Not Bored in New York

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Best Rapper Alive.

#48.x The Sonic ‘barrier’?

“Hello.”

“Can you hear me?”

Of course you can’t because the sonic barrier is in the way.

If you were in a plane–or a car on the salt flats of Utah– travelling faster than 330 meters per second then perhaps you’d be able to hear me.

A Jet flies by going quite fast. A mist forms around it. Chuck Yeager is waving to you from the cockpit, but you can’t hear him and he can’t hear you because you are on one sde of the sonic barrier, and he has broken thorugh to the other side.
You can’t find the opening.
Damn it.

Do you think Chuck Yeager ever came back from the other side of the sonic barrier?
When we hear him speak is he further away?

Andy Green, do you know?

What is the cause of all of this illocutionary confusion. It is infelicitious, for a barrier divides two spaces, and those who have ‘broken the sound barrier’ are not on the other side of anything.
they are here in geotemporal space with those of us who have not ‘broken the sound barrier’.

Or perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps there is some kind of invisible mysticism at work. Perhaps there is a substanative difference that is affected by a sonic boom, and its lack of a visual signifier alows me to so readily betray myself.
Perhaps ANdy Grann and Chuck Yeager do not hear as we ‘uncrossed’ people do.
Does ‘breaking the sound barrier’ an even amount of times reposition one on their default side of the sonic barrier?
Are all people born on the same side of the sonic barrier?

On normalizing, agency, and mastering in audio production

I’ve been ruminating on this one for a few days, maybe a few weeks. I was sewing when it came to me altogether now, and I’m listening to Writer’s Block by Peter, Bjorn, and John as I write this. Go:

I’ve never normalized any of the albums that I’ve made. I’ve also never mastered them. Why? Because normalizing and mastering reduce the field of potentialities (both qualitatively, and quantitatively) that a piece of music can occupy. It’s really quite simple: I set limits on frequencies and dynamics, and then you as a listener have parameters within which you can listen to my music. If I squash something then you won’t be able to go above that squashed limit without distorting the signal. But, if I don’t master/normalize according to how I think the music should sound then you as the listener are left with more agency in regards to altering the performance. By mastering/normalizing I insert a point of mediation between the creation of the artifact and its consumption. There is a direct relation here between mediation on my part, and agency on the part of the listener. The less mastering and normalizing I do the more you have to/can interact with the music as an organic object by constantly adjusting volume and EQ settings according to your taste in an instant. By not mastering or normalizing I encourage the role of the listener as performer, which hopefully ‘levels the paying field’ a bit.

Photo

I’ve been photoing lately.:

rhizomes actually, not just textually

If we truly want to understand the rhizome as an ontological process/state then we must give it its leeway. No aloe plant that I have ever seen grows up through concrete—where the space of ‘give and take’ does not allow for much to pass.

The artifact constructed in a rhizomic state has no teleology, or at least no teleology that is fixed/achievable. If I make a drawing then it is a drawing. But utilizing the rhizome, becoming the rhizome, means that the drawing is never finished. The paper that I have drawn on can be cut; it can be burned; it can be sewn; it can be fermented; it can be duplicated; its parts can be reconstituted; its smoke can be inhaled; it can become a pocket; it can be made into a paste and spread between the pages of a book to be closed; it can become a behemoth of frequency to such magnitude that skyscrapers are built of it.

This artifact also has no definitive past, only constructed genealogies that draw partials from its past.