joshuatxuk
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Posts posted by joshuatxuk
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5 hours ago, chenGOD said:
I still think one of the key turning points in my musical development is finding the Dead Kennedys' record "Plastic Surgery Disasters" in the main branch of my public library when I was in grade 4 (so 1984-85) and taking it out cause of the weird cover.
my neon pink Lance Mountain Future Primitive deck (w/ gullwing trucks and matching rat bones)
Jello Biafra would get a kick out of that. There's an interview with him where he mentions how bootlegs of their music in SE Asia had the Union Jack to indicate it was "punk"
There's a treasure trove of IG accounts that just post 70s/80s era skateboard photos, it's glorious.
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2 hours ago, cichlisuite said:
In your part of the world too, then... I must admit I find it interesting, since what (little) I know about USA is that people there are used to moving around from place to place way more (for jobs), not to mention coming over the Pond from the Old Country in the first place. But I guess even despite of that, people tend to naturally form a sort of local society everywhere they go, and that this sudden (only two generations?) shift to individualism must be viewed as something rather unnatural and disruptive.
Well America has a lot of dynamics as a colonizer country so it's more akin to bigger Latin American countries and Australia and New Zealand to some extent. But it's also sprawling and there's a myriad of communities that were quite homogenous and fairly static or isolated. Nothing compared to often centuries or even millennia of constant villages / communities as the UK or Europe but there were some that def had little change for generations. Those smaller towns and especially more rural, remote, and often natural industry oriented towns (i.e. farming, fishing, lumber, etc.) come to mind. I read a great book called Blue Highways over a year ago about a writer who did a circular cross country road trip in the U.S. and he took - as best he could - smaller roads, the "blue highways" of old road maps.
Lot of places he visited were seemingly stuck in time or in their twilight years before merging with a metropolis, turning into unincorporated areas or ghost towns, or being consumed by a new highway. (New and/or re-routed railroads used to kill off towns in the American history before that - in some cases whole towns moved). It was written in 1981 but parts of it could have seemingly taken place decades before. The are towns and neighborhoods that I know personally via friends and family that were pretty much the same faces for 10-20 years or more essentially dissipate in a couple years. A death or two, a couple people move then suddenly 5 years later and it's a "different neighborhood." In a grand sense the UK and US have been pretty fortunate. With some exceptions - I lived in the UK from 1999-2001 and I remember talking to some women who left London in the war (Tooting specifically) and just never moved back. In the U.S. the African-American population migrated significantly from rural areas to cities in the 20th century. World wars and massive upheavals and revolutions shifted huge populations in other countries. In Japan there was essentially a collective social existential crisis after the war that's evident in much of their pop culture.
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47 minutes ago, toaoaoad said:
From what I recall it was just a terrible show anyway lol. We could tell it was terrible even as kids but for some reason we were devoted to watching it.
Also, 90s Simpsons were the best Simpsons (especially late 90s).
I never got into Saved By The Bell but I don't just fans much because for some dumb fucking reason I watched Full House. Regarding that show I read a good rant somewhere about how Kimmy was actually the most well adjuster person on the show.
2 hours ago, cichlisuite said:Maybe the single most pronounced thing I miss from my childhood was my grandparents house. It was a meeting point for the whole close and extended family at weekends. It used to be a large farm, but when I was a child, there was only one cow and a few chickens left (my grandfather's heatlh was increasingly deteriorating from his ww2 experiences). Still, he cooked schnaps and stuff, he would drive me around in his car (whole day road trips) to visit his friends in near and distant villages. I got to meet lots of interesting folks that way; blacksmiths, painters and sculpturers, farmers and guys who owned heavy machinery, war veterans, etc. Very fascinating for a kid. My grandparent's house was always full of people, relatives and neighbors and friends dropping by, everyone knew each other well. Friends of family would drop by and have a drink and just shoot nonsense, gossip, or laughs. We held family lunch "parties" on sundays, as a kid I would run around all day doing shenanigans with other kids, etc. Across the street from our house was a club house for young folks where bands were practicing or sometimes they'd have open air theatre program in summer.
