Torley Lives

Awhile back with solo piano 7 — now downloaded over 100,000 times on the Internet Archive — I encouraged prospective remixers to do their best and take my works in new directions. I was more interested in experimental/glitchy remixes still retaining strong melody than, say, 4/4 straightahead dancefloor looping, but Maximus Fowler of Maximus Productions has come up with the best of both worlds! Listen to his remix of "Swayless" which you can DOWNLOAD (MP3, no crap DRM!):

and here's the my original which you can also DOWNLOAD:

What I particularly enjoyed about his take was the bleeps and stutters he added at points; somewhat reminiscent of the transcendental collaborations Ryuichi Sakamoto + Alva Noto mastered, with a twinge of BT's This Binary Universe (one of my faves). Always luv influences coming back in a fresh way!

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Magnetosphere revisited (audio by Tosca) from flight404 on Vimeo.

At first blush, it seems absurd. At second blush, you may be blushing precisely because of how obvious it is. I thought about this possibility shortly after reading about the rumored new visualizer in iTunes 8. While not a revolutionary leap, consider the gap: most VJ (Video Jockey) software is hard to use but can produce spectacular effects. Their much simpler siblings, music visualizers which "read" the music to provide trippy animations which match what you're hearing, offer some of the same effects but with a limited degree of control — you may be able to cycle through visualizations at the touch of a key like MilkDrop can, but compositing and other fundamentals of a full-fledged VJ program are out of the question.

Why does this make sense? I'll explain: several years ago, it seemed laughable that Apple would enter the audio sequencer market — there were plenty of fine 3rd-party solutions, including Emagic's Logic line. Well, in 2002, Apple bought Emagic, and Logic went Mac-only. Further in the timeline, Apple took the guts of Logic and wove it into GarageBand, an easy way of making your own music, and the audio studio equivalent to what iPhoto does for budding photographers, or what iMovie does for aspiring filmmakers.

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I hear this wonderful question a fair bit, and I emphasize remotely in the title — most companies, even high-tech ones, will only hire for onsite, in-office positions. Not every person or every job is well-suited for working remotely from home, or as Pathfinder Linden (John Lester) and myself prefer, "networked" (since "remote" can sound… well, too distant!).

But ah, we're special. We really are.

You see, Linden Lab didn't just establish a virtual world where people can connect across the globe, no matter how physically distant — we "eat our own dog food", and try experiments in remote work for ourselves that I'm hopeful will scale and be adapted by other companies, like Cali & Jody's ROWE. This is the epitome of leading by example.

My answer to "What's it like to work remotely for Linden Lab?":

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I get cool tools suggested to me from various sources, including my contact form and in my vast surfing of SL-stuffs 'round tha Intarwebs. Some of it comes to me directly from the creators, others are from avid fans — if you find any of this useful + fun, say thankya to the makers, and spread the word onwards. That's how we prosper here!

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