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A Night of yk Records 2

posted January 18, 2018 #

A friendly heads up that I'm putting on a show this upcoming Feb. 23rd (2018) at Mercy Lounge for various bands on my yk Records roster. The first batch of announced bands include Patrick Damphier, New Man, Coupler, Tower Defense and Quichenight - many of which haven't even been announced as releasing anything on the label yet so it's a great first opportunity to hear what they've got to offer.

There's more on the way but I'd love it if you'd go ahead and buy tickets now so my Attendance Anxiety can be slightly quelled. I'm always nervous that no one will show up to these things but that just drives me to make it a great night out. Hope to see you there.

Vox Earworm

posted January 18, 2018 #

The first "Season" of Vox's show Earmworm just wrapped up, so now is the perfect time to binge on the eight episodes of various scientific music ephemera. They're short (never longer than 12 minutes) and cover plenty of interesting topics - like The secret rhythm behind Radiohead's "Videotape" or How a recording-studio mishap shaped 80's music.

It's not an overwhelming amount of episodes nor an overwhelming time commitment - two major pluses as far as I'm concerned.

Music Readings: Jan 2018

posted January 18, 2018 #

Stumbled into these two articles recently and found them interesting enough to share. The first, a piece on the overwhelming nature of music consumption, likely needs conversation and debate to get to the heart of but is certainly a worthwhile read. The second is simply a run down of the Grunge era rush for bands and how some legitimately great bands were sucked up into the machine.
  • Too Much Music: A Failed Experiment In Dedicated Listening- James Toth runs through his relationship with music and music acquisition (borderline hoarding) and his self-inflicted experiment to listen to only one album a week during 2017. Spoiler alert, he fails. Sort of. The revelations that come with the undertaking are certainly more positive than bad.
  • The Grunge Gold Rush - if you've ever wondered how Nirvana spawned a million soundalikes and consumed great bands like Jawbox into their promotion machine, this is for you.

posted January 17, 2018 #

I’ve always wanted to be on the @Grimeys wall of recommendations! https://t.co/vAOa1EmVpu

posted January 17, 2018 #

tfw when my daughter explains to her class that her dad sits in his office drinking coffee and making menacing synthesizer music over bits of dialogue about serial murder for a living. ??

Techmoan

posted January 17, 2018 #

I've recently been deep diving into the YouTube channel Techmoan. Host Mat unearths and reviews an absolutely ridiculous amount of music tech gear. From the more recent RokBlok player to Baby Driver's Tape Scratching Machine to the forgotten format of Phillips DCC. It's a massive repository but there doesn't seem to be a bad entry point. Here's a few that I've enjoyed lately: It's nerdy but a highly entertaining indulgence.

Coding HTML with Deep Learning

posted January 17, 2018 #

This FloydHub post on Turning Design Mockups Into Code With Deep Learning is an oddly captivating read. Conceptually, it covers the notion that you can "train" a Neural Network to understand website mockups and re-interpret them as code. Having worked with plenty of WYSIWYG editors in my tenure as a Person of the Web, I am skeptical but the article does more than just discuss the idea conceptually. They dig in deep with actual examples of how to educate a system and start outputting real code. If you're up for it, be prepared for paragraphs of technical text like:
The vocabulary prediction could be [0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.7]. The softmax activation in the dense layer distributes a probability from 0 - 1, with the sum of all predictions equal to 1. In this case, it predicts that the 4th word is the next tag. Then you translate the one-hot encoding [0, 0, 0, 1] into the mapped value, say "end".
Deep Learning, Neural Networks and this actual implementation are 1000% over my head but that makes me no less intrigued.

via Adam.

P5.js

posted January 17, 2018 #

I recently became aware of P5 JS - "a JavaScript library that starts with the original goal of Processing, to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators, and beginners, and reinterprets this for today's web." In other words, it's a Javascript library that lets you draw and interact with all sorts of data - APIs, sound, cameras, HTML - in an easy way.

Their Welcome Video is downright delightful with Lauren McCarthy and Dan Schiffman introducing the basic concepts. The Getting Started Guide looks to be as straightforward as you can get and keeps the bar low for actually trying it out.

Overall, a very intriguing offering. I don't have much need for developing big, robust, interactive sites but the potential this offers for artists who code seems pretty huge.

Yume Nikki returns

posted January 16, 2018 #

never heard of this game (or its sequel) until now. Looks worthy of a YouTube trip

posted January 16, 2018 #

We’re legit!! https://t.co/SihHDEOBSq

posted January 16, 2018 #

Weeping. https://t.co/FNZfhKyRjj

We Own This Town 4.0

posted January 16, 2018 #

Since 2006, I've been involved in a site called We Own This Town. I curate compilations of local area music, I write reviews of local releases and highlight various shows that I deem worthy of getting a spotlight. When I moved back to Nashville I told myself I wanted to up the ante on the site and allow it to focus on more than just music.

Over the past few months I've been laying the groundwork to relaunch the site. Not only did I redesign the whole thing but I also expanded the "mission" of the site to provide a platform for more varietal content. In short, I build a podcast studio and am distributing shows now.
The first series on the network is called Hott Minute, hosted by Ashley Spurgeon and Jamie Bradley. It's not about Nashville at all but it's hilarious entertainment from Nashville.

I think being able to provide a launching pad for all kinds of stories, jokes, news and what-have-you's from the perspective of a Nashville resident is an important viewpoint to provide. I've no idea if the experiment will work but I'm excited to get it off the ground and see where it goes.

yk Records: Introducing Patrick Damphier

posted January 16, 2018 #

Happy to announce that I'll be helping my buddy Patrick Damphier release some records on my yk Records label. Patrick ran the studio Club Roar while also writing and performing in the likes of The Mynabirds, Angel Olsen, Paper Rival, Stone Jack Jones and, most recently, Jessica Lea Mayfield.

His first release will be a 7" for the track "Under My Door" (which features Jessica Lea Mayfield on backing vocals and artwork by Richard Swift). We're working on all the promo elements to it now but excited to put it out into the world on Feb 23rd. If you're not already following Mr. Damphier, go check out his site and hit him up on Twitter or Instagram, where he seems to thrive the most.

Ben Worley - Console Wars

posted January 16, 2018 #

LA-by-way-of-Nashville musician Ben Worley has a pretty robust body of work for various film scores, short films and animations. His latest offering, Console Wars, is an EP-length soundtrack inspired by the book of the same name that documents the showdown between Nintendo and Sega back in the 90's.
You'd think this would be an 8-bit extravaganza but there's not a chiptune piece to be found. There's plenty of keyboards and engaging electronic sounds, sure, but it's not just a hodge-podge of actual videogame music. This is a proper, imaginary, score and I do recommend it.

posted January 15, 2018 #

I made this mix of Nashville music for a friend-- songs and records made by friends, peers, and heroes here over the years-- and it's 5.5 hours long! If you wanna dig in: https://t.co/cLDVHSR8r7 #Nashville

posted January 14, 2018 #

Look, I’m relatively smart but I honestly have no idea where commas go. I just throw them shits everywhere.
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