The house is empty today, the village is mostly quiet, with young people moving out to larger cities or other countries. Just last month I was having a conversation with my aunt, about the ways of our grandparents, how they always kept their family and friends close and knit. And in general how these traditions die out because of modern living, where each individual gets so wrapped up in day-to-day life and easily forgets about communities and such.
I'm struck by how this could apply to so many different places on Earth in the same timeframe of history.
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18 minutes ago, chenGOD said:
I'm glad to hear this - I got my first exposure through university radio. An instructor at the college where I was studying music knew one of the DJs, he put me on playing some of my electronic music, and we subsequently formed a post-punk-trance-synth band with some other people.
Anyways - yeah. university radio was and still is cool as fuck.
Yeah many in Texas are still going strong and Austin and DFW still have community stations that play niche stuff, 91.7 KOOP and 89.3 KNON
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36 minutes ago, d-a-m-o said:
One thing I miss is the pre 9/11 feeling of "relative peace", I remember smocking a spliff with my friends after class then back home turning the TV on and thinking "WTF is this Die Hard 3 ?" then realizing it was real life...
The 90s really ended on 9/11. I still find it strange people have grown up in the era after.
https://www.wallstreetmagnate.com/index.cfm?do=article.beautifulandhauntingfoundpicturesfrominsidetheworldtradecenterrestaurant
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/take-picture
I'll be honest, I don't think I'll ever visit NYC because my familiarity with it is so heavily indebted to film and tv portrayals of it from decades ago.
For better and worst it's looking the real estate of it is looking like every other slick re-developed city in the world.
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30 minutes ago, Cryptowen said:
on the one hand you see the global homogenization happening irl - that thing Mark Fisher had a term for (can't remember it off the top of my head) where you can go a city anywhere on the planet & you'll see the same chain stores, the same re-used layouts, people referencing the same media, acting out the same personas etc. But on the other hand the internet allows for the emergence of all of these incredibly niche communities which would never have been able to exist previously. perhaps there's a kind of music, or philosophy, or spirituality (or porn) that only speaks to a few dozen people out of a global population of several billion. thanks to the internet they can still find each other & sustain a network of sorts
i think this does tie into what i've been saying in AI threads about the changing nature of artist identity, authorship, social roles & motivations etc. The internet is ushering in a new era of human identity & we happen to be living at just the right moment to really see the change beginning to occur. We got to catch a glimpse of the old world, and will probably spend the rest of our lives observing the emergence of the new (like specifically i think boomers & millenials have two distinctly different kinds of brains, with GenX being either or depending on how young they managed to get on the wired). By the end of this century I really do feel like there will be a new sense of identity that isn't tied to the individual & a new sense of community that isn't tied to location.
Agreed, hard to still wrap my head around but I'm grasping this inevitability more and more. Well summarized.
Regarding homogeneity this hits on that ~ https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification
I noticed this with American and the whole middle class fancy Chip & JoAnn Gaines rustic modern trend too. Like, American kitsch has even been diluted and lost to time. Same with truly unique and weird (albeit usually in subtle ways) diners, bars, and honky-tonks. March of time was going to kill these but I often get irked when I see faux pseudo-replications of that ersatz (I hate to use this word but it's very apt.) Examples: Cracker Barrel, the front section of Hobby Lobby, most mid-size town decent coffee shops, etc. Like man, I miss the really gaudy and tacky aesthetics of the 1970s and 1980s that have pretty much been removed or scrapped. I watch old movies from that era sometimes to revisit it. Very few period shows get it right, in fact they usually overdo it.
There's a specific BBQ resturant I went to as a kid in Abilene, TX that doesn't exist anymore and to my chagrin very little evidence of it is online. It existed though for decades and was well known. Anyone else from that side of town who lived there knows it well. It had two rooms of really neat and authentic memorabilia and antiques and pictures tied to the nearby Dyess AFB. It had a lot of likely now valuable and rare WW2 era morale and propaganda posters. Most of the more then contemporary pictures and plaques and all that are now themselves all but lost to time. Chuck Yeager even signed a wall there.
