Law n Thangs

Arthur here. Better later than never, right?

So let’s talk about Jamie Lidell. His new album, Multiply, has been out since July, and despite various attempts of those around me to get me to listen, I just never got hip to it. Not another young white guy trying to recreate the sounds of classic soul, I thought (fully aware, of course, of the irony of this viewpoint). Does the world really need another Remy Shand?

No, I don’t think so. But I think the world could use a couple more Jamie Lidells. Here’s the track that convinced me.

Jamie Lidell: When I Come Back Around
from Multiply(Warp 2005)

“When I Come Back Around” might be the funkiest thing I’ve heard in years. Maybe it’s just my latent Prince fanaticism talking – the keyboard solos sound like an outtake from Prince, and the production bears that same scent of “Composed, Produced, Arranged, and Performed By” that we’ve come to know and love. Except for one thing. Jamie Lidell is no Musicologist, talking shit about “programmers” forgoing instrumental study to play video games with their sequencers.

Jamie Lidell is a fucking electronic madman. Evan could probably tell you much more about his history with Warp Records, his background as an IDM type, in group with names like Super_Collider. Listen to some of his earlier work; you will find it…um…very different. But what does he bring to this album from that history?

He brings the NOISE. The little glitch hi-hats, the drums flying around your head. The breathing backwards boom synth blast off space noises. All intertwined with blazing keyboard solos.

This is some future shit. Funk for the 21st century.

And it is bad-ass.

evan :: Feb.04.2006 :: The Soul :: No Comments »

It’s been a busy month, what with finals and all, but I’m going to sneak in here at the end and at least keep to posting once a month, if not once a week like I originally envisioned. Of course, I also envisioned having some backup, some folk, a posse of posters to keep up the schedule when I can’t, so I’m not taking all the blame.

Today’s theme, because it’s that time of year, is Favorite Track of 2005. It should be noted that this is distinct from Best Track of 2005, which is a decision that learned men will discuss far into the new year, and the Grammys will inevitably fuck up by not choosing “Feel Good, Inc”, the only nominee that even deserves to have made it that far. All I want to accomplish here today is to find the track I like the best, the one that sounds so fresh. While some might fire up iTunes and look at their star ratings, I know better than to think that I actually know what I like and how much I like it. Instead, I’m going by play count; it has some problems, but I’ve found if you can keep your iTunes Library file intact for a year or more, it becomes a much better indicator of how much you love the tracks you love. So from a Smart Playlist by the name of “2005″, with a total of 9 official completed spins, I bring you the Favorite Track of 2005:

Sigur Ros: Milano
from Takk (Geffen 2005)

It’s an odd choice, not what I would have expected. In fact, it was actually tied with the Paul Kalkbrenner track that I posted last time, which is a much clearer favorite in my head, but it would have been kind of pointless to post that. This is still a beautiful song, epic enough in scope to justify its 10+ minutes of length and then some. It probably got a bump because I do most of my listening in transit these days, and it’s perfect for that, whether you’re out enjoying a stroll on a sunny day or you’re searching for a little refuge from your crowded, stank subway car. It provides a ready injection of Triumph and Peace into an otherwise unremarkable experience, which is something I could use almost every day. To me, the song speaks of a battle just and justly ended, with remorse for the sacrifices that were necessary but a greater balance of hope for what the battle has won; tomorrow is brighter because of what we went through today. I can’t feel like that about every day, but 2005 as a whole was just so. 2006 should be a good one, and I hope it is for everyone.

evan :: Dec.30.2005 :: The Rock :: 1 Comment »

…even though that’s pretty much what it is. I’ve recently been falling in love with electronic music all over again, and blair at music.for-robots deserves a lot of credit for that. While the entire blog is great, his posts have always led the pack as far as I’m concerned. Over the past year or so, he’s chipped away at my encrusted prejudices about all things bleepy and thumpy, showing me grand new vistas of unexplored funkiness. From the hills of German techno to the shores of Folktronica remixes, it has been quite a ride.

