Raymond Scott is one of the more fascinating figures in 20th century music. He's so fresh that I blogged him in 2001:

As soon as I can find a copy, I plan to enthusiastically purchase Raymond Scott's Manhattan Research Boxset. Scott is best known for creating the zany jazz music in the 1930s that Carl Stalling eventually assimilated into the soundtrack for early Bugs-and-Daffy cartoons. I originally discovered him when a cover-band opened for They Might Be Giants, and was thrilled to have found, after literally years of (admittedly not-particularly-painstaking) searching, the author of 'Powerhouse'.

As if that wasn't cool enough: When jazz orchestras went out of style, Scott turned his attention to electronic synthesizers. He worked closely with awesome folks like Robert Moog and Jean-Jacques Perry, and pioneered some of the first electric noise generators, including (of particular interest to me) early implementations of algorithmic music composition. Eventually, he formed Manhattan Research Incorporated, which used synthesizers to create bizzare 1950s commercial jingles. The fruits of MRI-- comercials, demos, and other weird errata-- were released this year on a two-CD set, and they are astounding.

Did he anticipate contemporary ambient downtempo electronic music by half a century? Yes he did. Did he attempt to acoustically map the inside of Jim Henson's head? Yes he did.

ANYWAY, to bring things back to the present, the afforementioned boxset includes "Lightworks!", this shiny electro-mambo lauding the fun of of a new boardgame from The Tomorrow People At Bendix. It's bright and whimsical and maybe naive. Look!, it shouts, We have discovered The Synthesizer! And no, it need not be scary and cold electronic-- it can be whimsical and fun and silly! Be not afraid of technology, thou humbled and generical 1950s middle-class citizens!

Then welcome to 2006, JayDee's Donuts album flips Lightworks on its face. The whimsicality is tweaked into this menacing blunted breakbeat quirkiness, all sirens and chirping and shouting and banging. Dilla's uniquely nonsyncopated precision-mixed percussion makes Scott step lively.

This whole album is heartbreaking-- no track is longer than two minutes, but each has the seed of a killer four-minute hiphop gem from 2010. So I dunno, maybe the Raymond is secondary. Kweli says:

Recently on the Block Party Tour, Erykah talked about making Didnt Cha Know. As her keyboard player played the song she talked about being in the basement with Dilla in the D. He said pick a record, any record. She closes her eyes, grabs the one her hand leads her too. He said drop the needle, anywhere. She drops it, and the bass player plays the bassline that would come to be Didn't Cha Know. She says it's the most amazing thing she ever heard. Jay said gimme 10 minutes. That's classic...

So what I'm saying is the guy could flip a gimmicky 50s synth jingle or a random cheesey upright bass into equally classic and devastating tracks. And finding Scott on the album was like finding my mad-scientist grandfather at Wonderland on a Friday freaking out to Cee-Lo.

Raymond Scott: Lightworks - Download the Track / Buy the album

J-Dilla: Lightworks - Download the Track / Buy the album

Writing now from the secret underground lair in Lake George, NY, where Rich and I have gone into hiding for the week to write v1.0 (or maybe v0.1) of OpenBoxOffice, codename OBOe.

Major decisions so far:

1. We're going to use Ruby On Rails. So far, despite the "YOU WILL DEVELOP TEN TIMES FASTER" claims, this has mainly involved 12 frustrating hours of installing, reinstalling, compiling, cursing and recompiling poorly-documented code libraries.

This is only made more frustrating by the breathless and semicondescending tone of the tutorials. Actual quote: "Now, that is way beyond cool--it's awesome! OK, calm down and enter a test record." Thank you, Tutorial, for reminding me to calm down, lest the eldrich beyond-awesome power of your code seer my soul.

Anyway, I'll let you know when we get agile.

2. Theme song for the day: Jan Hammer Group's Evolove. (Picture it as the 70s movie "getting stuff done" montage theme.)

Since moving to DC, I've picked up Michael and Emily's weekly ritual of reading the Sunday New York Times every week. The problem is that I tend to naturally seek the most enraging and righteous-adrenaline-inducing articles I can find.

For instance! This weekend's NYTimes Magazine has a horrorshow frontpage article on The War On Contraception. The seriously deranged quotes from Christian Evangelicals ("I cannot imagine any development in human history, after The Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the (contraception) pill,") are merely surprising. What's enraging is the massive amount of federal funding ($205 million in 2007, up from $80mil in 2001) for the farce known as "Abstinence Education", aka plying teens with blatantly false misinformation. (E.g., "Condoms fail to prevent HIV approximately 31 percent of the time.")

Meanwhile on page A1, The CIA is being recleansed into an institution focused on "the primary task of supporting the agency's spying operations, rather than producing broad intelligence assessments for policymakers." In other words, it doesnt matter that we don't actually have any real intelligence on Iran-- The new CIA will still have the impressive ability to find WMDs there when asked. (Or at least, to not not find WMDs there.)

So when I read the NYT (or any news outlet), these are the kinds of articles I focus on. I'm not sure whether it's really a healthy or productive way to spend my time. At least I finally unsubscribed from Atrios and Americablog RSS feeds last month, so my net useless-political-rage-per-week is hopefully less now than it used to be.

I'm working with Green Media Toolshed and Bryght to build a light-functionality easy-to-use ASP version of Drupal.

One major part of the project is improving Drupal's user-interface. Drupal's standard UI is basically a big complex web of jargon and checkboxes. This actually makes sense for Drupal's core constituency of data-crazed web junkies, but of course doesn't work so well for non-tech-savvy folks.

