Matthew McVickar

Posted up at the Clones of the Queen merchandise ottoman.

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:51:03 -1000

Posted up at the Clones of the Queen merchandise ottoman.

Top: The website we built. Bottom: A late night finishing the...

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:48:00 -1000

PBS Frontline + ProPublica: Your Hospital May Be Hazardous to Your Health

The start of an all-nighter.

Top: The website we built. Bottom: A late night finishing the project. Clockwise around the table: Justin Falcone, Michael Nieling, Nick Krusick (all from Ocupop); Olga Pierce (ProPublica); Sabrina Shankman, Tom Jennings (both from 2over10 for PBS/Frontline)

Last week in New York, I had the privilege of taking part in the Tribeca Hacks Storytelling Innovation Lab put on by the Tribeca Film Institute, Ford Foundation, and the Mozilla Foundation.

Alongside my Ocupop compatriates Justin Falcone, Nick Krusick, and Michael Nieling, I worked with a small group of directors and journalists from ProPublica and PBS Frontline to produce an interactive investigative report on hospital illness and injury in the US.

You can watch it on Frontline or on Propublica.

(It was built from scratch—script, video, music, code, and all—in just four days, so watch out for rough edges. Chrome or Safari recommended.)

The source code is on GitHub.

This was the first real ‘hackathon’ I’ve attended. I work alone from home every day, so it was exciting to be in a room full of people working, to be giving and getting feedback immediately. I am still in awe of how pleasant the experience was, despite the number of cooks in the kitchen and the insanity of the deadline—live on the web on Friday at noon.

The stated goal of this hackathon was: “We will use the web to better tell the story about X by enabling the user to Y. They can take action on the issue by Z.” Were we successful?

We used the web to tell the story about hospital injury and illness by enabling the user to watch a video and learn more about six points in that video through interactive thingamajigs. They can take action on the issue by following any of the many links at the end of the video, several of which go to patient harm questionnaires that will become part ProPublica’s ongoing investigation, and others that provide guides for family members who have loved ones entering the hospital.

I agree with Charlie Detar: hackathons don’t solve problems. We didn’t fix hospital injury; that’s a problem that many more journalists, lawmakers, citizens, and healthcare professionals will solve. But we were successful if this interactive website directs attention towards this issue.

I am presently struggling with a lack of motivation.

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:42:00 -1000

I am presently struggling with a lack of motivation.

I found this going through photos this morning and it made me...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:06:28 -1000

I found this going through photos this morning and it made me smile.

Kaiser Dayuha and Lani Felicitas of Applecore with me and Paul (of Clones of the Queen). This was back in February when COTQ performed and spoke at the Pow Wow School of Music.

"Then, after the NPR number is reversed, take a look at the last number following the double digit...."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:55:00 -1000

“Then, after the NPR number is reversed, take a look at the last number following the double digit. 717228, 936557, 519225, and if we reverse the NPR number we get 247996. With this theory, the string of numbers would be ——/——/717228/936557/699742 (or, reversed 247996)/519225. So, the first set of numbers should theoretically end in a double digit, followed by a 0 (or possibly xxx110). The second set of numbers should theoretically end in a double digit, followed by a 9.”

- RJ Kozain’s ongoing detective work on the mysterious Boards of Canada campaign.

markrichardson: It’s kind of fun when this happens: I am...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:24:04 -1000

markrichardson:

It’s kind of fun when this happens: I am listening to something that I haven’t listened to in a long time, I am loving it, I want to say “Hey you should listen to this,” but the music itself is not available anywhere online and the mp3 file I have is too large to upload here. So I just listen to this track, a gradually shifting drone called “Swaying Curtain in the Window”, by the Japanese musician Chihei Hatakeyama, and think “God this is so beautiful” and I guess you will have to trust me on that. It is.

Do trust him; it is beautiful. This is one of the first records I ever bought based on the review (which Mark wrote), back in 2006.

This song is available for listening on Spotify, as is the rest of Chihei Hatakeyama’s very good discography.