Those who knew me in high school know I’ve always loved the bright lights of the Warp Records stable: Aphex, Squarepusher, Autechre, etc. Eventually I figured out that they call that kind of music IDM, and so I signed on as an official Fan of IDM. Like many fans, over time I built up a hard shell around my genre, sealing up everything dope and making sure nothing wack infiltrated the edges. If there’s one thing fans love to do, it’s categorize, and electronic music fans have made it into an art in and of itself. Nothing is better proof of that than Ishkur’s Guide. Though the presentation may be a bit lacking in artistry, the breadth of information there is glorious. With such categorizations in hand, I proceeded to exclude all the genres I thought were not serious or intellectual enough; basically if you weren’t pushing to the bleeding edge of what was possible, you were “formulaic” and deserving of scorn. Thanks to Isaac’s influence, I always had a soft spot for jungle, but house, techno, breakbeat, etc. were all written off as frivolous and wack. It was a narrow-minded approach and I regret it, though I was not always wrong; Happy Hardcore and Anthem Trance are still both completely ridiculous. Thankfully, I have mellowed with age and can now appreciate all things that are dope, not just what I allow myself to believe is dope.

These two tracks are from the most excellent BPitch Control label in Berlin, who are the vanguards of German minimalist techno. Headed by Ms. Ellen Allien, it is the first label since Warp where I have bought into their aesthetic and appreciate everything they are releasing, whether it is to my taste or not. Both these tracks were posted by blair on MFR, so apologies all around, wherever necessary, but I had to give the world another crack at them:

Paul Kalkbrenner: Gebrunn Gebrunn
from Camping 2 (BPitch Control 2005) [MFR post]

Fuck a song of hope for the new millenium, this is The March of Victory In The War Against Unfunkiness. It is a relentless destructive onslaught against Those Who Do Not Bob Their Heads. V-U Day is here, deny it at your peril.

Apparat: Cheap Thrills
from My Parade (BPitch Control 2004) [MFR post]

This is The Other March Of Victory, from the opposite flank. It shuffles and sneaks along, rather than stomping everything in its path flat, but it is no less undeniable. Resistance is futile.

All I can offer to conclude is that if these tracks were too massive, if they plowed you under and left you buried under the weight of their funk, don’t be afraid to come back. We’ll have some nice soft soulful tracks for you next, and hopefully “next” won’t be more that week away.

evan :: Nov.17.2005 :: The Roll :: No Comments »

Squarepusher: A Journey To Reedham (7 A.M. Mix)
from Big Loada (Warp 1997)

Today I’d like to talk about what makes a “Song of Hope for the New Millennium”. That’s the title IK awarded to this track, way back in the halcyon days of high school. The world was a brighter, happier place then, and while we had plenty of excess angst to stew in, deep down we knew that it was just a phase. We would go on to college and big things, navigating the Information Superhighway at full speed, stopping only to collect our rewards for being so cool and doing such interesting stuff.
I don’t think I can really sum up my feeling about the track any better than with a video treatment I’ve been carrying around in my head ever since I first heard it. It begins with a shot of an open manhole cover on a New York street. Slowly rising out of it is a life-size Super Mario, rendered in old school 8-bit glory. He begins to walk through the city, which is almost completely empty, like early on a Saturday morning. Along the way he finds other beloved Nintendo characters, who start following him around, until finally they form a huge pyramidal procession down Fifth Avenue. I wasn’t even that huge a gamer when I was younger, but there’s still a lot of nostalgia bound up in those characters for me, and I think their triumphal parade through the real world speaks of the optimism a lot of us felt about the merging of the virtual and the physical in those wild pre-millennial days.

Blockhead: Insomniac Olympics
from Music By Cavelight (Ninja Tune 2003)

Alas, the actual new millennium leaves a little bit to be desired. Even if 9/11 and its ensuing conflicts did not, in fact, change math and Jesus, it did change a lot about how much hope we had for this brave new era we had entered. Things weren’t going to be shiny and awesome all the time. For me, this Blockhead track captures perfectly the slight menace bred by the fear and uncertainty we all feel a bit of now. It’s not terrifying, nor is it angry or indignant; it’s just vaguely creepy, in the most beautiful way. It’s also a march, like the Squarepusher track, but this parade can’t be attended by anything so unserious as videogame characters. It’s got a be a brotherhood of broken but hopeful people finding their way through the urban canyons, kept going by the sunlight that peeks through the clouds.
The beat here is of course undeniable, but it’s the primal, warbling vocal sample of the chorus that carries the day. It stirs you from complacency and demands that you see the good in the world, and do some good of your own. That makes it my new official Song of Hope for the (still) New Millennium. If anyone else wants to hope along with me, feel free.

evan :: Oct.24.2005 :: The Roll :: 2 Comments »

Hello and welcome. This is where the music is going to be posted. The name may change, domains may be added, but this page will always be here for you. The music will live here for about a month, after which the mp3, but not the entry, will be deleted*. We aspire to have something new for you every week at least, but if we fall behind, don’t kick us off your blogroll right away. Be assured that we’re just taking extra time to find tracks that are just that much better.We hope that you enjoy the show, and anyone interested in contributing, let us know at putmeon@horseforce.net.

