In anticipation towards / preparation for the potentiality of total Planetary Shutdown (as has been predicted by the Mayans, NASA, Terence MacKenna, the Nostradamus, possibly some Australophithecus proto-shaman named ‘Zhembg’, and many other interesting people), I am devoting the next 681 days to communicating the spectrum of paranoia which I believe can reorder the chaos of human existence into a super-prismic ultra-rainbow of utopian self-discovery. I will attempt to weave an exquisite tapestry made of theories, counter-theories, maths, lies, stories, speculations, strategies of survival, proposals for responsible hedonism, temporary autonomous zones, and general psychogeographic meanderings. I will tap into a network of like-minded decoders of human knowledge in the attempt to gather and exchange data, experiences, fears, hopes, etc. in a feedback loop of triumphant futility.

ENJOY (approximately) 681 DAYS IN THE (100%) PARTY-ZONE.

Shred the next 600-odd days with my dear pal Joey Ryken.

Brian Eno: I think the other thing that’s important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they’re told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that’s sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time. So, we kind of like to think of structuring devices that make it so that there are differences in dynamics where sometimes only one thing is happening and sometimes several things are happening together.

Mark Richardson: You’re credited with “computer” on the album. There were two things that I read about years ago, when you were speaking about computer music, that might have changed over time. One had to do with the idea of electronic music so often being created on a grid. Where sounds were locked into place and ultimately certain genres of music were dependent on that. But at the time, you talked about how that was maybe problematic in terms of the development of music. Do you feel like that has changed at all? Is that something you’re dealing with now or that has been overcome in how you work with music with computers?

Brian Eno: I think it’s a really, really important issue. I think we’re sort of deep in the grid period of making music—well, we’re probably emerging from it a little bit now, I would say. You know how eras always have a sound to them and you don’t realize it until the era has gone? I remember when in the early days of rock’n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I’ll say “1959″ or “1961.” I can hear precisely. It’s like it has a huge date stamp on it. And I think we’re all capable of doing that. You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that’s going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is it glossy production values and it’s griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.

I just got an amazing 10-CD set, it’s the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what’s incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they’re just totally alive, these recordings. It’s very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight. And we’re going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It’s the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music. Because that’s what we’re doing, after all. All the programs we’re using started their lives, really, as word processing programs and the concepts that typify word processing, like “cut and paste,” “change typeface.”

[...]

Mark Richardson: A related question is the interface between the body and computers and how different that is from traditional instruments, which were often built with the body in mind—how they would be held, where the hands would be, where the fingers would be. And the computer is obviously modeled on a typewriter machine that was built in the late 19th century, and we have a finger to control a mouse and so on. But do you see any evolution of it in that regard of it? How people use them in terms of making their bodies work with computers?

Brian Eno: First of all, I think you’re quite right in bringing that up, because I think that is such a serious issue, and very few people notice it. Very few people take it seriously at all, because they’re still convinced by the Microsoft slogan “Go where your imagination takes you,” or whatever that bloody thing was. The idea that the computer is a completely neutral device that doesn’t have a personality of its own and just liberates you to do anything you want—it’s complete cock. You just make different music on a computer. And you can make wonderful music on a computer, but don’t pretend that the machinery is transparent. It makes as much difference to what you’re doing as it does if you play an acoustic guitar as opposed to a kettledrum. You’re not going to make the same music.

[...] there is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it’s still quite a long way off. Basically, you’re still sitting there using just the muscles of your hand, really. Of one hand, actually. It’s another example of the transfer of literacy to making music because the assumption is that everything important is happening in your head; the muscles are there simply to serve the head. But that isn’t how traditional players work at all; musicians know that their muscles have a lot of stuff going on as well. They’re using their whole body to make music, in fact. Whereas it’s quite clear that if the interface between you and a computer is a mouse, then everything of interest that happens must be happening in your head. It’s a big step backwards, I think. It’s back to the biggest problem with classical music, which is [that] it’s head music. It doesn’t emanate from anything below the shoulders, basically.

[...] we’ve had [years] of evolution to develop this incredibly fine set of muscles, which can do the most extraordinary, delicate things and which have their own memories and so on. And then we fucking well discard it all; it seems completely stupid to me. And also, I think, if you spend a day or—as many people do—a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially. It’s all wasted, and it feels wasted. You feel dead. You feel as if you’re not living a full life. Which, of course, is why—it’s my theory about why so many people who are heavily into computers are also into extreme sports and S&M [laughs]. It’s because their bodies are crying out for some kind of action.

Mark Richardson interviews Brian Eno

The Moms-tube: Cheryl Svensson and Jim Birren at the University of Southern California

A ghost crab eats oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill, shown glowing yellow-orange under ultraviolet light, at Gulf Islands National Seashore near Pensacola, Florida.

Glowing Oil Could Aid Gulf Spill Cleanup (National Geographic)

Wendy Carlos’s Experiments in Color Vision.