ADMIN: subscribe to GNO via Email

by lawrence

Although I love RSS Readers very much, there are quite a few who still have no idea what they are. So here you are: Email subscription of GNO! Scroll down to “subscription” in the sidebar, enter your Email address and click on “subscribe” button - done! From now on, whenever there’s an update to GNO, a copy will be sent to your mailbox automatically so that you don’t have to come back again and again. Yes, this will compromise my pageview, but so what? GNO doesn’t pay my bills anyway.




Please ignore that “free iPod” thing

by lawrence

Dear friends:

Sorry if you received that stupid “free iPod” hoax from me, I must be out of my f*cking mind to trust that site. Please accept my deepest apology for the hassle.




Gmail having technical difficulties

by lawrence

UPDATE AGAIN: Everything seems to be fine now.

UPDATE: Please write to me at lawrence at chinesenewear.com until further notice.

My Gmail is getting its period again, this is what I usually get since yesterday afternoon:

So please forgive me if I didn’t reply in time!




Something’s going on in the comments

by lawrence

This usually comment-free blog has seen a surge of discussion lately, do read Christiaan Virant (ID: zhao)’s defense of FM3 and Buddha Machine as well as the bicker about randomness/control in laptop performance between him and Zbigniew Karkowski (ID: zbigniew) here. Also not to be missed is this “what is a valid Global Ear article (on The Wire)” discussion.

And perhaps it would now be helpful to remind you, dear readers, that there is a feed for the comments of GNO available for subscription. The URL of the feed is:

http://www.chinesenewear.com/gno/?feed=comments-rss2

(For those who don’t know what RSS is, I recommend Bloglines - the most popular web-based RSS Reader - as a start. Go and get yourself an account for free, click on “My Feeds” >> “Add”, paste the above feed or any other feed that you want to subscribe to, and you’re set. From now on, you don’t have to check the website of GNO again and again to see if there are new posts or if your comment has been picked up, whenever they do, Bloglines will notify you automatically.)




New Banner of GNO

by lawrence

After working painstakingly for several hours, we finally have a banner for Global Noise Online! The pic is from Joel Chadabe’s book Electric Sound: the past and promise of electronic music, the original caption is:

Bruno Spoerri (seated) with a dancer controlling a MIDI system through David Rockeby’s Very Nervous System in 1991. Photo courtesy Bruno Spoerri.

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CNE online now

by lawrence

As promised.

Right now we have part of the artists bio, live news, label list, links, some of the texts about Chinese new music, about and contact page up. We’ve also had the CSA webzine (so far Chinese only) as part of CNE.

We are going to do it in the Web 2.0 fashion: release in beta phase and adjust/improve later on.

If you are one of the listed artists, feel free to report to us - either in English or in Chinese - at ear at chinesenewear.com about errors and updates of your bio. You can also leave a comment at GNO or post to our forum. Some might argue that in the true spirit of Web 2.0 we should have made the bio section into a Wiki, so that every artist will be able to edit/update themselves. The reason of adopting the old-fashioned, Web 1.0 way is to maintain the consistency regarding text format and language style and accuracy.

I always see GNO as a precursor of CNE, now since CNE is running, it will take back part of GNO’s jurisdiction. From now on, all the live concert/event news will go to the “Live” section of CNE. Some of the longer writings of GNO will be backed up and restored on CNE too.

We hope that you’ll enjoy this new ear as Michael does!

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Counting down for the CNE main site

by lawrence

As someone grew up in one of the major cities of mainland China, I can assure you that the Spring Festival (Chinese new year according to the lunar calendar) is getting less significant every year. The world is flat and the mood and ritualism of the festival have been “flattened” into the average days, as a result, holidays and festivals are diluted. It’s the eve of Spring Festival, after the dinner at my parent’s house I went back home for 2 reasons:

1. To escape the collective madness of CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala. (Have no idea what it is? Never mind, you don’t want to know.)

2. Get some work done and make sure that the Chinese New Ear main site can be online tomorrow. Yes, that’s right, you’ll be able to see the notoriously-delayed site within 20 hours.

Oops! Can’t forget that: Gung Hei Fat Choi! Happy Dog’s Year!!!!


Text: Lawrence | Pic: CHU Yang | Model: Michael

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ADMIN: RSS feed updated

by lawrence

There were some problems with the FeedBurner feed of the new GNO, if you have subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/gnoneu before, please delete it and subscribe to the following feed instead:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GlobalNoiseOnline

The original feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/gnoneu) is dead.

Alternatively, you might want to subscribe to our original feed, as oppose to the above feed, which is provided by FeedBurner. The content of the two feeds are exactly the same.

We are deeply sorry for the trouble.

(A tip to tell if you have subscribed to the right feed: if you’re getting “sound.tech.media.china” as tagline, you have subscribed to the dead feed. The correct tagline is “sound.tech.media.future”. All the buttons in the “subscription” menu in the sidebar have been updated.)




Introducing Dajuin Yao - GNO’s new blogger!

by lawrence

So you’ve learnt about the big news now and were redirected from the old Global Noise Online (now Global Noise Offline). But we have more exciting news for you: Dajuin Yao has joined GNO and will become a co-blogger with me.

For those who don’t know, here is bio of Dajuin:

For three decades, sound artist Dajuin Yao has devoted himself to the theory & praxis of “listening.” Embracing a “post-Concrete” asethetics towards sound, Yao stands against the dominant approaches in reality-based sound art which either tries to “musicalize” concrete sounds or focuses on documentary-oriented soundscapes. Taking it to the extreme, he also challenges the “composed” tradition of academic musique concrete by emerging himself in the so-called “humanistic listening”, “cultural listening” and “inter-cultural listening.”