*-Anyone who can prove that they are authorized to make such requests on behalf of the copyright owner can request that the file be taken down before then. All reasonable requests will be honored immediately, but an email that just says “take down my song, you sunuvabitch”, even if from lars@metallica.com, will require some further explanation and evidence.

evan :: Oct.23.2005 :: The Hole :: 4 Comments »

So it’s been a hop, skip, and a jump away from a while since I posted anything. It should not be surprising to anybody if I blame starting law school for that drought. I don’t want to make excuses, but god, if you’re still checking back and reading this, the least I owe you is an explanation.

Everyone says the first year of law school is hard, but I thought I was ready. I’d studied hard and done well on the LSAT; I’d just study hard and do well in class. I guess that formula is simple enough that it might yet hold true, but the experience couldn’t be less familiar. The LSAT just demanded that I lock myself in a room every Sunday for ten weeks and take a practice exam. It was a matter of discipline more than concentration, raw hours clocked rather then focused analysis. I’m learning that law school is actually much more than just a big logic game of shuffling seating arrangments and allocating people between vehicles; perhaps they should make wedding planners take the LSAT instead of law students. Law school seems to be instead a constant game of hide-and-go-seek between you and the professors, where you duck down and try not to get called on when you don’t know your shit and run around trying to tag them when you do. Once you get on call, by whichever side’s machinations, you get to go play on the Problematizing Seesaw, where you vacillate back and forth between clear rules and borderline cases as long as the professor stays amused. Afterwards you resolve to be a better seesawer next time, so you spend the evening going back and forth on your own imaginary seesaw, but it never feels quite like the real thing.

The end result is that after a month of school I feel a little dizzy. I think I’ve kept up alright, but my brain feels out of focus. I can’t get the two hemispheres to converge on any one idea. I have some faith that I’ll get my groove back soon enough, but I didn’t realize how out of practice I was. Three years without any significant intellectual challenges has built up a lot of cruft, and I’ve been getting by on a neat turn of phrase and a furrowed brow for too long. Big words don’t impress anyone in law school; neither do lazy analogies or unwarranted assumptions. It’s definitely going to take my focused and sustained attention over the rest of the year to get my domepiece back to fighting weight.

So I’m going on a diet. Not a food diet (though I’ve recently switched to Diet Coke after years of resistance, which should save me a few bajillion calories a year), but an information diet. I’ve decided that I really have to cut down on distractions, and right now I try to be knowledgable about too many things. I now have 99 feeds in my aggregator; there’s no way I can stay up on all of them and have a chance to be even a passably good law student. It’s nice to be well rounded, but I really feel like it’s time to stop sacrificing depth for breadth. If I need to get up to speed on something, I’ll do some research on it; no more trying to be preemptively informed.

That said, everyone needs to have a hobby. I’m not capable of banishing everything but Law from the life of my mind. The other thing I’m allowing myself is Music. It may be a cop out, since there was no way I was going to stop listening to music, but I’m going to try to actually devote more time to it. I think if I have a default thing to do when I’m not doing Law things, I’ll be more focused generally. My project is going to be an MP3 blog, similar to those under the Music heading in the sidebar on the left. The idea is no more complicated than me posting a track or two and some thoughts about them every week or so, but I think it will be get me (and hopefully you) more engaged with my collection and music in general. Ideally, I’ll be able to convince some others to join me in the endeavor, so I (we) can be up on what they’re up on.

So keep an eye out, and don’t forget to peep our brother publications, Beer Burgers and Dsquared, which have been publishing with renewed vigor as of late.

evan :: Oct.12.2005 :: Notices :: 3 Comments »

It’s been a banner week for the good ol’ Supreme Court, finishing off their term on Monday with a nice hefty wad of decisions. You all know which one I was waiting for , and it came down looking like a doozy: MGM v. Grokster was sent back down in an unanimous 9-0 decision. While it’s true that MGM and their fellow content conglomerates can claim to have “won”, in the sense that they achieved their desired procedural result, it is not nearly so splendid for them as they will claim.

