Lauren Just Named all the Presidents

Martin van Buren was a superb president; he had superb muttonchops.

I found a useful program called TabTrax made by the fine people at 2112 Design. With a name like that, how their products not be awesome? TabTrax converts drum tabs to drumset sheet music. One can also just write drum parts.

There are some weird issues... I can't figure out how to make triplets. There's no possibility of pentuplets or hextuplets or nothin'. Some of the 32nd notes don't connect very well. If you choose to switch between a ton of cymbals all the time, it's impossible to keep track of which hits are on which cymbal.

Try playing this 3-bar repeating thing. It most definitely qualifies as theoretical percussion (see this previous post). Start slow. The tempo's not reeeaally at 120.

Also, I'm going bald. I blame Lauren.

The Gears of the Reeving Machine are Turning

The playlist loggy thing wasn't working for the first installment of THE REEVING MACHINE, so I'll arbitrarily dump the playlist I made here. Plus, I apparently spelled reaving wrong! Yet again, my spell check dependency has got the better of me. Darn.

Car Bomb - Cielo Drive
Cattle Decapitation - In Axetasy
Psyopus - Insects
Daughters - Hyperventilation System
Secret Chiefs 3 - The Owl in Daylight
Necrophagist - Epitaph
The Locust - Armless and Overactive/Who's Handling the Population Paste?/New Tongue Sweepstakes/Consenting Abscess
Viraemia - Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation
Dillinger Escape Plan - Clip the Apex... Accept Instruction
Converge - Letterbomb
Behold... the Arctopus - Transient Exuberance
Lye by Mistake - 900 Seconds in Search of Jerry
Nile - Sacrifice Unto Sebek
Estradasphere - Smuggled Mutation

Allie sat in on the show and we drew how we were feeling with crayons. It ended up being very disjointed and colorful. Oberlin: it's like death metal and preschool combined?

I Wish it were Different!...

... growled the sqaure-head eyes-on-tentacle wombat creature with a tail thing. The capitalists had tied his 10-metre body up to a bourgeois's automobile. When the bourge floored the gas, ol' square-head had no choice but to sprint ahead of the car, as to not get bumpered in the Achilles tendons.

It was a travesty what they had done to him. He prickled with rage, thinking of his old life cuddling in caves and eating fish. Sensing that his expoitation potential had not been fulfilled, a promising industrialist named Swan had hooked a mini iced cream stand up to his tail. The five thousands of kilogrammes of ice cream weighed down on his spiked tail, as well as his spiked heart.

Flying children flew after Squarey and the attached auto and the attached iced cream enterprise in a giddy attempt to purchase their various iced creams and treats! Most failed and flew under the tires. Squish!!!

Allie drew all of this on my thigh today. As the level of detail increased, she got all up in the scandelous upper thigh region, which I then had to reveal to the proletariat later.

Theoretical Percussion: An Introduction

Theoretical Percussion is a term I invented to describe some of my work in writing for concert snare drum and drumset. It comes from a deep conversation I once had with Goofy, the legendary talking dog of folklore featured in the famous "Mickey Mouse" cartoons as well as the tales of Central European bards.

Lanky: Check out this sweet solo for concert snare drum, yo.
Goofy: Kickin', but can you play it?
Lanky: Ummmm... theoretically...

Goofy was arrested in 2006 for eating Pluto. Goofy, flummoxing and slurring and hyucking all over the place, alternately claimed self-defense,and precedent from the Mayi-Mayis.

Theoretical percussion compositions may or may not be possible to play. The goal is to write something exceedingly intricate to push the boundaries of skill. If, while practicing and revising, it becomes apparent that a passage is only playable by drumming robots, the section should be revised for humans. In the end, you end up with a piece that's as hard to play as it can possibly be! Those are always the most fun. Here are some examples.


Selection from "Big Pink." This is part of a solo for concert snare drum that I wrote over the summer. Think of each line as a separate bar. Now, some of this might be making you flummox and slur and hyuck all over the place. The fifth line in particular. The hernias in this line originate from some rhythms I wrote with my guitarist extraordinaire Julian, plus a conversation I had with Bethany, my fellow komodo dragon and an Oberlin Conservatory composition major. When you see x:y over a grouping of notes, it means play x notes spaced apart as if the grouping were a y-let.

