Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Here's an excellent (if somewhat wild) rant on the current state of the music industry and the online distribution situation. The meaty stuff starts more than halfway down, but the whole thing is worth reading.
I've been thinking about this stuff for a while, but even moreso in the last few days after spending the weekend talking to Martin Juhls from Thinner. If you don't know this site, you should. And not just because the music is consistently fantastic - as good or better than any electronic music label working today, as far as I'm concerned - but because it's all free. Not stolen. Free, by design.
This is the future.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis @ 10:13 PM EST

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Big thanks to Martin from Thinner for setting up the Halmackenreuther show in Cologne on Sunday. Good times!

Posted by Dennis DeSantis @ 06:22 PM EST

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

The few spams that creep around my spam filters usually get deleted without a second thought. But I received one today that actually made me laugh out loud. It's an ad for a web hosting company. Here's an excerpt of it:

"I visited your web site 'www.dennisdesantis.com', the official website of "Dennis DeSantis". I understand that Dennis DeSantis performs as a percussionist in contemporary music concerts and as a drummer with funk and hip-hop groups. Browsing through the contents of your site proved to be quite a fascinating experience. The purple shade background gives your site a very professional appearance. I appreciate your sincere efforts in presenting this site and wish you all the best. Your company would very much get a much more vast clientele by getting it's site hosted at a much better platform."

Brilliant. A robot that combs through web pages and copies the first sentence of the meta-tags into a human-readable sentence. The part about the background must be automated too, right; it just converts the HTML color coding into the English word for that color?

But all that technology amounts to nothing if the part that's ACTUALLY written by a human is poorly done. Let's examine the last sentence again:

"Your company would very much get a much more vast clientele by getting it's site hosted at a much better platform."

Ouch. That's some seriously incompetent English.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis @ 03:08 PM EST

Sunday, August 10, 2003

I read a really interesting article today, called "Why Computer Music Sucks." Basically, the idea is that as computers have become more ubiquitous in all forms of music, the academics in charge of defining what is and isn't "computer music" have become more and more conservative about what falls under the term's auspices. Interesting stuff.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis @ 05:32 PM EST

Wednesday, August 6, 2003

There was a brief period at the beginning of the summer when I thought that this move to Berlin was going to turn me into a pop star. For now, this is clearly not the case. I'm fine with this, however. It's going to require a little adjusting (I'll need to cancel my orders for a lifetime supply of Cristal and a lap pool full of bling bling) but I'll manage.
Several years ago, if you'd have asked me what I'd be doing today, I probably would have said "trying to land a tenure track job as a composition professor." For now, this isn't the case either.
So what I'm trying to do is find a niche for myself that's somewhere between pop star and tenured composition professor. This means thinking outside of the box a bit - there are no jobs that I can think of that occupy that particular place on the career spectrum.

Any ideas?

Posted by Dennis DeSantis @ 06:41 PM EST

Monday, August 4, 2003

We started our German class today. This is going to be a lot of fun.
Just to be safe, we started at the very beginning level, which means it's probably going to be a little while before we're not just reviewing. But the fact that we're now spending 3 hours a day, 5 days a week immersed in the language can only lead to progress.
The class is a veritable UN, and quite a few of the students don't speak any English, meaning that there's no possibility for a "fall-back" language - everything is done in German, which is exactly what we wanted.
The only low point is that, like all other German buildings, there's no air conditioning. And it's really hot. Really. Hot.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis @ 05:20 PM EST

Saturday, August 2, 2003

Went to WMF on Saturday to catch some of the Ghostly International party, and ended up feeling much better about the diversity of the electronic scene in Berlin. I'd been starting to think that the only things that people turned out for were skull-crushing hard techno and electro, but I was delighted to find plenty of people dancing enthusiastically to Dabrye's outstanding hybrid of techno, IDM, and hip-hop. That guy's live set simply shouldn't be missed.

Posted by Dennis DeSantis @ 04:21 PM EST

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