It was painted over over a decade ago when a new owner bought it and made it a run of the mill fried chicken restaurant. It since closed but I looked it up and the pictures of showed "retro" decor you can easily find on ebay or amazon and will likely always been able to find. Apparently it's closed now too. It was probably frequented by people who think that was "real middle America." Bums me out immensely. To bring it full circle it reminds me of Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club, a bar and ranch that is in the history memoir oriented film The Right Stuff. It was razed and while still remembered, as were it's patrons, the actual place itself is lost to time.-
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33 minutes ago, Alcofribas said:
something i feel nostalgic for from my youth (i was born in 82) is how comparatively limited things were and how that went hand in hand with a sense of wonder and surprise.
limits made it so that it was the kind of thing where you assembled knowledge more slowly and specifically and where chance played a major role. i would build little mental replicas of the inventory of different places - remembering that one bookstore had a particular volume that i would check out later or that a specific record store had a lot of a certain kind of record that i didn't know anything about and i would come to it in the future.
Thanks for articulating this, honestly when some people seem truly pining for the old days I think might be hitting on experiences and perspectives like these. there's an incredible flooding of memories I get when I revisit old reference books I had or even old niche magazines - I would pour over every detail so much so I would often both get a good understanding of a subject while simultaneously using assumptions and imagination to fill in the gaps. Seeing certain images from said media in other context is a bit of mindfuck. That's totally non-existent now, where you can google search and image or keyword.
There's a lot of extreme anecdotes to this in the late 20th century. World pop being forged from the selected Western rock and pop that they could get their hands on. Wild speculation of Soviet tech by the U.S. pre-1989. I remember seeing a documentary on Geoff Rowley and part of his incredible skill as a skateboarder stemmed from the fact that he was relentlessly diligent in doing tricks right everytime. He never thought that all the pro skater vids he watched as a kid in the UK were edited to only include the skaters nailing tricks and not hours and hours of falls and run up practicing. So when he came to SoCal he was arguably the most consistent skater active despite being a newcomer.-
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Regarding the lost truly "nerdy / geeky" ethos of cult following type fans and hobbyists that is still around but no longer as desperately unique or inherently intimate as it was before the internet:
Regarding the day to day pre-social media zeitgeist lost to time:
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^ This kind of dives into that discussion.
More broadly I revisit Mark Fisher Capitalism Realism (and Zero Books' videos that reference it). I need to check out The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. I see it mentioned a lot as a reference point.
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Also, FYI turning 35 tomorrow. I have a taste of pre-internet world that I remember but was not fully engrossed in more formative years. There's a lot of memories or memories / passive or second hand appreciation of the 70s and 80s for me via old books, vhs tapes, tv reruns. Something that strikes me with younger kids and adults is they don't have the same arbitrary but helpful cutoffs when it comes to pop culture and fads. It's def true of those cusping gen x and millenial, and millenial and zoomers - like a couple years and people can have wildly different shared memories and nostalgia. With some exceptions someone closer to 38 or 39 or 31 or 32 will have very different shows, video games, and movies as favorites than I will.
My kids - 2 and 5 - they have a far more varied and potentially timeless appreciate of media that will be unprecedented.-
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43 minutes ago, Cryptowen said:
the biggest change i notice (and this might just be the natural tracjectory of little kid -> almost 30) is that i feel like in the 90s a lot of ppl were still genuinely invested in the cultural narrative. now it feels like contemporary culture is largely a process of recognizing contemporary culture itself as performative, silly, corrupt, alienating, etc. And yet ppl still get extremely invested in some narrative, myself included probably
I wrestle with this a lot, the upside is that niche interests and taste are far easier to explore than ever but it's offset with a see of noise in terms of media now. I partly try to moderate my social media scrolling not just because of the nefarious shit but also because it's like overdosing on superficial and redundant media. It's a lot of curated ersatz over the more rewarding poking around I used to do in book stores or web 1.0 sites or libraries. Even thift stores are not what the used to be, those have been mined for vintage coolness and/or relegated to utilitarian minded goods. That sweet spot of finding obscure or odd things in the wild has declined.
