Vibiant

OK dammit, it’s been long enough, the Fit is here, the Fit is fully broken in, and I’ve done enough laps around Ohio now to have some sense of what it is actually trying to accomplish while I’m driving it. 

 First, some particulars on me.  I don’t race, I stopped street racing years ago, and most of the time i am usually trying to eke out maximum MPG to really piss off those fools who shell out thousands more on hybrids and can’t match the mileage numbers I get with my otherwise ordinary car.  [I get between 39-43 MPG in mixed city/highway, by the way.  EPA est. for the Fit is 31/38 city/highway.]  But at the same time I do enjoy finding the apex, and driving in a spirited fashion.  G forces are fun. 

 Now, we can’t go for a drive unless the car is prepped properly.  Mechanically, the car is still completely stock, right down to the 175/65-14 all season Dunlops.  They are quiet, and ride pretty well, but I keep looking at Tire Rack ads for acceptable plus zero sizes.  Stock pressures are 32 psi front and rear, but mex. press. on the tires themselves is a healthy 44 psi, so for the moment anyway, I’ve set the pressure at 40 psi front and rear.  Impact harshness is up, obviously, but shoulder wear is down during hard cornering.   There are a number of 270 degree, constant radius entrance ramps to I-90 in my area, I would estimate the radius to be about 300 feet.  They are posted at 35 MPH, and going 45 MPH through them at stock tire pressures means moderate understeer and scuffing on the front tires  a little more than an inch up the sidewall.  40 psi. doesn’t change the understeer, but does preserve the sidewalls.  I carry about .75 pounds of stuff in the glove box and front storage cubby, a couple CD’s , a flashlight, papers, and about 24 pounds of trunk stuff, tire pump, 2 gallons of windshield washer, jumper cables, etc.  Yes yes, but this is my daily driver, and experience has shown that nothing tempts Murphy’s Law more to give you a flat than to run without a spare or jack.  Leaving the spare out of my 1979 CHevy Impala did help, but the three flats I had in three years made the proposition less attractive. 

 Originally, my cheif concern had been the elctric power steering, I was a little concerned that the weighting would feel artificial.  If the car is stopped, very slight movements of the wheel will first take up the slack, admittedly, this steering system has very little slack, and then you feel the tourque from the electric boost motor kick in.  While moving though, the effect is transparent.  The wheel weighting is a little on the heavy side, the steering on my SE-R was lighter, 2nd gen RX-7’s are quite a bit lighter, but the motion feels fluid and low-friction.  The steering ratio is fast, almost Z51 Corvette fast.  The car feels stable at speed, even high speeds, [long, flat, open sections of Northern Michigan at say, 95, felt quite stable] and you can still get lots of wheel angle with little turning., my hands rarely leave 3 and 9 [thumbs on the spokes] in normal maneuvers.  The throttle is light and needs some finess, I kept noticing at first that the revs would zing up almost a grand during every upshift.  Apparently, my right foot was trying to take up gas pedal slack that wasn’t there, or I wasn’t letting off the gas as much as the car would like.  My technique doesn’t feel any different now, but I have stopped doing that.  The flywheel doesn’t feel specifically heavy, but it does hang onto revs, though in truth no more than other moderns cars.  One big surprise was the lack of engine braking.  I’ve never driven a 2-stroke Saab, so I can’t say that it freewheels quite that much, but I’m used to small cars with high compression engines and short gearing, which usually works out to a big fat jolt of engine braking.  The Fit gently coasts down to idle, almost like it had an automatic.  According to the Helm manual, the ECU shuts off the fuel injectors on overrun as a fuel saving strategy, so that may be the culprit.  The brakes are strong, the EBD seems to make up for stomping on the brakes, it is very difficult to get the ABS to engage if all four wheels are on dry pavement.  Get any one of them airborne, and it a different story.   I haven’t managed to corner hard enough to tricycle and trail brake at the same time, but given what the car does over bigger pavement lumps while braking suggests to me that it will go into “ice mode” in those conditions, which will make the braking very poor in those circumstances.  Bear that in mind.

 Since the car is front drive, 64% of the weight up front, and no rear sway bar, it car will understeer, that’s just a fact of life.  On constant-radius turns, the understeer is mild, but present.  Decreasing-radius turns can be tricky, you have to be very concious of weight transfe,.  It is all too easy to pile too much weight onto the outside front tire, which leads to massive understeer and yoyu just plow right off your intended line in a perfect tangent.  I dove for a left turn lane with too much steering angle and too much decelleration and totally missed the lane I was aiming at.  It was like I was driving in snow. 

