New World Notes

Watch: Someone Made a Rap Song About Second Life and it Fricking SLAPS

For a user-created virtual world that's nearly 20 years old, it's difficult for anyone to create the first something in its category, but Zatch Ixchel has probably done just that: "MESHONME" is the first rap song inspired by Second Life that I'm aware of. And it's actually damn good, with a solid trap beat matched to Zatch's staccato rapping of uniquely clever rap lyrics that only SLers will understand:

I come thru with a lil sum suttin

You come thru with a Ruth to the function

Boy, you better poof, better move it or somethin

I'm bout to blow thru the damn roof with the dumb shit

Got a new suit with the HUD shit too

Only shed blood with a new tattoo  

They're so on point, I thought he must also rap in real life, but he tells me no.

"I choose to do it in relative privacy/anonymity, even in real life," as he puts it. "I suppose this is because I see it as a character I am playing. To put my face on something like that would feel inauthentic. In Second Life, I don't have that issue."

"MESHONME" is very much about SL culture: "I guess I was inspired by the inherent materialism of Second Life," Zach tells me, "which complements the Hip Hop genre rather well. I also thought it would be funny to watch someone try and flex that sort of bravado and wealth in the context of a virtual world."

Nailed it. As does the video, which stars his RL wife Lucie. Full lyrics below courtesy Mr. Ixchel, who's originally from New York -- in case anyone wants to get an East Coast/West Coast avatar rivalry going.

Hit Japanese Pop Composer Promotes New Solo Project With SL Video

This totally charming SL music video incorporates Japanese-themed locations with Japanese pop music, and there's a very good reason for that: Both the video and the music are by Yasushi Watanabe, and if you follow J-Pop, you're probably already familiar with his music.

"He composes music for many Japanese major singers including AKB48 and Nogizaka46 (do you know these big groups of Japanese girls?) He composed some music for anime and games too." (He also composed this banger by Guilty Kiss.)

That's all according to Sanny Yoshikawa, my occasional, indispensable Japanese translator (and an adorable squirrel in SL).

To promote his spin-off project, called BYNORAL, Sanny tells me Watanabe returned to Second Life recently, since he had first explored the platform almost a decade ago:

Meet Miro Shot: The Rising Star Rock Band Inspired by Virtual Worlds -- That’s Now Touring Inside Virtual Worlds

Miro Shot, a UK-based indie rock band that’s recently gained quite a lot of renown and airplay (especially in Europe), just announced a mixed reality/virtual world music tour starting next week, including live appearances in AltSpace VR and Sinespace. 

This is not surprising, because founder and lead singer Roman Rappak was greatly inspired by a chance encounter he had with a taxi driver who told him about his second life. 

If you listen carefully, in fact, you can even hear a snippet of audio from that conversation in “I Used To Say Things To Strangers” (above), one of the band's latest videos. In it, the driver is telling Roman about his alternate life in a Second Life community for Zen Buddhists. 

“He kept talking about ‘this world’, as if his life in Second Life was much more important,” Roman tells me now, with wonder. 

It helped him realize that “entire populations are more at home or feel more effective in the virtual world and have a greater level of agency there as opposed to the real world.” 

Rappak got out of the cab, he recalls, “feeling amazed and scared.” 

That was about three years ago, roughly around the time that the Brexit vote, which was greatly influenced by Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation of social media, had upended Britain, setting it on an unknowable course. “In a way Cambridge Analytica was a massively multiplayer RPG (Facebook) that made something fictional a reality,” Roman now observes.

With those two incidents, “I went through a complete epiphany, on how nothing a band can do can be a statement unless it adapts to the tools of the era.”

He means that in the same way how, in another era, artists like Jimi Hendrix used the latest technology in the 60s to create a sound that came to define that decade. It’s not enough to express how much of a change we’re going through, Roman believes, unless bands of this era adopt the technology of today.

“Things like Second Life say more just by existing than anything bands are doing,” as he puts it. "We should have gigs where after people leave, they feel like they had a view into a virtual world.”

Miro Shot has been doing just that over the last few years, performing shows where the audience wears VR headsets, putting them into an XR experience of the virtual and real. (The band even describes itself as “an AR/VR band/collective”.

A lot of these thoughts are reflected in this Miro Shot video and others. And while they also feature sardonic or darkly ironic images of technology use, it would be a mistake to assume their intent is anti-technology:

Soliloquy: Interactive Ambient Music App Inspired by COVID-19, Evolves as You Type In Thoughts & Feelings About the Pandemic (Also Open Source)

Soliloquy is a cool new interactive music app (Mac/PC) inspired by the Coronavirus and about the Coronavirus, created by VR/adaptative music artist Robert Thomas -- previously on New World Notes here, and some of his SL-based projects here --along with Sam Dudley. Originally created for a mentoring program for UK music agency Manners McDade, the interactivity is simple, but pretty powerful:

You run Soliloquy, and type in your thoughts and feelings about COVID-19 and the quarantine/lockdown. When you type in a keyword, the ambient music evolves to correspond to that mood:

Linden Lab Sponsors Live Concert Return of Seth Regan (AKA Mankind Tracer) to Second Life Next Sunday

Update, March 26: Seth just let me know the event has now been changed to be a fundraising drive to help combat COVID-19: "This Return Concert will be a benefit with 100% of your donations going to help the World Health Organization's effort to battle Coronavirus," he tells me. "Please consider making a donation. [I] will not have any tip jars at the event, but there will be clickable banners to the WHO donation page at the event. You can also click here to donate directly to WHO." 