Heh? What the hell? Lanky, you indecipherable harlot! Okay, so look at the first such instance of this technique in Big Pink. The first four notes of the fifth line have "4:5" written over them. This means you should play 4 notes spaced apart as if you were playing a cinqtuplet. You basically just chop off the fifth note of your cinqtuplet. Then, the next six notes, the "6:7" grouping, should be spaced apart as if you were playing a heptuplet.

This creates horrible, horrible problems with time signatures. The main idea when I had this whole idea in the first place was about what time signatures would sound like if the bottom number wasn't a power of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16...). What about 5/6? What about 3/7?

Well fuck everything, because the last bar on this page of "Big Pink" (besides the extraneous 3:5 sixteenth note grouping) is in the time signature of 617/560. Yes. Six hundred seventeen five hundred sixty. It's amazing how badly adding a few off these odd spacings can screw up your time signatures. I had to do scatch work to figure out the 617/560 thing. My Macbook was broken at the time, so I couldn't just figure out the Least Common Multiple in Mathematica. I had to calculate it by hand. I haven't done that shit since third grade. It's awful.



If you're still frowning in fury about numbers separated by colons, here's the system Julian and I originally devised:



All we did was put dashes instead of stems on the notes we wanted ommitted. A dash doesn't mean rest; it means omit the note and the space it would occupy entirely! Under the "colon" system, which I just named, the two odd groupings in the 2nd ending on the 4th line would be written as 5:6 and 2:3, respectively. Bethany says that the colon system is a real thing and has been used by composers for hundreds of years before I devised it roundaboutly one June evening.

None the less, colony rhythms open up the possibilities for rhythmic shennanigans exponentially. You're never going to be able to play a 617/560 measure by subdividing (I think...), but you can figure it out by feel. However, it isn't going to be entirely accurate if you do it this way. Somewhere on my future agenda is plans to write some code to play back complex, colony rhythms perfectly. The only examples I can think of where artists/composers have used colony time signatures are some noise rock bands like Hella and Ahleuchatistas, and their frequent tempo changes and stellar live performances suggest that they figure their rhythms out by feel instead of through anything like my insane rhythm playback software method.

I leave you with a Theoretical Concert Snare piece I wrote something like 3.5 years ago, "Robot Rumble." Largely based off rhythms from The Locust, The Sawtooth Grin, and other highly technical metal bands, it has no colony rhythms. It's probably still impossible for humans to play anyways. I made it not in Sibelius, but rather Photoshop, where the possibilities are indeed infinite. I love all the varieties of Opus and other musical fonts. Good luck, sucker. Click to enlargen.


EDIT: In addition to math rock shiz, Zappa must've done something like this. I mean c'mon. Civilization Phase III.

Interview with Lankoff

Watch in horror as Allie, a good friend and Oberlin third-year Creative Writing major, interviews Lankoff about all things.

A: If you had to take one part of your body and transplant it onto another part of your body, what part would you transplant where?
L: That's silly.

A: It's not silly. It's interesting.
L: I would transplant my nostrils to my butt.

A: If you had to go on a date with any of the presidents of the United States, living or dead, which would it be? And what would the date be?
L: I would take Grover Cleveland out for brunch between his two terms and tell him that everything was going to be all right, that he'd be president again before he knew it. Then we'd cuddle.

A: Awwww.
L: Sure.

A: You're not very good at this.
L: This is the best interview I've ever done.

A: If you could be a Hamiltonian or Eulerian circuit, which would you be?
L: Hamiltonian. I avoid edges.

A: If you could have any Oberlin College professor turned into a dinosaur, and that dinosaur would be your steed that you could ride around on all the time, which professor? And what kind of dinosaur?
L: I would turn Bernard Motambo into a pterodactyl.

A: THAT'S THE PROFESSOR AND THE DINOSAUR OF WHICH I WAS THINKING!!!

That's all the time we have. What insight you, the reader, have gained!

Blueprints

90% of my free time goes to music: drumset, bass guitar, tabla, sitar, composition, Reason, gallivanting around campus beatboxing, screeching as loud as I can, thumb piano. Yesterday I found my 1/4" to 1/8" adapter, hooked my bass up to my Macbook, and made some terrible recordings. They're not worth listening to.

