Warren Ellis's Blog, page 99
September 5, 2011
GUEST INFORMANT: Colleen Nika
Journalist (Rolling Stone, Interview, Style.com) and DJ Colleen Nika will be posting here a few times during the week, she promises. She's doing lots of things at once. Including a multiplatform scheme called Nightvision that I've been greatly looking forward to:
I created Nightvision as a both a gesture of defiance and in pursuit of unity. In response to an array of perceived 'market voids', I birthed a simple 'mutant music manifesto': a plight to protect, preserve, and promote future, forgotten, and foreign sounds — exploratory and nonconformist music often alienated by the traditional gatekeepers, even in an age of so-called equal opportunity. As I grew disenchanted with what I felt was an increasingly balkanized and devalued modern musical experience–and constantly endured the same complaints from peers– I decided there was a real hunger and need for change. So, Nightvision offers a solution: to promote the idea of 'music without borders' by not only shining a light on lesser explored musical niches (those not fitting Pitchfork et al's pre-sanctioned musical course of 2011), but to elevate that interchange beyond simply downloading some songs onto your hard drive to distractedly consume, then swiftly forget. I saw no reason why the benefits of the digital age (unfathomable musical vernaculars at your fingertips, decoded within minutes if you wish) haven't also enacted an equally versatile, and accessible, real-world musical experience. Why aren't we able to see these artists we download from all corners of the web on stages? Why are they not curated into meaningful broadcast experiences? I decided to create such a haven — such an old concept, a la John Peel, it almost felt new again.
So, hence, Nightvision. It is a three-tiered platform: Stage 001 — which launches this week with an exclusive interview and mix from one of England's leading new electronic talents — is a dynamic editorial and podcast online platform. Stage 002 is a radio show, which you'll be hearing more about soon. We'll be doing a guest spot on Mary Anne Hobbs' XFM Music:Response show this Wednesday at 10pm UK time. Tune in! Most importantly, there's Stage 003 — putting it all in a live context, which means bringing acts that might never tour the US over here sooner and more often. Nightvision deploys Stage 003 this winter, debuting onstage with what will be a mind-spinning set of enigmatic and intense global performers NYC is unlikely to forget any time soon.
On one level, Nightvision are 'specialists', importing European and global music to an American stage; on another level, we are uniters with no allegiance to any locale or genre, and refuse to regard geography as prohibitive or prescriptive. We see New York City as a convenient starting point to prove our manifesto valid and vital. There will be more cities, more crusades, to come.
Nightvision is my brainchild, but such a gifted range of co-conspirators have joined me in my quest, that I consider it very much a collaborative movement for change. Artists, audience, me, the curator — we're all investing in the same dialogue. We're here to kill the inertia.
Below, a taste of our favorite sounds du jour; it was cobbled together under the influence of unruly spirits, federal greed, cosmic alliances, and the sense of stifling encasement, both bodily and psychological. Some of the tracks are old, some new, some drifting in between. All in under 20 minutes, all revelatory of where we stand aesthetically and in attitude. Enjoy.
NIGHTVISION lives at http://thisisnightvision.com/. You can find Colleen on Twitter.
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GUEST INFORMANT: Matthew Sheret
I've known Matt Sheret for a few years now: we met at a hauntology do in London. Our first conversation must've gone on for about an hour, sitting on the south bank of the Thames and watching the world go by. He's been a writer, a publisher and a public speaker, and for the last year or two has described himself as a Data Griot for the music service last.fm. So I asked him what that meant:
Griots were the bard/spin-doctors of the African Continent, taking traditional histories and reworking them to satisfy the needs of the audiences they found.
The 'facts' of their legends and their histories remained a constant, the raw tendons and sinew of their stories a carefully preserved structure, passed from griot to griot. But the flesh and bearing of every tale was twisted to suit the audience; they used context to weaponise content, to fill every telling with a meaning pertinent to the people listening at only that moment.
Hundreds of years ago we started to fix those stories, to lock them in place. We started to lose our bards and our minstrels and our griots, instead allowing ourselves to "recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols", in Plato's words.
But then those symbols started to lose their meaning, numbers in particular. Big data got bigger and bigger, and all the digits started to lose context. They became separated from the stories that got them there in the first place.
