Monday, August 27, 2007

I read a lot of news about Iraq. I do this because it's a situation that matters and because I feel like, by educating myself more about what's happening, I can somehow offset the hordes of chubby Middle American flag wavers who couldn't find the US on a map, let alone the Middle East.

This is probably the most incredible article about Iraq I've read yet. If any of it is true, we're in a pretty dark time.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis at 12:13 a.m. EST

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

During my two-year tenure as an in-house sound designer for Native Instruments in Berlin, I got to work on a lot of really cool projects. The one that I was probably the most proud of, however, was a bank of sounds for "Akkord", one of the instruments in the Electronic Instruments Vol. 2 collection of Reaktor ensembles. What was nice about this instrument is that it combined a really excellent synthesizer with a very innovative step sequencer. My patches ended up being a couple dozen combinations - that is, I programmed the synth, and then wrote a short step sequencer pattern that would demonstrate a possible usage of that synth sound.
It's understood that all of the library sounds that ship with NI projects are free for artists to use as they wish - they can be used completely without modification in commercial releases if desired. And this is technically true for Reaktor ensembles as well, which (as in the case of Akkord) can also include sequences of actual music. But I never thought I'd ever hear anyone actually use one, without modification, in a finished track.
While browsing Beatport just now, I came across a track by a fairly well-known artist on a fairly well-known label that uses one of my Akkord patches, with the addition of some drums, as an entire track. I'm not angry about this - after all, my sound design work doesn't entitle me to any sort of artistic control over how the sounds are used, and this artist is certainly allowed to do what they've done. But I do think it's more than a little weird. This is an artist whose work I really respect, and I'd like to think they're actually making it. Copping a demo sequence from a factory library is just lazy. I'm flattered that they thought it was good enough to use...but without tweaking it at all?
This brings up all sorts of questions about creative ownership that maybe aren't so interesting in 2006 since the hip-hop community has already been dealing with them for years. In a sense what happened here is not so different from sampling a record and using that as the basis for an original work. But it somehow FEELS different (at least to me, since I'm the guy who wrote the music in the first place). An appropriated sample is generally recontextualized, and gets a new life because of how it relates to the material around it. My sequence, on the other hand, IS this track. Just add drums, master, and release.

I'm strangely honored and also weirded out. I can't even imagine being proud of music I knew I didn't write, and then releasing it into the world with my name on it as if there was no problem. Even though there's nothing illegal about it in this case, it's still creepy.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis at 05:49 p.m. EST

Sunday, November 26, 2006

I received over 4500 emails last night, all of which were bounced-back forged spams made to look like they were coming from this website. That's a little much, so I've finally decided to turn off my catch-all email address. This means that I can only receive emails sent to addresses that actually exist. If you've gotten used to mailing me at "dumbass@dennisdesantis.com", well, I'll enable that one if you can give me a compelling reason.
If you find that mails to me are failing now, please let me know and I'll try to figure it out.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis at 10:47 p.m. EST

Friday, November 17, 2006

I'm currently in the middle of the somewhat painful process of moving my entire website to a new server. If you're reading this, then you're at the new site. If you're not reading it, then you're at the old one.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis at 10:21 p.m. EST

Tuesday, July 4, 2006

Italien - 2
Deutschland - 0

Scheiße.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis at 05:38 p.m. EST

Friday, June 30, 2006

It's pretty clear that I'm not going to update this thing on any sort of regular basis. I'm either too lazy, find the whole process entirely too self-indulgent, or some combination of the two. Strangely though, the one topic that seems to inspire me to blog (besides my occasional gratuitous self-promotion) is the environment - in particular, the recycling idiosyncrasies of wherever I happen to be living. (For those who've haven't been following from the beginning, my previous rant on this topic can be found here.)
New York likes to think of itself as the capital of the world. And in many ways it is. Money, glamour, excess - it's all here, in abundance. New York also likes to think of itself as a progressive haven. "USA Out Of New York" was a slogan that got thrown around a bit after the last presidential election. There's no shame here in looking down at the rest of the country for whatever reason - lack of geopolitical foresight, lowbrow dining preferences, trucker hats worn without irony, etc. And don't even get New Yorkers started on the environment. Hell, New York progressives even forced Bloomberg to reinstitute plastic and glass recycling in 2003, despite the fact that the program was a financial loss. Three cheers for us. No one's cooler.

The problem is that it's all bullshit. New York City is the most environmentally hypocritical place I've ever been. It's all talk, no action. Sure, there are bins for glass and plastic recycling outside of every apartment building. But no one uses them. NYC's homeless community makes a killing off of deposit bottles harvested from trash cans, not recycling bins. Waste is everywhere. Where else in the world can you buy a can of soda and get a bag, a straw, and a dozen napkins to go with it? Don't want the bag? No problem - the guy at the bodega will be happy to throw it away for you. Where else in the world is every single store air conditioned, but every single door is left wide open so as to be more inviting to customers? If you stay close enough to the store fronts, you can literally stay cool on the sidewalk in 90+ degree heat. What's going on?
The explanation for all of this is simple. If you have ten extra seconds to sort your trash, then you clearly aren't busy enough. And if you're not busy enough, then you're clearly not Making It In The Big City. If you can afford the extra time it takes to open the door to a store, then you must not have enough to do. And even if you actually don't have enough to do, you'd certainly never want to display that publicly. Then people might not take you seriously, thereby decreasing your chances of Making It In The Big City. It's the same reason no one here does their own laundry. It's the same reason no one here cooks their own food. Everyone's too busy pretending to hustle so as to create the illusion of success.
Meanwhile, where I grew up, deep in the heart of flyover country, everyone returns their deposit bottles. No one leaves their door open with the air conditioning on. People do their own laundry. People cook. And they may not have the hippest sideburns or the thinnest cell phones, but they somehow manage to save energy in ways that New Yorkers can't even imagine. For a bunch of hicks, that's pretty progressive.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis at 12:17 a.m. EST

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Alarm Will Sound played our Carnegie Hall debut last Thursday - and sold out. The New York Times review is up. Things look good.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis at 12:00 p.m. EST

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