zazen

Fair point. I could quote that modern saying 'the internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber' but then it would seem like I'm saying I'm smart, and thats not a smart thing to do. I don't know how old you are but when I was a teenager/young adult in the 90s, my knowledge and understanding of the world was very patchy. Some very small examples that I remember vaguely wondering about at the time: on the news every day they would talk about the FTSE index (UK equivalent of dow jones) going up or down but no-one would really explain what it was, or how it was calculated in the news they talked about right-wing and left-wing but rarely tried to define the terms. Like I had a vague idea, but it was only vague when I went to get a haircut I had no idea how to explain to the hairdresser what I wanted, or what the possibilities were, or what words to use. Consequently the hairdresser was terrifiying (this was more an early teens thing) I could list a million little things like this but you get the general idea Now these days the answer to all of those is trivial - you google it. But in the 90s for the political/news ones you could potentially go to a libary and spend an hour or two flicking through books but that was a LOT of effort. Or ask around with your friends and risk looking dumb. And I never wondered enough to actually do either of those things, so I just bumbled through my life with lots of things I only had a very vague inkling of, and no easy way to inform myself. We just weren't awash with information in the same way and it led to a very different way of being in the world. I'm sortof trying to understand what is different between then and now but perhaps its very personal to the way my own life has gone.

I remember life before the internet really got going (I was at uni in the 90s) and something just crystallised in my brain about the difference between then and now: Back at uni we would sit around in someone's room and chat and my way of socialising was to try and say things that were either funny or interesting. Or both. So you'd talk about things you'd read or heard and try and make them interesting. So I might talk about chaos theory and how it related to global warming, or someone (say) had read Carlos Castañeda and would go on about the mystical beings he wrote about in his books. And unless you happened to stumble upon someone who was actually an expert in any particular area (say an expert in enviromental modelling or an expert in the Yaqui cultures of Mexico), you could just explore ideas in a fairly uninformed way and it was kindof fun. Like you'd take a concept from one subject and a concept from another subject and try and squash them together and see what you came up with. But now that the worlds knowledge is at everyone's fingertips, you can't really chat in the same way. You end up kindof shrugging and saying 'well I guess I'll go and look that up later'. Because you know that any inkling of an idea you have, someone's probably written about it already in better depth than you could manage. So you can kindof go and read about that, and be better informed, but thats now a research activity, not a form of socialising. And everyone is aware of this in a way so conversations tend more towards the safe/mainstream because saying anything wild or innovative is probably going to make you look dumb unless you do loads of research up front. So unless you've got a subject that everyone has a lot of depth in, there's really not much point talking about it. I suppose 'current events' are still worth talking about because eveyone's roughly equally informed and its safer to speculate. Now: in terms of actually understanding the world, the new post-internet way is much better. For example back at uni we all spent weeks sitting around going on about Carlos Castañeda and the Teachings of Don Juan. But five minutes googling now lets me know there's now a broad consensus that Carlos Castañeda just made all that shit up. So we're better informed now. But actual conversations and socialising are harder, because its much harder to have a fun/interesting conversation and much easier to have a safe/boring one. And so the way I get my social needs met has sortof split into two - my intellectual curiosity and my need to see and read hilarious things is met by the online world. And my need to have face to face conversations with people is met by having conversations with people and thats kindof nice but a lot of the conversations are boring because we can't have interesting (but naive) talking-bollocks sessions like we used to.

Appreciate that proceeds are for a SEN sensory garden

Kettel - Wingtip (2016) Various stuff on Bandcamp by EOD, e.g. the EPs EODS1 through to EODS9 Imagine This Is A Higher Dimesnional Space Of All Possibilities - James Holden (2023) Various stuff from Aleksi Perala since 2020, e.g. FI3AC2039070 from Midnight Sun 4a

@chenGOD Yeah sorry about it being Spotify, its the only practical way I can think of to share playlists. I'm open to suggestions. Is there a playlist format thats shareable? I wish you could make playlists on Bandcamp. Aleksi gets a lot of discussion in 'New and Upcoming releases' threads but I thought we could do with a thread on the 'music' forum for general AP chat. So have started one here, including a 3 hour Midnight Sun Highlights playlist: https://forum.watmm.com/topic/104787-aleksi-perälä-discussion-and-playlists (and I spent a while stitching together all the Midnight Sun covers not realising @cear had done it already)

