Raffaella – Ballerina

Raffaella feels like a bit of an interesting oddity in my list of “artists I like to listen to”. For the most part, to be frank, she feels like kind of a nobody level musician, though not for not trying pretty hard to get somewhere. Though Wikipedia says she was dating Justice Smith for a while and she got a set on Vevo Discover, which is pretty sweet. I’m not really here to gossip though. My first exposure was when she opened for Sigrid in 2019. Before the show I started listening to this album just fro the sake of having some idea of who she was.

I’ve been a fan since then though. I actually listen to more Raffaella these days than Sigrid, which is also amusing. It actually feels like a bit of a shame that she doesn’t seem to be making a ton of traction in her career, because she has a really interesting and varied sound and a lot of clever lyrics going on in her tracks.

The opening track of her first EP, Ballerina, is Sororicide, an airy jazzy track that follows a little story about a girl who seems to both wants to reject and embrace the whole concept of being part of the popular crowd, and how ultimately it’s all kind of a big fake sham. This is a bit of a running theme throughout this album’s tracks. A desire to be part of the cool crowd while trying to reject it for individuality. I really like the use of vocalizations as part of the backing track to the lyrics, with the oooohh and the little do do do that pop up.

It’s followed by Bruce Willis. On a side note, I really like how this is one of those rare songs where the title isn’t just the chorus line. It has a lot of the same feel and themes of Sorocicide, though it has a much fuller sound to it. I like how the hook breaks out the way it does each time from the calmer lyrical sections.

The third track on this EP, NASA’s Fake, has a more upbeat and poppy sound to it, which a much more prominent drum line to it and a bit more synth effects to it. It also has a lot more interesting variety to it’s melodies then the first two tracks with it’s bopping chorus and it’s little break out quiet interlude near the end. It’s one of my favorite tracks on the album.

The album takes a low key turn for a bit with Hell Yeah (yeah yeah yeah yeah). The airy and light feel returns for this track as well. The title track, Ballerina, picks up the pace a bit and has a nice little inspiration, autobiographical feel to it, but keeps the more light feel up with it’s pleasant piano melodies. There are actually quite a few nice little underlying piano melodies all throughout this album. It gives it a nice light Jazzy feel overall. In the case of Ballerina, it certainly evokes the feel of a ballerina dance. Based on when I saw her on stage, and some of the videos I’ve watched, Raffaella also seems to do a lot of her performance on her barefoot tip toes.

The last track is probably my favorite track, with Balaclava (like the ski mask). It really feels like a nice culmination for the album as it takes a lot of the elements of the previous tracks and stacks them all up for one last hurrah. It also tells a little story about breaking and entering into rich people’s homes, which I find amusing.

I’ll probably do future posts on her second album, but in general, I really enjoy Raffaella’s music, and I really hope she can get somewhere bigger in the future.

Aurora – All My Demons Greeting Me As a Friend

Released 2016.03.11

I don’t know exactly when my first exposure with Aurora was, but I can say my exposure of actually becoming a fan, was through Sigrid. Which is kind of funny because I feel like it more often would go the other way. I don’t know that Sigrid and Aurora are “friends” exactly, but they have, I dunno, been in the same room together, and re both originally from Norway. Though Sigrid seems a bit more based in England, Aurora is decidedly Norwegian.

I’m sure overtime my music tastes will evolve again, but for the time being, Aurora is definitely my top pick for favorite artist. I can’t really articulate exactly why, but there is just something, quote magical and wonderful about every track she has done. Like, seriously, solidly, every track. Her musical style reminds me a lot of Björk or Enya.

I’m not here now to write about every track, though in time, probably, I will. I am here to talk about her first album, All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend, or, for my own sanity, simply All My Demons. Similar to the case with CHVRCHES, Aurora is an artist that I am sure I heard before becoming a fan, I just didn’t really put much into it. Her first album, is also my top most listened to album, at least, according to last.fm. I’ll be running through the Deluxe version of this album.

There is a lot of variety to have here, but all of them share a sort of, primal energy. Aurora incorporates a lot of traditional Norwegian sound and vocalizations along with modern electronic music and methods. It creates an incredibly powerful vehicle which Aurora uses to push her message. Oddly enough, while her message have a clear, “love everything and everyone” sort of motif, she has mentioned before that a lot of her songs are left to “personal interpretation” by the listener.

