Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – Conversation 3

leo – Cicada Burnt

A Guy Called Gerald (Live in Session) @TheLotRadio 07-17-2026

XPAN II with 30mm lens and Kodak TriX400

“Folks have a lot of pet peeves with movies these days, but my biggest one is probably that an absurd number of score composers are afraid of melody. I should be walking out of a theater humming your lietmotifs, you cowards, not feeling vaguely unsettled by ambient atonal strings…”

While everyone is entitled to their opinion, the crucial part they get wrong is that it’s not due to the composer. It’s a choice by the director.
They direct an approach, style, aesthetic for the score. As with all departments, nothing goes into a film without their sign off. If a director wants iconic melodies, they work with a composer who can deliver those…

So rather than making some grand claim about “an absurd number of composers…” they are complaining about watching a film with a score exactly as the director intended it to be heard. If you don’t like it, go watch a different film.

But I think their issue would be better served by asking for what they want.
For example, rather than making absurd claims, ask “Please recommend me recent films with an iconic melodic score?”

With access to IMDB they can answer their own question.
So if you are a complainer, name a film that you loved the ‘grand melodic score’.
Now go to IMDB, check who the composer is.
Now check the composers IMDB. Have you seen all of their films?

It is a personal taste issue, rather than some universal issue.
Everyone has their own taste. I for one, grow tired of epic melodic scores within about 30 seconds. But I do still appreciate melody, so I seek out the work of more subtle film composers, who’s past work I adore. For me that might be Carter Burwell, or Ryuichi Sakamoto or Thomas Newman or etc…

You do you.

hand tracking module

Zimoun: 9 prepared dc-motors, cotton balls, 10 metal bowls ø 67 cm, 2026

great to see Australian Government taking a stand on AI and publicly stating they will work to protect their IP – NZ has an election in November this year. Still waiting on any policy from NZ parties…

AI music platform Suno hits bum note as 55M users exposed in data breach, claims infosec expert
Do you use Suno? Have you been notified by them of the breach? Have you cancelled whatever form of payment you used?
Is this what vibe coding gets you?

Hack also reveals Suno AI Slop Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius
#scum

Too Many Books? Impossible… but Mendel Uminer faced a crisis when his landlord objected to the 10,000 volumes in his New York studio apartment

I’ve never used it but seems Letterboxed is in line to be assimilated by AI and inevitably enshittifed…

Finger drum youtube videos – via matrixsynth

How to hide from killer drones: in the Ukraine war, anti-AI tactics are producing bizarre forms of camouflage

Ghost Font – an anti-AI font that can be read by humans but not leading AI models.

Climate change survival guide: Key advice for what to do if you find yourself caught by a wildfire

Good Tools Are Invisible

power of nature – amazing drone footage of recent Kaikoura flood by Geoff Mackley #nz

mmm a transparent case for your 303

Soviet Control Rooms

The Exorcist 1973 Banned Trailer
(projected on film this would be anxiety-inducing!!)

a testament to how good sound editing is!

Some people have hobbies…

Shooting bulb exposures of fibre optic light, as digital previz before shooting film…

Lee “Scratch” Perry – Cricket on the Moon

Beenie Man – Crazy Baldhead (feat. Luciano)

King Tubby · Scientist – Scientist’s Japanese Dub

Beat Pharmacy – Ghostship (Deadbeat Dub)

Linton Kwesi Johnson – Peach (Dub)

Linton Kwesi Johnson – Cultural Dub

Prince Far I – Tribute to Bob Marley

Important part as text:
Focusing the 80mm lens:
Before exposing with the telephoto lens, measure the distance of the subject with the rangefinder of your RETINA, and read off the distance against the index (15) on the focusing scale (4).

Then turn the camera towards you and transfer the measured value to the focusing scale for the telephoto lens (37) marked in white figures on black.

To do this turn the focusing knob until the appropriate distance on the telephoto scale is opposite T-index mark (37 a).

Do not, however, use the black ring (39) on the telephoto lens itself for setting the distances.
This ring is part of the depth of field indicator and serves only to show the depth of field available.

Thanks to Butkus website for archiving this & many other vintage camera manuals

I imagine this generic email was sent to every sound effects company in existence.

PSA: If you release your sounds via a third party I strongly advise you to check your licensing terms with them, to verify your work does not get licensed for AI training, without your consultation and express permission. Especially note the use of the term “rights-clean” – they really mean copyright laundering.