Recently, Yao’s compositions distinguish themselves by their non-expressive nature, and focus on what he calls “passive improvisation” & “algorithmic improvisation.” Yao’s approach towards objet sonore comes in accordance with the aesthetics of Wang Changling, famous poet of the Tang Dynasty, whose view on man’s relationship with external objects advocates “hitting it with your heart.” Dajuin is also interested in the epiphanic moments during which the sound object & the listener, or the auteur & the listener, become a unified “one”, or, on certain occasions, exchange their roles.

Since 1997, Yao has called on various young artists in China to establish China Sound Unit, a free-form collective devoted to the study of different modes of listening. China Sound Unit also works on the listening/thinking/collecting/re-shuffling/
analysing/preserving /de-composing and re-contextualization of sound objects in various cities of China.

In recent years, Yao has also devoted himself to the acceleration of the intercommunication of avant-garde music scenes among different countries and cultures.

In addition to all that, Dajuin is the presenter and curator of Sounding Beijing 2003 - the first large-scale experimental music festival in China, and the host of an online radio program (actually proto-Podcast) ForeTaste Radio. He also runs the sound art record label Post-Concrete. Dajuin has just taught a sound art installation course at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China, and is currently responsible for establishing the Computer Music Studios and planning the computer music & sound art programs at the Center for Art and Technology, Taipei National University of the Arts.

Dajuin’s writings about music/sound art (in Chinese), as well as his web art pieces, can be found here.

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ClearType Tuner for PC users

by lawrence

Tip for PC users: Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner seems to be the tool of choice if you find GNO’s typeface intolerably ugly.

Related:

Why the font of GNO looks like shit on PC, but not on Mac? (1, 2)




A note to PC users reading GNO

by lawrence

(Important correction appended, 16:13, Jan 4, 2006)

Dear PC users:

I can imagine how you hate the typeface of GNO, but as I said in this previous post, there seems to be no way to adjust the font on this blog hosted by Wordpress.com (I would be appreciated if you can prove that I’m wrong). For the time being, if you’re looking for a visually more appealing reading experience, please use this feed (provided by Feedburner, not the built-in feed provided by Wordpress) to subscribe so that all the formatting here will be preserved. As for the RSS readers of choice, Google Reader’s “lens-like” AJAX effect of the left panel looks formidable; Bloglines is still the most popular web-based reader (especially convenient for those with tons of feeds to read).
You can subscribe to GNO with Google Reader and Bloglines by clicking on their respective buttons in “subscription” link category of the right column.

PS: Mac users won’t have this problem, the reason of which I couldn’t understand.




R.I.P. Derek Bailey (1930 - 2005)

by lawrence

Derek Bailey died in London on 2005’s Christmas Eve on natural causes, he was 75. (UPDATE: according to an email from Martin Davidson to Eric of Just for a Day, Mr. Bailey died from motor neuron disease.)

Here’s a concert of him playing with The Ruins (Tatsuya Yoshida + Sasaki Hisashi) in 1997, available in FLAC format on Bit Torrent. (registration required)

UPDATE: From Avant Music News:

A three-hour tribute to the late Derek Bailey from WFMU is posted for download.




ESWN Culture blog featuring Lawrence

by lawrence

I just started writing ESWN Culture together with Roland Soong, the man behind the stalwart EastSouthWestNorth. For me, ESWN Culture is an outlet for Chinese cultural topics other than sound art/experimental music/new media art. For instance, when I wrote about The 1st Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism here (post 1, 2), I confined the topic to “sound art on the Biennale”. Of course there are much more to discuss about the exhibition since it’s mostly about architecture (sound art is really marginal content), this is typically good material for ESWN Culture. While GNO will remain cutting-edge, ESWN Culture doesn’t reject anything mainstream.




ADMIN: 1-click RSS subscription buttons added

by lawrence

In the right column you’ll see 4 new icons, those chicklets enable you to easily add Global Noise Online to your favorite RSS Readers. Right now there are links to Bloglines, Feedburner, Google Reader & My Yahoo!, all you need to do is to click once on them and follow the instruction.

Among the above 4 readers, my personal favorite is Bloglines, although its frame structure is kind of out-fashioned. It also occurs to me that people interested in sound art are not necessarily tech-savvy, to the point that many don’t even know what an RSS Reader is. If that is the case with you, I strongly recommend that you click on the Bloglines link and have a taste of it. RSS Reader is like your postbox, I’m pretty sure that once you have a postbox, you wouldn’t want to call all the magazines that you’ve subscribed to check if they have new issues out. It’s pretty much the same with RSS Reader: it’s just a “soft” postbox that saves you the trouble of ploughing through all the blogs and news sites in your bookmark.




ADMIN: Busy Busy Busy

by lawrence

I’m now working for the official documentary about The 1st Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, due open Dec 10 at OCAT (OCT Contemporary Art Terminal) in Shenzhen. The job is pretty time-consuming so prepare for the irregular blogging here.




Admin: typeface of GNO

by lawrence

I have never figured out why the fonts of Global Noise Online look so much better on Mac than on PC (my main browsers are Flock/Firefox), and I have to say that the web-based control panel of Wordpress.com still has much room for improvement (for example: no font-setting button! I think one can do that buy dig into the HTML code but that’s never the preferred way though I know how to do it). Sorry, PC users. I will rent my own server and switch to Wordpress.org template soon, hopefully that would provide more customizability.




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