Program or Be Programmed

That's how it goes these days.

Among this week’s music selections: We’ve got it all! New but sounds old Brazilian smoothness with no waxing required; ominous Western-themed slow-psych ambience; hard rock from last year that could pass for an idealized 1974; stone cold grooves from a Moscow troupe; shimmering underground electronic music for a good cause, and more.

Less filling. Tastes great.

If you happened to notice that last week’s edition was delivered on Friday morning instead of Saturday, I appreciate your attention to detail and I apologize for fat-fingering the date scheduler. Please don’t assume any subtext other than every now and then I make a mistake. Also, I hope none of you got confused about what day it was and missed work. If you did, I’d be happy to write a letter to your manager and explain how it’s all my fault.

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I don’t know if any of you have read Doug Rushkoff’s book from 2010, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for the Digital Age, but it’s a shame more of us didn’t read it sooner, because 15ish years later it’s been proven largely correct. Had we read it then, maybe things would’ve turned out differently. We’ll never know.

I picked the book up for the first time last month, but it’s been sitting on the waiting-to-be-read shelf since the pandemic, if I remember correctly; part of a prolonged expedition down an information/technology rabbit-hole.

It’s an interesting read, if you’re looking for something about the structural changes to information and human relationships caused by mass-scale digital technology adoption, algorithmically managed feeds of information, and so on.

If you’ve read anything by Neil Postman, it’s in that same vein of approachable-yet-heady books about how individuals and wider human society will be reshaped by online communication (although Postman’s work in the 1980s and early ‘90s predates the invention of the iPhone by a stretch, he gets most of it right).

Rushkoff breaks up the book into chapters by area of impact, such as Time, Place, Choice, Identity, and other fundamental attributes of life that are altered, inverted, or eroded by the social web and onlineness. The case he makes is that the less people understand about how technologies like algorithmic feeds work, the more likely they are to be victims of that technology. He got that right!

It doesn’t mean everyone has to learn to code, but not enough people grasp how the sausage is made. The sausage makers certainly prefer that people don’t know (because it benefits their ad business), and the cracks only show when Elon does something stupid like make blunt-force updates to X AI’s chatbot Grok at 3:15am so that its every interaction is steered toward white genocide conspiracies for days at a time.

However, there’s a growing body of research demonstrating that when users understand how their social feeds, AI, etc. work in general terms, they become less susceptible to misinformation.

But I digress…

What I wanted to share was this short passage from Rushkoff’s book about the differences between analog and digital music as a result of invisible choices made when encoding sound into a digital format. This is from the chapter about Choice.

The analog recording is a physical impression, while the digital recording is a series of choices. The former is as smooth and continuous as real time; the latter is a series of numerical snapshots. The record has as much fidelity as the materials will allow. The CD has as much fidelity as the people programming its creation thought to allow. The numbers used to represent the song—the digital file—is perfect, at least on its own terms. It can be copied exactly, and infinitely.

In the digital recording, however, only the dimensions of the sound that can measured and represented in numbers are taken into account. Any dimensions that the recording engineers haven’t taken into consideration are lost. They are simply not measured, written down, stored, and reproduced. It’s not as if they can be rediscovered later on some upgraded playback device. They are gone.

Given how convincingly real a digital recording can seem—especially in comparison with a scratchy record—this loss may seem trivial. After all, if we can’t hear it, how important could it be? Most of us have decided it’s not so important at all. But early tests of analog recordings compared to digital ones revealed that music played back on a CD format had much less of a positive impact on depressed patients than the same recording played back on a record. Other tests showed that digitally recorded sound moved the air in a room significantly differently than analog recordings played through the same speakers. The bodies in that room would, presumably, also experience that difference—even if we humans can’t immediately put a name or metric on exactly what that difference is.

So digital audio engineers go back and increase the sampling rates, look to measure things about the sound they didn’t measure before, and try again. If the sampling rate and frequency range are “beyond the capability of the human ear then it is presumed the problem is solved. But the problem is not that the digital recording is not good enough—it is that it’s a fundamentally different phenomenon from the analog one. The analog really just happens—the same way the hands of a clock move slowly around the dial, passing over the digits in one smooth motion. The digital recording is more like a digital clock, making absolute and discreet chocies about when those seconds are changing from one to the next.”