Here and here.

Mexican Radio

It's the time of the semester when radio shows on WOBC get rolling. This time around, in the frantic ten minutes before the midnight deadline, I applied for a metal show and my ceremonial Josh & Brendan have fluxuating attention spans tomfoolery.

I received both! O happy day! O joyous parshums!

"The Reeving Machine," a noise-assault wherein the listener's bones are liquified and centrifuged, shall be on Saturday nights/Sunday mornings from midnight until 1 AM. Playing the likes of The Locust, Ed Gein, Cattle Decapitation, and The Dillinger Escape Plan, I'll be kept busy changing the tracks every 43 seconds. The drumming should be fan-effing-tastic.

"Deepthroat Unicorn," an avante-garde/progressive rock/jazz/world mishmash, shall be on Wednesday afternoons from 4 to 6. Think of it like a more refined version of our old show, "The Prosthetic Moon of the Elephantine Illuminati," but with a question of the week. And on the other side of the day. No more 3 AM radio shows for me no more!

All of this means I have to make an even greater concentrated effort to peruse archive.org, last.fm, the WOBC archives, and the Conservatory library. Digging deep into layers of technical death metal (tech death) and technical grindcore (tech grind) is proving particularly difficult. While there are some promising leads (Triumph of Gnomes, Viraemia), there are also a bajillion lame, lame deathcore (the bastard child of death metal and hardcore) bands. I recommend The Apparatus's recent compilation of free, underground tech metal. It's a good soundtrack for problem sets...

Of course perusing music means I hear more vomit I want to emulate, which means I've been playing/making more music. I'll upload up some of the stuff I've been working on soonish. Tentative titles include "Black Juice" and "Sleazy Slam."

Socialists!

I just got back from the first meeting of Socialist Alternative. Brendan and Amanda also showed up, so it was a gleeful time all around. I took from it the fact that economic downturns occur because of overproduction. I should've been able to figure this out before, but I'd never really thought of it this way. The guest speaker, who'd spent a few years establishing a socialist platform in Bolivia, claimed that it would take $40 billion annually to provide food, shelter, education, and health services to the entire world. "Wow," I thought, "that doesn't seem right."

I just checked out the 2010 US budget and we're allocating $45.685 billion for education alone. So... either I misheard, the speaker was wrong, or the US is vastly mismanaging its tax revenue. I'll put my money on one and three. (FYI... ever wanted to see what the US budget looks like without staring at a huge list with lots of numbers? Look at this!!! Pretty graphics!)

Of course, the driving thrust of the speech was the utter failure of capitalism. Is it fair to look at the current recession like this? I took an introductory economics course here at Oberlin two years ago, and while I learned loads and gained a thorough understanding of how the current US and world economic systems function, I was left with the impression that economists don't actually know what's going on in a capitalist system. The chock everything up to the "invisible hand" and have no idea what's happening when 2000 lb. October 2008 anvils fall on their heads. Maybe socialists don't know any more than capitalists do, but I'm looking forward to seeing how their competing theories play out. Not that any political party besides Democrats and Republicans will ever come into existence in the US or anything.

On Le Corbusier: Part 1

I'm in this fabulous art history class called "Modernism and Environmentalism in 20th Century Architecture, with Prof. Daniel Barber. It's fun! I'm in it mostly for the chance that I'll persue architecture and/or urban planning. Taking it with me is my fellow vagrant Amanda. We seem to have competing views on Le Corbusier. More specifically, his idealized city of 3 million people laid out in "The Contemporary City," chapter 11 of The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (1929).

Amanda (and I paraphrase): Yuck! Straight lines? Grids? Exactly 24 skyscrapers? ALL THE SAME HEIGHT? Barf out! Gag me with a spoon! I'd rather kill myself than live in that city! It's completely unnatural!

Josh (Lankoff): I don't think the plan was to adhere to that EXACT model. He says that he's "avoid[ing] all special cases... assum[ing] an ideal site to begin with" (164). It's not that a construction crew is going to march in and build the exact same plan in every continent. This is just a jumping off point. There's obviously going to be variance. Also, what's wrong with grids? Have you ever tried driving in Boston or DC?

