Joseph Arruda posts here

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.

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.

“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…

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…

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,…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

Last minute I got invited by my friend Rob to join in, and who can say no to that? Third time seeing them, and this time the scale of the spectacle was what I would describe as a merger of Pink Floyd extravagant spectacle with the bleak industrial aesthetics of either Ridley Scott’s Alien film, or a death duel with Survival Research Labs.It was quite exceptional.

“The probe will look at air carriers’ policies and procedures to determine if they are safeguarding personal info properly, unfairly or deceptively monetizing it, or sharing it with third parties, the agency said yesterday. If they’re indeed doing anything “problematic,” they can look forward to scrutiny, fines, and new rules, says the DOT.” While this is specific to airlines and their data…

I’ve met Ren several times around town (she’s a staple of the South Bay live scene); an amazing talent with a distinct voice, she knows how to curate a setlist that fuses jazz, Americana, blues and folk with fluency. Here is a gig from last June, at the now defunct (but utterly memorable venue) Art Boutiki.

Most of my abstract work starts like a lot of jazz…improvised. I play with palettes, mediums, surfaces, until something interesting emerges. Often, at some stage, something clicks and then I start to refine down a specific trajectory that gets constantly recalibrated as I go. From time to time though, I actually get a very specific (often absurd) idea, and I sketch a loose idea of it out in a…

…or a variation on a theme of a possible one. When I first picked up an issue of AF in the indie shelf at R&K Comics on the El Camino, I was only interested in the fact that it was created by Howard Chaykin, whose work on a proverbial reboot of The Shadow for DC Comics brought intense attention to a creator with a penchant for not only hard boiled crime noir, but a visual style that is still…

Today, I’ve taken the time to breakdown a significant portion of a nattering screed Rishi Kumar provided to The San Jose Spotlight. I’ve grown so tired of these soapbox pitchdecks as policy announcements that I was actually compelled to shoot this one down for it being so farcically lightweight. “For decades, residents of Santa Clara County have endured inconsistent assessments, a broken appeals…