I'm very happy about how things are now because all the things I miss from my youth can still be revisited mentally. I think about much I miss the 90s before social media and how literally my headspace and thinking and self-aware state of imagining and perceiving things was different. If I turn off my phone and unwind a bit I can return to it. Ironically I can transport to actual substantive nostalgia that way than by binge-scrolling "retro and nostalgia" 80s and 90s content on reddit or IG which doesn't hit 99% of the time or is stuff I've seen a lot. There's so much from the past was far, far worse. I have kids and I'm actually very optimistic about their future because despite loud exceptions most zoomers and alphas are more inclusive, empathetic, and open-minded than they were 10, 20, 30+ years ago.
We're in a weird time, one of massive and still to be determined sea change. The world is both becoming overwhelming homogenous while likewise unique and interesting niches are flourishing. More reason to reflect on how much I have improved my own life and honed in on core values, beliefs, tastes, etc. - not but trying to be a certain way but rather being a better version of myself.-
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7 minutes ago, brian trageskin said:
porn is miles better nowadays
It is and it isn't.
It's cool to immediately look up both new and old niche content but there's a titillation and novelty of the really small and even innocuous stuff that stirs arousal in youth. I know it still exists, I see memes about like how thicc the mom on Incredibles is but there is the reality that the longer gradual quest for porn is much shorter than it was pre-streaming, pre-web, pre-cable. I think about how so much lore and urban legend used to surround things like nudity in films or hidden stuff in video games (Duke Nukem strippers, anyone remember that?). That has been lost to time.
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6 hours ago, EXTRASUPER81 said:
I also appreciate Reaper's 'Guiltware' business model - after a month of use it's still free to use, but when you open it it has a pop up which basically says, come on, don't be a dick, it's only £40 for a lifetime license.
Yeah that's a stupid affordable price and about the most generous trial setup I know of.
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I revisited this list, offhand Ardour stands out but the rest seem obscure or Linux based.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_for_audio
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3 hours ago, auxien said:
second that rec. used Audiomulch for years, there's a lot of depth if you want or it can be very straightforward for relatively simple and quick things (once you get the hang of it of course)
re: the plunderphonics lean of the project, Girl Talk was promoted as using it years ago, he did a lot that's very much based on manipulating others' music so there might be some techniques mentioned in the videos here....that said, these videos are old so maybe there's newer stuff but...anyway. besides that i can attest that AM is good for taking in some samples and fucccin with em hard.
Yeah I suppose plunderphonics was a bit too misleading but this is helpful, reminds me of how 0PN used goldwave for eccojams.
I want to make 1991 and Odd Nosdam sounding stuff. Lo-fi house / techno overall as well. I think the former just uses DAWs and the latter is def a MPC sampler user. Burial is def an inspiration ethos wise, IIRC he was using some Adobe program?
I think I'm sold on Reaper for now, I can play around with VSTs too with that option. I have a hard drive of various free drum machine and MPC percussion .wavs to lean on. My plan is to sample audio and loop breaks from cassette tapes with my Sony decks with pitch control (+/- 30%) and likewise use tape to both "dirty up" any synth lines I come up with before re-recording it back into a mix.
Anyway I have a specific plan for at least two songs in terms of exact samples to loop and melodies to layer so this helps a lot. I want to get this started quick and dirty with a setup that is not daunting in terms of learning curve nor price.-
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3 hours ago, yekker said:
Cool edit will work!
I remember awepittance touting an old ass version of this because of it's weird editing options
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I honestly thought the Farnsworth was the i don't want to live on this planet anymore vibe
I suppose the Picard facepalm cover that though-
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59 minutes ago, nikisoko said:
Logic 4.8
on Windows? I didn't consider Logic but now I'm curious
18 minutes ago, Cryptowen said:I've been using Jeskola Buzz since 2004 & haven't ever bothered updating it. It has been a pillar of stability
is it a tracker? I've seen it mentioned (Field uses it) but no little about it
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So I'll try to keep this succint.
