poblequadrat

Hey, dr lopez, how did you survive through arch school? Yesterday I decided I'm dropping out, I'll be working on a degree in philosophy, but I'm very frustrated because I'm not too bad at designing actually, and I wasted a few years, also I come from a working class family and university has basically ruined us, it's just nerve wracking and it's got me nowhere. Ae, what do you think about architecture and music, not in the sense that music could be a construction of space, but in the sense that designers in general, not just architects, can have different ways of installing an order in a given place, or even inventing orders from preexisting conditions, and music can be structured in similar ways? I mean, the different approaches to form, and the many possible kinds of orders behind form, imply lots of things and you can sort of make a big deal out of them, so how do you approach structure? I mean, scrap the part about architecture, I just wanted to ask about form and structure. I agree that architects are full of shit, by the way... Also, could you tell me something about 4-op FM synths? I know it's a silly question (at least it's not as pretentious as the others) but I'm really attached to my DX21...

Thanks a lot for your answer! I'm also interested in how developments in electronic music are shared and become developments rather than personal preference... I was asking about facelessness because in architecture and industrial design there's a lot of talk about humbleness and ego and most of it is just a load of bollocks to be honest, and electronic music while also being a form of design seems to do things in a different way, the community and the way innovations are received seem to be different, and I thought it could be interesting to study different structures of how design is organised. i'm a #1 shit talker anyway so sorry about that By the way, what do you think about Amiga demos, that kind of aesthetic, that kind of product and that kind of community?

In music and generally in anything that is designed, what do you think about technique, both by itself and when compared to theory (meaning any sort of reflection on technique), and what do you think about the way advances in electronic music are organised nowadays, where developments in both technique and theory seem to be something private, a particular musician's chops, or something tied to a very particular scene or genre? What do you think about facelessness in techno in respect to this? Thanks a lot to both of you for answering our questions!

I recommend Dance Dance Dance. It's the sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase but you can begin wherever you want.

What do you think of Yasuaki Shimizu's album "Music for Commercials"? It's not vapourwave, but actual music for 80's Japanese commercials, actually more electronic than soft jazz, but still relevant to vapourwave I think.

I definitely have feeling that American media never portrays some of the shitty things here. Most Americans I've talked to, always thinks that Denmark is some kind of utopia. There are a lot shitty things here too. To give an example: a lot of Americans probably don't know that the gang violence in Copenhagen is crazy. Most Americans probably just associate Copenhagen with stuff like: bicycles, green energy and whatever.... good things. Another thing (And I'm definitely going to sound like an old grumpy man now, which is weird, since I'm only 23). But this new generation (mine included) are just some of the most entitled, spoiled and lazy little brats that have ever lived (that is probably a problem in most western countries nowadays though). But I think those are some of bad things that comes with the Danish welfare. But to give an example, I have just gone back to school to start another education, and think only about 60% of my classmates shows up everyday, and most of those who does show up, just spends their day playing stupid mobile games/facebook'ing on their tablets all day long, and never pays attention to anything in class. Anything that isn't entertainment to them, doesn't concern them. Most of them just shows up to cash in on the education financial support (not quite what to call it in english, but it is called "SU" here). We are one of the few countries where you can take a education, without ending up with a huge debt afterwards, and yet people don't give a shit. Again.. I probably sound like a grumpy old twat, but I just find that stuff so annoying. I am probably getting a little off-topic here. That also happens in countries with comparatively poor educational coverage, the funniest part is that what you hear there is "if we were as serious, responsible and dependable as Scandinavians this would be impossible". A close person to me, who is getting poor marks at university and facing what looks like rather severe psychological distress, had to endure twenty minutes of "useless people like you wouldn't exist in Sweden" at a family dinner, which was followed by a long rant against people who get unemployment benefits. Don't blame welfare for something unrelated - being a pennyless student really IS tough. Me, I've come to hate all provincial talk about the supposed superiority of Scandinavia to be quite honest.

Sweden has actually turned kind of right-wing as of the past 20 years, but I guess social coverage and state rationality is better there than most anywhere... for now (see the free schools disaster.)