The photos above are from the National Geographic Book of...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:11:00 -1000

The photos above are from the National Geographic Book of Mammals. I think this particular edition was from the 80s. Lauren and I leafed through them in full at a coffee shop last week and had an excellent time doing so.

For your enjoyment—now or in the future, alone or with loved ones—here are links to Google Images searches for 36 animals found in that book that we’d either never heard of or found particularly cute. Don’t waste them all at once.

Records and cassettes purchased on jaunt around Williamsburg...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:16:00 -1000

Records and cassettes purchased on jaunt around Williamsburg today.

From Academy Records, two cassettes from artists I’ve never heard of: one labeled “Chinese industrial meets minimal synth. AWESOME” and the other by Olii Aarni, whom a quick Googling in the store revealed works with tape loops, which is all the excuse I needed. Great cloth packaging on that one too.

From Sound Fix Records (which is apparently closing and selling its stock at discount), a George Winston solo piano LP I haven’t heard and a Kyle Bobby Dunn ambient/drone record I’ve enjoyed quite a bit.

I’m hanging out with cool dogs in New York this week.

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:12:10 -1000

I’m hanging out with cool dogs in New York this week.

"To me, it sounds like a collection of demos, the majority unreleased. The record was rumoured to be..."

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 17:54:00 -1000

“To me, it sounds like a collection of demos, the majority unreleased. The record was rumoured to be called Rayners Lane, which wouldn’t fit in with the self-titling of this album. It doesn’t sound like a huge budget XL album release, and would appear to be a mixtape, rather than a fully formed album. Despite Paul’s unusual way of approaching promotion, it would be very unlike XL to allow any artist to put out a record in such a colossally understated manner.The bitrates are hugely variable, particularly on the skits of which many seem to cut short (track 8), which wouldn’t fit with it being a proper album release.”

- Josh Dalton: How I ‘Found’ Jai Paul and What We Know Now

Detective work regarding the mysterious Bandcamp-released Jai Paul.

markrichardson: Waveform from a track from a new album that...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:26:00 -1000

markrichardson:

Waveform from a track from a new album that many music writers are raving about.

There were two guesses in the comments that this was Deerhunter’s ‘Monomania’, and that was my first guess too.

But it’s not ‘Monomania’! This is ‘Monomania’:

And here’s every track on the noisy new Deerhunter album of the same name:

The track in Mark’s waveform is just over four minutes. ‘Monomania’ is 5:21. ‘Nitebike’ (4:18), ‘Pensacola’ (4:01), and ‘T.H.M.’ (4:20) are too long, too short, and too long, respectively, and their waveforms don’t match. Every other song on the album is under four minutes.

So what is it? I made a smart playlist in iTunes to help me figure it out. Songs released in 2013 whose running time in the range of 4:00 to 4:20.

A few leads, but ultimately nothing. No matches in the Flaming Lips, The Knife, or Autre Ne Veut albums. I checked out Spotify to check runtimes and listen to some albums I don’t have; nothing there either. Not Tyler, the Creator, not Justin Timberlake.

Hmm… maybe Paramore? The new album isn’t on Spotify, but the track listing with track times is on Amazon, and, there’s a song that’s 4:10. The thirty-second preview revealed it’s a loud song. I checked if the full song was on SoundCloud; it is, and the waveform looked promising! I ripped from SoundCloud with OffLiberty and loaded it up in Audacity (the waveform editor in all of these screenshots):

Yes. I am quite confident that the very compressed waveform in Mark’s post is Paramore’s ‘Now’.

Inspired by Andre Torrez’s hamburger prompt and on the back of...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:21:00 -1000

Inspired by Andre Torrez’s hamburger prompt and on the back of my dotfiles work yesterday, I had the idea to use the current moon phase as my shell prompt.

Using a random bit of Ruby I found on the web, I built a function that prints the current moon phase—as an Apple emoji—and added it to my prompt string.

Get the source code.
My entire .bash_prompt file, which incorporates this function into a much more complicated prompt string.