Amanda insisted that it'd never work anyway, so I've decided to apply the least rigorous, least scientific test to Le Corbusier's idealized city that I can: building it in Sim City 4 and seeing what happens.

Here's what we're dealing with:

This is pages 174-75. I've colored it pink to get around copyright laws. If I'm still in violation, contact me and I'll take this picture down.

The jist: Transportation hub in the center. It's surrounded by commercial skyscrapers. These are surrounded by medium-density housing which commutes to work primarily through train, monorail, subway, and other public transportation. This is all surrounded by the "park lands," public parks and forests. The plan goes into far more detail, which I will try to incorporate into my Sim City model as much as possible.

An important question: Sim City obviously isn't the perfect tool to do this, but does it hold ANY legitimacy? I'd like to think so. Its traffic simulations, at least, are highly realistic, especially using user-created plugins that more accurately simulate citizens' route planning to and from their jobs. Here is an article about a middle school in Rhode Island that used Sim City as part of its fifth and sixth grade curriculum.

Regular updates on the model Le Corbusier city to come.

Raccoon Flying in my Face

Yesterday I was on a dandy early mornin' run with my friend Rose, and we approached a rotting raccoon carcass. "Gross out!" I said, "Gag me with a spoon! A rotting raccoon carcass swarming with maggots!"

The nice drivers swerved left to avoid the dead animal and two runners. But then, a jackass in a truck was either drunk or just a huge jackass. "THUMP!" went the carcass as it got run over. A huge truck hurtling toward us, Rose and I leapt off the side of the rode, across a stream, and onto a hill as we were showered with fur, bacteria, carcass bits, and vile stench.

What are the chances that I caught some raccoon disease?

Shizberry

Allie and Jenny, two mischievous Oberlinians whom I miss kind of, started writing a musical with me last April. Cuz that's what we do on weekends.

It was originally supposed to be about the joys and perils of shizberry addiction. Shizberries are a highly addictive, highly electrically-charged maroon and navy fruit. They're not real. But as time progressed, Allie and Jenny turned their focus to a makeshift plotline about the "Bad Decision Café," a place we've all been known to frequent.

This left me with the incomplete overture to our shizberry musical. This piece was going to be played before the shizberry factory burns down, killing thousands of workers, in the style of the Triangle Factory.

So here you have it, the musical number I composed in Reason 3.0 (under the monkier of Crab Coma as I do with most things), titled "Shizberry" because there's no other real suitable name. Enjoy?

Resigned

Humanworld is a downtrodden, miserable plane of existence controlled by the dual, arbitrary constraints of space and time.

Space and time are two trees competing for existence at a point, and one tree winning. Time holds the most sway. The other dimensions bend to its will, as do the inhabitants of humanworld. What they do at any given point could barely be considered free will. It is Sunday night, so it is highly probable that the student is studying. It is highly probable that the system is functioning as it does on any Sunday night, within a minute tolerance.

Not that this place doesn’t contain its share of mysteries and worthy endeavors. Existence is crazy. Armies cause destruction by moving clockwise. I could easily be happy until I die studying humanworld and its inhabitants.

But infinitely more is going on than in humanworld. Perhaps the universe is infinite in size. Perhaps there are an infinite number of dimensions. I owe it to myself to learn as much as I can about what lies beyond. So it's not that there’s anything especially wrong with humanworld. I’ve just had more than enough time to experience it and would be interested in exploring one of the other infinity possibilities?

One with more than three dimensions, perhaps? One where time isn’t linear, please? I’d even take trees being purple in the summer instead of green. Just anything different from oh so dreary, mundane human-world.

Drat. On that note, there’s actually especially right with the humanworld either. Genocides and stock markets and commercials for Olive Garden and CGI M&M’s that are supposed to look human. Is the consumer supposed to imagine eating a person while eating an M&M? How is that supposed to make him want to buy more?

Whatever I want to learn, I’m stuck with the unfortunate hillbilly upbringing of being on Earth and only truly being able to understand three dimensions plus time. I refuse to give into humanworld by looking into it for answers. I shall look as far away as I can.

Bottoms up the Hatch

Pass me a sizzle. I'm late for tea.