Phil Sherburne sounds off with a good piece on dark days in the electronic music business, with a manifesto, of sorts, written by himself and others: here.

I can certainly identify with the sentiments expressed, and the economic side looks dim indeed:

Record sales are declining–labels that once could confidently move 1,000 copies of a 12″ single now struggle to sell 250–and legal downloads, while presumably growing, aren’t taking up the slack. In the U.S., a falling dollar and rising petrol prices have jacked the price of an import 12″ single to $12 or more– and that’s when you can find a record in shops (or, indeed, a record shop) at all.

I re-watched Feiern the other day, a 2006 documentary on the Berlin techno scene. I had forgotten about the dark side of the film; it’s actually extremely depressing in places. But there are moments, too, that are genuinely funny–there’s a scene where Ewan Pearson talks about playing the 12-hour Berlin marathons Phil refers to, and the sorts of people who manage to withstand them–”people who would just carry on dancing if you stood there banging a wooden spoon on a saucepan.”

But I really see a lot of bright spots in the music right now. The infighting and petty politics seems to be a constant, not something that’s steadily increasing. ILM threads have been descending into meaningless vitriol and ad-hominem attacks for years now, for instance. I would venture an alternate explanation for the ennui and exhaustion Phil refers to–there’s no easy way of tracking every unpaid download, but as 12″ sales decline I would say consumption is skyrocketing. Music critics are always drowning in new releases, to be sure, but there are too many tracks being released, too many mixes, too many downloads, too many things demanding urgent attention to at any given moment, too much shrill Internet hysteria. There’s so much noise that it has gotten difficult for me to hear any kind of signal in there whatsoever. If you’re constantly mired in it, with no rests, no breaks for air, it’s hard to see the music evolve. It’s glacial gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium–all you end up seeing is endless minute variations on a theme, instead of a larger picture.

One of the ways I’ve gotten inspired and intrigued again is by cutting down my listening drastically–by only listening to, say, one new single a week. The complaint about “too many re-edits,” for instance, only holds if you’re actually listening to all of those re-edits. I certainly don’t. The problem isn’t that too many re-edits are being made, but that they’re being released; it’s gotten so incredibly easy to make a re-edit in software, and releasing it digitally is nearly as easy as dragging the file to the trash folder. If something needs a re-edit, it’s the release process.

I saw Ewan Pearson at Sonar and admitted to him that I had stopped listening to new techno this past year. I said that I’d been listening to nothing but old records (vintage Eno for the book, electric Miles, Fela Kuti, Terry Riley, Can, etc.) He was encouraging, and told me that it was a good thing; it was always good to take a break, to get rejuvenated. Had a nice conversation with him about Eno and music-as-process (his favorite Eno record, “by a country mile,” is Before and After Science.) I also met some really lovely people at Sonar I’d never met before–Pantha du Prince and Efdemin from Dial, among others–who impressed me not only as musicians but as conversationalists, in tune with a wide range of music past and present.

One epiphany I had at Sonar was the Minus label showcase, oddly enough. Those hoary patron saints of minimal really impressed me. To be honest I’ve never had a great time at a Minus event before; I certainly don’t worship at the altar of Richie Hawtin or his crowd. But I really had a fantastic time watching Minus do their tag-team laptop lunacy in front of thousands of people. Really fun, danceable, a bit housey, constantly shifting and changing in unpredictable ways–certainly not painfully monochromatic oonce-oonce tedium. I wish I had photos to show you–the stage set looked really awesome, with massive arrays of programmed LEDs–but my camera was stolen backstage. Hawtin’s look these days is also something of a shocker up close; gone is the unfortunate new-wave haircut, in is long shaggy hair and a newfound dedication, as detailed in a recent issue of De:Bug, to being green (not necessarily in the Kermit sense, but in the carbon-offsetting sense). I eagerly anticipate his upcoming beardo-disco record!

I’ve been on the road pretty much nonstop for the past month. First Barcelona, then Boston, then Los Angeles, then San Francisco. Now, as of a few days ago, I’m in Boston again. Soon New York. Then who knows where.

