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YEARS, (2011). A record player that plays slices of wood, translating year ring data into incredible piano music
by reading the "grooves" with a PlayStation Eye Camera and processing its output through Ableton. By Bartholomäus Traubeck.

foxtongue: (Default)
365: 2012/01/09 - remembering

My father taught me how to tune a six string by ear when I was a very small child. Today I discovered that I can still do it. He might be gone, but the knowledge is not.

Remember kids, a telephone dial tone is an "a".
foxtongue: (Default)


The newest breath-taking treasure from The Secret Knots is Music For Stray Days, a special collaboration with The Impossible Girl AKA Kim Boekbinder!

The song in the comic, (featuring the violin strings of none other than our favourite fey, Meredith Yayanos), is available to download as a pay-what-you-want.
foxtongue: (Default)
trumpet bellydancer

Performers at Ederlezi, a Balkan Brass Band night at the Russian Hall, Vancouver.
foxtongue: (moi?)
Kimbra - Settle Down



Bonus: Kimbra singing with Gotye in a very Peter Gabriel-esque cover of "You're Just Somebody That I Used To Know".
foxtongue: (bright spring)
Victoria Victoria Victoria

Promotional headshots for my mother, electronic multimedia artist Victoria Gibson, for the Guelph Nuit Blanche 2011!


My mother brought me a small, wooden jewelry box yesterday. It's a beautiful thing, laquered marquetry and celadon tinted birdseye maple, as finely crafted as an expensive guitar. Inside is a music box mechanism, one of those spring-wound revolving cylinders, that plays Impossible, a song hauntingly familiar yet difficult to place, (always the mark of a classic). I adore it. I am a sucker for music box mechanisms. I used to regularly carry them, the manual kind that you place on a surface and wind by hand to control the rotation of the barrel, hey jude, canon in d, as time goes by, until the constant wear against the other things in my pockets would break the metal keys off the comb. I love how clever they are, how much clockwork goes into them, how very simple yet complex they can be, how much strange and wonderful history they contain, the first mechanical music, the basis of the first programming, the melodic birth of the computer. Now there is a small graveyard of them in my room, each one flawed in some essential way, each one with a snapped off spot in the melody, a haunting gap where a remembered note should play, as perfect as a zen garden.

Really she came over for a photoshoot, the box was a bonus, something she bought me years ago, but lost in her house until recently. Rather than cash, she's paying me in Burning Man gear, a good sleeping bag, two 5L water jugs, and a big, hefty cooler, which is completely fantastic. Also, due to a mix-up last year, Lung has a spare tent I can use, and Tony's offering to split a bunch of our left over supplies from last year. Crowd-sourcing for the win! Now I need a ride, a place to camp, a bedroll, and to figure out a week's worth of food, sugary electrolytes, and wet wipes, all on a budget of close to zero. Andrew's bet twenty bucks I can pull it off. Screw being reasonable, I'm not going to let him down.
foxtongue: (beseech)
Portal 2: Exile Vilify, a hidden song by The National

Monday: It was just after midnight when he opened the door. In the interest of brevity, I will leave out the next three hours, excepting my desire to be wanted, kicked in like a knife, a piercing pain that has yet to fade. Suffice to say, A. has gone away. Like in the old stories, antique, anonymous and trying, everyone a letter instead of a name, places expressed as an initial and an em dash. Off to the sanitarium, he cried!

After: I sat crumpled in the street where I had been dropped, left salty eyed blind and exhausted, my glasses on the hood of a stranger's cold truck, too tired to stand, even as the the night evaporated as thoroughly as the warmth on my body where his hands had apologized and cradled me goodbye.

So that, for now, is that. After a multitude of absences and various failure situations, he has decided that he is not currently capable of being responsible in regards to my un/happiness and has withdrawn from my life. I do not know when he will return or in what state, but it is my hope, however small, however sad, that he will come home to me when he can.
foxtongue: (moi?)
Spending this weekend in Seattle to attend the Ainsley baby shower and take some pictures of Rebecca's baby bump. It's going to be a great trip. Not only am I staying with some of my favourite people on the planet, there's plans in the works for an obscenely epic Friday. If you're in town, you should come! The rest of you, start your jealousy engines revving. I'm starting with an early dinner in Belltown, the better to attend the opening of a Kris Kuksi show at La Roc La Rue, (also featuring monochrome pop-alt darling Travis Louie), then dropping South to see the Scala Choir hit the stage at the Showbox. Oh yes. YES. Favourite tumbled upon favourite upon favourite. I'm drooooooling. Drooling like a happy kitty. Meaow purr durr.

