My local newspaper The Irrigator has a great pic with their article on my exhibition at The Roxy Art Space this month. Read about the For 100 Years multimedia exhibition at their site.
I seem to have given the newspaper the wrong link to the album For 100 Years and the EP of remixes And Another 100 Years, click on these titles to find them.
Here are a few pics from the exhibition:
According to a famous Middle Eastern folk tale Pythagoras was one day walking past a blacksmith's workshop when he heard the sounds of different hammers pounding the anvil. Mostly they just made a noise but every so often he noticed they fell into a sequence that produced something special.
When he went inside he discovered that the hammers were all of different sizes and when he measured them, all but one had a particular mathematical relationship. If these hammers struck the anvil in sequence, the notes they produced had a harmony to them. This was because one turned out to be half the weight of the biggest, another was two-thirds the weight and the next was four-fifths the size of the largest hammer.
In this way Pythagoras is thought to have defined the octave and how it relates to the third and the perfect fifth. These are the key musical intervals that, for centuries, dictated the entire grammar of Western tonality.
Their Unfailing Test from abre ojos on Vimeo.
New work from my friend Abre Ojos, see more HAXAN at his website.
Lovely sentiment. Sometimes kids books really stoke their sense of wonder.
From the book Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees.
Took my old monitors to Burning Seed so I could play DJ in the Kids Camp and found someone pushed my speaker dome in.
Found a dead spider on my kick drum. I like to think my kick was powerful enough to kill but it was probably my smelly feet.
It's not the first time a spider has been attracted to my music gear.
Spotted these Star Wars-themed pedals on Ebay. Neat.
Another promising boutique effect pedal on Ebay is this one:
A few months ago I posted a video of a theremin through a Talking Machine pedal, which made me want to try one. Seeing as the Australian dollar has been punching above its weight, I decided now was the time and I recommend Mad Ape on Ebay for superior service -- not only did the pedal ship quickly from the US but they included an Australian power adapter. Fantastic service!
Haven't given it much of a go yet but it sounds amazing on bass guitar, great variety of filters ranging from fuzzy wah through to vowel-y and classic funky sounds.
You'll find many tips on recording with contact microphones, as well as free software in my interview in the October issue of Audio Technology.
Or you can read it on your tablet FREE at www.audiotechnology.com.au/tablet
This Texas Instruments Speak & Spell possesses a rare component, one which anyone who has ever looked at secondhand Speak & Spell units would appreciate. This Speak & Spell unit has an intact battery cover.
These images were taken at The CAD Factory's night of short performances at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery last weekend for the Uncovered exhibition. I've begun editing my video footage and am thoroughly enjoying revisiting the event.
Disquiet Junto Project 0036: Still Life
The painter Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was one of the great practitioners of abstract expressionism. The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, not only houses a wealth of his works, it also has on display artifacts from Still's daily life and practice, such as his smock, his old paint cans — and his record collection. These records, displayed behind glass, include pieces by Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach, among others, and they're accompanied by a small note: "Clyfford Still was passionate about music, particularly classical music. Shown here are several samples from his record collection." In this week's project we're going to take that word "sample" literally.
There's an interesting question inherent here about matters of aesthetic influence: how it is that the man who painted such massive and graphically evocative works was, in fact, listening to music far more figurative than the art he himself produced? The goal of this week's Disquiet Junto project is to take a shared sample of the sort of music that Still loved — a 78rpm recording of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante — and turn it into something that might be deserving of the term "abstract expressionism."
So, the instructions for this week are as follows:
Step 1. Please select part of this MP3 of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante:
http://goo.gl/XqBvb
Step 2. Then transform that sample, through any methods you desire, into something that you feel meets the definition of "abstract expressionism" provided by the Clyfford Still Museum: "marked by abstract forms, expressive brushwork, and monumental scale."
You cannot add any sounds to the sample, but you can manipulate the sample in any way you see fit.
Deadline: Monday, September 10, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 10 minutes in length.
Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.
For the DVD release of For 100 Years I'm making these handcrafted instruments. They sound pretty good, the kind of percussive tap sound you'd expect. I'll share a remix soon.
Above is a recent image of one of 'the wires' built by Alan Lamb and Scott Baker outside Wagga Wagga, NSW.
Philips, the company that brought us the cassette, the compact disc and the DVD, researched the possibilities of electronic music in 1956.
Acoustic engineer Dick Raaijmakers was asked to make a tune with Philips' electronic equipment to show what was technically possible. Using more than 10 professional recorders he made dubs and sound-effects by cutting, layering and splicing tape.
The results were impressive, even now his first commercial track Song of the Second Moon from 1957 still sounds cool. Raaijmakers worked under the pseudonym Kid Baltan, which was his work-nickname reversed (NatLab Dick).
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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.
It's so corrupt. Now they want to have longer copyright periods because they say the young artists are relying on this money. The young artists never see any money because they sign away that money to big media corporations, like Universal and Viacom. We, the artists, lose all of our rights to these massive corporations, who then come down heavy on these kids for downloading films and music that we never see a penny from. It's complete bullshit. I want to encourage your audience to go and pirate a bunch of my stuff right away.
"Most listeners today swear they love the bottom end on vinyl, but I remember in the heyday of vinyl, it was all about top end," VanDette told Ars. "'If we could only have a clear top end without all those pops and clicks' we thought," he said, noting the tendency of low-end record players to introduce unwanted noise. "Back then, bottom was the enemy. It made the grooves [in the vinyl] too wide, and forced us to turn down the overall level of the disc."
