I quite fancied prancing about pretending to be a composer so I asked a bunch of people to send me recordings in either C Minor or Eb Major. Then I stitched together a bit of this and a bit of that and made this lovely monster: Once Were Strangers. I knew some of the people very well, others were friends of friends, and the task felt heavy with responsibility towards all the contributions that people had trusted me with. I set a rule for myself that I would use something from everyone who contributed but in the end I didn’t really need that rule because this thing emerged with each contributor taking a little space together. I would like to do more stuff like this.
Released August 25, 2014
Author: sometimesjasmine
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Once Were Strangers
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The Great Restoration
I started this website in 2012, when the internet was hurtling towards evenly spaced content arranged on a white background, unmolested by haunted cursors or on-load music. I wasn’t having that, so I made my little corner of the internet a stubborn altar to 90s web design, hand coded in notepad and free from style sheets. It was hell to update and impossible to find anything.
Eventually I caved and decided to compromise on stye in favour of content and move my online operations over to wordpress to give me a better chance of actually using it as an online archive and channel in its own right.
I moved everything to word press in 2021 around the time, or part of, The Great Cull, wherein I got rid of a lot of stuff. I actually don’t regret much of what I got rid of and I tend to be of the rip it up and start again mindset for change. Problem was I set up a super bland front page with a few photos and links and it was so bland looking and the background was so white I hated looking at it and I think I actually didn’t load the thing up for about 2 years. I noticed promotors just link to my bandcamp anyway so it didn’t feel urgent to do anything.
Until I rekindled my excitement about rottenbliss.com by unearthing an old trodat stamp and thinking it would be nice to make calling cards again. Which means giving people this address. How awful if anyone had seen that evenly spaced monstrosity! Better knock it back into shape. Which is a fairly typical example of how odd competing forces like whimsy and shame provoke me into action.And that brings us up to date at the dawn of The Great Restoration Project. But will this be different to the other Great Restoration Projects that have lost momentum and failed? We don’t know. But we go on anyway.
I don’t get on with social media so I don’t really have any other option for online broadcasting other than building my own little printing press.
1. It has to be easy for me to add stuff
2. it has to be easy for me to organise stuff and build pages and newsletters around categories and post date
3. must not contain the words press, bio, booking or content;
4. should be an enjoyable place to dig around for curious people regardless of whether they are familiar with me or my workI initially had another ambition for this website – I wanted to create an online artwork of some kind. I’ve had that ambition ever since I started learning Max/MSP and saw some web embeds. But…. I already have to spend a lot of the day in front of a screen. I live in a city and I take the tube. I’d rather spend that time touching an instrument or fucking around with paint.
So, off we go
Hah I can do better than that↑ follow the black rabbit: relic from the original rotten bliss website
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Is There Life on Neptune?
Listening to WFMU improves my quality of life by at least 17% which doesn’t sound like all that much but look here I’m not saying that it’s 17% great I’m saying that it makes everything else about 17% better and that’s really quite a big deal when you think about it.
Every year WFMU holds a fundraiser wherein many of the DJs put together special compilations CDs to give away to supporters. I made this to support Sammantha’s 2018 compilation on the theme of glass.
It doesn’t really sound like anything else I’ve ever made. It’s kind of proggy, wantonly surfing rhythms and styles.
That’s Jowe Head joining me on vocals, doing really a rather spectacular job and nailing the whole thing in one take.
Check out wfmu. Sometimes terrible, always brilliant.
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The Nightwatchman Sings
Growing up in the 90s I listened to a lot of mix tapes. My favourite tape was one that had been recorded over so many times it had become warped. Between songs were glimpses of whatever had been recorded before, esoteric phantoms that couldn’t be traced. I liked to put that tape on low at night before I went to sleep and lie in the darkness listening out for my favourite part, when ghostly horns and strings emerged from a heavy guitar drone and just before the tape clicked off the warm tones of a radio 3 late night DJ announced “that was Miles Davis and Gil-”.
Thus began my obsession with interzones: the moments before sleep, long walks through London, surfing through radio waves, transcendence, Tangier, leaving, arriving, moving through. The Nightwatchman Sings is a collection of such moments without beginnings or endings: songs emerge and give way to the next moment; seasick recollections of troubled dreams; a fevered mind grasping in the dark for connections.
released September 28, 2017 -
3 11
I can tell apart eleven shades of green but I can’t be sure which end of the train to board at Deptford to be in the right place on the platform at Woolwich Arsenal to change for the DLR
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Does “Live” Matter?
