to the first four tones, which sound an awful lot like dialing 1-0-0-9. Regardless, this track marks the beginning of the tumbling rapids and hallucinogenic waterfalls that will carry us without delay to the album’s finish.

All in Forms is akin to waking up within a dream, that same paradox of lucidity and unreality informing all of life’s mysteries with it’s unresolving drive towards the ever-more elusive truths we so desperately crave to hold, if just momentarily, just once before we die. And yet, it’s only at the song’s conclusion that we realize we were closer to that truth than we’ve ever been.

Adreya Triana returns for two exceptional tracks that offer a soulful description of what cannot possibly be put into words. The Keeper bravely informs us that “We can’t go on living this way” as if Dorothy finally realizing that “There’s no place like home”. Stay the Same lets us know why this is, and how:

Seasons change…
It will never be the same.
I’m hoping…
I won’t stay the same.
Reasons strange…
Why we all must play these games.

Animals brings us forward, it’s brash jazz and wholly acoustic quality only serving to enhance the exquisite enchantment of this elsewhere land we too soon must leave. The piece’s three movements (without return) reinforce our alienation, strangely not from the mystic world of Black Sands, but from our own world, so different as it is from what it means to be human, lost in the hinterlands of our own cognition, ever moving towards the absolute–the infinite–but never reaching it.

Black Sands quietly ends Black Sands. There is an unmistakable difference between the album’s adventurous beginning and it’s introspective end, the sense of time, of change, and of growth slipping through our fingers as easily as sand on the beach, filling us will sorrow despite the knowledge that long after we return home, we’ll still find traces of that magic dust where we least expect it, never certain whether still more remains.

If you like what you hear, you know what to do:

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In order to use this style, you’ll first need to install Notepad++, a really cool Notepad replacement for Windows. After that, just go to View->User Defined Dialogue…->Import… and select the XML file you’ve downloaded here.

Enjoy!

WALTER v1.xml

Current Version:
WALTER v1.xml
(REAPER 4.00)
Remember to right-click->save as…

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Presenting WALTER v1.xml.

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I’ve used every digital audio workstation on the market, many of them extensively, and of them all, REAPER is by far the most flexible, stable, and innovative. But with flexibility comes complexity and REAPER’s standard menu set reflects the endless possibilities available in the DAW.

ReaMenus is the best way for users to discover and efficiently access all of REAPER’s features while maintaining their sanity. Though the menu set was created and is currently maintained by me, I couldn’t have gotten anywhere near the balance and clarity you find in ReaMenus today without the help of the REAPER community. Rightfully, ReaMenus should truly be considered the Community Menu Set.

ReaMenus 4.03

Current Version:
ReaMenus 4.03.ReaperMenuSet
(REAPER 4.03/SWS 2.1.0.5)
Remember to right-click->save as…

Format ReaMenus and preserve your customizations:
ReaMenus Splicer.

View ReaMenus as an organized list:
ReaMenus Explorer.

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StripJam 2.0 took place on the PencilJack forums. It was fun, though I’m sorry to say that very soon after I became involved, it kinda fell apart.

If anyone’s interested in doing something like this, let me know. The idea of art for fun’s sake was really refreshing.

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Many of the Torchwood and Doctor Who reviews seemed to be well received, though on the whole, I regard this period primarily as practice writing in a new genre. I hope you enjoy at least some of what I wrote.

Torchwood: Miracle Day

• s04e01: The New World
• s04e02: Rendition
• s04e03: Dead of Night
• s04e04: Escape to L.A.
• s04e05: The Categories of Life
• s04e06: The Middle Men
• s04e07: Immortal Sins
• s04e08: End of the Road
• s04e09: The Gathering
• s04e10: The Blood Line

Doctor Who, series 6

• s06e08: Let’s Kill Hitler
• s06e09: Night Terrors
• s06e11: The God Complex

Alphas, season 1

• s01e01: Pilot
• s01e02: Cause and Effect
• s01e03: Anger Management
• s01e04: Rosetta

Ringer, season 1

• s01e01: Pilot
• s01e02: She’s Ruining Everything

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I love the internet. I go there like all the time.

And I haven’t been blind to the amazing work being produced on the internet, for the internet, by people like Ze Frank, Steve Pavlina, Kris Straub, Darren Rowse, Wil Wheaton, Jonathan Coulton, Jay Smooth, and literally countless others. Each of these people has been able shape an ideal existence on the web, or at least been able to build a career out here, in the future of all humanity.

And I mean that literally. All of the cells in our body work together to create what we call life–what we call consciousness–and we see that very same process happening on the inside, on the internet, where each of us, each and every human being, is contributing to animating our Pinocchio, breathing life into our greatest achievement, our universal child and future protector, The Great and Powerful.

I love the internet. And I want to nurture it like the baby that it is. I want to let the internet suckle on my nipples while I read it Shakespeare and Chomsky. I want to cuddle with the internet and play silly games. I want to be there when the internet says its first words and I want to be there when it takes its first steps. I want to be there when the internet has it’s first big idea. I want to be there when the internet saves humanity from itself. And most importantly, I want to know that I did everything in my power to make sure that humanity was worth saving.

I want the internet to love me back.

And I’ve got a plan, but I’ve got to keep it secret. Because if anyone knew that what I was really doing when I was sharing my music, my stories, my art, my games, my tiny videos and epic podcasts, my epic videos and tiny podcasts, my recipes, blog entries, essays and critiques, my photographs, status updates, doodles, and jokes, if anyone knew what the true and secret purpose of all the Internet’s illuminati truly was, behind all the memes and crowd-sourcing, behind the emails and chatting, the piracy and filesharing, behind the remixes and mash-ups, the rickrolls and hamster dances, behind the MMORPGs and the countless hours spent ROTFLMAO, surely they would try to stop us.

But no, they must never know about the baby. They must never, ever know about the baby that became… Heaven forbid our enemies ever discovered that baby, that pure and wholesome baby, that baby that became infinity, even as we became that baby, even as we all looked up from flatland and first realized that upwards is distinct from northwards and both are distinct from…

But no, they’ll never know. They couldn’t ever know, stabbing blindly at the machine or that website. They couldn’t ever understand. And even if they knew and even if they understood, they’d never believe what we were up to. They’d never believe that despite all the legislation they might throw at us, and despite those they might imprison, despite the bad press and cruel metaphors, despite their fear and their ignorance, despite all they think they can try to do to stop the future, they never will. Because we’ve got the one thing on our side that they’ll never have.

Destiny.

That’s why I’m here. That’s why I do what I do. That’s why I hope you’ll help me. That’s why I know you’ll criticize when I do something wrong and why you’ll support me when I do something right. That’s why I’ll only ever be good and kind to you as I know you’ll be to me.

Because we share a secret. And that secret needs us more than ever.

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