Joseph Arruda posts here

http://josepharruda.com

[zeruch]

Art: irresolução da memória

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP: Seal "Life's What You Make it" (a Talk Talk cover) live 2026

I haven’t been really into Seal after his third self-titled album; not sure why, but he by and large has not produced anything that’s captured my ears much since. That said, his voice is still very much intact, and he’s clearly a solid live performer, and in this case takes a haymaker swing at a fairly to-spec cover of one of my favorite Talk Talk tunes, Lifes What You Make It.In particular, Zach…

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 156: Steve Hackett & Steve Rothery "The Black Sea"

The last time ex-Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett worked with another guitarist named Steve it was current but also ex-Yes 6 (and 12) stringer Steve Howe, in 1986, on the sole album released by GTR; a kind of more cerebral follow up to Howes previous project that decade, Asia. It followed the Asia idea of progressive rock musicians slumming in AOR/arena rock, and generally well executed. But a…

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 155: Flotsam & Jetsam "Wading Through the Darkness"

I have always associated Flotsam & Jetsam as “the band that Jason Newstead left to join Metallica” in the mid 80s, but the truth is that they were (and are) a solid metal band in their own right. This remains my favorite track from them, which is a bit of an anomaly (they are more of a thrash metal band than the slow, menacing stalk of this cut), but they have plenty in their catalog worth…

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 154: Balming Tiger "Oui"

This is new to me, as I generally have ignored a lot of South Koreas musical exports; the focus on an endlessly repetitive mass-production line of fungible K-Pop ‘idols’ (which I’ve always argued is largely U.S. R&B repackaged for initially regional consumption, a position I seem to not be alone in, as evidenced by a growing body of discourse, both on the street, and in academia). But Balming…

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

RIP James "Blood" Ulmer

Back in the late 90s I got wise to Ornette Coleman and his harmolodic phase; a concept that is equal parts avant-garde jazz with an attitude that is punk as hell, and influenced a lot of great artists, mostly in NYC, who pushed an immense number of boundaries. One of those people is James “Blood” Ulmer, who played with Coleman, and then carved out a wildly careening path since. He passed away…

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Art: the San Mateo series

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

VOC-25 is...really weird, and really awesome bit of art, that can be used to create other art.

VOC-25 is a conceptual vocal synthesizer with 25 sets of plastic teeth, each set representing a unique note on a keyboard, crafted by Love Hulten. I dig these kinds of utilitarian but aesthetically eccentric concepts.

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP: 153, Sonny Rollins live in Copenhagen 1974

RIP to the Saxophone Colossus. Many years ago date night was dinner in the city and Sonny Rollins live at the Masonic Theater circa 2006. It was a regal brass workout, as he played an uninterrupted single set for 90 minutes. This set however, is shorter (but no less powerful), and in Denmark. His sound was massive, and his expression seemingly limitless as an improviser.

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

AI and Thinking In and Out Of (a) Box

“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.” He’s right, and it’s not even just AI; it’s a variation on the same problem many C-Suites have when sufficiently detached from the actual process of making stuff, which in a sufficiently large enough org, is almost impossible to…

[zeruch]

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 151: Scars "Author!, Author!" (1981)

One of those things you find by random chance decades after it disappeared from the pop culture landscape. I managed to recently watch Big Gold Dream (not big budget, but tells a big story), a documentary about the post-punk scene of the 80s in Scotland, and this band was mentioned. I managed to find this release online, and I dig it.It’s raw, wiry, anxious and has parts that remind me of early…

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Basquiat (1996)

I didn’t really know about Basquiat the artistuntil his death made the news, but this biopic/film solidified my interest in him, and since then his work has exerted a strong gravity on me. The film came out in the 90s and has an astonishing cast of names that would become bigger with each subsequent decade: Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Gary Oldman, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Hopper, Claire Forlani,…

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 150: Jazz in Harumi Murakami Novels Mix from NTS

She hipped me to his writing, and we listened to jazz together for over a decade, so I think of her when I see references to him. Several of the artists in this list (Hancock, Rollins, Coleman) we saw together live, which is just adds to the nostalgia.

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Art: A Perda Nunca Desaparece, Apenas Muda de Forma

The title is Portuguese for Loss Never Leaves, Only Changes Shape. What started as what I thought would be an addition to the Disquiet series, kind of went into another direction as I tried some different things; I once accidentally bought a single tube of “water mixable oil colour” (I thought it was gouache and I think was misplaced in the gouache section of an art supply store near Joshua…

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

No Meta, I don't Think You Understand much of anything...

I do not need my camera to be “smarter” at any stage of anything. Smart-anything just really refers to something that places more telemetry and privacy invading data extraction into your personal space. I certainly do not need it to “understand” and damn sure do not want it “interpreting” any media I have. There was a time when this kind of ad-copy might at best be perceived as innocuous, but at…

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 149: Ok Goodnight "22"

I wasn’t terribly familiar with OKG other than knowing their frontwoman also does music for the animated webseries RWBY (which no, I do not watch or have any interest in, but I am a former gallery staffer at DevArt in the pre-Wix days, so there’s tons of pop culture knowledge in my head I have zero interest in but has made its way in there regardless) and that the group is yet one of the many…

View On WordPress

[zeruch]

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 148: Kinsey Sessions (w/ Danny Carey) cover The Police "Driven To Tears"

Scott Kinsey is probably most famous for being a co-founder of the jazz-rock fusion Tribal Tech, and he perennially holds sessions at the Baked Potato in SoCal, with a rotating case of collaborators, and in this case has Danny Carey (Tool, Beat, Pigmy Love Circus) on drums, as they all take a swing at The Police classic hit, Driven to Tears.This is frankly one of the better Police covers (studio…

View On WordPress