cousin girls

Let me just give you an impression of the robot exoskeleton I and some other people (don’t want to reveal too much at this point) have been working on for some time. We’re not finished at all, and what you can see in the video is the person controlling the skeleton and not the other way round, because the motors did not wanna work today … Anyway, I guess you already got it: the movement of the person in this suit is going to be controlled by someone else …

Oi mates, thanks to all of you for being so kind and open towards all the things out there and inside (oh, and in between, too ^^)!

So let’s see what’s going to happen next:

––>RAUM 25 C<––

This wonderful little label Getting The Story Straight just came up with its third release so far.

Disjunctive ecclecticism, as found in Ibizan Street Dirt (GTSS001) and What Makes The Possible Real (GTSS002), rules this slow paced, round and sensitive mix consisting of elements from Space Disco, Material House, Reality Computing and Popular Music.

LISTEN HERE

1. Mono Puff - Pretty Fly
2. Talking Heads - Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)
3. Iz & Diz - Love Vibe (Pepe Bradock’s “Confiote De Bits” Remix)
4. Mono Puff - Pretty Fly
5. Quarks - Fallen
6. Hosomi - Kumorizoranohajimarutokoro
7. Björk - Jóga
8. Mice Parade - Double Dolphins On The Nickel
9. Asa-Chang - Kutsu #3
10. Morgan Packard - Airships Fill The Sky
11. Morgan Packard - Mink Hills
12. Yumi Kimura - Always With Me

The intense climax is reached in the second half, when layering Hosomi and Björk creates a surprising tension. The momentum, then, just carries on, as this beautiful Mice Parade song is even more intesified by Asa-Chang’s trumpet play, anti-climaxing into two accordions from two different tracks, together breathing along, making lots and lots of space for the Mink Hills, when it’s nearly time to say good-bye already …

So keep your eyes open, your ears, that is.

Dear friends,

this is going to be unbelievably nice – those of you who attended the party at Patrick’s place last Saturday know what I’m talking about (cf. this post in Morgan’s blog).

Morton Shumway’s again going to play, too. You know what that means if you recently asked yourself why those crazy party people use to shout out “Africa!! Africa!!” these days.

May 2nd, 2008, Morgan Packard will give a concert at FYW (Cologne Ehrenfeld). Please see flyers below.

Together with Ezekiel Honig, Morgan Packard released on acclaimed Microcosm Music NY (alongside Miskate et al. taking a naturalist, or corporeal turn towards sampling in electronic (dance) music), later on Anticipate Recordings which through his album “Airships Fill The Sky” and releases by Ezekiel Honig, Mark Templeton, Klimek, and Sawako became co-defining for contemporary music – don’t miss the freely downloadable Summer Tour Remixes!

Airships Fill The Sky, by employing instrumental elements, sampling and synthesis – i.e. representation, performance and simulation – poses questions about relations between sound, music, nature, motion, feeling, technology and mind. Packard plays the accordion in a way that investigates material properties of the instrument in an expressive context – the instrument not mainly as a tool to express artistic or musical concepts, but as a body expressive of itself, of its physical properties and meanings, which cannot just be infererred by myself and applied to an otherwise dead matter, but are in direct relation to this thing, and of homologous properties of a human body – the instrument breathes, feels, as I synchronise my breath, my feeling.

Here, already, simulation takes place: Myself as a mind–body, capable of conveying a universal connection between sense and matter, cannot only acknowledge the expressiveness of the instrument and the processes that surround it, but I can reflect and describe all this (what I maybe need representational power to) in order to communicate. This becomes possible as feeling is in all things, and breathing in it’s meaningful, expressive aspects relies on my knowing about how it feels to have a body which breathes.

Thus, the instrument becomes part of myself in a twofold sense: its breathing as breathing is simulated in my capability to abstract from my own concrete bodily states and draw the meaning of a thing breathing from my own breathing (it breathes through myself, or technically: I run a simulation of it breathing on my hardware, which is not all that ‘hard’, as it/myself knows about breathing); and my own breathing as breathing becomes realised in the instrument, i.e. the instrument is an integral part of my conception of breathing, of its meaning, of what it is for myself.

Sure, there’s a stricter way to grasp simulation, which we encounter when we meet the natural beauty of the simulacrum. To make it clear, hearing the sound of SuperCollider determining the synthetic aspects of Packard’s music is bliss. But apart from this production esthetics, the simulational power of SC presents us a dynamic representation which is becoming natural – it’s arguable whether this would be representational at all, and also, whether I assume too much about the actual simulational effects here. What I hear is the following: imagine a field of hollow bamboo canes as they could be used to build panpipes. Some of them touch one another, others stand apart from one another, imagine now a process that partially blows, partially shakes these, namely with a dynamic that reminds of unsteady, but strong and playful wind rattling at your door, shaking the bamboo façade of your cozy shed.

Again we are confronted with a very much material, dynamical and sounding process, but this time probably without a body proper in the first place. Again, we do not seem to deal with an absolute disembodiment here, but with a simulation which does not consist in an irreality or disembodied virtuality, but in a virtuality consisting in ourselves which can be realised though this very simulational process.

Luckily, as I am not capable of giving a complete account for what makes me appraise Airships Fill The Sky in this manner, I will stop here. Hope to see you on Friday!

Thanks to cramo for making this happen!!

See Morgan Packard’s webpage, where you can also download the SuperCollider instrument – thanks, Morgan!

“One singular deception … is to mistake the sensation produced by our own unclearness of thought for a character of the object we are thinking. Instead of perceiving that the obscurity is purely subjective, we fancy that we contemplate a quality of the object which is essentially mysterious; and if our conception be afterward presented to us in a clear form we do not recognize it as the same, owing to the absence of the feeling of unintelligibility.” (How to Make Our Ideas Clear)

Sometimes you just have to be patient until after a meteorologically hyperboring winter it will finally snow like … like it makes me very happy.

Why I like the snow sooo much … can I say? Is it because all the boring numb crap of like mostly everything gets covered in crisp, sparkly, calm and calming immanence – I can hear myself hear, and oh, it’s fun strolling through the snow.

Take a look out my window:

“Our external permanency, would not be external, in our sense, if it was restricted in its influence to one individual. It must be something which affects, or might affect, every man.” (The Fixation of Belief)

“To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by nothing human, but by some external permanency – by something upon which our thinking has no effect.” (The Fixation of Belief)