It’s nice to be home. The long summer days are inconceivably hot, almost baking. I don’t have an air conditioner; I haven’t used one in years, I think. I’m far more sensitive to cold than I am to heat. During the day, I work in the basement of the Media Lab, which is frigid, windowless and airless — like working inside of a refrigerator. My writing desk at home is under a skylight, which is blinding during the day; I keep a lot of my plants perched underneath it and they’re doing extraordinarily well. Orchids, lavender, jade. I planted a bunch of avocado pits in a jar and they’re shooting up like trees. I do most of my writing and reading at night, when a cool breeze blows through the window.

I’m working on the Discreet Music chapter, which is a long one. If there was space on the book cover, I think I’d retitle the book “Another Green World/Discreet Music/Evening Star.” Discreet Music was released the same year as Another Green World — the year 1975, if you were in the UK. (They were released later in the US.) Discreet Music was released the same week as Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music! DM and MMM are two of my favorite records. I have them both in various redundant formats (vinyl, CD, mp3, etc etc.) and persist in believing that the various formats actually do sound different. For a long time when I lived in New York City, I would fall asleep with Metal Machine Music spinning on my record player. I didn’t find it harsh and abrasive at all; at a low volume, it had a comforting, shimmering effect, and did a fine job of drowning out street noise.

Re-reading: Haunted Weather (Toop), Swollen Appendices (Eno), Experimental Music (Nyman), Echo and Reverb (Doyle), Audio-Vision (Chion). Going on lots of long bicycle rides to clear my mind, between long work shifts.

I just got in to Barcelona for Sonar, so updates may be sparse over the next few days. The airline lost my checked-in luggage (including my camera), but hopefully I’ll still have some photographs to show for my time here when I’m back next week. If you’re in Barcelona, drop me an email (see the “Contact” link on the top of this page).

Late one night when I was working, I started making a list of alternate 33 1/3 books I’d write if I wasn’t doing this Eno one:

Maurizio - M7
Drexciya - Bubble Metropolis
Ennio Morricone - Soundtrack to Vergogna Schifosi (1968)

Huge sellers, all. Get on these, people!

There’s an old spinet, probably a hundred years old, on the top floor of the other side of the art collective I live in. While I had my laundry going in the basement, I walked up the winding stairs to the spinet, which literally sits under a plateau of mirrors beneath a skylight. There was a slight misty rain coming through the window next to the piano. I was just messing around on the spinet, playing a few chords here and there, and banged out “I’ll Come Running” from memory a few times until I could play the whole thing at the proper rhythm and tempo. What a simple song–it’s like a children’s song, only a few arpeggios in a few keys, like something I would have played when I started taking piano lessons. (I quit piano lessons at age 17, and my skills have atrophied significantly in the decade-plus since). But the song’s apparent simplicity is deceptive. I played it in C, picking out the vocal melody line in diads with my left hand to simulate the tenor of the voice, and using my right hand for the bright cascades of arpeggios. It would have been so much easier to play if I had recorded the arpeggios first in Garageband or something and then overdubbed the other parts on top of it. Playing the parts of the song synchronously is tricky, especially on a creaky out-of-tune piano, but with each successive iteration (about six tries) I got decent enough at it. Then I made a stab at “St Elmo’s Fire,” promptly gave up, and went downstairs to switch my clothes to the dryer. Compared to the complicated, heavily layered ambience evident in so many of the other songs on Another Green World, “I’ll Come Running” sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s poppy and sentimental, but that’s part of what makes it so memorable. It’s far easier to replicate on a piano than, say, “On Some Faraway Beach” on Here Come the Warm Jets, another song that gives off the appearance of a straightforward ballad, only to reveal itself as a castle in the air, built of layers of dreamy backing vocals, lead vocals, and intricate keyboard lines that weave in and out of each other.

In German, “castle in the air” translates to “Luftschloss,” and that’s the title of an (instrumental) piano ballad on After the Heat (1978), also sort of oddly placed around the middle of the album, and also very graceful in its own way. It sounds like Roedelius playing the main melody–he has this legendary flair for elegant work with keyboards; the layers upon layers of unearthly sounds that grow around the main melody are so subtle they almost go unnoticed. The key word is “almost.”

Two years ago, I thought it would be fun to write a short book on Another Green World for the Continuum 33 1/3 series of music books, and that fateful pact I made has weighed on my psyche like a ten-thousand-pound albatross ever since. After various fits and starts, I’m happy to say I’m making good progress on the book. Nothing feels better than getting at a project that’s been on the back burner for so long and watching it assume a shape and personality in your hands.

