roglok.net

Manuel Bürger, Tracky Birthday, Konrad Kuhn and I teamed up to create “Best before - A Dsico Fanzine”.

The fanzine is a playful hommage but also a critical examination of Disco culture. It boasts of 52-pages, screenprinted by hand, limited to 250 copies, plus a poster inlay. The title “Best before” indicates that even if the validity of Disco music is long expired, it’s still around. Many people consider it dead - while there’s all kinds of ghosts that prove it’s stayin alive! Who will finally kill it?

To order your copy or download some fresh mixes visit the fanzine’s oldskool website (made by me): http://www.dsico-fanzine.com

Masayuki who is running the music forest blog interviewed me about Upitup Records and the future of the music industry. The interview was published in the book Yomu Ongaku (Reading Music) made by J-Core producer DJ Technorch. “Yomu Ongaku” is written in japanese and limited to 300 copies - unfortunately I couldn’t get a printed specimen. Below you can download the english version.

Read

Scans

I wrote a little essay about authenticity in contemporary creative production which was published in the great book Shake Your Tree #3 by cool guys Manuel Bürger, Sebastian Haslauer and Florian Bayer.

In the design of contemporary music software, a strategy of simulation has been established: Functionality and appearance of analog instruments are imitated by means of complex algorithms and photorealistic graphics. Instead of recognizing the specific qualities of the computer as a musical instrument, one recurses to approved aesthetics and traditional methods of operation when designing digital sound tools.

My thesis elaborates on the intrinsic differences between traditional and digital instruments in order to explore the aesthetic qualities of the computer as a musical instrument. As with any software, music software exactly defines the possibilities of what can be expressed with it.

The aesthetical and functional decisions made in the design process undoubtedly exert an influence on the user‘s mode of working. The interface can therefore be considered as a musical ideology. To address the question, how the creative work is impacted by the tools being used in the production process, critical positions of contemporary electronic musicians are gathered and evaluated.

The text pages of my thesis were printed with a Riso RC 4000 while the pictures pages were printed with a Xerox digital printer. I chose these techniques to create an aesthetic correlation with the topic.

Read

Pictures