Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust.
Listen here.
Music of Sound showed a play for our time in three acts on this post.
Act one, in which a tech bro wants to convince the musician to release on Spotify:
Act two, in which the musician is reluctant and the tech bro makes grand claims to win him over:
Act three, in which the tech bro finds out that musicians aren’t stupid and is schooled.
THE END
6k ≠ 200k.
Musicians can’t just grow an audience.
Streaming as a business model doesn’t benefit musicians and may not be around for very long because even the streaming companies are not making any money – except the CEOs, of course.
I am actually contemplating releasing a music cassette next… :-)
Good morning. This post might be a little longer and you might want to make yourself a bowl of tea or a cup of coffee. I’ll wait.
Let’s go in alphabetical order. AI first. I heard that WordPress has made a deal, or may be in the process of making a deal, to allow one or more AI companies to scrape all of the blogs and websites that use the WP platform at wordpress.com. I don’t know whether this is true or not but think it is quite likely, because money.
Much of my website runs on WordPress, but it’s wordpress.org and not wordpress.com. The former is open source software, the latter a for profit hosted platform using that software. That means whatever WP decides to do does not affect this site. However, since this here is an open and public blog it means that there is no barrier to stop AI from scraping it. No laws exist to stop AI from ingesting this blog that has entries going back 30 years.
I came up four possibilities:
I sent these thoughts to Canton and asked “maybe there are more options that I can’t see?”
Canton and I have been working on this website for about 30 years, having started with Pandoras Box in 1995. He often dispenses valuable wisdom, as he did in his reply (I asked permission to quote from his email):
All depends on what your mission is! If your mission is to just not have anything to do with AI, then I’d do #1. Just ignore it. Don’t use it, and don’t be fussed that your public posts will be scraped by yet another system. (All your public stuff is already scraped multiple times per week by various services and systems.) The cat is out of the bag. The horse has left the barn. The robot has rolled off the assembly line.
If your mission is to bodily throw yourself on the gears of this machine and put energy into defeating AI then you might have to do something more active than erect barriers, like try to poison the AIs. Leverage the fact that your public website has a high search engine ranking and decades of content about your music. Rewrite every of your public posts so that flamenco appears to be a kind of custard similar to flan. Get a few other prominent guitarists to do the same and maybe Chat GPT version 4.5 will slightly confuse flamenco and flan. When asked how to make a good custard maybe future GPT will answer that it all starts with a good rasgueado…
Speaking more as your friend and less as your web hosting provider, what I really recommend is making peace with AI so that it doesn’t poison your own brain space. There’s so much superficial noise and clamor around AI I find it hard to keep a balanced view on (1) what is useful and amazing about AI, and (2) what is truly destructive and diminishing about AI, where we should apply the brakes.
Do you know or know of Josh Schrei, the young musician and Yoga practitioner who grew up in Santa Fe? More or less my age? He has this absolutely fantastic homemade podcast called “The Emerald” which I’ve been eating up. It’s a wide-ranging discourse on all sorts of topics through an animist mytho-poetic lens. Full of heart, nature, and wisdom: A really good balance for all the nerdy stuff I listen to.
Here’s his episode on AI, “So you want to be a sorcerer in the age of mythic powers…”
I think he does a good job to reframe AI in the context of millennia of human history, along with good precautions and insights.
That second paragraph is so very Canton. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoy his company so much.
So, the toothpaste has been squeezed out of the tube and can’t be put back. That’s fine. I can control what I can and that’s the path forward.
Here is what I have in mind. In terms of writing, this /latest blog will become more of an announcement blog. News of a tour, news of a review, a new album finished, and so on. Everything else will happen on Backstage. I understand that everyone (including me) is tired of subscriptions. (Ha, that’s why I call it a membership!) Like all of you I have to juggle subscriptions. My rule is super simple. Does something delight me? Does it make me smile? For that reason I subscribe to a search engine! I use Kage.com because I enjoy not having to wade through the ads on Google and DuckDuckGo, I enjoy getting more relevant answers, more quickly. Much more quickly! I stopped using Evernote, which I had subscribed to since 2009, when they doubled their price. I switched to open source Joplin, which may not be quite as polished as Evernote but does nearly everything I need. Subscriptions have to be tended to every year. Some need to be pruned, others become more necessary. It’s an orchard of subscriptions! :-)
Before I move on to my second topic I am going to take a moment to make this announcement:
In April the digital distribution deal for HuHeartDrive is up for renewal. After Higher Octave 1990-1992, Sony/Epic Records 1992-2001, SSRI 2001-2018, HHD is my fourth label and the only one where I have 100% control over the distribution. HHD released Fete in 2019, two versions of vision 2020, Bare Wood 2, several Dance 4 Me remix singles, guitar + pipe (from the video I made for the Dallas Museum of Art) and all of this music is currently available from all digital distributors and streaming platforms. I intend to end the distribution deal in April, which means that while the music will continue to be available from Bandcamp it will disappear from Spotify and Apple Music and all other such platforms. This move could very well mean that I will earn less money. I think that a lot of people are in the habit of listening to playlists–either their own or their stream provider’s–and they may not even notice that my new music is no longer part of that rotation. This is fine. What I am doing is what I want to do. I feel it in my bones.
