Hometown Feilding is the artist name from Mark Sadgrove, a New Zealander living in Tokyo. We all know about the whole kiwi noise scene but while most of it is rock orientated, New Zealand has some of the greatest musicians working with computers such as Rosy Parlane, Dion Workman, Richard Francis and Sandgrove. Mark is the probably the only programmer of all of them. Simulations is a playful collection of pieces with a warm and natural feeling to it. The more you listen to Simulations, the more you can relate to the New Zealand aesthetic but in a different and very personal way. What at the beginning seems to sound like an early electronic version of African music then leads to a second half that, under a kind of dirt behind the digital sounds, demonstrates an exquisite sense of time, pace and development.
Computers were originally created to be tools of science. Voltages at physical points in a circuit represented binary numbers. The manipulation of those voltages by logic gates in a sequential manner allowed "swift" calculations originally useful mainly for scientists wanting to simulate systems whose mathematical description was opaque. Software was seen as little more than a statement of intent, its form largely dictated by mathematical necessity. Where an algorithm expressed an idea with uncanny succinctness, or using a clever trick, the author might feel compelled to publish their code in the usual
spirit of sharing which allows the scientific enterprise to move forward with astonishing rapidity. The reward for writing good software was no more and no less than the reward for achievement in other fields of science - recognition and satisfaction. Certainly the need to keep the code a secret was foreign to the very nature of computer science.
Some time in the 80s, computers and their software came to represent something other than scientific machinery. They were transformed into products that served a non-scientific public, often in ways that were trivial compared with the computer's full capabilities. From this point on, the openness of software source code in the scientific tradition switched from being an obvious standard to a liability for companies staking their name on providing a certain user experience on the personal computer. The situation was compounded in the 90s when the capacity and processing power of regular machines (relentlessly following Moore's law) became such that music and video became digitally tractable.
The transition of computers from scientific tools and objects of intellectual fascination to commodities which supply entertainment is both fascinating and troubling. The success of computers has led to
the paradox that restrictions are now being imposed which narrow the possible scientific applications of a computer. Digital rights management and laws such as the digital millenium copyright act effectively
outlaw certain numbers, programs and processes on a computing machine which in principle knows no bounds other than it's finite memory and processor speed. Likewise, the proliferation of the closed source software model has led to a situation where the operation of computers necessarily remains opaque even to the curious user.
The most magnificent scientific tool of the last millenium has become a hobbled toy in the present one.
It should be said that even for those who don't care to know the inner workings of a computer, the ready availability of huge computing power has been a boon, especially in the field of music. However, computers are even more powerful when they are seen for what they are - scientific tools. The software-libre movement deserves your support for reinstating the spirit of curiosity and scientific openness to the forefront of the world of computing.
The music here is an almost unrestricted number. Please copy it at will; the only restriction is that you follow chosen license's attribution requirement.
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