June 29, 2003
Spasticated
I spent most of last week at Apple's yearly World Wide Developer's Conference. It was in marked contrast to the last computer conference I'd attended, the 2001 JavaOne. That show was an over-the-top extravaganza that was too big for its own good. It felt like Sun was trying to bribe developers to have so much fun that they would go back to their companies and say good things about Sun and Java. That's one way to build sales. WWDC, on the other hand, was a much more tame and focused affair: no cocktail hours with tiger prawn appetizers here, just lots of sessions and (mostly) brown bag lunches. Alas, it was the people at WWDC that made the event for me. Mac heads, especially the developers, are a much more lively and creative bunch than your run-of-the-mill enterprise Java programmers. This is again in contrast to message that Sun was projecting in all the leftover JavaOne posters around town.
One person I met at WWDC was an admin named Nigel from Sydney, Australia that I ran into at the Ars Technica meetup at the Thirsty Bear. Nigel was pushing the new CD that he had just put out on his label, Spasticated Records, called Ministry of Shit. When he first described it to me, I had no idea what to expect as I, sadly, didn't get any of the references he mentioned for comparison. It sounded cool but music is hard to judge when you can't hear it. Still, anything making fun of Ministry of Sound couldn't be all bad. He promised to give me a copy the next time he ran into me at the show and true to his word he gave me a copy the next day.
Ministry of Shit is a hilarious album of remixed pop tunes. The CD and insert have pictures of smeared feces and are labeled The 2003 Anus. If I had to pick a genre for it I'd pick postmodern deconstructionalist. Those are some big words for an album of parodies but I think they fit. There aren't any harmonies in the traditional sense and yes some songs have rhythm but the melodies are mainly samples sent through a delay. Each track breaks down the traditional pop tune into a melange of microscopic sound bites repeated ad infinitum. The best songs keep some kind of rhythm to move the song forward. Lost in Glottal Stops by DSP Wanker, AKA Nigel, does this quite well to Eminem samples. Another fave of mine is an Weird Al Yankovic-like rendition of AC/DCs TNT called Oi! by Ac/3p except instead of an accordion a drum machine and a synthesizer are abused. Another notable track is Please Take My head Out of This Bucket of Ice by Skkatter which destroys Die Another Day by Madonna. This isn't an album for everyone but some will find it brilliant.
