by Ben Spatz
It occurred to me that DJ battling is much like the Glass Bead Game in Hesse's book (which I haven't read), in that the gamepieces are samples of anything. There is no code of rules, which would have to limit the game from what Hesse describes, but on the other hand there can indeed be a winner. In the Hipbone versions like Tenstones, you get this neat little game, but it's really nothing more than a kind of degraded form of conversation. You would never choose to play Tenstones rather than having a conversation, except if you were enamored with the idea of playing a "game." In a conversation, it's the same kind of linking of concepts, but your discussion of them can be as complex as language, which so far goes beyond any algorithm humans have programmed. However, DJ battling is obviously a separate thing with its own worth.
I imagine a futuristic machine that plays samples, and the samples are in the form of glass beads. These glass beads can be read by lasers inside the machine. Each bead is an album or a recorded speech or a collection of sound effects. You have this machine with two screens and two bead inputs, and you carry your collection of beads, and you throw them in and the contents come up on the screen, where you can digitally fade, scratch, and mix them. Or maybe the samples come from the internet. This kind of battling could come to include not just all music but all sound, and eventually all recorded material including text, pictures, movies, and holofilms.