New Music from Miso & Misprint

Mizao is Miso & Misprint

'Hard Return' is the second tune from the collaboration Mizao - Misprint Thursday & myself. Misprint has provided vocals over a rolicking bass & drum eurodance mix in this electronica ear candy tune about telephones, customer service departments & existential angst.

Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?
Is this the refund dept for my life?
I think there's been a mistake
I'd like to make a return


This is not my life
This is not my life!
I'd like to speak to a supervisor
I'd like to speak to a supervisor


Yes, I'd like to make a return please...
Well... I think there's been a mistake.
I understand... it's a very hard return...
I have a receipt!


I'd like to speak to a supervisor
I think there's been a mistake
This is not my life!
I'd like a refund


We're releasing this tune free to download at this time in advance of the completed album project, when it will go to iTunes. You can listen to or download it here:

Hard Return on soundcloud

(no account necessary)

You might also be interested in the Internet Club mix of this tune:

We Are Anonymous on soundcloud

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We Are Anonymous - new music

Greetings citizens of the internet

It's been quite awhile since I made some new music outside of virtual worlds, but I've been stimulated to do so by Misprint Thursday, whom I worked with before on the music/video "The Roof Is Gone" for Burning Life 2009.

Misprint has asked me to co-create with her on Indaba Music - a collaboration service for musicians. I'm really excited to work with Misprint again; she is definitely a "Go!" person and we work well together.

The musical tracks at Indaba turned out so nice that I decided to do a mix version of them while they await Misprint's vocals. I am a fan of remixed/extended/alternate versions of songs so this works well for me.

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The mix I have created is "We Are Anonymous," a tune for the loose affiliation of netizens making headlines lately. It follows my life-long interest in musique concrète & sound assemblage and includes many old sound-friends of mine, including the sound recorded off my own modem in the late 80s - the thrilling, dulcet tones of the SYN/ACK handshake.

The credits on this mix belong to Anonymous, as does the meme mashup graphic above. Both are freely released with a CC license to Anonymous to use & enjoy as they will. Music just wants to be free. F**k the #RIAA.


You can listen to the track in several places:

- Hosted through the generosity of marx Dudek: We Are Anonymous

- on Soundcloud: We Are Anonymous

- As a soundfile on Vimeo: We Are Anonymous


You can also download the high-quality MP3 from Rapidshare:

We Are Anonymous (download)

* A very few people have reported that "Rapidshare makes me sign up for an account before I can download." The Rapidshare interface is not the most intuitive, so here is a screenshot to help you:


The middle box (which I have outlined in green) is the download link - you should be able to get the song from here without signing up or in or anything. If you can't, please let me know - this has only happened to two people out of many*

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I had great fun doing the mix and am really excited to hear what Misprint does with the tracks at Indaba. We are also planning future musical collaborations using/remixing many of the tracks I did for raves in the 90s.

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Early VW machinima

W00t! Finally I am finding some of what has been packed away a very long time, including this early animation? machinima? of the virtual continent I created in 1996 using a program called VistaPro.

VistaPro was pretty spiffy for its' time: it supported 1024x768 rendering with Phong highlights, 4x antialiasing, VESA drivers and was capable of downloading terrain elevation maps from USGS ASCII DEM and USGS SDTS DEM files from the USGS, NASA, JPL, the US Air Force & Navy and other sources to recreate completely accurate maps of terrain... including Mons Olympus on Mars and the lunar craters (I had models of Mau'i and Big Island to trace my journeys there). Here's a nice review of VistaPro in its prime.

It was also capable of generating a camera path for an animated tour of the created world. The video you see here was a world - land - I made and used as the basis of several stories and chapters of my novel-in-progress 'Anna of the Sidhe'; it was also the source of +100 web pages of scenes from that continent used as backgrounds to roleplaying/writing with the VR co-op RP groups Virtual Camelot and Virtopia and where Anna was born.


Unfortunately, at the time I was creating and working in these worlds, technology was straining; even with a top-of-the-line tweaked and streamlined media computer, I was hard-pressed to make videos larger than 320x240, the compression artifacts were horrible and it took hours and hours to render even simple scenes.

In this flythrough, a lot of the forests and trees have been removed in order to not have the machine choke or gorge the hard disk or just plain quit; mostly the structural canyons and shape of the underlying geology is viewable. You will notice two areas of water; one a lake hidden deep within the interior of the continent and a river which leads inward from the other side of the mountains; these places were pivotal locations in the story of land and Anna of the Sidhe.