Companies started to look for ways of filling that gap (Chris Heathcote wrote really nicely about that last year), and the likes of The Guardian and OK Cupid started to spin the numbers into pictures and the pictures into paragraphs, connecting the numbers – at last – back to their sources.
Last.fm started looking for someone of their own to do that, and named the role, this new/old caste, in the process. The Data Griot. Me.
Last.fm users send tiny bits of information about the music they're listening to to their Last.fm profile, and we call each piece of data a scrobble. What users get out of scrobbling is music and live event recommendations. What we get out of scrobbling is enough data to drown in.
Our Music Information Retrieval (MIR) team turn all that data into meaningful connections for the people who use Last.fm; chart data, radio algorithms, data-visualisation tools. The guys in MIR are respected scientists; they are much cleverer than you, and have a tremendous capacity for booze.
But sometimes people need paragraphs. My job is to humanise the numbers, to turn that huge quantity of data into stories, the kind of mini-narratives that could surface anywhere. I turn the facts and sinew into simple blog posts, into ticker-tape copy running beneath celebrity gossip shows, and into audio scripts broadcast to 9 million listeners every single day.
I can't see in scrobbles alone. If I'm reading the numbers and not fleshing out the context I am not doing my job. I have to see through the 98,000 people screaming "Baby I was born this way" last week and look at how badly they want to feel liberated. I have to find out why witch house has given way to yacht bounce has given way to cloud rap will give way to hazy beach. I have to instinctively know how differently an Xbox listener behaves to an iTunes die-hard.
On the good days, with the charts pointing in the right direction, I see the grins of listeners spinning Kendrick Lamar's "Ronald Reagan Era" on repeat. And on the bad days I see the booted foot of Sir Paul McCartney stamping on humanity's headphones, forever.
And then, one day, the griot after me will need to see through those same numbers and tell a whole new story.
You can find Matt at his website, at his last.fm profile, and on Twitter.
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September 4, 2011
British Summer Time
Things and stuff I want to make note of:
John Robb, writer on Open Source Warfare and Resilient Communities, is doing a Q&A at the Well right now. You may recognise his name: I've quoted from his blog, Global Guerrillas, many times here. I'd like to clip a couple of things, from his introduction and his definition of OSW:
I began in operations (Tier 1 spec ops) and and then became a technology analyst (I was Forrester's first Internet analyst in '95)… spent some time figuring out how warfare would evolve over the next decades. That resulted in my work on open source warfare (which has become popular with guerrillas around the world and ended up in a scientific study that was on the cover of Nature magazine), violent superempowerment, systems disruption. After I got a handle on that topic, I started to use the same approach to work on ways of configuring society/economics to weather future disruption/failures. Essentially, strategies of peace.
Open source warfare is a form of warfare seen in a world without compelling ideologies. A world where lots of small groups, each with their own motivations for fighting (from criminal to religious to nationalist to ethnic), can join together to take on a much larger enemy (usually, a nation-state). In many cases, the groups involved don't even know what they are doing when they engage in it. They just do it naturally, out of weakness. Open source warfare is a form of warfare where any group that wants to fight can participate. Every group can innovate. They can try out new methods of attack. New targets. If the technique works, every other group copies it (as in, release early and often). Groups share info between each other freely since the other groups are co-developers of the war…
Elsewhere, I've not been able to keep up or completely parse Jacob Appelbaum's rolling coverage on Twitter of the following event, but this site seems to have it in a nutshell (?):
After breaching the Dutch CA (Certification Authority) DigiNotar, Iranian hackers managed to sign forged certificates for the domains of spy agencies CIA, Mossad and MI6. Leading certification authorities like VeriSign and Thawte were also targeted, as were Iranian dissident sites.
"The era of disposable robots, sharing our lives, is so obviously just around the corner, with all the resultant goodness and badness."
– Russell Davies
I'm not completely sold on the "sharing our lives" rhetoric, especially not in the same sentence as "disposable robots," but that is a statement that makes you (me) lean back in one's chair and go "Huh. Yeah." Another little future that's in the process of sneaking up on us from an unexpected angle. But I have to circle round to "disposable robots," and slightly recontextualise that as "burner robots."
