Korg Kaossilator Pro Plus
Trump’s off to a running start for sure!
The NY Times is already trying to round up allies to try and hold Trump down. He threatens too much of the very existence of news generators today like the NY Times.
His major threat is that he threatens to impose an alternative view of reality over the monopoly the NY Times has had over this in the American mind for maybe a century. They are that one “font” of truth from which srpings each day the interpretation of the world for so many once it’s stories and articles get circulated in Tweets and FaceBook pages and Youtube etc. Since the years since the western pioneers and the new world of industrial cities.
The change from individualism to cooperation for mass culture and mass production and mass consumerism demanded equality and commonality and not individualism. One doesn’t have to read the bio of Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew) or Stewart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness to understand this. Or Eric Fromm’s Escape From Freedom about the totalitarian years of the 30s and 40s and the fact that many millions around the world wanted to “escape from freedom” more than perhaps the powers of the leaders who promoted slavery, totalitarianism, commonality, equality. The new swing away from individulism to equality (those two paradoxical founding symbols of America) was the grand symbol that dominated most of the 20th century.
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It came most forcefully with the ideas of President Wilson during the First World War. But certainly it’s spirit floated over the collective zeitgeist of the various generations of the 20th century. Certainly the 60s were a decade of commonality and equality symbolized perhaps best by the Woodstock festival. Only in the late 70s and then the 80s, did America truly begin the stirrrings of the indivudialism spirit again. At first, this of course the great promise of the Internet. Yet we’ve seen it directed at a different course than the first few years and those years of true sharing to a tool for conformity through the small roundabouts social media one can get trapped in forever, going around and around but never going outside the small circles of social media. They hover over people’s iphones today like that dust hovered over Linus in Charlie Brown.
Of course the world is attracted towards the powerful magnetism of technology today and the amazing things it has done and is doing and will be doing. The new augmented virtual reality of Google-financed Magic Leap. What new vision of the world might they bring us? Will we get side-tracked by the dazzling bells and whistles of the new technology so that we can’t see how it might be entraping us? Turning up a type of mental power over us, like turning up the water in a pot that a frog is in. Turning it up slowly. Like the soft revolution going on in American consumer and popular culture today. Using modern methods of brainwashing. Using almost all the media. Except for the renegade “fake news” sites like the Drudge Report. One needs to read the NY Times and their new story on how Trump is threatening the world of diplomacy. Hopefully, he is!
Ultimimately, the big question to me is, does technology always have a political agenda? Has it in fact always had one? But one that we simply couldn’t see at the time because we were within its environment for so long, like fish in water. It was impossible for us to see or feel the real effect on us of the media of our times. In my time in the late 60s and early 70s, when my mind was open to so many types and forms of music, the world was not a multi-media world as it is today. Music appeared on the local radio station with a DJ that gave shoutouts to various high schools in town. We bought the music in record bins. As small two song 45s like the Peppermint Twist or Take Five. Or albums like Rubber Soul.
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Will our new technologies bring us more or less freedom? More or less equlaity and commonality? This seems to me the most important question, a question to always be asked by the astute radar people for popular culture. These people see things coming. Apart from being happy, tthey are miserable for the most part. The knowledge of future events more often than not is the kind of stuff that simply haunts minds.
This is close to asking will the new technologies bring us closer to nationalism or globalism? This seems the big “elephant” in all the political ideology groups, nations, cultures today. More than anything else perhaps, hovering above the election was the feelings within Americans about those two ideas of nationalism and globalism.
One needs to ask questions like I asked in my screenplay about Silicon Valley called The Magic Light. I predicted the ties of Silicon Valley with the Democratic campaign a long time ago and wrote this screenplay about this. The screenplay partly takes place in Silicon Valley and moves among leaders of the valley and American technology like Google, Apple, FaceBook, Twitter and MicroSoft.
The bottom line to me is this: is the purpose and uocome of the technology (iPhones, social media,Cloud, etc.) will it be a vision that is created to allow the individual greater or less freedom? Or, will it allow the individual greater or less equality? Does it attempt to make someone part of something else? Or, does it celebrate the individual’s creative, artististic self? It seems to me that much of the struggle in the world is between these two gret groups of people in the world: those who constantly merge and create life in this world and those who simply stumble through it, usually in the vague control of someone else. So many have lost “wind in their sails” these days.
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All of this moves to an exploration of the latest modern music technology. Does it create freedom or equality? The big elephant in the room under a new political administration. A grand change in that big struggle of America with her two grand symbols: freedom and equality, individualism and commonality. Is there a trend in the world away from centralization to nationalism? Away from Brussels to London? Away from the Blue Areas of America on the coasts to the Red Areas inside the nation. (A feeling that might also be evidenced in various states of the nation and cities within these states and groups within cities). This might evidence the emergence of the symbol of freedom and invidivualism in America after being dominated by it’s opposite in equality. This was the grand battle of symbols in the last American election and what made things even more dramatic was that the symbols were carried in the bodies of one man against one woman.
I’m continuing to observe this new technology. Staying away as much as I can from the subtle brainwashing of social media.
Modern digital music instruments.
Perhaps the Internet and its words could only go a certain distance.
It might be in the hands of music and its modern technology to lead the way into a new world of freedom.
Yet, one cannot get around the fact that a commonality of programs have been put into many of these instruments. Sounds and voices created by the manufacturer of the electronic instrument. Sounds that many use without changing so that much of modern music sounds the same as many begin to use the same programs, make the same music with their Korg instruments.
But the Kaossilator and Minilogue allow music to be changed dramatically and created new. The possibilities become endless as one can change the parameters within the instrument to vary the sound so that new sounds are made. I work with putting the two instruments together in new ways. It seems like putting together pieces of a Picasso painting. This is the feeling I have with all this musical power in front on me. Some in the amazing Kassilator Pro Plus and the Minilogue. A vast universe amongst the two instruments. And using them together offers new possibilities.