UPDATE: Colin Barrett suggests this could be done without Ruby. I have attempted and failed to convert this script to a Bash shell script. Any help is welcome.

A bar in Tokyo. Photo by my friend Saori Azuma.

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:41:00 -1000

A bar in Tokyo.

Photo by my friend Saori Azuma.

Bending/Ascending

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 14:57:00 -1000

I’m catching up on some reading this morning and just finished this Cokemachineglow review of GYBE’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! by Conrad Amenta.

Canada is now experiencing a dyed-in-the-wool, law-and-order, defense-spending, social-contract shredding, anti-tax Conservative agenda, one with which I don’t necessarily agree but which I don’t deny seems to resonate with a majority of Canadians. Where Canadian politics tend to avoid the kind of volume and polemics that America’s year-long federal campaigns involve, at home Godspeed may find currency in the kind of paranoia in which they excel. However, it’s not paranoia we need: it’s voices on the left articulating more than anger. Canada has a new subterranean truth, and that truth is that the majority of Canadians are conservative thinkers. I can think of no better time for one of Canada’s most respected protest bands, living in one of Canada’s most progressive cities, to talk about health care, taxation, First Nations and Aboriginal rights, women’s rights, fucking anything but how “The gatekeepers gazed upon their kingdom and declared that it was good.” Which: yeah. And?

The review all but ignores the music in favor of an exploration of its context—the politics of this band—and how the reviewer feels they fall short of being effectively political. I don’t think that’s a bad approach: it’s an under-addressed topic, it’s insightful for those with no knowledge of Canadian politics, and it’s worthwhile because it’s thoroughly opinionated. (Worthwhile for me, that is; if you read a lot of political music writing or are thoroughly versed in Canadian politics, this piece might seem facile.)

This is a perfect example of an ‘important’ record meaning different things to different people, and of cultural critics pulling on its edges to move it to their corner of the court.

Mark Richardson’s Pitchfork review encourages a focus on the art:

The focus on the band’s politics obscures something important: Godspeed You! Black Emperor are making art, not writing editorials. And the fact that they are making art gives them leeway to do things that wouldn’t work in the context of pure rhetoric. It allows them to find magnificence in destruction and build an aesthetic out of decay and loss. So for all their political slogans, pointed titles, and references to global doom, engagement with Godspeed’s music can feel exceedingly personal. When listening to their music, I’m not necessarily thinking about the downtrodden transcending their place in the capitalist hierarchy or the end of the world; I’m thinking about the idea of transcendence, the raw grace of noise, and the tragedy of endings. Godspeed’s music works so brilliantly because it can be abstracted and scaled, blown up into an edifice that towers over a continent or shrunk down to something that feels at home in a bedroom. So mapping the contours of their grand music onto your own ordinary life can feel both natural and inspiring.

And that, I think, is how most people approach the album.

For Sean T. Collins, the bleakness of the album was a mirror.

Ian Latta at Tiny Mix Tapes points out that while the band is unapologetically and specifically political, the results are usually more symbolic and indirect than they are activist, and the band has as much to do with that as do art-over-politics fans:

On this album, “Mladic” ends with a recording of drumming in an Occupy Montreal protest; the liner notes call out specific bills in the Canadian parliament; and the LP is inscribed on Side A with, “TWO THOUSAND STONED KIDS WILL BE STOKED,” and on Side B, “TOO BAD THEY DON’T VOTE.”

None of this is to say that anyone expects GY!BE to lead a revolution or that they hold any of their listenership more responsible for the state of the world than they hold themselves. But we know that when feeble attempts are called satisfactory in the face of a wall that grows ever bigger, that crescendo just starts to build up again. Should we hit the wall again? Should we see how other people are confronting the wall? No, let’s just pretend we got through it again. Let’s do what we did 10 years ago. We can’t pretend the past 10 years haven’t happened, can’t pine for mom and pop record stores and that perfect moment of communion when everyone in your squat reached consensus on what typeface should be used for that zine. We can’t undo the internet, can’t opt out of the media completely, and can’t ignore the developments of the past 10 years. We can’t rewind the film loop, but we can burn it.

