New Monday #75

Happy Monday -

A mixed bag this week. Links to click. A lesson!

R.L. Burnside

RL was a country blues guitarist and singer from Mississippi. Born in 1926, he was a sharecropper, cab driver and part-time musician until the 1990s, when he was signed to Fat Possum Records and subsequently started touring with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. With Spencer, he released a blues album like no other, A Ass Pocket of Whiskey. It’s a chaotic mix of blues and perhaps punk, with R.L.’s singing and stinging slide guitar work. It was recorded in four hours, and it sounds like it, but it is wonderful.

Enter Tom Rothrock, the producer who brought us Beck, worked with James Blunt, the Foo Fighters, Elliott Smith and others. Rothrock remixed R.L., cutting up vocals and guitar parts and adding hip-hop-inspired drums and whatnot. The result is... shoegaze deep trance blues dub? I have no idea what this stuff is, but Come On In might be the Devil’s background music for your remote job in hell.

Here’s a taste while you read.

Come on In, Pt. 2

https://youtu.be/FyNB4t0w-eA?si=5eyLF875YaALRyMs

Check out the whole album here.

AI Updates — Good News for Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese?

Speaking of the Devil, here are some updates on AI.

YouTube is changing its monetization policies in favor of non-AI generated content. A video on it here.

Remember that awful AI bland, I mean band, Velvet Sundown? Of course you do! It was so uniquely memorable. Major backlash over it, causing Spotify, also known as Satan’s Baby Sitter, to pull some of it down. Might there also be policy changes? We all hope so. Read more here.

It seems people are discovering that AI sorta sucks. Companies are reconsidering their development strategies. A bigger bomb drop: researchers are getting empirical about it sucking. Coders reported that they felt they were 20% faster with AI. Research sez 19% slower. This is a really good read, fast and hopeful.

Maybe, though, the heroes of the story will be the kids. As glued to their phones as Gen Z is, art school enrollment is up. Is the rebellion upon us?

More Analog Learning

Another lesson, extending out last week's dip into tape and saturation. I’m tying together the concepts of timbre with that of harmonic distortion. This is avery useful and kinda cool way to look at things.

There’s an interesting and practical homework assignment that YOU SHOULD DO, especially if you’re looking for ideas about how to set up your mix bus. Mixes busses.

Click here to go to this week's lesson.

Do we want lessons in the body of the email or at the end of a link?

Warm regards,
Luke