links

listen to my culminating album, rally on the airwaves, on my website or on mirlo (a community-based music sharing service)

download voxulem, a set of scripts for setting up a local streaming server with songs archived off of internet radio streams, on codeberg

take a look at the project's Novation Launchpad setup or my audio workstation setup

download some of the digital audio workstation projects (note: this link might move to a new location soon)

culminations

this project culminates in three forms: a short of radio and digital music pastiche, a toolset developed in the recording and arrangement process, and this written section. the toolset consists, currently, of a synthesizer configuration for the Novation Launchpad, and a scriptset for archiving songs from radio streams, and onto a locally-stored streaming server. i call this second script system "voxulem". i have made an album with these and other tools to cover several (mostly community-licensed) songs that embody a non-nationalist spirit.

on interrupting nationalism

pointing out the ways that we are all related is the easy part. this approach is so ubiquitous that it was my first thought of what a song challenging nationalism would look look like. that is not to say that there is nothing of radical use or value in creating a combination work of cultures that claim themselves diametrically opposed; yet it has been done countless times, and here we are. the FCC ham radio rules, to give one example, mention the goal of "international goodwill", and yet they say so with the stated agency-wide goal of the united states leading communications internationally. the ideal ham may be a bridge-builder, yet, by the guidebook, they are also a loyal propagandist.

to go further, i propose that one needs not to create preferred unions but to dissolve dispreferred ones. this can mean taking a part of one's nationality and distancing oneself from it, or, in cases, denouncing the importance and perceived reality of said nationality altogether. in the 21st century (or, as you might have it, the 58th century), this type of anti-national distancing scares repressive governments in a way that internationalism rarely does on its own.

a major issue with this approach is that, in our day and age, most attempts to distance oneself from one nationalist project are closely tied to the promotion of another. it is easy to say, "i am not in this group, for i am in another"; it is harder to say, "i am not in this group, for it is a fiction that i reject." it only gets harder in song, and harder yet if the songs composition is to reflect the divergence in aspects beyond only its lyrics.

on sampling

sampling, the act of taking a small piece of music and using it another purpose, carries border-breaking potential at its core. not only does it combine sound from various sources, it takes them and uses them for often-unintended purposes, in a way not dissimilar to l.a. paperson's concept of retooling. and it rarely asks permission, and has the lawsuits to show for it. it can be a way of situating oneself within a genre, and yet the sampled sounds carry a cluster of artifacts that usually don't match the target style.

much of my work with sampling takes samples that are especially short, even for samples, and turns them into singular notes or the basis for new instruments in the resulting song. this type of sampling has taken off in the digital era, and i find that it can be used to capture a zeitgeist to a greater extent than a smaller number of longer samples can.

adorno talks about the idea of turning the dial on the radio as a tendency that, if taken to its logical conclusions, could upend the whole idea of the broadcast media of his era; for with it, the listener repeatedly rejects programming and chooses another source, exercising a level of agency that they have themself discovered.

in an odd way, adorno's subversion has come true here: the successors of adorno's audience have access to more dials than adorno could have imagined. we have playlists, shuffle, repeat-one, curated mixes, and several layers of queue management baked into most streaming services. are we freer? in any case, the turning of the dial in our moment calls for an approach more creative and finely tuned to reflect the entropy of our present-day dials. i carry this form of faster-paced sampling as an offer towards finding that present-day approach.

on covers and intellectual property

like any good academic project, this one has nothing original about it. the methods, the soundwaves, the songs, the political theories, have all been hashed out in different places before. its originality, if it has any, comes from bringing these things together. i have therefore, in many cases, chosen to use source material that is willingly given under a license allowing its modification and retooling. similarly, i have focused on the usage of community-built software where possible in my process of adaptation; the goal is that no company will be able to claim a major stake in the project, that the finished product might be able to join the same community canon as the audio and software from which it pulls.