The Quixotic Engineer

It’s time once again for a Musical Box post, where I condense a month’s worth of personal recommended listening. However, this month I’ve handed the reigns over to my friend Navneet “Nav” Alang. Nav writes about technology, identity, pop culture and the Internet at Scrawled In Wax. I’ve been a big fan of his blog for quite a while now, and am thrilled that he graciously agreed to guest-blog.

Here are his top picks for this month:

As a regular reader of The Quixotic Engineer, I always look forward to the monthly Musical Box posts – so it’s quite the honour to get to do one myself! My thanks to Matthew. Without further ado, here are some of my recent musical faves.

Mark Kozelek has been making music for over twenty years, first with Red House Painters and most recently with Sun Kil Moon. I loved Sun Kil’s first disc, Ghosts of the Great Highway, and looked forward to their most recent release, April, with a great deal of anticipation. It was worth it. “Moorestown” (above) does a lot to showcase the bittersweet ache at the core of Kozelek’s work, which is littered with tales of love and loss, elation and pain. Fun fact: Kozelek played the bassist of fictional band Stillwater in the film Almost Famous.

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Back in April, there was a lot of excitement around the rerelease of a game called Ikaruga on Xbox Live Arcade. The game seemed to have garnered praise from all corners, including many people whose opinions I’ve come to greatly respect. My anticipation grew, and when the game was finally released I immediately jumped on my console to give the demo a whirl.

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Bloom is a shader effect used to simulate the real appearance of very bright light. While it was once considered too hardware intensive for real-time gaming, modern systems with HDR rendering make frequent use of it. So frequent, in fact, that the effect has become synonymous with “next-gen” graphics. Today I’d like to take a closer look at bloom, and address what I feel is an unfortunate trend in its use.

Bloom aims to recreate the optical effect known as the Airy disc. In the real world, when light passes through a circular aperture such as your eye it diffracts, causing flaws that limit the maximum resolution of even a perfect lens. These defects are negligible for normal incoming light, but very bright sources can appear to bleed into surrounding darker objects.

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Jazz is a fascinating genre of music. Born out of slavery in the Mississippi Delta along with its sister the blues and defined by complex melodies and improvisation, it became the framework for some of the greatest musical minds of the 20th century.

To those of us raised on three chord rock and 2:50 pop songs, however, jazz can seem a tad impenetrable. The songs often lack a traditional structure, and change rhythm and melody on the fly. Lacking a paradigm within which to understand the music, it can be difficult to pursue the active, focused listening required to properly grok it.

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For whatever reason I was introduced to an astounding number of terrific new artists this month. Perhaps having my headphones on 8 hours a day at work has something to do with it. In any case, here are this month’s Musical Box picks.

Ladytron’s new album Velocifero came out at the beginning of June, and it quickly became one of my favourite albums of 2008 so far. I’m not always big on electropop, but their heavy beats and thick synth layers really won me over. Helen Marnie’s haunting voice probably had something to do with it as well. If you like this song I recommend checking out “Tomorrow” off the same album.

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