Stop and listen

naviarhaiku547 – night deepening…

The haiku shared by Naviar Records this week prompted me to try and remember warm nights, as it's been cold here.

As for the video, it's another that I downloaded from Archive.org for a different project and was available on my desktop.

The music piece

Disquiet Junto 0652 By the Tale

The Disquiet Junto project this week is to "Set a favorite story to music."

My partner suggested that I should use my Totem Story, which I wrote last year and like a lot but it got a mixed reaction from the judges of a competition.

(They thought it was inappropriate for me to write from a First Nations' perspective, which I can understand is not my experience to represent even if it is historical fiction.)

Anyway, recently I've been playing with the M-Tron Pro VST and used it for all the instrumentation except the drums.

I was aiming for a sense of uncertainty, as well as incorporating a human voice and obviously the organ is there for the religious moments.

The video came from Archive.org and was something I had on hand that seemed to suit the music, although it has nothing to do with the story.

I dare say

 

naviarhaiku546 – The figure of a man

The haiku shared by Naviar Records reminded me of this video I downloaded from Archive recently, while I was looking for sirens to use in a Junto project.

It features a man addressing a different sort of storm and offered a good challenge to remix the material into a song.

Roland down the road

Buckle up, I reckon it'll be a bump ride!

Disquiet Junto 0651 Why Compute?

For the Disquiet Junto this week I've ramped up the chance in the Random effect for MIDI.

It was my response to this week’s prompt:

proposed by George E. Lewis, musician, music theorist, music professor at Columbia University, and artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Lewis is the composer-in-residence at this year’s Musikfestival Bern.

Lewis asks, “Why do we want our computers to improvise?”

This week’s project: record a piece of music that responds in some way to Lewis’ question.

I often use the Random effect, as it adds little variations to the loops I make.

Today I ramped the effect up to 100% and found that Ableton Live's onboard instruments started to crap themselves.

So I sent the information out to my Roland Boutique rack and recorded the results.

Dunno, weirdly it doesn't seem so unpredictable.

Maybe I should've shifted a few more parameters?

You've heard of industrial goth

Disquiet Junto 0650 Doppler, Interrupted

 

The Disquiet Junto project this week asks participants to "Record a piece of music in which a passing siren blossoms into something else entirely."

I've used my tenor guitar with some pedals that were at hand, although the recording is noisy in a way that I didn't intend -- maybe the lights?

Bicycle

Ambient artists beef

 

naviarhaiku544 – out of my dreams

The haiku shared by Naviar was troubling me for days, as I wanted to record but didn't feel it justified the poem.

This weekend I fitted a double-kick pedal to a bongo drum and tuned the bass banjo, then spent days jamming on riffs.

Eventually my partner ventured that it needed something and suggested the frog.

Literally

Disquiet Junto 0649 Concerto for [ ]

 

The Junto prompt led me to read a little about concerto and I got the impression that it's been one of those types of events where people have shown flair in ways. 

So I started pondering what I'd want to see given the solo performer treatment and pulled out my Omnichord thinking that I could finally write a song that showcased electric toothbrushes. 

Then I began to ponder my lead instrument and looked around a bit more, before arriving at the video of cowbells. These are near my office and sometimes I hear visitors using them. 

So I added a beat, as one does, then thought what sounds would support a cowbell solo?

This show is Sofa King awesome

 

naviarhaiku543 – rain on the cherry blossoms

 

The haiku shared by Naviar Records this week asked for something delicate, so I plugged in my Superego and added drones to the upright electric.

Disquiet Junto 0648 Shadow Boxing

 

The Junto project arrived as I was re-drafting a poem for the Campionato Mondiale di Umar. which goes with this sketch.

This competition has given me a focus on the rehabilitation of Griffith's auxillary water tank, as I've sketched it in various media as the scaffolding progressed to the current protective skin.

So the idea of shadow boxing seemed to be picking a musical fight. Today I assembled a scaffold of my own and hit the record button.

You can see I've used Behringer's 606 and 303 with Chase Bliss' Condor and Generation Loss pedals, as well as a Korg FM Volca and a Shure SM7.