Outlook, Part Five

Um, Outlook… I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but you do know the R key is literally right beside the E key, don’t you?

Good Moaning!

Painting

Before music took over my life, the Visual Arts were my thing.

I can’t remember exactly when (who can) but there was a point in my childhood, somewhere around grade four or five, where I realized that, yes I could draw, but also that I could draw really, really well.

I worked to learn what I could from elementary teachers who were good at encouragement but for whom arts and crafts was a minor concern in the curricula they had to teach. Past that, I fumbled around trying to teach myself what I could; copying comics (I got really good at drawing Garfield) and flipping through the “How to draw…” books I’d check out from the school library.

At first, I never really focused on painting. Sure, I did a little here and there but colour for me was pencil crayons and, sometimes, cheap, water based tempera.

Then there were two things that changed all of this.

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This Just Sucks.

Steve Albini 1962 – 2024

While I’m not a fan of a good chunk of the bands he’s recorded, I admire them for what they were (and still are) and I greatly admired Albini’s outlook on recording and music in general. The Problem With Music is still one of the most important things you can read if you’re a musician of any kind.

(There’s also this gem on his studio’s website)

AI And Music

Just read this Rolling Stone article about Suno, and wow.

I knew what I was getting into. All AI articles these days seem to follow the same template: People amazed/shocked at how real this AI generated thing is. Covering the backgrounds of the people who created the AI thing. Going over the difficulty getting AI to make this particular thing as opposed to that particular thing while in the end it’s all scraping large amounts of data to try and come up with something that could potentially be deemed original.

In short it’s just more techowanking over a recent AI breakthrough. As always, there is a lot of back patting and corporate-speak-rabble-babble about being creative and empowering the people and whatnot.

And it’s that bullshit that drives me nuts.

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