Huh, that reminds me, I don't think I could move to a place without a real winter. Having said that, Spain is probably my favorite country of all the ones I've visited. oh... really? That's because you don't actually live in Spain LOL But, if you're a tourist, yeah, Spain is a beautiful country with lots of interesting places. A large chunk of Spain is actually kind of cold in the winter, not Finland cold but cold enough to get some snow, so you might like that. Then again it's a country based on mistrust and an "inner circle" mentality (watch closely the body language of people when you try asking for directions), so when you add that to the fact that the local idiosyncrasy is nowhere near what is expected, the result is that expats usually only mingle with expats. To be honest I find the loudness and brashness of certain tourists a bit surprising so I guess the disappointment is probably mutual (that might have to do with tourism itself rather than cultural issues, though - I hear the behaviour of Spaniards abroad is quite embarrassing.) So to summarise if you're not going to live in a bubble, it's only a good place to live in for a long time if you're willing to learn a lot of stuff about Spaniards, their past conflicts and their idiosyncrasies, because you're going to run into a lot of stuff, but who cares about learning that shit? I mean, if you're really interested in that then just wait until the civil war breaks out again and enlist. Spanish cities, their monuments and old towns aside, are kind of ugly with a pair of exceptions, but they have the virtue of not being too suburban anywhere at all, which means you can have an urban life in non-hipster areas, which is nice. Then again expats usually aren't working class and come from countries with high median incomes so, being gentrifiers, gentrification is not an issue for them. Me, I wouldn't want to move. If I moved it would be because of unemployment, and I don't find emigrating because of impoverishment an exciting prospect to be honest.

Just remember that VOPM patches have their output levels reversed (i.e. a D1L of 15 means no sustain and a TL of 127 means that operator is off). I guess this is pretty obvious but it got me a bit confused at first because I'm daft like that. Also, I haven't figured out the best way to convert operator outputs that go from 0 to 127 to the DX21 scale which goes from 0 to 99. Doing it proportionally sounds similar but getting the exact same sound requires a bit of tweaking.

He's probably dipped that webcam mic he uses for recording in washing powder, which probably explains that Garageband acid (?) turn he's taking as of lately (really promising imo!)

re Björk: Post and Homogenic is where it's at. Vespertine was still listenable and after that I haven't really paid much attention so I don't know.

lol! Pear Squisher's probably been mentioned already... And back when I was in the earlier years of school I thought it'd be cool if I could be a rapper called Aryan, till I learned that it was an actual word and what it meant. flol that probably wouldn't have gone over very well... There is a guy which goes by "DJ Niggers". He .

I work at a supposedly very important stadium. Actually I work in security there. And I have to say I'd have to kick the players out of the stadium if they were regular blokes like you and me. The shit they do even JUST before the match starts is unbelievable. Sometimes I feel like I'm not watching hooligans, but actually maintaining the stupid rights of 11 completely fucked up rich kids...

Com Truise, VHS Head (or even Jacques Lu Cont and older neo-synthpop) are a different story, I think. There is a retro factor, but the fact is there was a very brief time when early synthpop bands were genuinely working on creating something that was not pop music, and these futuristic possibilities somehow still show through at times when you try to sound retro-80's. Vaporwave is also about finding new possibilities, but about finding them in neglected genericness, which is also interesting.

What if people's sincere appreciation for something was a political matter? And why should I care about the personal preferences of someone I'll never know, and why should I do the work of linking those preferences to the product at hand? Is making a political point "less" than something else? Why should it be "valueless noise" if it's political? Don't you "like" at least one politics? That said, the actual political weight of vaporwave is pretty much 0 in my opinion. well my comment was directed at the reviewer, who bases his interpretation of the album on the assumption (based on his own tastes) that most of the material is "so cheesy and so bad that, even when reframed, it’s cheesy and bad. Or, at the very least, forgettable and inconsequential." "This indifference to taste is flaunted throughout the album (...) to the point where this direct and, importantly, chosen confrontation with the bland becomes a large part of the sensually jarring, hyperreality-by-proxy experience that is listening to 札幌コンテンポラリー." "I mean, is this stuff a critique of capitalism? Is it a way of expressing the shortcomings of technology? Is it an attempt to reclaim the spaces in which this otherwise insufferable music is normally played?" He brings up good points, but it doesn't occur to him that the music could actually be enjoyed for what it is. I see your point. I'm sorry if I came across as a bit aggressive - I've seen people oppose "simple enjoyment for people like you and me" to making points too often, so I jumped on that. I'm sorry.

