Q•••Y_>>mag

Xurilia Pinball Wizards

BlipVert / Will Northlich-Redmond

w_blipvert • bandcamp

The Sound Tower of Dr. Jitters is the eighth full-length release from BlipVert aka Will Northlich-Redmond. Dr. Jitters is a capricious sonic-scientist who has been all but ostracized by society. Despite his best attempts to develop compelling and unique products for humanity, his inventions are widely misunderstood, rejected, and in some cases outlawed. After many years of being shunned and repudiated by the public and its institutions, Dr. Jitters recognizes his work is too important to be pushed to the margins of civilization. Hence, he builds a giant abstract kaleidoscopic monument to preserve and showcase his achievements: The Sound Tower.

Content Warning: Dr. Jitters assumes no liability for any changes, psychological or physical, one may experience after entering The Sound Tower.

Hikoki Boom Boom

Danny Meyer && Patrick Lee

xasopheno • weresocool.org • patricklee3000 • patrick bandcamp

Patrick Lee - the high thing that sounds cool and is fast its a piano or something maybe Danny Meyer - weresocool programming && video (It's pretty short, so don't watch if you want to watch a long thing.)

Fractilian Space (a MegaRace cover)

Michael LaDue

much_ladue_about_nothing

She, the Cheese

Molly Bolten

mollybolten • mollybolten • bandcamp • spotify

I transferred some grated parmesan to an old jar from Italbrand Nonpareils Capers
When I placed it in the fridge it
giggled, and I looked and realized
she, the cheese fancied herself
hiding in plain sight, her organs
visible through clear glass walls but
shrouded in a bold claim to be
completely something else.
But I wasn’t angry, I was happy for her
—what I wouldn’t give to be
smiling so truly even through
the foreign shell of my body,
laughing at having tricked them (righteously)
and finally at peace
among the other foods.
The truth is, she, the cheese had planned this all along
the soft bag she came in was unwieldy,
all thumbs to pour from,
scattering loose crumbs every time—
she knew this.
So she let me reach my point of frustration
and swap her less welcome exoskeleton
for a sturdier one, one that she would feel held by
and I was happy to see her in her new skin.

Cells

Robert Woods-LaDue & Danny Meyer

xasopheno • onkosonkosonkos • bob bandcamp

oh my time, such blessed substance, oh

each moment's center, gives me a core of sweetest rose, 

oh, overlaid on grains, roots in the wooden current

a surreptitious joy, a bliss hidden and found

an overwhelming green blossoming, a fragrant arm around you

I smear the serpent's balm. What shall pass us along?

roaming the swollen haze, wild pinks and whites echo, both modern and ancient

the presence falls lifelessly to the floor, the presence falls.

the cadential quills pierce my being

imbalance rises.

Lil' Titus

Mark Pascucci-Clifford

mouscula • bandcamp

I recorded a good ol' chord progression that I've been kicking around for far too long and need to develop into a full piece, and am doing my best to have fun in the process. I used an Akai MPC 1000, Yamaha DX7, Fender Rhodes, and a Vibrapone in making this. I'll be adding the update for the next issue :) Big love to you all.

The Dumbest Gig on Upwork

Devin

myspace • bandcamp

A few years ago, I went through a lengthy phase of underemployment, and I’d occasionally trawl Upwork for music production posts.

The main problem with music gigs on Upwork is that posters often don’t have a firm grasp on the nuts-and-bolts of music production — or are so accustomed to using cheap-or-free stock music that paying anything for music feels like a luxury. As a result, the rates are usually rather low: It’s pretty typical to see gigs in the $5 / hour range if you do the math.

Bob who is currently on the job-hunting grind was on the job-junting grind until just recently (congrats!!!) dropped this post in the group chat yesterday — We Want Music Tracks — which takes this tendency to a new, ascendant tier of lunacy. There’s some language issues with the post, but that’s fine — I’m not going to pick on people who might not be native English speakers. Anyway, here’s the gig in a nutshell:

Here’s a few different ways to think about this

If you worked this like a standard 5-day, 8-hour workweek, you’d need to make 10 tracks per day, giving you 48 minutes to produce each track.

At the end of the week, you’d transfer your 50 tracks, and get $65. You do this for a full month. The breakdown is $1.65 / hour.

Let’s say you get ambitious and doubled your production rate, making one track every 24 minutes, and only working 4 hours a day. You’re now making $3.30 / hour.

But let’s say instead you want to “make it worth your while” by producing the tracks quickly enough to make minimum wage ($15.50 here in CA).

Good News / Bad News! You’ll finish all 200 tracks in a a little over 2 standard workdays… but you have to produce 12 tracks per hour. That’s one track every 5 minutes.

But could you make it work?

We brainstormed strategies to facilitate this: The strongest contender was recording everything at double-speed using features like Logic’s Varispeed, or playing everything an octave up and re-sampling at half-speed in post before the final bounce.

Alternatively, if you bounced each track exactly on the downbeats, you could get away with looping the entire songform once or twice, cutting the total length you’d need to produce down to 1 or 2 mins. Then you could double or triple the audio using a script.

We thought of a few areas where scripting would cut down on production time — but the issue then becomes: How much time does writing the script take? Every minute you spend coding narrows your 5-minute production window by precious seconds.

Additional research was conducted into the price of electricity for a home studio setup, which (using PG&E’s working average of $0.21775 per kilowatt-hour) we estimated would knock $15 (that’s 6%) off your total $260 for the project. But like they say, you have to spend money to make money.

Anyway, in my opinion, the best option would be to do this project as a performance art piece at a gallery or museum.

You’d set up a studio in the gallery, along with some text describing the project’s requirements. You’d hang some kind of sports-scoreboard thing on the wall, displaying a rolling 5-min countdown clock, track counter, and income generated.

Then, for 2.1 standard workdays, you’d go hell-for-leather, churning out a new banger every 5 minutes. Then after the 2.1 days are over, the studio setup remains in the gallery, looping the 200 tracks on repeat. The title could be “Minimum Wage” or maybe “We Want Music Tracks.”

SFMOMA — hmu, I’m ready to gooo!!