My second topic is Bamboo, the album I am currently working on. I am have five pieces in different stages. I enjoyed creating shorter pieces for Rain Poems, which Culture Court called Audio Haikus in this piece that imagines a long conversation about the subject:
Short tracks. Beautiful, atmospheric pieces that celebrate the sound of water like audio haiku verses.
I am planning on carrying on like that for this new Bamboo project: mostly shorter pieces. But, looking ahead, I’d like to do an album of longer pieces next, after Bamboo. I love how the guitars shift on African Rain because I play around with shifting accents. That I would like to dive deeper into. Cool rhythms that shift subtly, arpeggios and melodies that change shape through changing accents… like flowing water or a murmuration of starlings.
Yesterday I read Gioia’s new post regarding the dopamine culture. (Ted Gioia is another subscription that I am happy to pay for.) Last month he started with The State of the Culture, 2024, which was followed by 13 Observations on Ritual and the latest post is How to Break Free from Dopamine Culture. These three articles are full of gold and I think most of them can be accessed by non-subscribers.
Here is a quote from the newest of the three posts:
Even before this scroll-and-swipe mania, I was telling people they should listen to longer music tracks—at least ten minutes in duration.
I originally got this idea from researching the practices of shamans around the world. I noticed that it typically took 10-15 minutes of drumming or singing before the shaman entered an altered mindstate. I later gathered scientific evidence from other fields (neuroscience, biology, etc.) that also suggested a ten minute threshold.
That fits nicely with my intention of creating longer pieces. I imagine pieces that are about 9-11 minutes each but will see how it feels and what the muses command.
Gioia mentioned the 42 minute orchestral composition Become Ocean, by John Luther Adams, in his piece: link to Wikipedia entry about the music, link to a recording on Apple Music. I would love to hear that performed live someday.
Pro Tools is the last topic. I saw this post by Tim Prebble, who recorded all of the rain sounds on Rain Poems. He wrote:
AvidLink, which I have zero use for, is using 96.6% of my Macs CPU!
I Force Quit it and my Mac becomes responsive again…
My next thought: can I delete AvidLink? What use is it?“Avid Link is a free app for anyone looking to find, connect, and collaborate with other creatives, promote your work, stream video, purchase and manage products—all in one interface”
No thanks.
But rather than delete it, for now I’ll follow this advice of how to stop it auto-launching Stop Avid Link from starting at boot
There you have it, some good advice for any of you using Pro Tools.
That’s it, end of post. I hope you will enjoy a very fine day.
Wednesday evening I went to a movie theater that was showing Perfect Days, by Wim Wenders. It was the first time I went to a cinema in years but I like Wim Wenders’ work and wanted to see this movie in a theater. The seats were large and comfortable and I counted only seven other people in the audience.
This is my kind of movie. I love everything about it, the pace, the camera work, the use of music.
There is a good interview on the Academy’s Guide to Movies, because Japan picked Perfect Days as their official entry for the 96th Oscars.
Wim Wenders Talks ‘Perfect Days,’ ‘Anselm,’ and Why He Continues to Embrace 3D (Exclusive) | A.frame:
The other film is Perfect Days, a character study centered on a middle-aged Tokyo toilet cleaner (played by Kôji Yakusho, who won Best Actor at Cannes). Unalike as they may be, the two projects exemplify the filmmaker’s visionary approach to experimenting with format and function: Perfect Days was conceived of and shot like a documentary, while Anselm utilizes cutting-edge technology and pushes the boundaries on stylistic choices.
I don’t want to write more because I don’t want to spoil the movie for you. It’s a lovely film and I hope you will see it. I will rewatch it soon. :-)
On the subject of Japanese movies I saw Beat Takeshi’s 1999 film Kikujiro on Mubi yesterday. I did not know that he is a comedian, too, as I only knew him from his tough guy roles. Which is why this movie surprised me so much. I laughed a lot.
Jon asked me to take some photos of him and we took these at the Sofia in Sacramento. Thanks to Stephen who made him laugh, I think. I couldn’t see what was going on because I didn’t want to miss Jon’s reaction.
Stephen suggested that I make one long mix of Jon’s bass solos during our performances of Butterfly Dream. Every one of those solos is really great and I think the tempo is always very similar. So, challenge accepted. Will dig through the live recordings and have a go at this.
