Category Archives: Videos

Prekop Approximate

Some days I can't get anywhere close to the music that got me thinking. But some days I can hit it pretty squarely - or at least I can hit the things that define the style to my ears.

So here's a sketch called "Prekop Approximate" - named for Sam Prekop. He's the singer for The Sea And Cake, but also has a bunch of solo records that I love.

Flat

(reposting, with better sound & video quality)

Last weekend, I listened to a lot of Nigerian highlife from the 70s and decided: hey, that sounds fun! Let's try that! As usually happens, direction changes once things get moving. So I didn't even get close to highlife.

Instead I got this:

Lamp Post

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Originally Titled "Bong 33", because the default title for a new song on the Boss BR600 is "SONG ##", where "##" is simply an increasing number - so this was "Song 33" when I initialized it - and I just changed the S to a B, because it's a pain in the ass to change each letter one at a time by spinning the little jog wheel. And so it was called "Bong 33" for the last 12 years. Now it's "Lamp Post"

Except for my mumbling about Italian fascists, all the sounds are guitar into the BR600.

Rain girl

This is one of my favorite pics - a girl walking in the rain outside our first house. I've posted it previously, a couple of times.

I came up with an implementation of Aaron Hertzmann's "painterly" non-photorealistic rendering algorithm. This recreates the source image by using simulated brush strokes of varying size, color and shape. It's not a blurring or filtering of the source; it's a recreation made in much the same fashion that a human painter would copy a picture: look at the source, choose a color, make a stroke which follows that color. Repeat until you're done. As with a human painter, it starts with large brushes to get the background and large areas filled, then it refines the image with progressively smaller brushes.

This video is the algorithm in action, drawing the strokes (20 per frame, to save time). I told it to use short strokes.

The music is called "One Bird". That's me.

Here's one of a pic of Adrian Belew:

Longer, thinner brush strokes.

And, Tricksey:

Tricksey, Painterly