My hurried really-live-livestream setup for Thursday’s experiment in livestreaming I considered performing a dastardly act of subterfuge this week: I thought I might just stream the rehearsal footage for my weekly experimental stream instead of actually doing it live. I know. I wasn’t feeling quite myself. In my defence, my last livestream had been riddled with tech issues and I questioned the sanity of putting myself through the stress of wrestling with technology I haven’t yet mastered in front of an audience. I had made a pre-recording as a backup in case I ran into tech problems again and then it occurred to me that perhaps I could skip the live attempt altogether whilst still providing a live experience. I employed all manner of sophistry – does it really matter if it’s actually live? Isn’t it more respectful of the audience’s time to stream something reliable? I recorded it earlier today in one take, so that’s very almost live…
It helped that I had been questioning the meaning of “live” in livestreaming for a while already, as I had been exploring the unique character of the livestreaming medium by testing the old rules of shared-space performance and maximising the new opportunities of independent-space performances. I had started to question whether livestreaming really had to be live in the same way that I was questioning all the rules of shared-space performance: holding the old rules up to the new medium, careful not to indiscriminately lift and drop the limitations of shared-space performance into livestreaming.
Does live matter, then? And what are the ethical implications of deceiving an audience? The possibility of seamlessly faking the live-ness of a shared-space performance is not at all straightforward whereas such a thing can easily be achieved in livestreaming. If an audience is deceived into watching a pre-recorded stream, will their emotional experience be any different to witnessing a real livestreamed performance? Here I am assuming a difference in emotional tone between live and pre-recorded performances – from my own audience perspective I would expect to experience greater anticipation and empathic nerviness from a live performance due to the inherent danger of live performance: things can and do go wrong. Equipment breaks; humans err; programmes crash, often with comic timing. This adds some excitement. I like excitement. An elevation of the heartbeat. I like a good heart thump. An increase in empathy towards the artist because neither artist nor audience knows for certain what is going to happen. I love a bit of empathy.
In questioning the limitations of shared-space performance it is important to understand that many of these limitations carry with them opportunities that may be lost in another medium. One promised advantage of independent-space performance (i.e. virtual performances) is that audiences are able to augment their experiences to suit their needs and preferences: you don’t have to deal with a chatty person standing next to you, nor do you have to sit in silence and endure the length of a performance if you don’t want to. But are those things actually important? Is the threat of a chatty audience member an opportunity to savour the specialness of pin-drop-rapt gigs? Is the obligation to remain through a patience-testing performance in fact an opportunity to push through mental inertia? Should we be finding ways to build these opportunities into livestreaming? And what does all this tell us about how humans experience performance and how individuals navigate through the personal, social, and ritual elements of performance?
I digress, which appears to be a general hazard in undertaking this research as there are so many fascinating angles to livestreaming and the way it reflects on people and art and society. Back to the story, then. It’s Thursday evening and I’m due to start streaming in half an hour. “Well I suppose I’d better pretend to start setting up now”, I joke to my fellow lockdown inmate. And that’s when I appreciate the full absurdity of faking a livestream. Whatever impact the deception might have had on the audience (arguably none), the experience for me was bound to be drastically different if I went through with using a pre-recording. No adrenaline; no endorphins. I mean I care about sharing my art and everything but also I really like nice chemicals. So, I wired everything up and managed to get the stream out on time – a real live livestream – with extra heart thumpiness because usually I’d have allowed at least an hour for set-up.
What does all this mean? Does live matter? Inconclusive; however, the thrills greatly outweigh the stress for me so I reckon I’ll keep doing it forrealz live.
Watch Thursday’s experimental live stream
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Isolated Voyages
I can hear birdsong now from my flat. I live on the 7th floor of a building off Brixton Road and sirens and scooters and car horns and endless traffic provide the usual soundtrack. Now we can hear the birds.
You can’t really smell a photograph or move within it or sit near it and allow it to seep into your eyes. I’m missing sounds at the moment, despite the birdsong and the break from traffic sounds: I’m especially missing street collages.
Here are five busy smelly field recordings for anyone missing sonic excitement. There’s even a dog. There’s quite a bit of drama in the dog recording, actually: I believe you’ll find it quite stimulating. In these days.
Best ingested with headphones…
A busy square in Chandigarh on a December evening with noisy night birds and human chatter (Punjab, India).
Walking through Margate arcade (Kent, UK)
Walking through the medina (Tangier, Morocco)
Standing still in Grand Central Station (New York, USA)
A dog playing on a windy beach (West Sussex, UK)
rotten bliss 