UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

February is just a couple of weeks away, and as I have every year since 2008, I’ll be participating in the RPM Challenge.

What’s that? It’s simple: produce an entire album (10+ songs or 35+ minutes) entirely during the month of February.

My concept this year is a bit different than in the past. This time around, I will not be using any instruments… just my iPhone. I’ve assembled an interesting collection of music creation apps (which I will detail in a future post, but for now will represent with a pair of screenshots, below), and these will be the only tools I will use to generate sounds. I may sample my voice, found sounds and instruments using my iPhone’s microphone, and I’ll do final mixing and post-production on my MacBook Air, but as much as possible this will be an album produced on the iPhone. Given the nature of some of the apps I’ll be using, I also expect this album to be a lot more experimental/avant garde in style than most of my recent solo work.

I am tentatively calling the album i. And I am also considering producing a companion album, called The Way Out Takes, that will consist of unedited versions of the more experimental tracks that end up on i.

Stay tuned for more details as I think them up.

SOPA is DYING; its evil Senate twin, PIPA, lives on
Cory Doctorow brings us some good news over on Boing Boing concerning House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s decision to shelve SOPA (for now). Cory also hits on just why fighting this legislation is so important:

[T]he net is more than a glorified form of cable TV — it’s the nervous system of the information society. Any pretense that is used to build censorship and surveillance into the network will touch every part of networked life.

It was nice of the New York Times to give us an introduction to Mormonism in today’s paper. But I think what this suggests is that we really need a lesson on the U.S. Constitution, specifically Article VI, Clause 3:

[N]o religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

On the Behavior of the iPhone Mute Switch
Yesterday the New York Times reported on an incident where an audience member at a New York Philharmonic performance interrupted a Mahler symphony (literally… the conductor stopped the performance) with an iPhone alarm.

It was understandable, in context. And I think John Gruber gets it exactly right:

You can’t design around every single edge case, and a new iPhone user who makes the reasonable but mistaken assumption that the mute switch silences everything, with an alarm set that he wasn’t aware of, and who is sitting in the front row of the New York Philharmonic when the accidental alarm goes off, is a pretty good example of an edge case.

Climate as Proxy for Capital Within the Minneapolis Skyway System
I spent the better part of the last decade working in downtown Minneapolis, and as such became intimately familiar with its convenience, its obscure corners, and, as this scholarly longread explores, its complex challenges in managing expectations between public and private spaces, and the class- and race-based divisions it engendered.

When walking through the skyway system, it is very difficult not to keep moving. The difficulty of strolling, sitting, standing, or stopping inherently excludes certain groups, particularly the poor and the elderly. Similarly, the ease of skyway access to certain populations (e.g. suburban commuters, office workers) lies in stark contrast to the hidden access points to the street.

(Via kottke.org.)