So the plan is to use a few custom wizards, some CSS, and the new Forms API to dumb down Drupal's control panels, making them less powerful and more easy to use. Hopefully it can be implemented as a single contrib module, without requiring custom themeing or forks from core. We'll see.

So far all I have to show is this new version of the admin menu: Custom CSS plus graphics from Project Tango, inspired by Development Seed's UI work for VoteNoPowerGrab.com.

On the way are new UIs for Taxonomy, User Management, and some other stuff.

Currently in heavy rotation:

"...Music isn't really like cooking--there's no reason why you can't have artists who make a whole dish out of the sonic equivalent of flour, or salt. (And you do--virtuosos of monochromatic concentration like Plastikman and Pole). And yet there's hardly any positive terms in pop critical discourse for fanatical focus or fixated perseverance... Look at dance magazines, and you will see reviews that approvingly list an artist's forays into genres other than the one whose section they are actually reviewed under. Stylistic inconstancy, generic treason, and dilettantism are, paradoxically, almost supreme values..."

~Simon Reynolds, 2001

Shows coming soon to DC: The Roots (with Chuck Brown!), Procedure (now at Science Club), and (wait for it...) Jason Forrest AND Food For Animals.

Daaaaaaamm. And you thought the district was all indyrock.

MP3ing: This guy Malcom Kipe on Merck has an album out of really nice simple instrumental hiphop and sample-monkeying. Nothing crazy or revolutionary, but that's probably why I'm playing it a lot.

Thoughting: The new bubble is here, kids. Last week at SXSWi the number of VC-fueled $5000 open-bars was out of control. Now 37 Signals is on the cover of Business Week for supposedly bringing KISS-style opensource dogma to the masses. I spend a lot of time lately alternating between excitement and ambivalence about all this.

Coding: The new freelance career is busy! Event-organizing tools for the World Food Programme, site redesigns for Ashoka, and miscellaneous work on a half dozen smaller projects.

Designing: I dislike having Toneland as a "personal blog" and tjones.cc as a "professional site". I've been experimenting with ways to merge them. My latest attempt is a moo.fx/flickr/del.icio.us hybrid that I'm not really happy with yet.

Listening: to Bruce Sterling's SXSWi keynote, in which he basically tells everyone there that they are obese and backwards. Not that I necessarily disagree with him. I'm trying to decide if it's all hand-waving or actually substantive. I'm also processing how a lot of people seem to be making a living as conference-track wide-eyed motivational-speakers-slash-public-intellectuals.

I'm working from the wifi at Crumbs & Coffee on Columbia, and have noticed some very suspicious behavior.

I'm trying to read a blogpost at MusicThing titled "Radiohead's Gearporn Blog"- but all I can see is:

Now, you might think initially that this is just a well-meaning firewall recognizing the word "PORN" and trying to protect the good patrons of C&C from unchecked public pornography browsing. I know I did, which is why I was stunned (stunned!) to find that the first three actually-potentially-offensive websites that occurred to me (FleshBot, SuicideGirls, Rotten.com) all traipsed past C&C's firewall with no problems.

So it's become clear that the target here is not in fact actual pornography. No- what we're actually seeing here is a deliberate campaign to combat the growing menace of unchecked public vintage synthesizer buffery. (This is also the only possible explanation for the name of the firewall's manufacturer: "SONICWALL".)

More on this as further news warrants.

So last month The Moms gave me a copy of EMERGENCE: The Connected Lives Of The Ants In Your Brain And Stuff. It's one of a half dozen recent best-seller tomes about how the actions of relatively dumb autonomous units can combine and interact to form unexpectedly powerful and weird results. (I think the creators of VOLTRON understood this a long time ago, but it wasn't until like 2003 that politics and pop-science caught up.)

So it turns out that one of the important characteristics a swarm needs to have in order to become EMERGENT is what the academics call locality, which basically means that neighbors interact with each other. So that instead of having a big textureless mass of isolated entities, we begin to form whorls and knots of interest and feedback and happenstance.

This was all on my mind last night at Drupal DC Meetup. I have this totally unsubstantiated feeling that DistrictDrupal, in combination with burgeoning posses in LA, San Francisco, NYC and elsewhere, are both symptoms of and engines powering the exponential growth and maturation of the Drupal project that everyone is slightly-hesitantly sure we're beginning to see.

Unsurprisingly, the people I spoke with had pretty different priorities from what I hear coming out of the Drupal mainstream. The big questions here were about advocacy: CRM, bulk mailing, peer-to-peer campaigns, media outreach, event organizing. The big stars of the show were Views.module and DevSeed's SeedCampaign media outreach tool and EchoDitto's criminally-underrecognized (not that I'm biased) Open-Source Repository.

Techies aside, we also had peoples from at least a dozen local NGOs in the process of transitioning to Drupal: NDI, The Quixote Center, New America Foundation, Ashoka, The Middle East Institute and Green Media Toolshed.

So it looks a lot like Drupal is becoming a major engine of the DC nonprofit/political sector's web presence. And now that Tim Cullen has shoehorned Drupal onto the US Senate's archaic SQLite servers (Fairfield county, represent!), maybe we'll even see more incumbents taking advantage of it as well. (ha.)

All of these efforts are going to be working towards very similar goals, so the key to success is Collaboration-- online organizers and techs from these groups need a place to lay out their projects and priorities, find out what they've got in common, coordinate and communicate, avoid redundant effort, and hopefully finally catch our technology up with our ideas. You know, like Voltron.

Anyway, large props and thanks to everyone who came out-- ESPECIALLY to Eric and Jeff from Development Seed (who picked up a startlingly-high SMS-enhanced bar tab) and resident Drupal-illuminati M3avrck for putting the whole shabazz together. See you guys next time.