Aleksi Perala gets discussed a lot on the 'New + Upcoming releases' forum (e.g. this thread has 2000+ posts in it) but I think we could do with a thread here on the Music forum where we can talk about his stuff more generally. And maybe post playlists? If ever there was an artist that its worth making playlists for, its Aleksi. A recap for those who might be new to AP: Aleksi Perala was originally on Rephlex as Ovuca some 20 odd years ago (e.g. check out Afternoon Girl from 2001 ). Around 2013 Aleksi and Grant Wilson-Claridge came up with "Colundi" which is a set of 128 specially chosen frequencies that make an alternative microtonal tuning/set of scales within which to create music. Since then he's worked exclusively on making music with Colundi and has released a huge amount of it - over 100 albums of material since 2013. He explains his prolific output in this 2021 interview: So he puts out a lot of music. Often there are some great tracks there, they get released without fanfare or explanation and then he's moving ever forwards and working on the next thing. And the track names are all numerical ids like FI3AC2139340, which makes it hard to remember which is which, and hard to discuss them. I can tell you that FI3AC2039070 is a banger, but thats not much use to you unless I also provide a hyperlink. And so, WATMM, I think there's some important work to be done here, sifting through everything and sharing recommendations and playlists with each other. In late 2020 he released a series of 16 Albums/EPs called Midnight Sun, so I'm going to start with that Midnight Sun "Midnight Sun was all for Finland, the Finnish nature and the beauty here and the fact that we have something called “midnight sun” up here. At midsummer, you have to go to northern Finland to actually witness the midnight sun. With my wife, we went to see it last summer, it was awesome. I don’t think people realize that very much. I get the impression whenever I’m in Central Europe that people seem to think of Finland as a cold and dark place, which it is in the wintertime, but in summer, it’s the opposite. We have more light than the rest of Europe and it can be very hot up here as well" Midnight Sun and some of the series that come after it have a lot of tabla-style sounds and rhythms. I found this explanation attached to a grant that a Finnish Lift company awarded to Aleksi: "In this project I plan to use Colundi Frequencies to model physical instruments and materials. First, I analyze the sound I've chosen using Fourier analysis, a visual equalizer and my tuning ear. I calculate the ratios of the sine waves in the sound and their averages. Then I digitally build the sound of my chosen instrument part by part using colundi frequencies based on my tuning systems. I have found that the sounds of indigenous percussion instruments are best suited for this, as their upper notes are not harmonic in the usual way" The whole of Midnight Sun is 134 tracks lasting 13 hours, I spent a few weeks listening to it and made this playlist of my favourites. Its 30 songs, 2h52m, you can think of it perhaps as a long double album. I've kept the original ordering and included at least one track from each of the 16 releases:

wait so this is like limited edition? you have to have a code?

re: fashion: I guess you might have seen the dieworkwear/derek guy guy on Twitter? He does hilarious but also very interesting threads where he explains tailoring I'm not actually into suits or tailoring but have learnt a lot of interesting stuff about the last century of fashion by following him. Here's a thread from last year where he demolishes Tristan Tates' suit e.g.

Can you make a track with this or just sounds? What would the code for a track look like?

Good to think about all this stuff. But I do quite appeciate that whatever the funniest thing is that happens in the world each day, a large portion of the world gets to hear about it. e.g. Which makes me reflect on how amazing it is that the whole world is potentially in touch with each other now. I can remember the pre-internet days when that was not the case, and I could write a lot about how that felt very different (maybe another time). Which makes me think that for all the problems being created by putting everyone in touch with everyone else, it might be a necessary thing that we have to go through. But still, there's lot to figure out about avoiding the pitfalls so good thread.

Getting rid of them is an idea because they do sortof hide things from the people that don't visit them. But they are sortof important for the 'identity' of watmm I guess? I remember when the Artist Subforums first got added, years ago, there was a plan where the posts would still be optionally visible in the main music forum too. Sortof like tags? Chaosmachine was working on it but it never got done iirc. Wonder if you could do that now with tags, the artist subforums just filter to a specific tag (and if you post there, that tag gets added), but the posts also show up in main 'music' forum. re: having a poll every few years to add a new featured artist: if you did that, you'd also need a process to get rid of them, .e.g any artist subforum that hasn't had new posts for a while gets retired and the posts get released back into the main music forum. Didn't there used to be a cylob subforum? I guess thats what happened. Or alternatively: just leave everything as it is. I was just kindof interested in the fact that the featured artists are frozen in time and what that says about us.

https://tubedubber.com/?q=NrH7hbi8fPM:JQceBpIOU-E:0:100:0:0:1 or, on second thoughts https://tubedubber.com/?q=NrH7hbi8fPM:uVx-n7X_47Q:0:100:0:0:1

Now we just need to get RDJ to soundtrack an episode of In The Night Garden

HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS TILL NOW Squarepusher + Cbeebies, genius

No new Featured Artists since 2011. Thats an interesting thing to ponder. Are we a bunch of old people stuck in a time capsule (yes is a perfectly valid answer to that). Or is there just no one new on the scene who's good in the last 13 years (seems unlikely). Or should we add some new ones (I have no idea who. Aleksi Perala? EOD? Kettel?). edit: Idea: Maybe every N years (N=3?) we should have a poll to add a new artist subforum, to keep up with the times?