After a four month outage due to blog depression and bread slicing, The Department of Toneland Security is back in commission. Thank you for your patience.

To start 2006 off right, this is a half-hour mash-up of some much-loved tracks from 2005: New_Year_Resolution.mp3

I remember digging through my Dad's old blues records a few months after I bought my first turntables in 98, asking him what was good and what wasn't. The first one he handed me was an extraordinarily warped and well-loved copy of Oscar Brown Jr.'s Sin And Soul. I remember listening to the album in my bedroom, hearing the bouncy shrieking sounds through a haze of nasty old-record-static, and wondering how many times Dad had stayed up late doing the same thing with the same piece of vinyl.

This record is a freakin classic, hands down. Crazy and smooth and fun and horrifying and deep-- hillarious and catchy-as-hell songs about slave auctions and chain gangs and death and love and kids at the zoo. I bought the repress from Dusty Groove a few months later, and it's been one of only a few vinyls I've taken with me wherever I've moved.

Here's a track: "But I Was Cool"

A few years ago, I finally saw him in person-- he was singing "Bullshit", a song he wrote about the Iraq war, to a Not In Our Name rally at NYU. And then, last week, he passed away at 78.

The obituaries in the mainstream media have done a good whitewashing job on the man's life, with a self-congratulatory good-thing-America-has-moved-past-all-that-injustice-nonsense-from-the-60s attitude that makes me ill. To read NYT or WaPo, you'd believe OBJ did nothing post-1969 besides sitcom cameos. Zero mention that almost all of his performances in the final ten years of his life were at rallies protesting the War On Terror.

Here he is in 2002 on Democracy Radio:

Certainly, terror terrifies me, I don't want to be anyone's damn collateral damage, I don't care what the cause. But on the other hand, I want them to fight all the terror. Not just this perceived terror that scares Bush and his oil interests, but the terror that terrifies the neighbors in my neighborhood in Chicago Illinois, where the police will jump on you and the gangs have been organized to terrorize the communities.

So yeah! Let's have a war on all the terror, and let's have that be an intelligent war that the considers consequences! There are consequences of all these things we're about to do! And when you say 'either you're with us or against us'... that's too simplistic. And so somebody needs to speak up.

The squares are running it. And what we need is hip people. And by hip I mean Human Improvement Potential, that sees that the human race could get better, and not try to beat it down into submission.

Human Improvement Potential. Oscar Brown Junior, Rest In Peace.

Bonus track: "Brother Where Are You"-- OBJ remixed by fellow musicopoliticist, Matt Herbert

I think it was in Melbourne four years ago listening to the Process track on Staedtizism 2-- I was talking about how great the final few bars of it were; he jumped up and pointed at me and shouted "It's a NOISE GATE! You like NOISE GATES!" and we spent an hour toying with CoolEdit's "noise gate" functions and it turned out he was right.

Used conventionally, the gate removes background debris from an audio recording-- any swath of sound with volume beneath a certain threshold is silenced. But you can, if you are insane, turn the threshold level way above normal, so that it silences substantial and important sonic creavaces. So an old reverby drumbreak turns into a train of minimalist arrhythmic fragments in enforced stroboscopic stacatto. Where each individual drumhit, rather than sprawling lazily across multiple milliseconds, is heard just briefly.

This Daedelus track has these fragments all over, in a too-cute clutter of samples that, for better or worse, never quite harmonize or rhythmically sync. (And does anyone else think this is exactly the same swelling-strings-loop that Wagon Christ just used in Shadows?)

P.S.: check out the trailer for Night Watch.

LUPR is a Max/MSP app that plumbs a directory structure for random audio files, then filters and remixes them in BPM time. Saturday evening, Mark convinced me to let it loose on my laptop and record the output, and I was pretty happy about the results. If you like ambient sound collage, give us a listen.

I also really like Mark's LUPR demo, sombaa.mp3, in which he demonstrates either less of a penchant than me for horribly time-synched drums, or possibly just that his hard drive contains fewer breakbeats than mine.

LUPR's output always reminds me of the ambient bits from Mr Brubakers Strawberry Alarm Clock.

I just got back from Sundance and it was a trip. On one hand the films were amazing, truly independent and made without compromising their art. On the other hand, it was totally overrun with corporate sponsors and street marketing. In the end, the amazing (or not-so-amazing) films made the festival for me.

Here are my recommendations:

• Lonesome Jim
• Hustle & Flow
• Me and You and Everyone We Know
• Lackawanna Blues (featuring Mos Def and Saul Williams)

I recorded this last summer at the first Connecticut hip-hop fest. If you do something cool with it, post it back to Toneland.

Sometime last month, my job description at EchoDitto suddenly expanded to include producing internet radio shows. I got to order lots of shiny new sound equipment, steal Zack's mixer, and go crazy.

You can listen here. There's also a podcast feed if you're into that. Yesterday I posted the best show yet.

Williamsburg- August 14, 2003: Suite for trumpet, waves, helecopters and a massive power-outage.