BRIDGE podcast w/ John Lamberton

Theo and I talk about coffee, integration of different disciplines, maintaining old disciplines, the weirdness of ice skating, WinterIce with Uri Caine, the voice as a biological instrument, embodiment, effects of technology on live performance, the music of Kate Bush, Wilhelm Reich, the origin of his collaborations with Ben Monder, the recording process on Oceana, the Bleckmann woodshed, practicing what you aren't good at, developing a toolkit of extended techniques, Bob Ostertag, using loopers and other gadgets, Björk and her Medúlla vocalist crew, death metal vocals, getting softies from seeing laptops on stage, letting new technologies sterilize aesthetics, Theo's master-list of weird/adventurous vocalists, the bespoke music making and community building of Meredith Monk, whether or not "just putting in the time" is enough for artistic success, taking artistic risks, and inspiring resistance and refuge on This Land with The Westerlies.

John and I chat about the American ultra-modernist composer Elliott Carter as well as coffee, composition, set theory, continuity, modernism, algorithms, technology, and more. I particularly enjoyed the stories John shared about his time spent with Carter which gave me a little more insight into Carter's personality, disposition, affect, and drives. I also very much enjoyed getting a window into John's composition process and strategies. Carter's music has a sort of academic bent and comes with a daunting catalog of materials usually reserved for doctoral music theory classes but I feel like his musical language should be easy enough to get a feel for if you skim some wikis on set theory, combinatorics, permutations, etc. His rigorous methodology is pretty impressive and I wanted to learn more regarding his approach to internalizing such a vast swath of material.

Mark Fell is a computer musician and artist based in Rotherham. We chat about green tea, collaboration, algorithmic processes, remote performance during quarantine, fancy pliers, whether he or his son Rian Treanor is cooking dinner, working with John Chowning, and a lot more.

I've been following Mark's work for years I'm very grateful for his generosity with him time. If you want some guidance in terms of where to start with his discography, I'd highly suggest:

snd - Atavism

Multistability

anything from Sensate Focus

Sonya and I chat about coffee, cypherpunk, cyberpunk, nootropics, admiration for Gwern, Tor, Signal, Bitcoin, SciHub, PGP, opsec, threat modeling, encryption as a hermetic seal, Tarot vs Tetlock, zine making, artifact vs art, physically tangible art vs digital art, anarcho capitalism, distaste for cannabis culture, communicating across frameworks, becoming a theist after being an atheist, costly waste signaling, media diet suggestions, and more. Check out Sonya on Twitter @sonyasupposedly and her personal site: sonyasupposedly.com

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During the day he might be Mark Cichra CFA but by night... he's Money Hammer!

Money Hammer is a brutal death metal one-piece that sets out with the mission statement to teach basic financial management skills. While the idea might sound absurd or silly, the riffs are as brutal and crushing as the 2017 Bitcoin dip.

Check out Money Hammer on Bandcamp here:

https://moneyhammer.bandcamp.com/

This conversation is mostly improvisation shop talk with my buddy Ross Bryant who does improvised comedy with the likes of Improvised Shakespeare Co. Unlike Ross, my interest in improvisation is specifically musical so I wanted to mind meld with him and see where our practices overlap, where they diverge, and what takeaways I might apply to my own work. Check out Ross's excellent doodles on Instagram: @rossbb

John is the CEO/founder of Decent Espresso. Today we chat about coffee drinking, non-coffee influences, espresso extraction styles, the new technical vocabulary used by the Decent community, flow profiling, Jonathan Gagné's conditional espresso, secondary puck compression, flow profiling, IoT and privacy, hackability, forays with ML temperature profiling, the water hammer, and espresso mayonnaise.

It was my pleasure to speak with Andy Schecter about coffee, espresso, extraction, proportional integral derivative controllers, data collection, god shots, the 'think tank'-y era of coffee forums, tofu, pressure profiling and more.

In this conversation we talk coffee, nootropics, Lawnmower Man, VR, air as medium, audio vs music or sound, audio as temporary social architectures made of air, manipulating wind and air in a public art installation, voice replication with machine learning, the listening space he facilitates "Black Hole LA" and different residencies they've featured, his parents' TM practice, music as sugar or vinegar, 25ms vs 40hz, and more. The conversation was too short to cover everything we wanted to so expect a second conversation in the coming weeks where we'll pick up on the topics from this episode as well as the implications of music and machine learning in the future.

Check out more of Micah's work here: nophones.org

The Black Hole listening space Micah facilitates:

https://www.blackhole.la/

and his collection of essays on audio Figures in Air: https://www.amazon.com/Figures-Air-Micah-Silver/dp/1941753019

In this episode of the BRIDGE podcast, I speak with Magnus Vinding who writes on topics such as antispeciesism, veganism, suffering focused ethics, consciousness and more. In this conversation we do a lot of vegan shop talk including ways of eating, thoughts on "fake meat", cultured meat, and methylcobalamin vs cyanocobalamin before we get into the nitty gritty of utilitarian thought experiments. Toward the end I inquire about how artists and musicians can contribute to movements aimed at reducing suffering and we end the conversation on contemplative practice as a way to cultivate compassion.

Here are the videos from Animal Ethics that Magnus refers to in the conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOQNclA8JyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOBeQOz1Hzw

Here's the Animal Ethics YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCko1rYsrC9nBTjozImX-FEw

The Dr. Gregor video on B12 that Magnus brought up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT7m9RsPJYM&t=147&authuser=1

...and Gregor on coffee:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5TLzNi5fYd-ewr1tj8sc0iLpZwriMRt3