Exploratory Grooves

My website up and running

2006-05-15T22:31:00.000+01:00

My website is now up and running. After some initial teething problems, and trying various options with hosting, I opted for the 'squarespace' option -- very intuitive and easy to deal with. Not sure how much storage space I'm going to need in the future, but for now it works fine.

I will continue to post here, but the most interesting postings (at length) as well as new writings (as PDFs), music (as MP3s) and archives will be at:

http://toposrawnsley.squarespace.com

My Full Website

2006-05-12T16:12:00.000+01:00

Although still in process, a much more full presentation of my ideas is going to be available on my website at:

http://toposrawnsley.squarespace.com

Here music and papers will be available for download. I plan on having a full archive of older writings from XLR8R available here, as well as a complete back catalog of mixes, fully remastered from analogue tapes into MP3.

Media, distribution and the emerging culture of creative ideas

2006-05-12T16:10:00.000+01:00

There is a movement afoot in the underground music scene, as always shifting and transient, staying one move ahead of where you think it is at. Underground 'dance' music of all varieties, and the musics which span off from the initial impulse within the core of the dance music events, the people that attended them, and the work and lives of those people, always contained a core of something 'beyond' the ordinary notions of what a music 'scene' was about.

Many of the producers and labels now putting out their music are managing to combine sound with ideas in refreshingly new ways. One of the ways in which this has begun to take shape is through the freeflow of exchange and networking that takes place on the internet and through the facilitation of free downloadable music. In this, now quite commonplace, activity is something much more profound: a radical new way of understanding how media and formats of media distribution are involved with how we create, listen, live.

The sorts of things that I used to write about in the pages of XLR8R Magazine back in the mid to late 1990s, when things were still much more rooted in a specific kind of dance/electronic music scene geared around traditional entertainment models, have now begun to change. It should be possible to see now what was only a possibility back then.

Although much of the work in my academic papers is extremely technical, it is a part of the more general expansion of the whole ethos of the underground culture to have such forms of expression, and which have a strong overlap with various kinds of research going on in more traditional disciplines. If underground artists wish to make an impact such interaction is also necessary.**

Will post cool tunes from my current playlist

2006-05-09T12:49:00.000+01:00

My entries will from now on lead off with the tune that is top of my playlist at the moment or stuck in my head and recurring whenever there is silence.

i-pod fave: Nulleins - 'Multiplex' Seven Spaces EP (Thinner, cool netlabel: http://www.thinner.cc/main.php)

I suppose this sort of thing is a variation on the old DJ charts (ie: what are the top ten tunes in my record box at the moment
Some of those old charts are still up on the XLR8R archives as I recently discovered
- check http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/xlr8r/

...oh, now i started to get all nostalgic. once this thesis is finished, there's nothing for it but to dive head first into some beatsmanship again...

Sun in Scotland

2006-05-05T14:49:00.000+01:00

Oh it is actually feeling like Spring finally. What a gloriously sunny day in Scotland -- there's nowhere like it in the world when it is like this...

Don't feel like working.... (see my last post)

The last few weeks of a doctoral thesis

2006-05-04T12:25:00.000+01:00

I'm counting down the weeks till I submit the thesis I've been working on since October 2002. That 's a long time for a single project. Most of the hardwork has been done -- that is hard work in the form of thinking through the ideas and writing it all out. I'm now in the last stage -- the detailed editing: dotting i's, crossing t's and checking footnotes and typos. It is all rather tedious. I guess one of the most difficult things to cope with is knowing that this beast of a thesis will be over in terms of the focus and committment that it has required over the last three years particularly, but also not being sure as to what life will be like after it is done. I suppose spending more time doing other things (such as blogging etc) is a way of preparing for something else, a life not totally controlled by the need to express clearly a rather esoteric line of research. This is of course the sort of thing that they don't prepare you for in 'education'. Maybe this is the real heart of what it means to become a "Dr."
The irony is that, in many ways, that is exactly what my thesis actually argues: for a basis for intellectual work in life itself, as a way of articulating the contours of life's ambiguity and contingency, as well as its joys.

Blog missive from deep within The Dude

2006-05-03T13:52:00.000+01:00

Well... let's see how this goes. Long time since I published anything more general than some esoteric academic papers. In fact, probably 1999 when my last piece was published in XLR8R on the state of digital culture. (interestingly, many of the observations are now pretty much in place... prophetic or what?)

Not sure that that feat will be repeated. In fact, not sure about very much, except the ambiguity of things. Been reading too much Merleau-Ponty.