As you can imagine they got a fairly blunt reply from me, especially as
– they clearly have not done any specific research – most of the tech questions are very clearly stated on my website, such that a stupid AI could assemble the answers in seconds.
– they wish for me to donate time answering their questions AND spend 30 minutes on a ‘scoping’ call? WTF? This is not a charity.
– asking about metadata, perhaps they could read the page on my site about metadata?
– asking for indemnification when used in a slop generator is a big lol

But the grossest part is typical of the AI age – they aren’t sounds or field recordings or foley.
Its all just data, to be copyright laundered & commodified.
No wonder AI slop is so low quality, bland and generic.

What an amazing little 35mm film camera, bought for NZ$300 in mint condition
Schneider 50mm F2.0 lens, with options for a 35mm and 80mm lens…
Considerably heavier construction/more metal than the little Contax T2 I sold a year or two go (for NZ$1500) and the Retina has bulb mode!

realised later why every time I stopped at the lights, people laughed…

it looks like a DIY funeral?

We’ve all seen the tacky AI slop images on social media, and noticed how google search has turned to crap but in the last few weeks I’ve started getting feeble attempts at AI gen comments at this very blog!? Its bizzarre but it shows how utterly shit AI slopgen is at pretending to be human… Some examples below – I have deleted the links embedded in the comments, which is the entire purpose of the comments… I can only presume they are automated because WHAT A WASTE OF TIME..

They are so very clearly NOT human and so very clearly NONSENSE with a few bits of text attempting to appear as relevance and SO OBVIOUSLY SPAM!! Agentic slop can kiss my ring!

no one asked about your dumbass ‘conversational AI’

WTF Moogfest sand noise lol

and again…

there is no Lumiere excerpt, Henke wasn’t mentioned.. WTF

Pathetic AI slop bros – GET A LIFE!!

Wainui South Coast on a sunny Sunday afternoon is therapeutic…

Moses Boyd – Say Yeah

Maryanne Amacher – Tower

goat (jp) – Without References/Cindy Van Acker

Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force – Yermande (Kick and Bass Mix)

Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force – Lamb Ji

Adam Freeland – Transhuman

Brendon Moeller – Sound Older Than Fear

song loan foot casta from vietnam via KoizumiGakki

lol at the writers tiny dck rule… – an informal strategy used by authors to evade libel lawsuits.

Hackers made death threats against this security researcher. Big mistake:

“The enemies and the ex-girlfriends, generally speaking, are the best [for gathering intelligence on a suspect],” she says. “I love them.”

Turning audio to MIDI – suspect we will will inundated with such tools… which should also mean Melodyne gets better & better…

Here’s How To Archive Online Content, And Why You Should
(for a very long time I have had a folder on my desktop called ‘zref’ – anything that inspires me or is useful as a reference for future projects etc gets dumped into that folder & backed up to my NAS. I love my zref folder! I also recently set up some streamdeck button to launch Precise Screenshot app, as I find if I browse reels on Instagram I want to save a reference of interesting work, but I do not trust Instagram to actually keep bookmarks etc and I don’t want to use Instagram to view them, so a screenshot with the makersID, autosaved to the zref folder is ideal for me!)

sounds like an album I’d want to audition before buying:
10 million robots in JAPAN by 2040

Clever: seabed cables detect silent whales by reading pressure waves.

Flexible rhythm perception, once thought to require a big brain, has been shown in bumble bees

How to clock to a drummer

Tokyo’s favourite railway loop: Yamanote – these interactive soundscapes combine the station melodies, announcements, door chimes and train sounds of the Yamanote Line, depending on which direction you travel.

The Family Keeping Watch Over a 52-Year-Old Pot of Soup

unrelated, Long-term nuclear waste warning messages

oh wow, upcoming new album:
N-068 Ryuichi Sakamoto + Alva Noto . 12 Conversations

sample fodder: Art Bell – Best Of Alien Calls vol. 1

I’m not religious… wait a minute! A chicken church? This changes everything!

Big fan of sportsing?

And thats a wrap!

After many, many months of field recording, sound editing & design work, and collaborating with lovely humans (and no fckng AI!) with the last month spent at awesome Park Road Post for the mix, the film is now completed!!

At times its felt like a family reunion, working closely with so many dear friends – brothers & sisters of sound & music & cinema! Its been an utterly positive, sonically life affirming experience… and I am overdue much high quality sleep…

Now the excited waiting for the films release!!
#blacksheeps

A silly confession. When I went to film school I was so naive/green I kept wondering why the film industry had such a fond affiliation with hiphop, in that everyone always seemed to celebrate the end of a shoot with a ‘rap’ party lol… It was the late 80s… but I somehow still expect someone to turn up with two turntables & a microphone… DJ Pots & Pans with MC Black & Decker lol

And now: OMFG I have a mountain of highly motivated delayed momentum for all my own projects!! A weekend off & time to change down, drop the clutch & mix some metaphors!