The album itself is up and down on it’s emotion and tones as well. Almost all of the tracks are underpinned by a sort of lingering sorrow, but other push it to the forefront. Some tracks like Runaway, Winter Bird, and Lucky, which are hopeful but sad. Others are much more sorrow and sadness, like Under the Water, I Went to Far, and of course, Murder Song. Murder Song is particularly interesting in it’s two versions, the less often heard album version has a much larger and forceful push to it, while the more commonly heard acoustic version bonus track is much much more low key.

But there is also plenty of emotion from the upbeat tracks, which are some of my favorites on the album. Warrior is the commonly known classic. Running with the Wolves is very full of primal energy and builds to a fantastic climax. Conqueror has a great beat and tune, though Aurora has mentions she dislikes the track. I don’t know, but I suspect because it has a bit of a, subservient theme, which feels like it pushes against her otherwise fully independent spirit personality.

Probably my favorite song on All My Demons… is Black Water Lilies. It feels a bit less complex than a lot of the other tracks on the album but I really like the running melodies and overall sort of, happy lyrics with a sad-ish sound it has throughout, though it’s mostly positive energy. It wasn’t a song that was initially my favorite, but its one that grew to be so after digging deeper into Aurora’s overall sound.

I can’t really say I can give an unbiased overall opinion here, but i can say it’s my favorite Aurora Album and it’s also one of my favorite, overall albums.

Code Project – JavaScript Pixel Camera

Sometimes I do projects that end up being entirely fruitless and pointless.

Ok, maybe not entirely fruitless, but sometimes I get caught up in an idea, and end up essentially just sort of, reinventing the wheel, in a complicated way. For starters, I got caught up with this little tutorial here: https://thecodingtrain.com/challenges/166-image-to-ascii . It uses JavaScript, to convert the input from your webcam, into ASCII art. It’s a nice little step by step process that really explains what is going on along the way so you get a good understanding of the process.

And I got it to work out just fine. I may mess with it and add the darkness saturation back in because it helps bring emphasis to the video but the finished product is neat.

I then decided I wanted to see if I could modify the code to do some different things.

Specifically, Instead of ASCII characters, I wanted it to show colored blocks, pixels if you will. I managed to modify the code, and the output is indeed a pixilated video, but it’s not video, it’s constantly refreshing text. The problem is, it’s writing out a page where every block, is wrapped in a <font> styling tag, which means it’s writing out a ton of extremely dense HTML code and pushing it out, so it’s a little weird and laggy and pretty resource intensive to run.

I also image, there is a way to simply, downsize the input resolution, and upscale the video, to achieve the exact same effect.

One variant I made also just converts images to single page documents of “pixels”. but, ugly font based pixels, to achieve an effect you can get by resizing an image small then large.

Like I said, kind of fruitless and pointless, but I got caught up in the learning and coding part of things.

I also may go ahead and do some additional modifications to the code to make things a bit more interesting. I could try using it to make my own Game Boy Camera style interface, for example. Then make it output actual savable pictures. I found a similar project to that online but it would be cool to code my own up and give it an actual interface.

Anyway, here is the code for the jankey video JavaScript, sketch.js first then index.html after. Also a Demo is here, though I may remove it int he long run, especially if I make an improve project.

let video;
let asciiDiv;

function setup() {
  noCanvas();
  video = createCapture(VIDEO);
  video.size(48, 48);
  asciiDiv = createDiv();
}

function draw() {
  video.loadPixels();
  let asciiImage = '';
  for (let j=0; j < video.height; j++) {
     for (let i = 0; i <video.width; i++) {
      const pixelIndex = (i+j * video.width) * 4;
      const r = video.pixels[pixelIndex + 0];
      const g = video.pixels[pixelIndex + 1];
      const b = video.pixels[pixelIndex + 2];
      const pixelColor = "rgb(" + String(r) + "," + String(g) + "," + String(b) + ")";
       // console.log(pixelColor);
//      const c = '<font color=rgb('+r+','+g+','+b+')>'+asciiShades.charAt(charIndex)+'</font>';
      const c = '<span style="color: '+pixelColor+';">&#9724;</>';
      asciiImage += c;
    }
    asciiImage += "<br/>";

  }
  asciiDiv.html(asciiImage);

}

index.html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/p5.js/1.6.0/p5.js"></script>
    <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/p5.js/1.6.0/addons/p5.sound.min.js"></script>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
    <meta charset="utf-8" />

  </head>
  <body>
    <main>
    </main>
    <script src="sketch.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>