Also, reading that over, I am considering that my considerable lack of sleep lately has left me with temporary brain damage.
foxtongue: (moi?)

The video for Will Do, a single from TV On The Radio's upcoming album Nine Types of Light.

foxtongue: (Default)
Hacking can take control of a car through an infected music file:

But their most interesting attack focused on the car stereo. By adding extra code to a digital music file, they were able to turn a song burned to CD into a Trojan horse. When played on the car's stereo, this song could alter the firmware of the car's stereo system, giving attackers an entry point to change other components on the car.
foxtongue: (moi?)

Wore It Deep (The Tree Ring) from Destin Daniel Cretton.



Generous Shadows, their (new) album that includes this track, is available as a free stream or an $8 download. It is all very pretty.
foxtongue: (moi?)
Amanda Palmer & The Young Punx - "Map of Tasmania"


Amanda Palmer's pretty and sometimes delightfully filthy new album, Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, has been released on-line, free to listen, $0.69 USD or more, depending on what you feel you can afford, to download (either as an entire album or as individual songs).
foxtongue: (the welsh got you)
FLUXBLOG 2010 SURVEY MIX:

This eight-disc, 157 song mix is a survey of some of the best and most notable music from 2010. It’s fairly comprehensive, covering indie, pop, rock, punk, folk, rap, R&B, soul, dance, country, modern classical, ambient and electronic music, and in many cases, hard-to-classify genre hybrids. I inevitably had to leave out some things, but I think you’ll find that this serves as both a helpful guide to some of the year’s most exciting music and a surprisingly listenable series of mixes. Discover new stuff! Rediscover familiar artists in a new context! Jam out to ten and a half hours of world-class tunes! If you enjoy this, please do pass it on.
foxtongue: (moi?)
Pop stars to stage silent X Factor protest
Later today, Pete Doherty, the Kooks, Billy Bragg, Imogen Heap, Orbital and many more will gather in a London studio, collaborating in a bid for this year's Christmas No 1. But the strangest bit is not the team-up: it's that they are not recording a single note. The ad hoc supergroup is assembling in support of Cage Against the Machine, a charity campaign to take John Cage's infamous 4'33" – a composition of pure silence – to the top of the Yuletide charts.

The campaign has been gathering momentum over the past couple of months, winning celebrity endorsements, amused press coverage and around 60,000 Facebook fans. Their inspiration is obvious: last year's successful push to raise Rage Against the Machine's Killing In the Name, released in 1992, over X Factor winner Joe McElderry's The Climb. In 2010, instead of loosing a profanity-laden rap-rock tirade on the British public, Cage Against the Machine organisers want to unfurl the serene sound of silence, taking on whoever wins X Factor next week.
foxtongue: (femme)
...But That Was [Yesterday]

Song on repeat, fingers frigid from typing, everything around me perfectly still. We're talking about dying, about family in the hospital, about relationships that never were, chances that perished almost as quickly as they had become. I think about fire, about how much tragedy stains my heart, how much sorrow clogs my breath. The boyfriend who committed suicide, the woman who was almost my mother, dragged to death, pregnant, under a truck. Family wrapped in white sheets, counting minutes. A different parent, one of many, confused, waiting to die. There was a phone-call. Later, at some unknown time, there will be another, and perhaps the person on the line and I will cry together.

I’m helplessly needless and needless to say I owe you.
Helplessly needless and needless to say I owe you.


Outside is cold, the rain has half frozen, but I expect colder still. Clothed in frost, in the shirt of someone I used to love, winter is crawling through the windows, offering loneliness in place of flowers, memories of years when I still had a future. They play out like beads on a string of days, tallied in small bursts, bright but too long ago. How is it that days are so long, while years are so short? Fractions of lifetime stretched out over bone. Cells replicating. I used to believe that one day would be easier. Soon I will be too old for it. I will be done, the last page written. The book closed. Somewhere out there, past the glass, there is snow.