 Lift throttle oversteer does not seem to be a problem, you can take that any way you want to.  A previous Hyundai Accent I had was quite sensitive to it, which made the car highly maneuverable, but uncomfortably twitchy, almost to the point of driving it like a rear-engined Porsche; brake only in a straight line, and accelerate through corners.  In that car, you could quite clearly feel the dynamic center of gravity move back anf forth throughout the length of the car, depending on what you were doing.  THe Fit is far less sensitive to it, which is great, most of the time, but a little tail-happiness wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, from time to time.  The Progress Group supposedly had a rear sway bar available now, I’ll have to check that out. 

Welcome!  If you’ve gotten this far then you’ve probably at least listened to the CD.  How you got the CD in the first place, I have no idea.  That’s not the important part.  The important part is now you have been exposed, as it were, to Remodeled Music.  Whatever the hell that is.  I’ll attempt to explain:

 If you imagine remixed music as the combining of two musical events; say a trip hop version of “V-8 Ford Boogie” by Ronnie Dawson, say, you have the Ronnie parts as being one musical idea, and the “umpshi, umpshi” and scratching as a second one, which conveys the impact of music without it actually being a song in particular.  Not really much different than a mashup, except that each of the two elements could stand on their own as individual songs, since they were, once.  If you think that the whole  can be greater than the parts, then the creativity in the collusion of elements is what makes the mashup a song. 

Now, imagine using more than two musical elements, where they need not be complete musical ideas in and of themselves, where the final product has more of a “plunderphonic” feel to it, while still strictly adhering to the precepts of the modern pop song.  More to it than remixing, and when I came up with the term in 2000, mashups, as a name, didn’t exist yet, so I called it Remodeled Music.  [I even capitalized it for effect.]

It was a long road to develop the form into what you see today.  I first experimented with the idea in 2000, looking for ways to do found sound collage that didn’t have to sound quite so much like Negativland.  Being a hip-hop/electronica fan from way back, that was where my head was at.  I experimented with the short musical phrases I found in TV commercials, and some of those experiments found their way onto an EP for the Thunderbunnies, and experimental band I helped found in 1994 with Every Man.  It sounded nothing like other TB material, but it sounded interesting.  Further experiments with a more pure electronica sound for the stillborn Press The Button album “Operation: Big Beat” led to a number of songs constructed from as many as six different songs, looped and matched by hand [I hadn't discovered sequencing on the computer yet; I'm old. .  fashioned] on to a 4-track.  At the time, I was still hiding the sources for many of my loops: the television.  This first whole album of the stuff, “Remodeled”, had a mixed recption in the found sound community.  About half of the people who heard it didn’t feel that the samples were modified enough to make it my music, it was more like piracy, than sampling.  I could see their point; one needed an encyclopedic knowledge of television and advertising to figure out what sample came from where.  I was at an impasse.

 Not long after this, I discovered Acid, and had a small revelation which led to a much larger revelation.  In this case, Acid was the Sony’s sequencing software, and my small revelation, was that since this was sampling anyway, there was no particular reason to hide the sources of my sampling.  This also meant that I could use a much wider variety of commercials and promo spots, since I was no longer constrained to using spots which had complete musical phrases in them sans announcers.  These two things made the next project possible:  Remodeled X, a 58 minute groove through the world of advertising.  The samples themselves were anchored musically, instead of being “text based” as it were, so if I cut off an announcer in the middle of a word, then, no bother.  The result of which was something else I hadn’t expected: lyrics.  Of a kind.  You can tell from the tone, they want to sell you something, but they never seem to get around to it.  You can also dance to it, which also seemed important, not enough found sound audio collage is danceable, in my opinion.  It also managed to prove what many people suspected all along:  the best music is not found on the radio, but in the commecials, usually on TV, since only that medium can still get away with pretty pictures and a rockin’ groove to drive desire. 

Remodeled X was popular, more popular than Remodeled, anyway, but I still wans’t there yet.  I had hit upon the right formula, but the sound was not yet at the sufficient level of complexity.  The creative spark of constructuion, I came to think, was still too small.  This ultimately led to Remodeled X minus 1; The Conquest of Light Music.  .  Whereas Remodeled X used 22 commercials , promo spots, and a bit off of Iranian State Television from the 70’s, Remodeled X minus 1 used 113 such sources, dramatically thickening the sound and making it infinitely more difficult for me to construct.  Now we finally start to see harmonics between the sampled loops creating entirely new sounds, drum synchopations perhaps unthought of ever before, and huge numbers of offers, rebates, exaltations, and other advertising tricks richocheting incompletely through the atmosphere, rebounding harmlessly off each other and off you.  Their teeth missing, their poison drained. 

Remodled X minus 1 is available through me and other secret agents of plunderphonia, like random nude fellows at BM.  emails send to paul@vibiant.com will get you a copy, provided you provide me a working mailing address and some form of compensation.  The music itself is free, of course, but the artwork ain’t, nor is the shipping, and so some chocolate chip muffins or whatever music projects you’re working on right now or just some something else interesing, would probably be fine.