Fuck off trolls



Dear bassling,
Your video "Aeolian harp recorded over electric guitar pick-ups", may have content that is owned or licensed by rumblefish, but it’s still available on YouTube! In some cases, ads may appear next to it.
This claim is not penalising your account status. Visit your Copyright Notice page for more details on the policy applied to your video.
Yours sincerely,
- The YouTube Team 

I won't claim that my YouTube channel is free from any copyrighted material such as commercial audio recordings (particularly the work of INXS) but I am astounded that, according the renowned copyright troll Rumblefish, my recording of a large-scale aeolian harp built by Alan Lamb and Scott Baker (and known as 'the wires') has a resemblance to "Deborah Van Dyke, Valerie Farnsworth-Chakra Meditation - Guided Journey through the Energy Centers of".

I might just have to see if I can find this recording on the torrents so I can 'research' how closely my recording resembles theirs ;)

Beat the Clock

Beat the Clock by bassling

Here's my entry in Ableton Live's Beat the Clock remix competition. It took less than 10hours and you can VOTE here, cheers :)

Delightful Angel of Death



Earlier this month I posted Amon Tobin's Slayer remix, this is another awesome interpretation of an awe-inspiring metal band (whose Rick Rubin production created thrash metal in my opinion).

Circuit bent beats


Here's my new toy -- and it is a bit of a toy but it sounds awesome through my Filterbank. I'll post a video soon :)

Adrift Ocean Drift riff



This weekend I watched sea monkeys and re-worked a remix I did late last year. The video above captures both of these endeavours.

The remix is expected to be released in the next month or two and was the result of an interesting methodology, which you can read about at this blog post.

Into Kaoss

From out of the box and into my Kaoss Pad, here's a short remix of some sounds generated with my circuit bent toys.

Cosmic visitor

Starman - Buchla remix by ethanhein


Digging this re-working of David Bowie's Starman, a tune that made a lot more sense for me after seeing the film The Velvet Goldmine.

Ethan Hein's blog is a great read too, his discussion of Originality in Digital Music is a great overview of contemporary copyright issues and the like.

Soma chillout dub mix


A deep dub mix must be about as relaxed as electronic music can get while keeping score on the foot-tap-ability index. This Soma Records collection blended by Nadja Lind features a fascinating lecture on the role of endorphins and dopamine in human development.

Out of the box



Another sample of my sonic mayhem using circuit bent La Dictee Magique and Pitchshifter. It's very loud and lo-fi, so turn down your speakers a bit before clicking on the triangle.

Gypsyphonic




Gypsyphonic's mix is a lot of fun, marrying gypsy breaks with tuff beats and hyped hiphop. Grab it while you can I say.

Amon Tobin's Slayer remix

Amon Tobin used this track to close his set last time he was in Australia. It's an OTT and somewhat comic drum and bass remix of Slayer, who are a fairly groovy sorta band anyway and played New York's Studio 54 back in the day.

Tomorrow Never Knows



Above is a great piece on how The Beatles took ideas from avantgarde composers into the pop charts. For further reading on this I recommend Craig Schuftan's The Culture Club because he charts the influences widely and comes to some really disturbing conclusions about pop music.

Various sources on the internet have mentioned the amount of money paid by producers of the show Mad Men to use the track in a recent episode and, it seems to me the producers had no choice. Sure, it'd be a bit weird to see Don Draper say something about The Beatles and not hear them but could anyone make a convincing reproduction of this tune, with all the tape loops and effects?

More to the point, what other song captures the zeitgeist of the time? Within a couple of years The Beatles were transformed by their use of drugs and thousands followed them on similar trips into their own self-consciouses.

One of my favourite tracks to reference The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows is The Chemical Brothers' Setting Sun. I like how the clip represents the idea of finding yourself by taking psychedelic drugs but in the '90s it was MDMA rather than LSD, which had become difficult to source for a new generation of astronauts exploring inner spaces.

Miraculous Agitations

Over the last few days I've read and re-read this article on the music found in mechanical sound and the processes that artists use to generate their own, Miraculous Agitations by Dan Wilson.

Here's a quote to give you a flavour:

During an otherwise mundane train journey in 2004, I heard a fantastical mechanical sound. The train turned along a curved length of track, causing dense creaking of multiple loose panels, all modulated chaotically by carriage motion until an inter-carriage door slammed, obliterating the interactions that gave birth to the fleeting sonic marvel. Language doesn’t do this marvel justice. The experience compelled me to acoustically reproduce the sound—how difficult could it be? But after eight years it still eludes me. I call near-irreproducible acoustic flourishes like this miraculous agitations.

I wonder if these sounds aren't heard only in the listener's head -- a fleeting sound which connotes a melody? There's an interesting harmonic phenomena mentioned in this video.



The idea of acoustic synthesis that Dan Wilson mentions in the article is cool and something I've thought around but not at the depth that he's explored. In previous years I've been enamoured with 'the wires' for their synthesiser-like noises and was really excited when I found that by playing drums next to them I could make them respond to the tempo I was pounding.

The idea of creating machines which generate noises that have musical qualities is appealing to me. I've got this idea for one that I'm hoping to develop but I'm going to try out this thaumaturgy thing that Dan mentioned, for now.

Rotten notes

Another performance with my Utopia Synth, Giant Cooter, Wavedrum Mini, Rabbit Hole Delay and Kaoss Pad 3.