Here's the kind of live event we haven't seen for quite awhile in Second Life: This coming Sunday (March 29) at 2pm Pacific, musician Seth Regan (known as Mankind Tracer in SL) is returning after a long absence from the virtual world to perform live in a four sim-wide concert.  The temporary sims come courtesy of Linden Lab, which is also promoting the show on its official social media channels and in the SL viewer itself.

The sims are not live on the Second Life grid yet, so follow Regan/Tracer's Facebook page for the SLurl when it's available, join his in-world group "Friends of Mankind", or click this Destination page.

Mr. Tracer amassed a relatively large fanbase within Second Life in his heyday there, but hasn't performed in SL since 2016 -- and that was for a fundraiser to benefit the children of his good friend and manager, after she tragically lost her life to cancer. Late last year, however, he approached Linden Lab with the idea for this month's free show [now a fundraising event to help the fight Coronavirus -- see update above] with any event donations going half to the American Heart Association and half to his mother, who suffers from heart disease.

Tracer tells me Linden Lab was happy to help sponsor the show with the free sims and promotion:

Listen: Music Inspired by Gödel, Escher, Bach Co-Created by an Artificial Intelligence Trained on Bach and Human Interaction With the AI

Click above to hear something fairly amazing: Music created by a merger of Bach, artificial intelligence, and live interaction by a human audience. It's from the new album "The Eternal Golden Braid" by my pal adaptive music/sound artist Robert Thomas, who's been creating works of music shaped by virtual reality, digital interaction, and AI for well over a decade. (As here with Chris Nolan and Hans Zimmer and more recently here with the LA Phil).

This current project, as the title suggests, was inspired by the landmark book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and incorporates music from Bach himself. As Robert explains in his liner notes:

This piece started life as a collection of renderings from a machine learning process which was trained on a large database of works by Bach. I then curated some fragments from it and used them as a starting point for a composition for string trio.... We wanted to explore having the audience interact live with the music in a collective strange loop, so I constructed the piece in two "levels" which the players could move between at any time. Level 1 was calmer and more introspective and represented by Blue. Level 2 was more chaotic and extroverted and represented by Red. When the piece was performed the audience held up colored cards, which were recognized by a machine learning camera on the stage. This fed a signal to the players which told them which musical notation to read. 

So this is, as Robert puts it to me now, "music composed in collaboration with an AI, which was trained on Bach, then performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra, with the audience interacting, guiding the music. Aspects of the music were inspired by themes in Gödel, Escher, Bach, though: At the start and end you hear kinda shepherd tones played by the strings; these are one of the strange loops referred to in Marcus du Sautoy's talk about [Hofstader's book]."

The live performance looked like this:

Watch, Listen: Teaser to Chouchou's New Concept Album "Hello, Astronauts”

This is a new teaser for "Hello Astronauts", the next concept album from Chouchou, the Japanese duo which launched its music career over a decade ago by performing live in Second Life. Since then they've gone on to gather a pretty large following, but if you're most familiar with Chouchou through its dreamy, otherworldly SL sim, this latest project will evoke similar feelings of dreamy otherworldliness. As Chouchou's spokesperson tells me: 

Watch: Chouchou Debuts First Experimental Album, Here's the Trailer

Here's a hypnotic and delicately beautiful video for your Thursday -- the trailer to "oort", the new album from Chouchou, the acclaimed Japanese duo with a beloved, now-preserved virtual world experience in Second Life, 

Ooort? It is, as the band's spokesperson told me: "[It's] the cloud-like origin of comets that are considered that they had information of creatures and struck the earth in ancient times. And that is how life arrived on earth, so it might be the origin of us."

The full album is for sale online here.

Chouchou's Upcoming Album Now for Pre-Sale, Listen to a Free Track

Chouchou, the acclaimed Japanese duo with a beloved, now preserved virtual world experience in Second Life, just put up a free teaser track to their upcoming new album "oort", which is available for pre-sale now, and like their SL installation, it's dreamy, twinkly, mysterious. Yes, it's called "oort" -- which as Chouchou's spokesperson says:

Chouchou's Legendary Second Life Sims Saved by Linden Lab; "The Babel", the Band's Interactive Music Sim Gone from SL in 2013, To Be Restored

Glorious news for fans of the Chouchou sims, the beloved, dreamy Second Life regions owned and created by Chouchou, the acclaimed Japanese music duo of the same name, After reports that the sims would be closed last Summer, the band and Linden Lab have reached an agreement to keep them in SL.

I wrote "sims" because that will include The Babel, the band's reactive music experience that hasn't been in Second Life since 2013. (See above.) "[It] will be back in Second Life thanks to Linden Lab's kind arrangements," Chouchou's spokesperson says.

Even better news: While other classic sims have been restored by Linden Lab, only to become non-interactive ghost towns, Chouchou tells me the band and its management will maintain a live presence in them: