opened for Trail of Dead (along with IQU) last weekend. I picked up the CD but only today had the pleasure of unwrapping it and listening to it.. It’s got that lovely indierock mix of tightness and rawness. You can check them out here.
Sound Studies tomorrow. Semiprofound sound fact #356:
In The Victorian Soundscape, John Picker writes about Charles Babbage’s campaign against London Street musicians. For those who don’t know, Babbage was a famous 19th century mathematician and inventor of something called the “difference engine” which was something like an early general-purpose computing machine. With a little historical license, some have called him the inventor of computing. I’m not going to get this across clearly because it’s been a long day and I’m tired, but here you have the “father of computing” opposing math and music: Babbage said that street musicians made it impossible for him to do his calculations — to compute. I want to write something about the later attempts to eradicate “noise” in cybernetics as a metaphorization of this earlier urban bourgeois sensibility. And something else about the opposition of computational precision and music. I’ll get it right, but not tonight.
Jonathan: You should have a look at Hogarth\’s print, \’The Enraged Musician\’ (1741) if you aren\’t already familiar with it. It\’s a classic statement of the supposed antipathy between popular and polite music.
Nice blog by the way.
Alphonso Lingis has a really cool take on noise in his _The Community of Those Who Have Nothing In Common_. It\’s in the chapter called \”The Murmur of the World.\”