the coming face of all-on technology

in 1984 my brother (the world's greatest mechanical engineer) was having a poker game at my parents' house and i was watching videos on t.v. herbie hancock's "rockit" came on. it was a video i'd only seen once before, but i immediately burst into the game, grabbed my brother's best friend mid-hand by the lapel and said, "you need to come see this right now."

my brother's pal was a hardcore jazz musician and he didn't realize that herbie had, to use his expression, "lost his mind." he also had never had any exposure to scratching or sampling and he stood, literally agape, as grand mixer d.s.t. did his thing while hancock's keyboards wept and robotic legs kicked (mostly on-beat) on the screen.

"remember this moment for the rest of your life," i said. "what you are hearing is a concept that will radically and permanently change the face of modern music." to this day he considers me to be a messiah of music for that announcement -- i think i just got lucky.

but i'm about ready to get lucky again.

the birdhead passed me this link this morning and it represents the next logical step in the progression -- it is to video, music and live performance what record scratching was to music 20 years ago. watch it under high bandwidth conditions only. you may have to give it a couple of passes to let the underlying concept (and potential) sink in. keep in mind that what you're looking at here was put together by a couple of very talented hacks, what you want to do is consider the bigger picture.

{an aside for americans: i'm guessing that your inherent supremacy issues will make this guy's accent sound german, and therefore, imperialist/nihilist/"not good." rest assured, he's a swede. what you may not realize, that we are fully in touch with here in finnmärk for geographical reasons, is that sweden is in the middle of a full-pitched battle over trademark and copyright issues. it's getting big enough that process may actually gain parliament seats -- the video link above is rife with references to that effort. a very good background article about this, in english for you monoglots, can be found here.}