We live as long as we fly
Взял тут у сестры троюродной новый фотоаппарат пощёлкать. В итоге можно полюбоваться на мой район обитания со сверхвысоким разрешением в 9 мегапикселей фотика Fujitsu FinePix E900.
So, having downloaded the new Mogwai album, I put it on in the background, and got down to my studies, or something of the sort. It tinged and twanged in my crappy dorm speakers nice and glamorously. The little guitars on the album are squeaky clean and ringing, produced to hell and back, no wonder the album is being hailed as genius left and right. If you look at it as a factory-made cake, in which sugar, cream and other components are measured out to a tee, you have to admit the epithet is fair.
But the sweet-sounding idyll was suddenly interrupted by strange jerks and stutters. Usually this means the file is broken, and I'd have to re-download the whole album. I was already about to wince, but the weird sound just wouldn't end. Then it hit me that one single file from the album couldn't possibly be totally broken, especially since I downloaded a RAR archive, which checks for integrity during unpacking using the CRC algorithm. In the end, I started to listen to the track further, trying to figure out if the Mogwai musicians really decided to mock the listener and shove onto a blatantly commercial and easily digestible record an evil and prickly track, resembling harsh cut-up electronica and partly the duo The Books. My opinion kept changing every few seconds, and my brain was paralyzed, because melodic instrumental music chopped up into small pieces by some creepy dismemberment maniac sounded simply mind-blowing.
In the end, I decided that this was the artists' intention, and was already about to forgive Mogwai all their sins for such a stunt . But I had enough nerdiness in me to re-download the album anew just to check. Naturally, in the "normal" version of the album that same track Friend Of The Night turned out to be a rather boring single, which nowadays even gets airplay on FM radio, and is by no means a work of pathological anatomy art. And what I mistook for the musicians' persistence and maniacal nature turned out to be nothing more than a tricky recording defect. Obviously, the album was stolen from the studio while still unfinished, which is why the effect full of psychedelia and magic emerged.
Now I'll explain why the story has such a title. All of this pretty much reminded me of Andrey Gorokhov's constant talk about how sound quality doesn't have a decisive significance in perceiving music, and that the crisp and refined studio recording, which major labels and music craftsmen love so much, actually sometimes kills the magic and drive. My story is tied to such a point of view only indirectly, but it reminds us of similar things.
About how technical means like sampling really did open up new horizons and allowed unprecedented ideas to be realized. And about how all techniques are truly permissible in sound painting: both noise and basically any sound can not only be built into a musical composition as decorative elements, but are music in and of themselves, or can form the skeleton of a composition. And about how chance can spawn things in art that sometimes cannot be achieved through long labor and virtuosity.
For me these are absolutely obvious axioms, and it's very weird for me to see when people hold a different opinion.
P.S. Not hoping that anyone will back my philosophizing, I'll still post the files.
Normal version Amazing version
Yesterday I visited the "Olimpija" sports complex, located in the leather factory district in the city of Daugavpils. The complex is a converted recreation area for workers of some organization that existed in the Latvian SSR. You can stay inside the complex for as long as you want, having paid 2.5 LS ($4.5) for entry.
Inside there is a small pool (4 lanes of 25 meters). Compared to my usual RTU pool in Kipsala (Riga) this one is small and greenish. But on the bright side, right next to it there's also a sauna, a Turkish bath, and a jacuzzi. Plus the walls are painted in cheerful colors with little flowers, and near the edges there are wooden chairs for the relaxation of visitors.
The jacuzzi turned out to be a funny thing. I used to imagine a jacuzzi in the form of light bubbles, slightly tickling the skin, but in reality everything was seething and bubbling like a cauldron with some hellish brew. Or like a mountain river. The reason is obvious - thrill-seeking visitors don't really think twice, and joyfully accept the machine's settings whatever they might be. And the administration, meeting them halfway, cranks everything up to the max in the morning and doesn't touch them anymore. In reality, everything can be adjusted however you want, including the temperature and the amount of air streams bursting from below, which I found out experimentally.
The Turkish bath, or what the complex designers had in mind by it, is just a room with two pipes from which hot steam, slightly scented with eucalyptus and mint, comes out. Only the implementation is funny - huge pipes stick out right on the floor, and getting a 2nd-degree burn is a piece of cake. Especially for people like me, who move around by touch without glasses.
The second funny detail is the button for turning on the supply of a new batch of steam. The walls in the bath are completely smooth, and only in one place a small tail of a steel rebar sticks out. They say that if you touch and stroke it, then shortly the pipes will rumble like contentedly grunting elephants, and spit out a new portion of fragrant heat. At first I took this for a local urban legend, but experiments showed that this corresponds to reality. It seems this was done to avoid ruining a normal button from moisture and heat, and at the other end of the rebar there's simply a sensor measuring the resistance, which changes upon a human touch.
There's no point in talking about the sauna. On the contrary, I'll ask. I've repeatedly heard that a "sauna" is a purely harmful New Russian invention, and Finns actually always have taken and still take steam baths by the principle of a classic "Russian" banya. Is this so? Because the sauna appeals to me only because it smells very nicely of dry wood in there, and I'd rather just sit in the Turkish bath.
Based on the results of the visit, a decision was made to buy a membership and visit the complex regularly.
Страна победившей революции жж0т ярко-оранжевым галюциногенным маревом:
mr_carbo, ты там шоколадные батончики с ЛСД ещё не пробовал?
А из Риги, говорят, все наркодилеры уехали в Англию и Ирландию, вслед за своими клиентами. Так что будет народ сидеть на диете без шоколада и кушать курить что ещё осталось.