Back in the day, when I was working on 2-3 films a year, at the end of every mix I made a habit/ritual of taking a nice bottle of tequila along to celebrate. Apart from having spent many months working on the film, the final mix is the most intense collaboration, as a small group of people do very focused work in a big dark room for 10+ hours a day. And it always used to amaze me to observe the mood shift. One minute we are all working & listening, making the very last changes to the mix, the last change is done and checked, the mix is declared completed. Tequila opened, shots uploaded, and near-instant party-mode activated!

End of this coming week and we are done!

SIGN/e : Graphic notation for Ableton LIVE
Download the free Max for LIVE device at Github

Mark Rothko’s Color Fields Mirror the Elements in a ‘Weather-to-Painting Experiment’

AI slop music SUMO find new ways to rip off artists

Ken Rockwell: Why We Love Film

Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search

wow this is quite unreal: Seismic Explorer
zoom the map to wherever you live, hit play bottom left & watch all the quakes from 1980 to now!

How to ask for help from people who don’t know you

especially great as it has no output

Tonal Tuck – Phragments

Vakat – Percussion Work [NWHITE022]

SoulParlor – Dub Works – Season 3

cute EMF sensor: the EMF Explorer Badge

whoah the headline: I make good money. Why do I still feel like this? is like a sucker punch for the byline: “The middle class was a policy project. Every piece of it has been unbundled and repriced — and now two very different groups are living two very different nightmares.”

Japanese symbols that speak without words

Initiation stones, buried recordings, and Ringo Starr’s drumkit:
inside the visionary world of reggae master Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry

wow what a gorgeous tiny camera!!
I checked Japan auction site, there’s one available but its like NZ$8.5k!

interesting idea: Vacation With An Artist
Book mini-apprenticeships with master artists around the world. In-person and online.

A24 Knows You’re Mad About the Google AI Collab… & doesn’t care?
WIRED via archive.pl

Need an evil laugh vs bird imitater soundclash!

Thirst trap!

Save as ‘bot responder meme’

Cabaret Voltaire – Sensoria
love the camera movement – HOW is the camera rigged!? – screenshots below give a clue…

Downside Up

genius!
Tony Hill – rigs
THIS video demonstrates the rig

Cabaret Voltaire – Sensoria 2026

one of my favourite tempos
two legs: baaad!
prime number:good?

Last week was week 1 of predubs for the BLACK SHEEPS film.
Over the course of the week, Supervising Dialogue Editor Ray Beentjes worked in Park Road Dub Stage 2 with DX+MX rerecording mixer Mike Hedges who got through all of the dialogue predub.
In parallel, I was in Dub stage 1 with FX rerecording mixer Lex Feodoroff who got through all of the Ambience predub & Foley predub by the end of Thursday, so Friday we set up & started FX predubs and got half way through Reel 1.

For the coming week, on Dub Stage 2 Mike will start into Music Premix with composer Victoria Kelly while we continue with FX predubs… We’re aiming to finish all predubs by Thursday, and then set up for the final mix…
And then the real fun starts!!

(obviously not our movie on screen)

Visited fave local secondhand bookstore yesterday & got this amongst a few other gems… Any book with “a foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller” is going to be good but some of the photos really justify the books title… Also some fascinating info on cameras used from the early days:

Midori Takada – Through The Looking Glass (1983)

Rrose x Tommy Four Seven – Loam [2.0-1]

cv313 – 01 A1 – seconds to forever (intrusion dub)

Rebecca Horn

Automatic drum and bell machine

More With Less

kentaro – tonemata v.1.0 VST3/AU (works in ProTools via Bluecat Patchwork plugin)

Has AI already killed nonfiction

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel – fascinating doco from 2022

The motorized instruments of Johannes Kreidler

The rise of the ‘botsitters’

In Conversation: Al Wootton & Valentina Magaletti – No Tags x The Listening Room

Search the Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music and class action those aholes!

“Editing is the final rewrite, where the poetry is written in cinema language. The film is made or broken in the editing room.”

1961 Hillman Husky

First day of predubs today!

I can’t share any photos inside the building, but there are lovely photos of their dub stages on the Park Road Post website

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls – IMDB

Deleted and Extended Footage

the footage from stars wars premieres etc is adorable

WHOS A GOOD BOY?

KNEEL DOWN AND KISS MY RING!

OH MY! I CAN SEE THE MUSIC!

