Tiptoe Tiger E14 🐯| Hubba Hubba 🥰
Edition #14 | Casting 101, listen to the machine, free culture, put down the phone, Beijing post-punk
Sup? It’s another week and below you will find another excellent edition of Tiptoe Tiger made for you with love.
Per usual, there are five unique & eclectic recommendations for you down below. Enjoy.
This week:
Hand Shadows
Stable Audio 2
Culture Pass
Social Media Breaks
Backspace
Hand Shadows to Be Throw Upon the Wall
Oh just a charming old book with fantastic illustrations that teaches you how to make shadows of camels, geese, deer, old men, boys, rabbits, birds, goats, dogs, elephants, pigs, and turtles with your hands! Go bananas.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12962/12962-h/12962-h.htm
Stable Audio 2
I try to feature AI and tech in general on Tiptoe Tiger as rarely as possible. There are entire libraries being written daily on artificial intelligence and new tools and I generally think it’s the duty of Tiptoe Tiger to look elsewhere. We seek the overlooked, not the looked over.
But I can’t let y'all miss this because it’s pretty crazy and I think not only is an interesting novelty but it can serve as an actual tool for musicians and producers.
Stable Audio, who’ve developed generative AI that generates audio, recently released their second model, Stable Audio 2. It’s insanely robust and easy to use.
You simply write a prompt (it can be literal, sonically descriptive or evocative, poetic, and abstract), set a desired length (Stable Audio 2 can generate up to 3 minute tracks).
Here’s one of my favorite full length songs I’ve generated with the tool using the prompt, “drum machine garage punk, vintage distortion, shoegaze sunshine, fast, four-on-the-floor, grungey, tijuana sunshine, washed out dreamy, elated” :
The textures are insanely beautiful.
My friend Joel generated this chilling, cinematic, and crazy composition with the prompt, “pebbles on water meet trombonist from manilla with synthesizer background, dark, ominous, ambient, frightening, manilla”:
But you don’t have to generate anything resembling fully composed music. You could use this tool to generate samples or loops or just ambient noise.
“snappy retro drum machine snare sample crushed 8bit sound”:
“80s house female vocal energizing sample”:
Try it out here: https://stableaudio.com/generate
When you make an account, you get a certain number of free generations each month. Be sure you’re using the Stable Audio 2 model while generating.
Culture Pass
I don’t think I need to extol the virtues of having a library card here. I’d be preaching to the choir.
Most people know by now that having a library card can give you access, not only to the facilities and resources of your local library, but huge archives of ebooks, streaming movies, music, journals, and more, all online. (Libby, Hoopla, Kanopy, also check out your library’s website of course.)
My most recent discovery though was that many cities have programs whereby, with a library card, you can get free access to certain museums, symphonies, plays, zoos, etc.. In NYC, the program is called “Culture Pass” but different cities have slightly different names for it.
Here are the cities I was able to discover in the U.S. that have programs like this:
Delaware (the whole state!)
A pox upon your city if you don’t have one! But of course, if you’re hellbent on going to the museum for free, be sure to look for free museum days– they’re common.
Know of any other cool or unusual benefits you can get or resources you can access with a library card? Let me know!
Social Media Breaks
For the month of April, I decided to abstain from participating in Instagram and deleted the app off of my phone. Hold your applause. I did not succeed in this 100%-- I had to use Instagram to do some marketing outreach for a friend and I used it to promote Tiptoe Tiger on two occasions. Nothing to be hard on myself about.
I did reduce my social media usage 95 - 98% of what it probably would have been in April. In that, this was a huge 110% success.
The mental release of not regularly checking social media was more significant than I anticipated. The few times I looked on social media this month, I realized that a lot of the thoughts and emotions I experience while scrolling on Instagram aren’t very… um, uplifting?
Though I missed seeing my friends’ beautiful faces, it’s been a psychic release to not constantly feel soldered to a whirring and buzzing social spectrum animated by the emotions, joys, and envies of everyone it touches. There’s a lot of psychic shit to get snagged on while on the feed. Social media can be triggering but you have to remind yourself that you can just put the gun down and walk away if you need to. Don’t shoot the mirror.
At times, I found myself missing cool events, music video releases, new works by artists I enjoy, conversations I would have had with friends if I had been checking social media. But you know what? Most of the time, I was unaware, blissfully.
Never lacking in creative “oomph,” I found myself even more creative when there was no persistent background compulsion to look at social media and without the thought to share things omnipresent.
With the month over, I have some new ideas about balance related to social media. Instagram isn’t without its benefits and possibilities but I think it should be engaged with very sparingly (for myself at least– maybe you’re way less compulsive than I).
The new balance I’m going to seek out I think is to redownload Instagram for up to 1hr/ day in the early evening and delete it anew each time. Or something, we’ll see! Either way, it’s nice remembering the obvious: you can always step away.
Backspace
I found the band, Backspace, from a video outlining the underground music scene in China. Backspace is a Beijing based band making stormy and sexy, driving post-punk with an air of intrigue to it. It’s like hazed-out psych surf Gang of Four with smokey vocals, if those words mean anything to you.
I enjoy working or writing while listening to Backspace. Since I don’t speak Mandarin, the music doesn’t interfere with the linguistic parts of my brain. It’d be a lot cooler if I spoke Mandarin though.
Here’s a link to their Spotify too where you can check out their albums:
Thank you!
Thanks for reading Edition #14 of Tiptoe Tiger.
I usually round out by feverishly begging people to reach out to me and to tell their friends about Tiptoe Tiger.
This time, I’d like to just point out that many of you have been reaching out and you have been telling your friends and for that, I greatly appreciate you. Thanks for reading! See you next week.
Chinchilla, Godzilla, cigarillo, Amarillo by morning,
Rob Hogan
Tiptoe Tiger’s Hot Thang
Tip is optional yet delightful: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/robhogan