After a dark and dreadful New England winter I’m feeling rejuvenated, inspired. There are roses blooming on my block on vines so massive they look like grand old trees. The community gardens in my leafy Boston neighborhood are in full generative swing. I feel inspired by doing interviews; I feel inspired by being able to think about ideas again, and that process of discovery. Part of it, too, is that I am starting to see connections grow organically, nodes in the circuit where stories meet — I can sketch mental schematics that are going someplace interesting.

Part of the reason I was so stymied was because everything else in life came first — my day job helping to start up a new research center in the confines of the MIT Media Lab, a big move from New York City to Boston, my health, bills to pay. Another reason why my brain was so stopped up was because I felt for a while that I just couldn’t write anymore, outside of the odd article here and there. When I was caught up in thinking about music full time, writing to pay the rent, getting promos, dealing with labels, and just trying to keep up with the relentless breakneck pace of all of those bits being pushed around the Web, I started to hate music, and I had to step back for a while. I could no longer keep up with every new release. I started avoiding new releases. I went through one moody month in which I listened to nothing but Sun Ra’s entire discography. Then cycled through other stuff — Coltrane, Ayler, old disco records.

I got interested in other things — technology, for instance. Free software. Politics and the US elections. Film and video — I inherited an old video projector from 1995, aimed it at one of my slanted ceilings, and use the hazy flicker of old Cabaret Voltaire videos to light my 200-year-old apartment at night. I read Mastering the Art of French Cooking cover to cover and taught myself about béarnaise sauces and soufflés. I attempted to master passages from Horowitz and Hill’s classic The Art of Electronics in parallel with the art of French cooking, in the interest of balance. (I finally learned how an op-amp worked, after avoiding the subject like the plague when I was a student at MIT years ago.) I re-read Jane Jacobs’ “Death and Life of Great American Cities.” I took up cycling (so very Kraftwerk), and now I cycle back and forth across bridges, about eight miles a day. To offer some perspective on this achievement, two months ago I had three broken ribs after falling down a flight of stairs while moving some wood furniture.

I have no interest in writing a standard rock biography of Eno. That would actually be pretty easy to do, and it’s been done. There’s a goldmine of archival interviews and material available online; I wouldn’t have to stray very far from my computer to put together a canned history of “the making of the album.” But I would be bored senseless writing that kind of book, and I don’t even read books like that. I somehow doubt Eno does either.

I’m trying to write an exploratory book on the ideas underpinning the music — I have little interest in the detailing the minutiae of recording sessions and gear. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve learned some fascinating things about the way that Another Green World was put together in the studio. But I’m also interested in Discreet Music, which came out the same year (1975); I’m interested in Evening Star; Obscure Records, Harmonia. I’m interested in cooking, gardening, painting, cybernetics, and televisions turned sideways. But instead of my base of information getting too unwieldy — like my overgrown garden yard in Boston, which is bursting with so much entropy right now that it’s practically impossible to see the marble paths that wind through it — I actually feel calmer and more focused. Every day I hear from an Eno collaborator or friend who has useful advice or a unique perspective or encouragement to offer.

It’s also been helpful to really be into music again. I had just gotten in touch with Dieter Moebius and one searing summer night while I was working I put the Eno/Moebius/Roedelius record After the Heat on the stereo. I was really moved by it, playing certain tracks over and over and hearing something new each time. It was like I could see the pathways of all of the electronic music that came before it and after it, traveling through that record like so many streams.

Countdown to Sonar: 4 weeks.

In the meantime, here’s a snapshot I took of the ceiling of Watergate in Berlin on New Year’s Eve, awash in a blur of programmed LEDs.

I wrote another article for Computerworld last week on hacking the MiFare RFID Classic chip. Those slick “tap and go” cards used by millions to pay for public transit in many of the world’s major cities? Ends up the chips on those cards can be hacked on a laptop in as little as 12 seconds.

Here’s the link:

MiFare RFID Crack More Extensive than Previously Thought

I went to Berlin in December for the Chaos Communications Congress, Europe’s biggest hacker con.  At the conference, a pair of wily German researchers showed how they reverse-engineered the chip backing some of the world’s most-used subway cards and access keys. In the tech magazine Computerworld today, I explained some of the details of their work.

Check it out here:

How They Hacked It: The MiFare RFID Crack Explained