This wont have a lot of relevance if you don’t live in Wellington, but isn’t this a great hobby for some retired dude… Lots of historical research, exploring old locations & documentation…

update: part 3, my hood…

I have a vague plan to drive the little 1928 Chev from Plimmerton into Wellington city using back roads as it has a maximum speed of 40mph so it might frustrate people if I drove it down the usual route, the motorway…

Beastie Boys – Jimmy James

Beastie Boys – Namaste

Beastie Boys – Intergalactic

Beastie Boys – Dr Lee, PhD

Kunstmachine 1 by Horst Pommerenke

Kunstmachine 2 by Horst Pommerenke

so interesting to see the process: Sigma 45mm f/2.8 Lens Repair & Analysis

‘Obsession’ Art Director Calls for Industry Reform After Getting Paid Less Than $7,000 as Film Nears $175 Million

Sampleworthy tunes – Samplette – selected at random each time the page loads

How liminalism became the defining aesthetic of our time

Resist the clankers: AI Resist List

Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized

Is the Twenty-First Century a Creative Void? Critics mourn a bygone cultural era. But nostalgia for the new isn’t new

Peter Vogel – Klangwand

Heller’s handwritten plot chart for ‘Catch 22’

dystopian developments in the bird world

If you’re not from NZ you will likely not be aware of a company called WHITES AVIATION. “Leo White was born in Auckland on 4 July 1906…. White captured some of the first images of Auckland from the air in 1921.. By 1945 White established the now famous Whites Aviation Ltd. Apart from the stunning aerial photos he also developed his business by hiring women to hand colour the monochrome photos, and such photos nowadays are highly sought after. Some great examples are available on this site and a number of books have been published…

The interesting aspect of this work is that Whites Aviation hand-titned photos all have a similar & very beautiful aesthetic. They are somehow gently tinted with colour in an understated way and the style is iconic, such that when I visited the Archives Open Day & had a tour of their photo storage, some of the photos they showed us it was instantly obvious it was a Whites photo.

In 2016 a local short doco initiative funded this great short film: “As one of the original colourists for Whites Aviation in the 1950’s, Grace Rawson reminisces and revives the forgotten art of hand-tinted photography for the first time in over fifty years.”

Co-Director: Greg Wood
Co-Director: Peter Alsop

So while all of this is interesting history, why am I blogging about it now?
Well… the last few weeks have been incredibly busy for me, as we start predubs on the film BLACK SHEEPS on Monday, so I have hardly left my studio in weeks… But as I needed to go into Wellington today to transfer data at Park Road Post for the mix, I had a quick look at FB Marketplace and this instantly caught my eye:

They had a few such boxes & only wanted NZ$30 for them, so I messaged & said I’d buy them & could I pickup today… They agreed & by the time I got there six other people had tried to beat me for them! And wow!!

I don’t plan to emulate the work of Whites Aviation – my aims are more experimental… But random coincidences such as this to me always seem like divine intervention. These beautiful sets of old oil paints that have a very very specific use, were waiting….
For me.

Re-edit of a music video I did to tell a narrative on birds in an era of mass extinction.
instagram.com/_eddcarr_
eddcarr.co.uk

Floating Points – Her Gift

Andreas Trobollowitsch // Live @ Erica Synths Garage

Forest Drive West – Mantis 1920

Anthony Howe – Occluded Generosities

Anthony Howe – Hoot Hanky Hoedown

interesting interview with Paul Friedlander
(despite the stupid youtuber shock face thumbnail)

Three YouTubers have ‘theatrical hits’ this year

The New Zealand game development sector has reached its $1 billion revenue target two years ahead of schedule!

wow it would be easy to assume these are AI, but they are ‘real’ aka real weird!
the work of Anya Boz

Enshittification, despotification and the open internet

What could possibly go wrong?
Scientists find yeast in frozen mummy’s guts, use it to make sourdough bread

Great write up on ableton LIVE extentions by Akihiko Matsumoto

needed one of these for the poor little man-babies that can’t cope wearing a mask…

Laurie Anderson: Tiny Desk Concert

Haiku, generative and interactive music album by 大雨-Ooame Giorgio Sancristoforo

William Fields, Algorithmic Art Assembly v3.0, San Francisco 2026

Sa Pa – Girls On Tour EP

Substance – Relish

Substance – Relish (Shed remix)

This is one of the strangest sounding things I’ve heard AI do: “An automated A.I. WWE news channel on YouTube tries to pronounce “WWE” as a word and ends up going insane at 15seconds…

Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki (English Sub)

Andy Warhol Visiting Roy Lichtenstein’s Studio (1974)

New Yorker: Our Longing for Inconvenience < this article feels like its written by someone nostalgic for something they didn’t actually experience themselves… It’s not about convenience, it’s about experiencing music unmediated by algorithms.