I enjoy Allelujah!, but the politics trouble me. Just listening to that sample at the beginning of the first track makes me anxious. What is it, why did they include it, and what does that mean that they included it? A sample of the titular war criminal being arrested? If that’s the Mladic they mean? Mladic has little to do with Canadian politics, right? How far out should one’s political concern extend? Is the sample just supposed to draw a line from genocide and a twenty-minute musical epic as a signifier of gravity? And why that sample? Just the unsettling, matter-of-fact tone of voice of a man observing and/or affecting the end of a manhunt? This album’s introduction, I suppose, to “the idea of transcendence, the raw grace of noise, and the tragedy of endings.”

A bunch of questions, followed by twenty minutes of noise to bury those questions. But I so badly want it to make sense! You brought politics into this, Godspeed, so finish the sentence! It’s easy to get cynical and think that Godspeed uses political symbols and half-formed thoughts to prop up their art while making no political difference, but I think there’s more to it. Maybe those questions aren’t being buried, but pounded out ad nauseam.

One of the big lessons I took from writing about literature in college was that teasing apart a text for its meaning wasn’t important because you would uncover The Artist’s True Intention, but because the process of trying created a valuable discussion and lead to insight. This is what I love about music writing and tearing music apart—it’s learning. Even, maybe especially, learning that failure to make sense of the thing is the thing.

So at the risk of projecting, I think Godspeed You! Black Emperor amplifies and reflects the anxiety of politically concerned but powerless listeners because Godspeed You! Black Emperor themselves are politically concerned but appear to affect no change. The music is long and loud and a statement, the statement has power because its long and loud, and so the statement is about power. That art speaks to us and in so doing is powerful. Powerful speech can make for political change, or it can remind you what the world sounds like without it.

(UPDATE: I somehow missed Jeremy Larson’s phenomenal review of Allelujah! at Consequence of Sound. It addresses the issues above to a similar conclusion and with a keen eye on the band’s back catalog and the actual music on the album. Essential.)

The first six songs on my ‘Best of All Time’ playlist, which I...

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 15:57:00 -1000

The first six songs on my ‘Best of All Time’ playlist, which I return to a few times a year, revel in, and add to sparingly.

If you haven’t heard them, each of these songs is absolutely terrific:

I am fascinated by this drum accent. It’s a quick,...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:52:00 -1000

I am fascinated by this drum accent. It’s a quick, multi-drum roll, pleasant-sounding on its own and even more so alongside the tense silence that follows it.

I don’t know what it’s called or how it’s played, but I know it appears (in slightly different forms) at least in the two songs sampled above: Vampire Weekend’s ‘Step’ and The New Pornographers’ ‘Unguided’.

If you know what this is called, I’d love to know.

Emily Bazelon: Defining Bullying Down

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:09:31 -1000

Emily Bazelon: Defining Bullying Down:

The definition of bullying adopted by psychologists is physical or verbal abuse, repeated over time, and involving a power imbalance. In other words, it’s about one person with more social status lording it over another person, over and over again, to make him miserable.

But when every bad thing that happens to children gets called bullying, we end up with misleading narratives that obscure other distinct forms of harm.

My favorite and most valuable SXSW Interactive sessions last week were on the sociological end of things. I was led to this editorial via Twitter by Danah Boyd, who was one of four panelists at a session called Digital Drama: Growing Up in the Age of Facebook. Emily Bazelon was another of the panelists. They are both smart and outspoken people worth following, especially if you are interested in the internet and its younger users.

Here are my few notes from that session:

Privacy is not about technologically hiding things; it’s about controlling a social situation. Privacy can be as much about post-incident as the incident itself.
Modern social networks’ business models are built on habituating a giving-up of privacy. This becomes consumer training, as marketing becomes increasingly ‘targeted’.
Facebook’s ever-shifting privacy settings and paradigms are harmful because they upset the existing understanding of settings–you can’t keep track of what’s visible to whom.
Being an adult who asks hard questions is considerably more helpful to kids than telling them things or lecturing them. It is important to let children work through social situations and think through things.

