Occupied with various vacations, home renovations, and childrearing duties I been delinquent in maintaining Processed. Here are some things I have been working on, though.
In an earlier post I briefly summarized a program on recent developments in neuroscience held in conjunction with the Aspen Ideas Festival. I recently completed production of the New York Academy of Sciences eBriefing on the event, and it’s available with open access at www.nyas.org/brain. In addition to some fine reporting by my colleague (and a gifted science writer) Alan Dove, we also posted complete slides/audio/video of the event, as well as a set of video interviews with the speakers and a printable e-book composed of transcripts edited for home consumption by yours truly. I’m thrilled with how it turned out, and you should visit to learn more about how to teach monkeys to play video games, why your brain waves are like an iceberg, and why that lesion in your prefrontal cortex is unlikely to keep you out of jail should you choose to murder your irritating neighbor.
My musical project, The Glass Bees, has been running for a bit over a year now, and continues to be very productive. To date we’ve posted 21 tracks for a total of approximately 120 minutes on our website, and Jason Das and I are quite happy with how things are going. Jason also just completed some housekeeping on the website to make it more attractive and to give you the chance to create a Glass Bees mastermix. You can also subscribe to our podcast to hear the latest tracks as soon as they are posted. If you need advice on where to start listening, try these recent favorites: Preface Introduction, Triumph, Thunder on the Prairie, I Shot the Serif, and Guitar Solo. All tracks are improvised live to a single stereo microphone and digital recorder. There are no overdubs and we try to edit as minimally as possible.
Until now The Glass Bees has been purely a studio/web project, with very little effort to actively cultivate an audience. We are slowly beginning to think that the time might be coming to go public. There is work to be done to set up a show, and maybe even to compile the recordings on CD. If you have a party coming up that will be attended by the types of people who can tolerate drones, loops, feedback, and unusual instruments, or if you know someone who organizes such affairs, drop us a line.
I’m also in the process adding a couple of blogrolls to the right column with links to recommended reading and listening, should you be interested. Please stay tuned.
