Going through the first twenty exercises once again. It will not become second-nature if I do not build revision into my learning. The trick is to make the revisions enjoyable.
The Nightcrawlers - The Biophonic Boombox Recordings
February 20, 2018
Anthology Recordings is set to issue a collection of recordings from Philadelphia / New Jersey experimental synth group The Nightcrawlers—a trio comprised of brothers Tom and Peter Gulch and Dave Lunt.
Titled The Biophonic Boombox Recordings, the release will be the group's first ever retrospective and features cuts pulled from over 40 cassette tapes that the trio released from 1979 to the early '90s under their Synkronos Music label imprint. These early electronic explorations drew influence from the cosmic minimalism of the Berlin School (Klaus Schulze / Tangerine Dream) and other European pioneers (Cluster / Popul Vuh) and were recorded straight into the mic of a JVC Biphonic Boombox as fully improvised performances.
It's available on the 23rd February from here.
Sign Libra - Closer to the Equator
February 19, 2018
A wonderful little gem that puts me in mind of all those late 80s New-Age albums that appeared on esoteric electronic labels such as IC Innovative Communications and Narada. If you remember those types of albums, you'll feel right at home with this. The EP is available on the Antinote Label. Bleep also have a vinyl release.
CV & Jab - Zin Taylor's Thoughts Of A Dot As It Travels A Surface
February 17, 2018
Boomkat:
CV & JAB is Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett, two artists that might already be familiar to many of you from their individual work over the years for the Kranky and Spectrum Spools labels. Together they have made this slowly engrossing album for Shelter Press - who else - perhaps one of the most elusive, uncanny and multi-layered “Ambient” albums we’ve heard in what feels like a long time, a worthy follow-up to a frankly astonishing sequence of releases on the label that started with Felicia Atkinson’s modern classic 'Hand In Hand'. If you’re into anything from Chris Watson’s field recordings to Vangelis and Badalamenti at their most romantic and evocative, or even Boards of Canada’s early forays into wildlife documentary pastiche, this one will sooth your mind like nothing else.
Don't let the very pretentious title put you off. This is excellent stuff. Vinyl and Digital are available here.
Flagging Extremist Content
February 16, 2018
Great article from ASI Data Science on Binary Classification and ROC Curves.
It is well known that online propaganda from terrorist organisations plays a key part in radicalisation in Europe and the UK. In collaboration with the UK Home Office, we recently developed and tested an AI algorithm designed to detect such propaganda on the web.
Following media coverage of the classifier (see, for example, BBC News and The Guardian), there has been much talk of how it works and its performance. In this post, without exposing the inner workings of the algorithm, we'll do our best to outline the general approach we took to design the classifier. We also specify precisely the metrics used and the performance achieved by the classifier.