This Is: SXSW

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 11:18:43 -1000

This Is: SXSW:

thisis:

SXSW coverage leaves me unsatisfied in this hard to explain way. I think it’s that no one acknowledges the underlying weirdness of the week, especially the Interactive portion.

This is great; go read the whole thing.

Having just spent the last week and a half at my second SXSW in two years, I have a few thoughts:

Part of the reason for this non-acknowledgement of the weirdness is that a lot of the coverage *of* SXSW Interactive has always come from *within* SXSW Interactive—on Twitter and tech blogs, by very privileged people who are knowledgeable and excited about technology and SXSW in the first place.

Those who are there and feel weird about it either don’t want to admit they are wasting money and acting foolish or don’t want to undermine their superiors by suggesting the flight and badge and hotel room that was paid for on their behalf was a mistake. The power this situation has in reinforcing a narrative of drunken excitement over “what we made” can’t be overstated.

The event lasts about a week and there are several dozen scheduled events happening simultaneously at a given minute of the day, a significant portion of which many won’t be able to attend because of overcrowding and then scramble looking for something else ‘important’ to do. The ones who don’t bother with sessions engage in networking, which disallows depth of discussion because it involves meeting new people and, often, marketing someone or something to them. The event is designed to overwhelm and discourage reflection.

There is a media that dives into it, but I wonder how much they care anymore. Bloggers smart about tech but mostly unaffiliated with the self-congratulatory tech world (your Gina Trapanis and your Anil Dashes) are more easily able to criticize it, and over the last few years have been rather vocal about How Much SXSW Has Changed or Why This SXSW Is Their Last. That may be an indication that the people who think it’s too weird or awful have already given up going at all.

A minute and a half walking down 6th Street, the hub of activity...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 08:04:25 -1000

A minute and a half walking down 6th Street, the hub of activity during SXSW’s music festival.

"Sweet kids laughing, playing and having fun."

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:30:00 -1000

I noticed a few weeks ago that the same sample of children laughing is used throughout both Neon Indian’s ‘Laughing Gas’ and Animal Collective’s ‘Did You See The Words?’. I wasn’t the first to discover this. A few days later, the sample showed up again.

Those kids show up at the end of Taimane Gardner’s ‘Toccata’, a local musician with whom my band was about to play a show. The night of the show, I asked her where she found the sample, but she wasn’t sure; the producer had apparently tacked it onto the track.

I was intrigued. All signs pointed to a widely available sample library, and sure enough, a half-hour of Googling and listening to samples revealed ‘Laughing Children,’ from Fear Productions.

Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo was kind enough to confirm for me over Twitter that he’d probably found the sample while “perusing the web.” From what I can tell, the Fear Productions collection is not available physically, so AC’s Geologist and Taimane’s producer likely got the sample the same way.

I love this sample—it’s a relatively lo-fi recording for an audio library, and the indecipherable “youlalow”-sounding giggle that appears halfway through makes it so unique and identifiable.

Extra credit:

From what I can tell, Alan seems to have ripped the sample from the website–the sample in ‘Laughing Gas’ cuts out and loops before the “PREVIEW” piracy-prevention audio stamp plays on the AudioSparx website. (Both the AC and Taimane versions include the full sample, which suggests they either paid $7.05 for the sample or obtained the collection elsewhere.)
I left a note on the official unofficial Animal Collective messageboard and found out the sample is also used in the techno music that plays behind the recurring ‘diaper time’ segment on It’s Always Sunny in Philadephia.
Unsurprisingly, this is a pretty common way for musicians to find samples. From the same Collected Animals thread, I learned that this easy-to-find recording of a Nichiren Buddhist chant is used at the beginning of Animal Collective’s ‘In the Flowers’.
I listened to all of the other tracks in the Fear Productions collection and recognized nothing, though ‘Maze of the Crypt’ sounds exactly like the darker end of Animal Collective interludes.