Issue 4 - Bass
I have no big overarching theme to explore this week. It was… a long series of days where too much happened but not a lot of consequential progress occurred.
That’s just how the weeks go sometimes, I guess?
Project Updates
In which I attempt to keep myself honest by talking about things I’m thinking of making, or have half-made. Or perhaps, have put successfully out into the world.
My friend Dave is an incredible DJ, and it’s always a cause for celebration when he puts out a new Drum & Bass set. Case in point, his new Wintery Liquid set. Which, in turn, inspired me to finally get around to something I’ve been curious about for several years – trying out Drum & Bass for myself.
The whole genre is a little off its peak these days, in terms of popularity, artists putting out tracks, and DJs mixing it. And honestly, I suspect that part of it is down to the fact that mixing DnB is hard.
For starters, (duh) it’s frenetic – the average DnB track clocks in somewhere around 170-175 BPM, nearly 3 beats per second. Up at those levels, it’s often simpler to stop counting so fast and just halve the rate (so 174 BPM becomes 87 BPM). And this is, sometimes what a lot of the software available to DJs (or embedded in digital hardware) will do. But not consistently, so mixing DnB requires a lot of attention to exactly what speed everything’s runniung at.
Secondly, far more than House or Breaks, a lot of DnB has weird melodic properties which can make even two tracks which are nominally in the same key sound “off” when mixed together. I think it’s partly because most DnB does a lot more weird melodic stuff waaaay down in its basslines, but I’m not sure just yet.
Anyhow, it’s a blast to mix when it works – when two tracks mesh, they often mesh really, really well.
All of which is, perhaps obviously, telegraphing the fact that I put together a first DnB mix this week. It’s called Float.
A Thing of Beauty
I was brought up to think of books as semi-sacred objects; not to be damaged, torn, or lightly discarded. And as we’ve grown into the age of digital readers, this mindset has in some ways intensified – if we no longer really need paperbacks, what, then are books for? I’d argue that the book as object becomes even more important – books which are beautifully made, or contain visual material which doesn’t translate well to a screen.
Anyhoo, all of this makes the art of Guy Laramée feel a little dangerous and transgressive to me. And yet… it combines the wonder of tiny imagined landscapes with the remaining beauty of books-as-object. It’s… quite something.
Dedo de Deus by Guy Laramée
More images and background info are available at Colossal.
Ephemera
The human body. Unless you’re a rogue AI, scanning all recorded human output to catalog our most exploitable weaknesses, you have one. And it’s fascinating.
I forgot to bring this up last week, so you may have already stumbled across it, but if not… it appears that, in the US and UK at least, human body temperature has decreased by nearly a full degree Fahreneheit since the 1800s. So that thing you probably learned before you were 20, about human body temperature being 98.6? Nonsense!.
We learn and distribute certain “facts” in the assumption that reality is a lot less mutable (particularly over a few generations’ lifespans) than it really is, and I wonder which bits of false folk-wisdom I’m carrying around in my own head.
…which leads me, sort of, to a classic story, published a decade ago, about how humans discovered, and then forgot how to cure scurvy, because we made the wrong assumptions about how citrus actually prevented it.There’s potential body-horror in some of the descriptions of the disease; if you can handle that, this is a great Sunday afternoon read.
More fun than horrible nutritional deficiencies, it turns out that your dancing style is recognizably unique to you. Perhaps the best part of this study is that its main discovery was accidental; they set out to find out whether different genres prompt different styles of dance in people. Turns out, nope – you dance in your own special way, whether it’s Jazz playing, or Drum & Bass.
Also great, if you have any interest in transportation, or Britain, or history, is this rundown of the origins of 12 London Underground line names. Having been to a lot of places (and lived in a few) where there are no names, only letters or numbers, I have a lot of retroactive fondness for the Tube’s scheme.
I received my Kickstarter edition of Cyanide and Happiness’s “Trial by Trolley” boardgame yesterday, and had a chance to try it on some friends mere hours after it arrived. It’s a great game, and you can place a “Late Pledge” for it if you’re intrigued by the premise.
Finally, a bit of a sharp right turn into a quick, great explainer on what the word “strategy” actually means because holy hell, do people ever like to throw that word around when they actually mean “an uncoordinated pile of reactive tactical initiatives”, and my inner pedant has more or less reached his limit with it.
Endnote
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