Monthly Archives: December 2006

The Pig Go

Neural Network Zen:

    Not wanting to throw away a several hundred thousand dollar investment, the CTO decided to put the monstrous neural network to use doing something else: prose. The developers spent a few hours re-training it to work from a dataset of phrases and output actual sentences instead of tokenized log lines. The reports it generates [are] included in a section of the company's newsletter. Following is one of its more recent creations.

    The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.

From The Daily WTF's article, No, We Need a Neural Network.

Decisions


I have a band, called "Smaller Animals". No, wait, I am a band called "Smaller Animals"* - it's just me... except when I get other people to help, and even then it's still mostly me, but with guests. We/I do mostly what people call "experimental" guitar stuff - that is, it's the kind of stuff guitar players do when they're not working with anyone else, and so there's nobody there to tell them to quit fucking around. I doubt it's interesting to anyone else, but whenever I finish an album I send it around to select friends, just so I can say it's 'out there'. I don't even play these songs for Mrs Cleek, because I know she won't like them.

Happily, I just finished another album's worth of stuff. I've already sent out all the CDs I'm going to send out, and I've decided I'm going to put this one on the web, too. But first, a little explanation of what it is, and isn't...

It's me playing various guitars, recorded to my now-retired Tascam cassette 4-track (next album will be recorded on my cool new digital 8-track). The sound quality varies from weak to ass: between the tape hiss and distortions, my lack of patience with sensible recording practices and simple laziness, the sound is sub-lo-fi; if the name "Portastatic" wasn't already taken, I'd have claimed it for myself. There aren't any vocals: I've done vocals in the past and have finally decided it's best if I just don't do that anymore. The songs typically don't follow conventional structures, and standard musical theory only gets a couple of chances to speak: these are like radio jingles for a world where Sonic Youth is a hot wedding band. The playing and arrangements and mixes are sloppy: close is close enough. I'm not a flashy player: there are no flashy solos or Hott Lixx. Half of these songs are probably impossible to duplicate - it's nearly all improvised, I don't keep track of the tunings or chords I use, and happy accidents during recording and performance are the rule. But, at least they're all really short!

So, in a nutshell: this stuff isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, and it's not meant to be.

OK, have I sufficiently lowered your expectations? I hope so.

Here it is. A 96Kb/s copy of: Smaller Animals, Decisions. (Warning: 27MB ZIP)

Maybe I'll post the CD artwork later.

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* It's a non-coincidence that a software company I am associated with is called "Smaller Animals Software, Inc."; but the band and the software company aren't related in any, umm, legal, financial or material way. If you happen to work for the IRS, or the NC Dept of Revenue, or NC Secretary of State, please consider that an un-official disclaimer.

Let It Snow

Nikon N80, 28-80mm, some kind of slide film

(repost)

This is an old picture. It's been nearly two years since I've seen snow on the ground down here in NC. Maybe this year... ??

About those "commandments"

Bullseye Rooster discusses the merits of the ten commandments.

Sample:

    3. Thou shalt not lie.
    Seems reasonable, but commandments are absolutes, and we all know times we should lie. Some very few good christians lied to the gestapo to save jews during the holocaust. And they invoked God's name to do so.

Start Your iPods

OMFIG... Monday?

  1. The Police - Too Much Information. Ripped from the 25 year-old vinyl.
  2. Sleater-Kinney - Memorize Your Lines
  3. Stereolab - Good Is Me
  4. Robyn Hitchcock & Venus 3 - Museum Of Sex
  5. Flaming Lips - Evil Will Prevail. Ah the good ol' Lips.
  6. Neutral Milk Hotel - Untitled. I suppose that explains why I couldn't remember the name...
  7. 3d's - Beautiful Things. This happens to be the 1st song on the iPod, alphabetically. When it comes up first thing Monday AM, I know it's because I forgot to hit Shuffle.
  8. Doc Watson - Doc's Guitar. Sounds like someone turned the tape speed up 2x. Damn this guy was good.
  9. Robyn Hitchcock - One L
  10. Neil Young - Cripple Creek Ferry. Mercifully short.
  11. Bone-us : Four Tet - Pockets. From Flux-Rad's 2006 Mixed Tape.