Random Links For November

Sorry I have been so quiet on the blog. This is not because I have been overwhelmingly busy, although I have finished two new pieces, a ninety minute live performance and other things I will document in due course. The main reason is that I tend to operate in terms of blocks of time and now I am ready for another "blog block"! To kick things off I will give you a random set of links of interest that I have stumbled across recently.

It may surprise you to know that Abstract Expressionism was promoted by the CIA as a cold war tool! This article from The Independent is dated 1995, so it's not exactly news!

Sometimes it takes me years to catch up with everyone else. Case in point is this LOLcat version of Eliot's The Wasteland. No, really.

Brian Eno has a new album out and this cute meta-interview might or might not tell you anything about it. Warp Records have made three tracks from this release available on their Soundcloud page. I have no idea what Eno is doing on Warp, but there you go.

The TED Prize is a $100,000 donation the Technology, Entertainment, Design foundation makes to a distinctive artist or activist, in order that they might use this money to achieve some wish. The 2011 prize goes to a truly incredible photographer who goes only by the name "JR". You can view his video "Women Are Heroes" and read an appreciation on the Lens Scratch blog. Prepare to be amazed!

I am always intrigued by the intrinsic properties of a given medium and, being an audio artist, I take special interest in sound-producing devices and how to alter/corrupt/modify them to suit new purposes. If you are like me, you will love this article on lock groove records. I own a good number of the records mentioned there, including the Lee Ranaldo release From Here to Infinity, which consists of nothing but locked grooves. Apparently that one is a bit of a collectors piece.

But it is dwarfed in scale by an album issued on RRRecords containing no fewer than 500 (!) artists contributing lock grooves. You can download it from Egg City Radio.

6 Degrees of Black Sabbath allows you to find connections between disparate recording artists. This reveals astonishing facts like the most connected artist is... Pigface! Black Sabbath themselves only rate third. The innovative software uses the community music database MusicBrainz, which it traverses to accumulate relationship info. Read the FAQ and some of the related articles to see how it was written.

Colorjack is yet another cool way of finding web colour palettes to suit your current mood. Though the ultimate tool for this is Adobe's Kuler, which attempts to build a social networking site on top of people's colour preferences!

More articles coming shortly.

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