The Court basically expanded the standard set in Sony v. Universal, which says that a technology need only be “capable of substantial non-infringing uses” to avoid being liable for any copyright infringement by its users. Now one can also be liable if they “distribute a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe”, which seems to only say that one must very cautious about how one markets such a device. This standard seems to cover most of the ground of Orrin Hatch’s nasty INDUCE Act, but I think there’s a lot of wiggle room preserved in the distinction between “inducement” and “promotion”. Under the new Grokster standard, it would seem that a given technology could be stupendously awesome at enabling infringement, but as long as the creators don’t mention that awesomeness, they’ll be safe. On the other hand, I think many people could make a good case for the making available of such awesomeness qualifying as inducement to infringe. Some patronizing metaphor about letting kids loose in a candy store would likely be trotted out to great effect in that argument.

For anyone who’s interested in what actual lawyers think about the effects of Monday’s decision, Copyfight has an excellent round-up, at least for their side of the debate. The other side isn’t that happy with the decision either, with Douglas Lichtman, a U of C law professor who filed a brief in support of MGM et al., pointing out that “intent-based standards…are among the easiest to avoid.”

What’s most interesting to me about Justice Souter’s ‘majority’ opinion is that much of the evidence cited against Grokster and Streamcast doesn’t seem to meet the new standard of promoting the use of their programs to infringe. Maybe I’m way off base, because I’ve only heard this issue mentioned once amongst the deluge of analysis in the last 48 hours, on the latest IT Conversations ‘law’ podcast with Ernie Miller (cop it with the new hotness). The bulk of the evidence centers around references to Napster, mainly documenting Grokster’s attempts to market to ex-Napster users after it was shut down, up to and including the use of the “ster” suffix. While Napster was shut down because it would not / could not stop the infringement happening on its network, it seems wholly unwarranted to therefore mark all its users as tainted, such that any attempts to market to them are evidence of infringing behavior. Napster was without question capable of substantial non-infringing uses, even though the particulars of its business left it open to liability for infringement, and it would seem that the Court has disregarded the possibility of marketing to people interested in those uses. The only somewhat direct evidence of promoting the capabilities of their software to infringe comes from an out-of-context quote from Streamcast’s CTO: “The goal is to get in trouble with the law and get sued. It’s the best way to get in the news.” The remark could have been a flip response to a stupid question from the press, or any number of things, but here it stands as “promoting infringement”. It’s odd to think that one quote could bring companies such massive liabilities, and perhaps in the jury trial it won’t be sufficient, but I certainly wouldn’t hire that guy to work for me unless I could get a muzzle-wearing provision into his contract.

All in all, I think the decision isn’t as bad as it could have been, but I’m sorry it even had to be made. I think most of the pundits are right when they say that the only real winners here are the lawyers.

evan :: Jun.28.2005 :: Notices :: No Comments »

I’m sure the more internet-addicted of you have known about this for a while, but the chance that some of you haven’t compels me to post it:

Overheard in New York

It’s exactly what it sounds like, and it’s not perfect. Some of the snippets are not funny. Some of them are perhaps not even real. But some of them are so profound I want to do cartwheels of wonderment. I’ll give you one of my (and their) favorites to start:

Dumb teen: Hey, look at this! It says “Train for jobs in beeyotch.”
Smarter teen: Fool! That word is biotech. Why you gotta be ignorant all your life?
–1 train

evan :: Jun.17.2005 :: NetBits :: 1 Comment »

Just a brief note: this type of thing needs to happen more often. We can’t be supposing that we understand the infinite mysteries of these electro-magic brainboxes that we call our “computers”.

evan :: May.20.2005 :: NetBits :: No Comments »

So Apple is now being sued for trademark infringement by TigerDirect (via Engadget). Cockamamie nonsense, I think. One thing did catch my eye, though:

“Tiger Direct contends that Apple’s use of the name has adversely affected its ranking amongst the Internet’s largest search engines, Google and Yahoo, bumping the company from its usual spot in the first three results.”

That’s a bold and dangerous claim. It doesn’t seem like they’re bothering with showing harm to their business or confusion of their brand within their industry; they just want to own that search term. Now, I don’t know what makes them think that even a tiny percentage of the people searching for “tiger” are looking for them and not this. I doubt they’re looking for the latest OS X release, either. The dangerous part of this idea is that there could possibly be a damages claim resulting from a change in placement in search engine results for a single English word query. That’s really just a step away from being able to sue the OED. Perhaps Tiger Woods could drop his last name and sue the pants off of zoos everywhere.

evan :: Apr.28.2005 :: Notions :: 3 Comments »