I'm excited to find these pieces of my early virtual reality experiences, artifacts and all.


... now if I can find some of the videos of early Burning Man and Big Bang/Moontribe events...

Summer Doldrums & Getting High On Music

Wired is running a great story about the Mustang school district in Oklahoma warning about the dangers of digital drugs - specifically binaural beat patterns in music.

Luckily, no one from that Oklahoma school district has visited my Temple of the Radiant Moon, where such beat patterns, along with alpha, theta and other Extremely Low Frequency [ELF] waves are incorporated into all the ToneSpheres. The Temple was designed to both relax you and to stimulate the pineal and corpus callosum using sound and color.

A lot of my own research for many years has been on the effects of sound and vibration on the human nervous system. The waves in the Temple took a lot of work, owing to the need for the wave cycles to be continuous and measured to loop at the right rates to produce the binaural beat effect without clicks or pops.

It is most effective to use such patternings with headphones on; the alpha and theta waves will reproduce through your speakers but you won't get the binaural effects unless you are wearing 'phones.

So please, if you are from Oklahoma and you are in Second Life, get a note from your Mommy, Nanny or designated School Thought Police monitor before coming to my Garden. Thank you ^_^

SLurl: The Temple of the Radiant Moon in the Garden of Sound

Other than that, it's summer; cicadas are singing and I am being lazy.

M.I.A. - Born Free

Here's some work i think worth promoting/distributing (and that slides right in with my installation State of Mind ) -

'Born Free' is a song from M.I.A. leaked on internet on April 23rd which is being used for the soundtrack of a Romain Gavras' (son of political filmmaker Constantinos "Costa" Gavras) -directed short film, itself a promo-teaser for his forthcoming "Redheads" - a feature-length film on the same themes as the Born Free video. It's the first single off her upcoming third studio album which will be released in US on June 29, 2010.


I've liked M.I.A. for awhile - a lot of her rhymes are really catchy and remind me of jumprope-skipping cants ('Paper Planes') until you actually listen to the lyrics and get with her head; the awesome sonic work in her material is also way-good and deliciously interesting to the ear. She's consistently kept her work digging, despite her popularization, and 'Born Free' is a real hit to the brain - it's swimming in the zeitgeist next to 'District 9' and 'Children Of Men'. I am really looking forward to the release of 'Redheads.'


Be informed: the video is "difficult" and certainly mature. It's unnerving and raw and probably upsetting. It's also hot and street-real.


The YouTube video is behind an "adults-only" rating, so you'd have to either signup or login with your username to see it. Better to get the widescreen full version straight from MIA's site:

M.I.A. - Born Free @ Miauk.com

Go, girl. Props out.

Whooo!
Yeah man made powers
Stood like a tower higher and higher hello
And the higher you go you feel lower, oh
I was close to the end staying undercover
staying undercover
With a nose to the ground I found my sound

Got myself an interview tomorrow
I got myself a jacket for a dolla
.............
and the car doesn't work so I'm stuck here
yeah i don't wanna live for tomorrow
I push my life today
I throw this in your face when I see ya
I got something to say
I throw this sh!t in your face when I see ya
Cause I got something to say

I was born free (born free)
I was born free (born free)
(bo-bo-born free ....)

You could try to find ways to be happier
You might end up somewhere in Ethiopia
You can think big with your idea
You ain't never gonna find utopia
Take a bite out of life make it snappier yeah
Ordinary gon super trippyer
So I check sh!t cause I'm lippyer
And split a cheque like slovakia

Yeah i don't wanna live for tomorrow
I push my life today
I throw this in your face when I see you
I got something to say
I throw this sh!t in your face when I see you
Cause I got something to say

I was born free (born free)
I was born free (born free)
I was born free (born free)
(bo-bo-born free ....)
ooooh

I don't wanna talk about money, 'cause I got it
And I don't wanna talk about hoochies, 'cause I been it
And I don't wanna be that fake, but you can do it
And imitators, yeah, speak it

Oh Lord? whoever you are, yeah come out wherever you are
Oh Lord? whoever you are, yeah come out wherever you are
and tell em!

Born free (born free)
I was born free (born free)
I was born free (born free)
(bo-bo-born free ....)

lyrics ©2010 M.I.A.