Molly Crabapple began her Week In Hell.
Interesting little article on one of the last remaining maskhara, or royal jesters, of Afghanistan (and why this one may still be around):
Atta boasted proudly of Pashean's many talents, telling me that in addition to his prowess as an entertainer, he was also a professional blackmailer, a master thief, and a prolific murderer, with an estimated fifty victims killed by his own hand…
And, in Lagos, Jan Chipchase stopped moving long enough to find this odd little piece of cultural disconnect:
In a country where a music video is shot in a day, and a movie can be shot in two – a collation of news clips on the Japan earthquake/tsunami makes for a decent disaster movie.
Japan Bitter Experience!
September 3, 2011
Next week will be Guest Informant posts, with luck. The ...
Next week will be Guest Informant posts, with luck. The week after that will be Three Panels Open posts, I hope. After that, I believe the site will revert to a previous mode of operation for a while.
With the lovely Chrome extension that blocks the horrible Red Button Of G+ Notification in Gmail, I'm making another small attempt to make Google+ useful. I suspect I will fail, and I suspect I will continue failing until they release an API that Seesmic Desktop can make use of. What's interesting to me is how quiet the service seems now — which doesn't necessarily mean that it's been quickly abandoned, but instead suggests that the majority of people may well have quickly descended into private circles. It's still not fine-grained enough for me, and discovery and relevancy is still a bad joke, but I'd like to find some use for it…
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September 2, 2011
Planet Pulp
I find several Favourite New Things a week. This is the joy of living in 2011: a new Leyland Kirby album lands in my email inbox, brilliant photographers make new images and post them in my social streams, dozens of people mock Jamie McKelvie on Twitter and there's even a hashtag for it.
And then there is PLANET PULP, which does terrible things to all my most atavistic and shameful bits. How I love this thing.
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i (warrenellis.com)
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Free chunk of book? Course you bloody do. Cherie Priest...
Free chunk of book? Course you bloody do. Cherie Priest:
Everybody loves free stuff, right? Right. And I'm reasonably sure that everybody (or if not "everybody" then probably "a lot of people") loves one or more of the following: dirty jokes, drag queens, magic, or kittens.
So here's some excellent news for those of you who fall into the category of "everybody" (as defined in the parentheses above).
Right now, over on Scribd.com, you can read the first 50 page of Hellbent for FREE, baby. And those first 50 pages – up through the end of chapter three – include all of the aforementioned elements.
And I will save you the energy of clicking through by sending you straight to the goodies.
SECRET AVENGERS 16 Sold Out
SECRET AVENGERS sold out at distributor level yesterday, its day of release.
What that means is, there were orders of X, and an "overprint" of Y, and enough shops sold out of X that they re-ordered from the stack of Y at the distributor's, and the stack of Y was all ordered. So some comics shops will still have copies that they haven't sold yet. Marvel will be going back to print on SECRET AVENGERS 16.
The twitter hashtag is #mckelvietoblame. Take a look.
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September 1, 2011
Algostep
I'm guessing this has been around for at least a year, given that chordpunch.com state that one of their artists emerged from "the London algostep scene in late 2010."
ChordPunch is a record label dedicated to algorithmic music:sound generated by or inspired by automated process.
Chordpunch was set up to explore the many and moving forms of algorithmic music. That might mean a computer program generating every note you hear, or new electronic music inspired by algorithms, or human beings following interesting rules with musical outcomes. We aren't too dogmatic, and mainly release recordings as documents of algorithmic activity rather than programs. But we hope to generate a lot of excitement…
For The Comickers: THREE PANELS OPEN
Over the spring, I invited a few friends and acquaintances of mine in the comics-drawing business to do me Three Panels for the site. Literally, a three-panel comic. The only rules were that it had to be legible at a width of 640 pixels, which is the width of the content bar on this site, and that it had to be three panels long.
In the general pursuit of keeping the site ticking over while I wrestle with the last chunk of GUN MACHINE, I thought I'd open the idea up.
Perhaps you'd like to do a three-panel comic to be posted here. If so, email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you'd like it to be associated with. Same rules apply: three panels, and it can't turn to mud when I run it at 640px.
The ones I like best will be posted here from 12 – 16 September.
Thank you for your time.
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