Apple's announcement of GarageBand today was interesting -- it's bundled with all new Macs from this month onward! There are concerns that Apple's treading on third party developers' toes, but the emphasis of Apple's ever broadening iLife suite spans the gulf between the home user and the prosumer -- a territory that needs more definition. There are great little apps everywhere, and the pro packages loom from above, but Apple really is perfectly poised to deliver products like GarageBand that edge into that prosumer middle ground.
Of course, GarageBand, with all its sensible, good-taste presets, is also perfectly suited to making terrible, good-taste music, full of aspiring authenticity -- Steve Jobs even got John Mayer (who's due for a chainsaw haircut from Flux, if I remember correctly) to demo the software onstage at his MacWorld keynote. But fuck it, as a dabbler, I'm never going to learn any of those pro music apps, and at the other side of the spectrum, ultra lofi stuff like GameBoy chip music isn't my bag, so GarageBand is perfect. It has guitar amp presets like "British Invasion" or "Surf", which is, yes, totally evil, but also kinda cool for slackers like me. An analogy: dodgy desktop publishing software enabled a wave of horrible design, but in the hobbyist late-'80s, it was also my start in design. (That's supposed to be a good thing. Right?)
Speaking of a digital life, here's something I wrote while on retreat a couple of weeks ago:
brief hints of a hidden enormityLately I've realised that I like to play in a digital world because it is a theatre of control, of quantifiable manipulations. Of course, it's a lot of other things, too: a space of creativity, and of the weird, productive disjunctures between use and design. But the digital superego is undeniable. Sometimes it goes recursive, and it needs to be broken down, or at least recontextualised.
I have a special fondness for the south coast of New South Wales. Even in summer, it is not "perfect"; it's often moody, blustery, mercurial. I'm staying in a town on a beach, with a large mountain behind, its bulk curving down into a shoulder of a peninsula. Long after sunset tonight, I was on the beach, feeling myself bleed into the white noise of the ocean. I looked to the side and saw the mountain's huge shoulder looming, faintly silhouetted in a misty light. And above that, a massive section of sky, hollowed out in red. It seems that the locals are fond of shining extremely bright lights up into the night, and the effect is the opposite of what I'd have expected; rather than blandly revealing the world, the enormous, hidden bulk of it is barely suggested in the sea spray. It's like a permanent version of what happens when lightning strikes -- you catch a glimpse of the terrifying being of what you thought was a blank sky. Huge shapes. It's like being swallowed by a whale, as I imagined it from Pinnochio and Jonah.
In these moments I feel like an animal, a small mammal in a primeval world. The digital superego is shed, and in that instant I rediscover the pleasure of the self. A decentralised self, so not a genital pleasure, but one that literally moves across the surface of the body: I remember how to lazily shiver like a cat, my nonexistent fur standing on end in waves down my back and to my extremities. Goosebumps.
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Totally random -- my latest in footwear:
I just can’t wait to get my hands on a pink mini ipod!
I’m not specifically familiar w/GarageBand’s features - but of course presets can always be fucked with, whether in hi-tech or lo-tech ways. For example, I’ve got a relatively inexpensive keyboard w/hundreds of preset sounds, most of which are excruciatingly boring in their zippy digital verisimilitude. However, what sounds like a cheesy digital tympani played in a real tympani’s register sounds like some odd, gamelan-like noise riot four octaves up. And if I imported a recording using that sound into the computer, and then further messed with it using basic effects that GarageBand or GoldWave provide - and choose those that wouldn’t make “natural” sense with either a tympani or a gamelan orchestra - well, now you’re making something that’s unlikely to sound like everybody else. Do this a bunch of times with a bunch of different sounds, and you’re no longer just doing the “surf guitar” sound. On the other hand, sometimes it’s a kick to hear cheap sounds: like the inexpensive Casio SK-1 “voice” sound Wire used, straight out of the box, on I forget which track circa “Ideal Copy” or so.