Ed Zitron – Revenge of The Business Idiot

Jean Pierre Raynaud

interesting read: Florian Hecker interview at Tone Glow

https://x.com/mrcur84

humans as data collection devices?

Rory Blank

Google in 2004

new HISSandaROAR sound FX library just released:
SD085 SWISH WIND FLUTE
Discount available until June 7th

to slice the air…

Originally a silent film, so hit the MUTE button!

Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company – Dance of the Seven Gongs

Pala’wan lute (KUSYAPIQ) palyed by Undu Apäl in Mäkägwaq, Palawan, Philippines

Tribal sounds of the Philippines • T’BOLI

Baka Pygmies – Song for Gathering Mushrooms

Yelli – Baka women “yodellers”

Bayaka – Joy after the Hunt

Three Likembe Players, Forest People’s Music, Ituri Rainforest

Afunakwa Rorogwela Lullaby

The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990-2024)

Deleted scene from Paris, Texas (1984).
John Lurie in his memoir: “I am sitting next to Wim at the screening of Paris, Texas. The lights go down and he whispers to me, ‘We had to cut the harmonica scene.’ There was a thing in the film where I played harmonica over the phone to Nastassja Kinski, right after Harry Dean Stanton left the booth. When the film played at Cannes it was still in there, and it has come back to me a few times that the scene is great. That it got applause. I’m disappointed that he cut it.”
via Twitter

clever designs by Argentine artist Guillermo Galetti

Striking New Views of the First Atomic Bomb Test

The devolution of Creative New Zealand

One of the old books I got at recent Lions Book Fair is titled ‘Whirligigs & Weathervanes’ and it had photos of this guys work….

ROBERT SKOTAK and PATRICK MCCLUNG – miniature effects masters

love this example in the vid:

a recent auction!

drone wars

Apart from scoring all these great books (best was a book called FILM AS FILM – Experimental Film 1910-1975, as well as some fascinating NZ history photo books)

I also got a couple of DVDs:

Of course the Kong Production Diaries are all available online, and while its funny to skip through the production documentation to see Peter Jackson go from being full of energy on day 1 of the shoot, to the utter exhaustion at the end, its also so good to see the documentation of the sound team, especially dear old Hoppy – Mike Hopkins RIP

Topdown Dialectic – False LP A

Paul St. Hilaire 1 Hour Mix – Steve Barker Selection for The Wire

Machinedrum | carRADIO 114

Cyngs – Copper Head Conference

Trump: “where do you think the WIND comes from?”
me: air has weight
also me: reading is good for brain
may I highly recommend this book:
Eric Sloane’s Weather Book (1974)
available from @internetarchive

wow awesome local job opportunity: TE NGĀKAU RECORDING STUDIOS DIRECTOR

interesting to see inside the old sawtooth building in Shelly Bay

mmm fjord seiche

What Causes Lightning? The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting.

In the Studio with Barker

really enjoyed the series HACKS and great to learn its creators really, really, really hate AI

The Discovery of the Sperm Whale Phonetic Alphabet…

Unfiltered Audio make great plugins and BattleFX is free! – “BattleFX was created to satisfy the common request of a dedicated plugin for the send effects in Battalion. The famous “Shatter Delay” and “Headspace Reverb” can now be used on any track.”

Nifty plugin AUDIOMAP does similar to my HISSandaROAR UI library demo videos using XO Browser

vid is cued to a great ‘drumfill’

that white stripe is actually almond icing

Become Ungovernable!

incredible image by young NZ photographer Tom Rae – his instagram

Kei Truck Garden Contest via twitter

love this idea!

the truth

By Laura Gilpin

An app – I need that 16 step button!

Bass tine set, an octave lower

Physical plugins!

via this video:

read by the poet, Gwendolyn Brooks

https://clipmapapp.com/openbeta

I’ve been scanning photos from my family archive & came across the photo below, taken by Mum or Dad in the garden of our family farm, some time in the mid 1980s…. Marny the cat!
monochrome version via silverefx

looks like Autumn…

Handy to know:
I’m using Silverfast scan software with an Epson V800 flatbed scanner… I got the scanner as it has a good rep for scanning 35mm & 120 film & came with neg holders for each format. But it sure isn’t fast when scanning high rez. So I learnt how to ‘batch scan’ in Silverfast i.e. place 3-6 photos on the scanner, select each, one-by-one & set scan parameters. then batch scan Go!
It means I can queue up a bunch of photos, set it going & forget about it for half an hour….
A good purpose for my old sandboxed Intel iMac. No more updates for you…