I have a early 2000s era PC with Windows XP I inherited and want to make music with it. Since I'll be mostly be doing plunderphonics oriented loop and beat scene stuff, mostly using old tape decks and players, so I don't need anything fancy. I had a copy of Ableton I got second hand but never did much with it. I had garage band and Rebirth in the past but using those is not an option. I want to try to minimize my setup and stick with familiarity which includes using my Tascam TL-122S
So I'm looking for the following immediately:- An equivalent to this as an audio interface: Tascam Us-122l USB 2.0 Audio/MIDI Computer Interface. I use mine now for my tape dubbing and digitizing setup and instead of splurging on a second used one I would like recs for something similar, ideally <$100.
- Any free DAW or sequencer (beyond a .wav editor like Audacity) that can run on a Windows XP with 1.6 ghz / 3.24 gb RAM. Reaper and Cakewalk come to mind but it seems overkill.Not urgent but ideal:
- Cheap but effective monitors. I have Audio-Technica ATH-M50s so something in that niche.
- I have an Alesis Q25 but open to any MIDI pad of similar price point.I'm also asking this because I'm so out of the loop but have an itch to start recording and making music lately.
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28 minutes ago, chenGOD said:
The UN vote map is pretty meaningless - the resolution was promoted by China and Russia, so obvious political games are afoot.
The other story is more telling about the cultural influence of neo-nazism, and is more worrisome than I realized. Although I wonder if one can call it neo-nazism in the Ukraine, given their history with the Nazis.
This is an interesting read on the current situation: http://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/2019/11/30/zelensky-struggles-to-contain-ukraines-neo-nazi-problem/
That explains Ukraine's votes. While that might have factored in the U.S. has a long history of weird hills to die on and the GOP tends to reject any UN resolution. It might lead to globalist black helicopters turning the freakin' frogs gay.
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^ damn, that hit differently
This is my favorite Conan and Larry King bit. (12:02)-
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7 hours ago, ignatius said:
many also think the war is the wave that Putin rode to power. that guy in chechnya is the one arresting all the gay people? i think he also made a bunch of weird videos talking about his cat right?
Yeah granted Chechen culture is steeped in machismo and homophobia and while Russia's steeped with prejudice against LGBTQA+ people Chechnya is far more dangerous. Hell it's rough to be outspoken as a leftist or broadly antigovernmental at all.
Kadyrov straight up denies any persecution goes in the "fake news" vein while simultaneously double-downing on vitriolic rhetoric. It's a very horrifying manner, basically he's echoed the fact that Chechen law enforcement washes their hands of it and allows vigilantes to kill gays.Quote"you cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic. If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn't need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning."
Kadyrov is comically corrupt and rich with lavish and absurd luxury items. Very akin to other Central Asian dictators and Gulf State emirs. (And the way the Trump's want to act) He's like Putin's brutish sycophant, the "little dragon" IIRC. Similar to Turkey, Philippines, Brazil, etc. he remains popular through fear, populist ramble and relentless re-development, investments, and your typical late stage capitalism. Grozy looks new and shiny but it's far more restrictive there for the marginilized than it was under the Soviets. The Russians fought Islamic insurgents but akin to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other conservative states the actual government enforce draconian laws and squash opposition in ways "subtle and nuanced" enough to maintain outside support.
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23 hours ago, ignatius said:
100% think the apartment bombings was a false flag by putin. the fact that they uncovered undetonated ordinance that is the exact type and method used by security services (kgb/FSB) is some good evidence. was done to so they could blame chechnya and invade making everyone forget about what was going on politically. is discussed here.. as well as putin's actions prior on his rise to power. - this is
episode 1
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/putins-way/
episode 2..
I completely forgot about those.
My knowledge on the nuanced and specific context of the Second Chechen war is scant but a big take-away from it is that Chechens who became Kremlin allies ended up in power and most of them fought against the Russians in the first war. Kadyrov is a fucking tyrant with a perpetual slush fund but a stabilizing agent of sort. Since those bombings were used to expand Russian involvement in the War in the region and ensure Chechnya remained a Russian state.
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22 minutes ago, zkom said:
"extremely highly trusted sources"
Ultimate Vaporwave - 80's Japanese Air Conditioning Unit Came With A Vinyl Soundtrack
in Music Discussion
Posted
Damn, this is pretty spot on. Music and art aside a bonus record as a Japanese marketing promotion in 1987 is prime vaporwave context.