sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

Unconventional time signatures, beats from Cuba, technology from the USSR.

1. "Soviet RITM-2 Synth and Loop Pedal", Slightly Nasty

This is a dark, engrossing soundscape made entirely on the РИТМ-2, a synthesizer produced in 1984 in the Soviet Union and often described as Moog-like. This specific unit has been modified for additional sound body, though the musician insists it was done with vintage germanium transistors— in other words, it's a modification that could have plausibly been done by a user in Russia in the 80s.

2. "Scratch and Frazzle", Ivar Tryti

I've featured Ivar the Elektron virtuoso in this thread before. Here he deploys an FM-synth groovebox to make a song with two rules:

1. It should evoke the soundtrack of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal
2. It should be in 5/8 time.

(Watch the sequencer lights; you'll see his measures have 20 steps.)

Result: an industrial banger with beats that hit like bombs and a rhythm that keeps you constantly off balance.

3. "Edelleen ja edelleen", Sleepers Tomb

Quiet, insistent drone ambient track. You're asleep, your phone's alarm keeps pushing at the barrier from some other world trying to break through and drag you out, but it's not working. This piece is built up slowly on a modular suitcase that splays the track's internal process open to view like something on a dissection table. It's got a good mood.

A Finnish-speaking Mastodon user translates the name as "on and on", but with a kind of a sense of "again and again", i.e., "it just won't stop".

4. "Do You Miss Boards of Canada Too? I Made This In 15 Minutes.", Dan Chippendale

A peppy mix of analog synth and clicky woodblock beats. Grows into a really nice energy. I do see the comparison to Boards of Canada but it's kinda doing its own thing.

Made on Elektron's digital synth box; Teenage Engineering's new super-Pocket-Operator; and the blur in the background is a Prophet.

5. "Odd Numbers", Shiro Fujioka

This one's something really special. This is an extended, mercurial electronic composition in the alien time signature of 7/8, made of haunting glass-harp feedback hums and IDM breakbeats. Nothing going on here is anything you could remotely predict, but in retrospect it feels like the only way it could have gone. Made/performed on Elektron gear.

Warning: The first ten seconds contain a sharp clicking noise which may be unpleasant on headphones. Metronomes :(

⬇️ Click below for beats ⬇️

This is the first big win of the year for the Committee of Interns & Residents, who also had a pretty big year last year. This win covers over 1,300 physicians, who have frequently been asked to work 80 hours a week or more. Northwestern Medicine is also an incredibly rich program—according to SEIU it took in an estimated $2.3 billion in net-patient revenue during 2023—so there's no shortage of profit available to give these physicians fair pay and better working conditions.

You can donate to the Forbes Union walkout fund here—Forbes is allowed to withhold pay from those walking out.

Today is day three of the Forbes walkout, and one of the highlight demands of today from Forbes Union is an interesting one: editorial separation and standards. This is generally taken for granted and enforced in most of the news outlets you read—but Forbes is not like most of them.

As you may be aware, their website peddles quite a lot of stuff with absolutely no oversight from quite a lot of people with a financial interest in what they're peddling. This is an extremely direct consequence of the website's "contributor model", which is basically an independent contractor free-for-all. This model has also been noted as giving advertisers an uncritical editorial voice and has been criticized at length by journalistic outlets such as Nieman Lab. It's also a gigantic grift, although I'm sure you've picked up on this from the jump. Poynter noted in 2012 that the model was a huge boon for Forbes—it guarantees them a huge stream of content for cheap and turns the website into a content mill. They wrote then:

[...]few of the paid Forbes.com contributors can make a living there alone, and of course as independent contractors they have no health or retirement benefits

So, needless to say this is all a bit of a sore point for the handful of people actually employed at Forbes and not just independently contracted. And naturally most of them are subject to the same pressures and influences even when they work on the "more reputable" physical magazine side of the outlet. The lack of integrity obviously does not stop at the bounds of the website, it's just worse there than in print. But print is still a problem: the (apparent lack of) editorial independence writers have on the print side of Forbes has been raised as early and as publicly as 2017 in The Washington Post.

It's an open question of how much Forbes Union can fix this problem—particularly given how financially beneficial it presumably is to Forbes—but it is an important matter to be addressed. In blunt terms, editorial independence is a necessary component for journalism to not just be stenography for the worst people in the world.

San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore may—by my count—become the 12th workplace¹ in the Bay Area under the banner of IWW in short order, as the workers there announced their intention to affiliate with the Wobblies last week. My understanding is City Lights is something of a cultural cornerstone—according to Wikipedia, it's even listed as a San Francisco Designated Landmark—and so unionizing it would be a major win for the IWW. Although it's not an explicit commitment, City Lights has suggested they will voluntarily recognize the union.

A successful unionization here would be a continuation of Bay Area IWW's momentum in the region in a few ways. City Lights would be their third bookstore unionization in the area—they've previously unionized Moe's Books in Berkeley and a Copperfield's Books location in Petaluma—and start the new year strong after an impressive set of unionizations last year. In addition to the aforementioned Copperfield's union, in 2023 Bay Area unionized three Peets Coffee locations, the Berkeley Ecology Center, and salvage-center Urban Ore.

A familiar tune emerges for why the unionization is happening now: low pay and a perceived lack of care from City Lights. In a story on the union with Publishers Weekly, CLWU organizer Joan Toledo notes that some employees work on minimum wage ($18.07/hr); she is quoted here as saying the store has “strikingly low pay, despite working at one of the most famous independent bookstores in the world. She also adds the store has “no grievance process of any kind” which is obviously problematic.

1. Covering 15 total locations.