Maybe we all need to order more records. #ListeningHabit

Pedro Mizutani & Skinshape - Mostrando os Dentes

This is a really lovely record that was released last week and is a wonderful rendition of classic late ‘60s Brazilia. This is a fantastic selection for quiet summer evenings or serious poolside lounging. This is a gentle breeze through the cabana and a ring of condensation around your cold glass on a sunny day.

Skinshape’s simple acoustic arrangements are a pitch-perfect backdrop for Mizutani’s soothing tone. They build layers together with casual and dynamic interplay. Highly recommend this if you’ve enjoyed recent works by Sessa, or classic works by Joao Gilberto, Sergio Mendes, et al.

Golden Brown - Whisker Fatigue

Colorado-based guitarist Stefan Beck’s new album is an interesting adventure pulled by acoustic guitar strings and plodding, murky keys through a wide and perilous landscape filled with beauty and danger in near-equal measure.

This music is a painting of cloud shadows moving across red rock formations and desert expanse converted to a format your ears get to enjoy rather than your eyes. There is awe chased by paranoia. Transformation juxtaposed against timelessness. However, it’s not a western score aligning with any Platonic ideal.

There is not a genre bucket that would do us any service. Where we’re going there are no dividers on the record store shelves. Ambient, jazz, Americana, kosmische, soundtrack, all mingled together like Carl Linnaeus never existed in this timeline. The opening song “Beezlebufo” (a type of giant prehistoric frog, apparently) is acoustic slow-psych, mystic trance and danger that will resonate with fans of Sqürl or Danny Paul Grody, among other slow-players.

Magick Potion - self-titled

You only need a quick glance at those three guys on the cover to have an idea that this is probably some sort of serious strain of rock n roll. You’d be correct. It’s a power trio of dark and fuzzy mid-70s classic rock right on front edge of proto-metal. Like a post-Led Zeppelin Detroit meltdown (although these guys hail from Baltimore, actually).

Press play on “Never Change” which is sort of like the De Stijl era White Stripes covering a Black Sabbath song with some friends. There’s just enough of the occult here to get weird but not so much that you have to wear wizard robes while listening. “Pagan” has some of that Zeppelin rocking Middle Earth but never crosses the line into Spinal Tap’s tiny stone henge.

This record came out in November of last year, but I only just stumbled across it last week. If you’re about to rock, we salute you.

The Diasonics - Origin of Forms

I stumbled across this thanks to a “people also bought” recommendation tangent, and it delivered because this band from Moscow is laying down some stone-cold psych-funk instrumental grooves. This originally dropped in January of ‘22, but it’s worth (re)discovering, if it wasn’t on your radar.

This is the band’s debut album, and solid evidence that they know how to play. If you like your drum breaks crisp, your guitar fuzzy, and your intrigue international than this one is worth your attention.

RIYL: Adrian Younge, Daptone Records’ instrumental cuts, The Soul Surfers, etc.

Various Artists - braek.

This newly released compilation from a UK label called Emotion Wave is a radiant assembly of electronic music spanning various sub-genres of IDM/Jungle, leftfield bass bangers and assorted other forms. For 22 tracks, it’s diverse in style but remains at a consistently high mark for output.

Press play on Panamint Manse’s opening tune “Whimgazer” for a tasteful package of retro IDM charm. It’s chased by a nasty bass wrecker of a beat by Gordon Chapman Fox (who’s taking a break from releasing ambient music as Warrington Runcorn Development Corp. for this sonic slap-down), which then gives way to the blissful rolling jungle sounds of BUNKR. Then a few songs later The Projektionist delivers a wonderful, old-school turntablist funk and break montage. There’s a little something for everyone here from the pantheon of experimental DJ sounds.

There’s a lot to like here, listening-wise, and all the proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders. Win-win.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for spending some time listening with us. We’ll be back next week with something completely different. Until then, mind the gap between digital and analog because there might be important feelings just beyond the audible frequency range we’re missing.