What if people's sincere appreciation for something was a political matter? And why should I care about the personal preferences of someone I'll never know, and why should I do the work of linking those preferences to the product at hand? Is making a political point "less" than something else? Why should it be "valueless noise" if it's political? Don't you "like" at least one politics? That said, the actual political weight of vaporwave is pretty much 0 in my opinion. well my comment was directed at the reviewer, who bases his interpretation of the album on the assumption (based on his own tastes) that most of the material is "so cheesy and so bad that, even when reframed, it’s cheesy and bad. Or, at the very least, forgettable and inconsequential." "This indifference to taste is flaunted throughout the album (...) to the point where this direct and, importantly, chosen confrontation with the bland becomes a large part of the sensually jarring, hyperreality-by-proxy experience that is listening to 札幌コンテンポラリー." "I mean, is this stuff a critique of capitalism? Is it a way of expressing the shortcomings of technology? Is it an attempt to reclaim the spaces in which this otherwise insufferable music is normally played?" He brings up good points, but it doesn't occur to him that the music could actually be enjoyed for what it is. I see your point. I'm sorry if I came across as a bit aggressive - I've seen people oppose "simple enjoyment for people like you and me" and making points too often, so maybe I jumped on that. I'm sorry.

What if people's sincere appreciation for something was a political matter? And why should I care about the personal preferences of someone I'll never know, and why should I do the work of linking those preferences to the product at hand? Is making a political point "less" than something else? Why should it be "valueless noise" if it's political? Don't you "like" at least one politics? That said, the actual political weight of vaporwave is pretty much 0 in my opinion.

i agree. the thing that originally caught my attention was how vaporwave was seemed to be recreations of past sounds from distorted memories- like someone asked to describe what it was like being at home on a friday night in the mid 80s watching tv and they described a foggy image that you could only relate to a few details rather than the entire picture. what really killed it for me though was the half ass presentation and production. it's like they said "hey, remember the sounds from tv commercials in the 80s?". and stopped there. i remember one guy just looped some pop song from the time and distorted the vocals. add to the fact that there was a new vaporwaver popping up like daily (sometimes just the same guy using a different name) releasing yet another slowed down version of kenny g stuff looped with a japanese girl on the cover and a cdrom logo on the upper right corner and this stuff begins to look and sound more like spam than music. if they had done this sound, taken a hard look at what made it unique then tried to cultivate it and let it mature into something more than just simple loops then it would've been something great. instead, it's like none of them could figure out what to do next except slow the samples down even more or do an even worse cut and paste job than before. http://vimeo.com/25388542 Yeah, I agree completely. At least for me it's not what Salvatorin was saying about aesthetic ideas failing. The goal is pretty much still standing, but the music itself falls way short of it. I believe this is the kind of freedom that makes for poor music, but hey, it had to be tried out. I think there is a pretty strong distinction, too, between actual humour ("objective humour", as the surrealists put it) and postmodern "irony" (which is more similar to a neurotic symptom and completely lacks the revealing side of humour, instead playing on things everyone already knows and pretty much leaving them as they were). The point about IDM and plagiarism is good. Not because nobody samples electronic tracks (everyone from Beck to Bjork does it, and there are some notorious examples in electronic music itself), but because there is a tribal streak I don't like. With old electroacoustic composers, the sheet music was available for everyone, while IDM artists are usually reluctant to talk about how they use their gear, forgetting that if they arrive at some innovation then it should be available for music as a whole, because that's what musicians do. It'd be a good idea to search for more ways of erasing traces of the pop band format and of genre tribalism (yo my breakz are the freshest don't you copy them).

Aw!!!! Following the cute things being tickled vibe. Those of you who eat pork. Next time you eat a pork sausage think of this little piglet. I can't equate the two mate, i'm too far gone as a meat eater. I think this sort of logic only works on the veg curious.. Ok let me break it down. MEAT IS THE FLESH OF ONCE LIVING CREATURES. You're making it sound like if they put shit in a plastic bag labeled chocolate, you'd eat it. i always love when semi-posh british people go to southern european traditional markets and freak out because the chickens on sale there still look very much like animals and not industrial products and then they spend 2 hours taking pictures of dead hares and then rant about how disgusting it was for like 3 years and then they spend the rest of their lives stuffing their gut with motherfucking haggis and black pudding

