Stripey

YouTube - Ah My Balls

isn't this just her cottoning onto, several years late, the fact that "the kids" aren't down with the 90's studio-pop, music video driven aesthetic anymore and want to see people pretending to play instruments again? Fuck, it's like watching your mum pretending to be avril lavigne.

I guess you haven't met many "ordinary israelis". The *vast majority* of israeli's I've met have been cool to talk to, but once you touch on politics *most* of them still completeley support the stance of their government and have some pretty entrenched racist / bigoted points of view. Like I said, military service is compulsory in Israel and most israelis in their early 20's will have served in areas where they are directly involved in the ongoing oppression and brutalisation of the palestinian people. In this respect, the "ordinary israelis" that you speak of are not just politically lazy, disenfranchised passives who have no control over the actions of their government, but they are actually directly involved in the criminal brutalisation of the palestinian people that occurs every day in the west bank and gaza. So it is entirely reasonable to blame AND boycott these "ordinary israelis" because they literally are the people who are responsible. War and the Morality of Americans by Joseph Potter read this article, it's equally appropriate for Israel and the UK.

yeah that is like an xfactor audition or something

its utter bollocks man, i caught a bit of it once a couple of years ago now (i think) and there was a welsh guy stapling his mates tongue to a desk. Infact i think that was one of the moments when I really started to wonder wtf is wrong with our culture.

Investigators clear Israeli air force in deaths of Gaza family - CNN.com "The investigators agreed with the IDF's contention that the family was killed by explosives and weapons that four militants were carrying near the family's home when they were hit by an Israeli aerial assault. The home was extensively damaged, investigators said." what a fucking horrible lie. "It wasn't our tank shells and airstrike that blew up their house, it was the bombs the militants were carrying when we bombed them" How on earth can this carry on without international humanitarian intervention?

YouTube - Rodney Dangerfield - Rappin' Rodney

thats totally cool. this is probably the earliest recorded footage of the supreme wigga tim westwood, with the same oldskool london stuff.

From my point of view, I want to make good tunes and the "live" aspect comes from how people might use that tune in a dj set or whatever. I think a lot of this challenges the traditional notion of what music, and clubs are for. It is wierd enough as it is that DJ's are a focal point, maybe if you removed that and just had a bloody ipod pumping out the tunes people would lose that focal point and be forced to look back at themselves. I really just do not see any point in performing this stuff live other than theatre and egotism.

I don't see the point in doing this kind of thing live atall. What will you do that goes beyond the average kind of thing you can acheive while djing with ableton live and a midi controller? IMO it's just sophistry and has no real value. I hate the notion that music = theatre and that isn't what electronic music is about atall. I like to hear wicked tunes being played out but I don't want to pay to see the artist recreate a sloppy version of it on stage so he can earn a fiver.

this is painful to watch

YouTube - Sherb and Preach accapella pt1 these guys are a good start

I don't know any decent person who would commit a crime because someone else told them to, unless their defense is being a fucking sub-mental xenophobic bootlicker. Are you really suggesting that the people who physically shot jews in the head in concentration camps are blameless?

You don't know that they don't either, have you got any evidence of their political beliefs? Is it really that unreasonable to raise this question? Because it is a fact that these guys have served in the IDF and have probably manned checkpoints, pointed guns at people and god knows what else.

Military service is mandatory in Israel, there is an interesting article here relating to the kind of thing conscripts commonly experience Our reign of terror, by the Israeli army - Middle East, World - The Independent

Sorry but a touring band coming here to make money is no different than an avacado being sent here to make money. I have nothing against the avacados themselves. Being Israeli though, the members of this band *will* have served in the IDF and therefore complicit in the crimes of their government. Unless of course they are conscientious objectors?

shame a bunch of fucking hippies hijacked LSD / psilocybin and forever turned the governments of the world against all experimental medical use of psychoactive drugs. Timothy leary was a twat, I preferred Aldous Huxleys approach. If it wasn't for timothy leary we would probably be living in a world where MDMA was a recognised treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, cannabis was recognised for its medical benefits and most importantly research into these substances wouldn't be illegal. Jimmy Hendrix, Pink floyd, Carlos-fucking-Castaneda, long hair and tie-dyed tshirts is what we got instead. IMO that's a less than ideal result.

The classic basic thing hiphop producers do with an MPC is they will sample say a 4 bar loop of something instrumental, chop it into 16ths and assign the whole thing across the pads, thats pretty much where the basic sound of people like dj shadow / wutang clan / 90's hiphop on the whole comes from. Using the multiple layers you would then do the same thing to a drumloop, sampled from a 3rd party or made yourself with a drum machine etc, + a bassline and build up the tune that way, sequencing patterns as you go. In this day and age, imo, sampling is (or should be) much more about sampling your own material rather than lifting stuff from records. The good thing about sampling like this is you might be using a fairly big or complex effects chain on 1 instrument. Recording a part then chopping up the sample and loading it into a MPC/mapping across a keyboard frees up your hardware effects (or cpu power) and then gives you a new level of creativity with what you've recorded. The advantage of computers in this though is that you can save the whole original effects chain/synth patch/midi pattern and go back if you need to and alter bits before sampling them again, if you decide down the line you want to tweak something. There are loads of possibilities, just using a hardware sampler makes it a bit more time consuming and clumsy.

there's a couple of interviews, with a coal merchant and a butcher, a bunch of nice photos and quotes, overheard conversations etc, a piece about someones arthritis and so on. There are a couple of sample pages on the website...I mainly got it to give to my mum because she has recently developed a habit of reading shit like hello! magazine.

yeah it's nice, depending on what software you use you can do funky stuff like assign several samples to one pad based on the velocity, so you can have several snare samples on 1 pad. A gentle tap will play a dull snare sound and a hard hit will play a brighter sound - its good fun to have a whole kit assigned to the pads with multiple layers of samples, it's pretty expressive. Another novel use is assigning each of the 16 pads a single note in a scale, or having 2 octaves of a scale assigned to each 8, then using the pads to drive a synth. You can do this kind of thing with an MPC and a laptop, it's just a lot more expensive and time consuming. I don't mean to be argumentative, it's just MPC is one of these brand names that has a reputation that far outweighs the realworld value of their equipment.

you assign samples to the buttons, you press the buttons, the sound plays. It's not that exciting.

yeah you can buy a 16 pad velocity sensitive midi controller (akai even make an "mpc alike" one, the entry level one costs something like 60 quid), I like hardware too which is why I have one of these which cost 120 quid Unlike the mpc family the pads use square rather than circular sensors so they are fully velocity sensitive right to the corners, it has an assignable x/y touchpad controller and the pads LIGHT UP WHEN YOU TOUCH THEM! if you're into that kind of performance value kind of nonsense MPC's are overrated, expensive out of date junk! The only thing that has outlived their technical worth is the quantisation templates they have and those are easy to get off the internet.

What is the point in buying a synth like that just for the factory patches? You may aswell buy a sample cd.

argh the mpc is an over-rated, out of date piece of hardware which is surrounded by a lot of bullshit mythology. It was cool in the 90's because it was the only thing at the time that did what it does, but now you can buy a laptop, audio interface and far better midi pad controller for less money and acheive a hell of a lot more.

KAREN MAGAZINE - MADE OUT OF THE ORDINARY I bought issue 3 of this on a whim and it came in the post today - it's brilliantly human in its content, elegantly designed and printed on very sexy paper.