via Louv

Really, really good and interesting song.

Just a little cheesy, but really nails a sense of the re-opening of the future.

I’m packing for London. I have a feeling that I’m going to be doing a lot more traveling in the next couple of years than in the last few, so I’m sort of assembling “standard kit” as I go, figuring out what I need from the rats next of cables and odd converters. Things which don’t charge off USB pain me, and these days the cables are bigger than the electronics.

It’s strange packing against 40 Kg. I wish I had a scale (I may well pick one up) but it’s more the sense of fitting through the eye of a needle. Fortunately or unfortunately I no longer travel with tent and water filter and walkie talkies. It’s the suit and the extra batteries, the mobile studio basically. There’s a few hundred bucks of expensive audio gear that’s probably just too big and heavy to make the cut, I suppose I’ll post it.

The hard part was that brief period where I travelled with both sets of gear. It’s been a few years now.

Two laptops, a terabyte of storage, two cameras, two microphones, cabling, chargers, batteries… a few years from now it’s going to be vastly different, smaller, more integrated devices, terabytes everywhere, probably things like phased array microphones… in the future, every device will be a video output device. Editing will be more and more the critical point: how little time can you make delivering your message take.

There’s probably a rule there: every time you half the length, you multiply the potential audience by 10. I suspect that’s about right.

So right now I’m trying to figure out how to simplify my message by another factor of two or four. I’ve spent a couple of years getting the depth in place – there’s now four or six hours of video and a dozen or so papers and long articles which flesh out the deep theoretical models – enough for a book, enough for people who care to dig through and understand my chain of thought about the world much as I understand it.

Now what I have to do is simplify it for people who just want to do it.

That’s a shift from a basically academic and reflective model to a model of active propagation: not teasing out what is right, but trying to inspire people to change their behavior in helpful ways.

Active persuasion.

The fundamental vision of the movement is shared to at least the same degree as the vision of the original free software movers and shakers. Shared enough to get the job done. Enough is held common to enable mass collaboration.

That wasn’t obvious to me until I spent some time talking to people at Global Swadeshi and it became apparent that we all spoke the same language and had come to broadly similar conclusions. And now, implementation.

Ride are also sublime. (audio’s quiet on this one)

Underworld also do fabulous things.

Great stuff indeed. I wonder who fills this niche for folks who’re turning those critical ages today?

Here’s one I made earlier. Hit “unmute” to hear it.

http://www.dyspxl.com/gallery/orbs/296-theme-song

YZ is cheesy in places. It cannot be denied that there are a few place where he’s going for an effect that nobody can quite pull off except live. But songs repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and grow richer and not tired, and he hasn’t pulled that off for quite some time.

It’s not Laurie Anderson’s “Big Science” for a darker age. Not quite.

No. Its a mature voice. He’s been, apparently, through hell and back, and now he’s got something to say not about the personal angst of the early brilliant material, or the muddled middle years where, well, now that he was no longer dying alive, there was nothing to say.

Now it’s turned outwards: its a NIN album about the world, not about Trent Reznor’s personal crisis.

There’s a little greatness in this piece of music. He’s got an edge now, a force, that really belies the raw venting of the early material. He’s the only musician that I listened to obsessively when I was growing up and maturing who seems to have genuinely transformed, transmuted and changed – to have matured as an artist, not simply grown older.

He should try politics.

And no, you can’t see it.

But there is a soundboard recording of the entire thing, which is spectacularly good, and which I’ll hope to be able to share online at some point in the near future because, let me tell you, the man is that good and then some.

World class.

Tip from David Bowie, who is blogging about music and telling interesting life stories online.