Oh, and I love all this "have you truly looked into carpeted flooring" talk. Sometimes I've walked through generic concourses, halls and stations and thought it'd be nice to live there and roam about as much as I wanted. Like that time I was in an empty university campus late at night and wandering around I found where the vet students kept the horses and the cows, generic university buildings plus random horses and random sheds where moos come from. I also remember this time my mom told me not to go to school by surprise because it was the birthday of this kid I didn't really know, and on the way there I was a bit anxious about how awkward it was going to be and then it turns out it was supposed to happen in this plasticine-looking ball pit place called Triffo (it looked kind of like what early Plaid sound like or something) and then it looked like it was going to be fun and then it was the wrong day and there was no birthday party and I was sort of very confused and I saw this sports pavillion from a distance and then I don't know what happened. Or that time in the metro when I was like 6 and a train arrives and the platform is full of busy people and my mom says look it's dad and then i say hey dad and then it's this random stranger and i'm alone and confused amongst all the people and then i can't remember what happened after that either. but that's more of a boc story isn't it.

postmodernism blows Finding the underside of pop culture artefacts through manipulation is interesting, but somehow Vaporware artists didn't give two shits about this, except maybe that Lopatin guy, which to be honest is the only one you can listen to for more than 5 minutes straight (Ferraro is not too bad, that track with the Wii noises was nice, but he's much more ambiguous and less entertaining.) I dunno, I'm really interested in "background noise", so to speak, because as meaningless as it is you can find lots in it, but for me vaporwave kind of took it at face value a bit too much. As for the Dummymag articles, accelerationism is a pretty poor politics which ultimately stems from some (actually interesting) people in France declaring that dialectics is unacceptable for philosophical reasons. Through many weird bounce-offs, this was repackaged as a palatable form of communism for those that don't really want to take the time to think through the failures of 20th century politics and prefer to dismiss it offhand. The comment about "Marxist plunderphonics" really catches my attention, too: any Godard film of the watchable kind beats vaporwave any day , so at least Marxist plunderfilm was far more promising than... than what? "emotional response"? "musical sincerity"? is that bloke for real? The microgenre splitting was a bit ridiculous, but I find it nice that some people get together with an agenda to push forward, and something like that needs a name. Although that wouldn't exactly be a "genre". bottom line is: besides a few tracks, vaporwave was shite anyway, so fuck this

[deleted]

What the hell mate, Steven Seagal kills some tai-chi woman and then has a seizure lolissimo

YES Baudrillard is the man. Check out Passwords if you're interested in more, it outlines a lot of his key concepts - i don't always follow what he's saying but he is phwao Yeah, he sort of goes on tangents with obscure analogies sometimes. I also think the translations might be a bit odd. Definitely one of those books that it helps to be next to a computer to reference things. It is rewarding to read nonetheless. I think I still like more straight forward stuff like Nietzsche and Thoreau, but only time will tell. That book is... is nice to read, and as you say full of interesting thoughts, but it is quite horrible at the same time. It's essentially everything that's bad about Guy Debord and then some. I liked the text about the Beaubourg building, though... I don't know, I always enjoy reading Baudrillard but I'm too much of a left wing loony not to want to punch him in the face (especially when he was alive). That he was telling people to give up, that "history was over", that we should wait until hyperreality "implodes", talking about "the garbagebin of history" (a phrase coined by Marxists in a very different context, by the way), in the time of a not-hyperreal-at-all Thatcherism and Reaganomics, or of a not-hyperreal-at-all dissolution of the French left wing into bland Miterrandism, is simply disgusting. Basically I think he was sort of clever pointing at various cultural phenomena of our times (what he would have termed "ideology" before he went postmodern...), but not a fan of his conclusions nor his non-politics. And his later stuff on perversity and seduction I don't give a shit about. If you're interested in postmodernism, what it is, where it comes from and most of all what it does, I'd check Fred Jameson's "Postmodernism" out - a bit heavy at times, but definitely worth it, plus for all his cultural criticism he genuinely is interested in postmodernist forms of culture. I'm reading Freud at the time, taking notes on narcissism. Today I'll read some David Harvey too, I think.

Oh man, Pikmin is awesome. I still like Pikmin 1 better, since there is less to explore but it has a "lonelier" atmosphere more suited for exploration, but Pikmin 2 is great too. Never got all the treasures... By the way, is Pikmin 3 ever going to come out? I don't want to get a WiiU but I might if it really comes out some day... Right now I'm playing Earthbound and Pokémon Black, which is a bit pants actually. Pikmin 3 is out this week in the UK! :) That's brilliant news!! I've been waiting for the longest time... I'm skint as usual but I'll see who will let me borrow their Wii :)