Well I’d wait ten thousand picks for just one more chance, just one more chance to see your face again.

The people around me do not know how to cure this sorrow. Tender, they insist on holding me or pet my hair, as if rocking silently is enough. Shivering, I require more, to engage, to pull my intelligence out from my pain. Perspective as everything. (Not everything broken can be repaired.) On the east coast is a grandfather, lungs filling with fluid, and a boy near the phone. We write back and forth, filling the void with comforting words, distractions, poetry, and rough jokes. We write back and forth and I do not know if I am helping. I do not know if I am like my friends, heartfelt yet inadequate, offering solace that would comfort me, but not them.

Well I’d pull, teeter away, at the earth with my teeth, the earth with my teeth to touch your face alive.

The piano kicks in, quiet, insistent, with a sound like birds. I am collapsing, fracturing, splintering, shivering into pieces. If someone were to touch me, I would explode, shrapnel embedded in every wall, with a sound like a wounded animal, terrified and very, very young.

You lie helplessly still as your face falls apart.
You lie helplessly still as your face falls apart.


My stress betrays me. Inside of my belly, chemicals misfire, hormones fail. I do not release an egg. "Progesterone secretion is prolonged because estrogen levels are low". My womb is lost, continues singing for fertility, even with the map misplaced. The walls thicken, then slough. Bleeding seven days, eight, now thirty. A flood. I grow pale. The red spills like an endless creek, enough to fill a pail. I am a tributary, coloured scarlet. Chunks of flesh escape me as big as the palm of my hand. My breath vanishes, the world glitters, and suddenly exhaustion, fatigue. It is too much effort to ask my heart to beat. I cannot move. My body is a heavy as lead, my veins filled with gold.

With wax and wires and hair from the back of your head.
With wax and wires and hair from the back of your head.


With my blood, so sleep. I am awake in the dark, endlessly so. My breath solidifies, but my dreams do not. Instead I write, I reply, my back-log of messages attacked, finally, until dawn, the sun a smudge of gray the same tenor as a cough. To a former lover, lost for too long, I write, "Your silver hair makes me think of feathers, of flight, and the purity of light seen through the fractures of a crystal. Perhaps you are, in fact, slowly turning into a dove, one the colour of lightning, a tongue like glass and a brain ripe with electricity." Our love was a wonderful thing, poetry balanced on edge, the quirky, deprived, and mad meeting together as one. Maybe somewhere is a world where it worked out.

Well, I can make your face brand new.
Well, I can make your face brand new.


We stay up late, my current love and I, an ordinary history of affection warped by misunderstandings, his lack of experience, the way he abandoned us the first time we fought. Where do we go from here? Defining what is wrong is only a first step, almost a year late, too late, almost a year since it all began. My eyes are glued shut with salt, hot and sad. His arm bleeds where it scraped against the side of the bed. My role has been counselor, not partner. Tearing words from his tongue has been almost impossible, the squeezing of blood from a stone. Together we have been teaching him responsibility, and though he is quick, he resists.

La da la da la da da da da da da da da da da

Dawn painting the top of the mountains, the world's orbit sliding day into place. The urge to shift from bed, to draw on the window, withers against the memory of warmth, of shifting discussions, the lace of conversation drifting over my eyes like something imagined from a far away land.

You are warm, you are warm

There are only four ways for a relationship to end; stuck together or split apart, drowned with misery or flavoured with subtle joy. Duality doubled, basics, building blocks, the future laid out as cabled strings that tie lives together. Abandonment, paperwork, making tomorrow always better than today. I fought for us until he apologized, truth the most harrowing weapon of all, and then my heart burst, as if there was nothing left inside the pain but exhaustion, terrible, cruel, but free. Even so, we are lucky. Now, no matter how it turns out, as a couple or merely friends, we will find peace. We'll love each other until death do us part.

Come take my hand and I’ll take your hand
And I will bring you out
Come take the line and I’ll take the line
And I will pull you out
In the sun
.

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