Sunday, October 13, 2013

How to paint algorhythmicly w/ sampled images.

good morning.
sampling images + angle offset and repetition along Y Axis, sloppily done.




Friday, September 21, 2012

Homeboy has no filter.
And is nice w/ the drums.
Always glad to see something like that live.

Friday, May 4, 2012

No Win Linn



Last night I decided to unplug the MIDI cables, hit record, and pressed buttons and keys without any real idea what I was going to do. 

this is it.












Thursday, January 13, 2011

progress


My perseverance has served me well. I tested the above device panel for the S5000 earlier. Everything works well. Well, except the Filter window. No images, but it's not hard to figure out whats going on. Here are the device panels for controlling an Akai S5000/6000 & Korg DW-8000/EX-8000 via Cubase. I'll expound on this subject on a later date, and give due credit to the author of the device panel...

I've noticed a minimally consistent bit of traffic here. I've been thinking about what might have caused this, and I can only assume it's for the sample packs I said I'd upload. That or somebodys turntable crapped out on them... Anyways, I've decided to upload the source .wav files for the micron as they are. it's like a 250mb file but screw it. im going nuts trying to trim it so I'll leave the editing to the one downloading it. I'll record the unfiltered KPR-77 kit tonight, and set up a soundcloud account for the KPR-77 + filter "experiment".

Hopefully I'll have download links by Sunday.
I'll leave you with two records I can't stop listening to.





Saturday, January 8, 2011

time for a change.

the SU700 crapped out, The KPR-77's clap/cymbal jack puts out excessive white noise, and the Poly-61m is under the bed waiting for me to find some new IC for it, so I said "fuck it". why put more effort into fixing shit than making music.

Since then I've been spending countless hours sitting in front of my gear working on music.

it's time to re-vamp.

and fix that damn formatting.


Monday, August 30, 2010

Yamaha SU700

Picked one up on CL last Wed. Had to play around with it to get it to work, but it's up and running now. Yea 8-bit.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Bleep, Bloop, and Tape Loops : a brief overview of electronic sound manipulation in Avant Garde and Musique Concrète

upon finding out I listened to Sonic Youth a neighbor of mine let me borrow a Pere Ubu box set.
"If you like avant garde,"

but what was avant garde?

Noise? Tangents? Music people like because nobody else gets? Weird music for the sake of being weird? Were Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu even avant garde? I eventually tested the waters by buying an LP on Nonesuch, but my confusion grew. avant garde seemed more like the bits of music that emphasized the movements of actors and dancers, but there were no actors and dancers for me - just a cryptic illustration of the composition. music best suited for films or something.

intellectual masturbation. people geting off believing they "got" something that was never really there.
self-congratulatory. pompous. art for the sake of art.

After hearing Tangerine Dream's Rubycon and Brian Eno - Another Green World I became obsessed with ambient music, and forgot about avant garde.

That was thirteen years ago.

In 2009 I found a $4 LP in the sound effects section called Voice of the Computer. The music reminded me of Walter Carlos - Sonic Seasonings, but Computer Suite from Little Boy predated the Carlos LP by several years.



after re-watching the BBC Four documentary The Alchemists of Sound, my interest was renewed.
two things occured to me. 1.) I haven't been listening to any electronic music pre-1969 2.) how the synthesizer would have appealed to the school of avant garde

I checked out
The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center to get an idea of what was going on with synthesizers in 1964.



The Mark II synthesizer and collage of found sounds makes these compositions a bit more interesting than the use of "conventional" instruments. If the Mark II was replaced with such instruments, you would have an LP quite similar to the one I bought 13 years ago.

I now think of avant garde as experimentation - theories exemplified by the composition.
[like the shepard tone in the The Little Boy]. It's not necessarily about writing music to make good music - the recording is the "actualization" of theory. In the case of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, theories are used to write the compositions, and the Mark II "realizes" it. Some of it fits within my old generalization...

...and some does not.

it pays to be open minded.

Friday, June 25, 2010

part three - Unfinished Business - Out Of My Hands

Two summers ago I was working three jobs - deli clerk, at a dry cleaners, and landscaping every Thursday.
It was a bitch, and ironically enough, the landscaping was the easiest due to the lack of customer interaction.
One day, instead of mowing lawns I helped my boss re-tile his bathroom and set up his stereo system in his new house. He lived about 30-40 minutes outside the city proper, so since I was in the area, I decided to rip out a page of the phonebook and find a record store. There were three options, two of which were Salvo and Goodwill. When that far from the city, neither place is usually the best place to look, so I hit up a CD shop with my favorite shit - $1 12" singles. Ever since my boy scored a copy of Symbols & Instruments - Moods on KMS I wanted to hit it up again.
I got there, got down to business sifting and sorting, selected 40 records [how much i got payed]. Out of those 40, I knew what 1 was, and that was a Kano record. The other 39 were from a private collection bought out from the store that belonged to the resident dj at a gay nightclub that shut down several years ago. I was trying to score some Patrick Crowley or Sylvester.... some high NRG shit. whatever.
I got home, and listened to all 40. I was pretty dissapointed that out of all those records, only 4 of them were good finds. I loaded the remaining 36 into the "dump off for store credit" pile, and added the 4 keepers to the "ambiguis dance/pop singles stack".
Two years later I came across those 4 records again.
Xena - On The Upside, Kano - I'm Ready, Kool Rock Steady - Power Move, and Unfinished Business - Out Of My Hands.

Initially I was pretty excited when I found it, not because I knew what it was, but because I recogonized Frankie Knuckles. Two things really lowered my spirits -1.) I was thrown off by the 1987 release date and started to think it was some form of repress, and 2.) I was listening to a lot of disco [mostly italian at the time] and I knew this was an OMNI song, so again I figured I just got something to the extent of a repress. You know how those labels do...canadian/french/german/us represses of disco records....anyways.
I thought it was a good tune, butI had no idea it was such a sought after 12". [3 wants to every owned copy according to Discogs]

Made me think...

Digging in the dollar bin isn't about trophies. Digging makes me appreciate the records use. Records should be used for playing out tunes, for exposure to new music - should be used for it's drum break, for their weird noises.
Instead, a drum break seems to be  another means of  tallying collectability. 
Record collecting threatens my ability to get a copy to use. Take drum breaks for example. I'm positive records like Lee Dorsey - Get Out My Life Woman,The Winstons - Amen Brother, any JB record, Funky Penguin etc.  were common recordsColour Him Father, the flipside to the Amen, was topped the Billboards.then about 20 years later people begin to sample them.
40 years pass, and tune that toped the charts in the begining is hard to find. 3 generations of people were after it -when it was new and two that are still after it. there's not a single person my age that hasn't heard those drums in NWA or Cypress Hill.

On the other hand, having 3-4 copies of a certain 45" really doesn't help my argument, but sometimes that's how many copies it takes to find a clean one.

getting back to Unfinished Business...
I'm putting it up for auction in hopes that somebody will use it accordingly.
Just some mid-afternoon/evening musings.
Gonna dip - try and get into somethin' on this friday night.