Disquiet Junto 3 Parts

The Disquiet Junto this week called for three parts: a beat from an oscillator, form from a drum machine and a field recording for melody.

After experimenting with the low frequency oscillator in my Sherman Filterbank, I recorded a slow 'blap' sorta sound using one of the four in my Utopia synth going into the aforementioned filterbank, which really warped the waveform.

This was then manipulated with various effects in Ableton Live, including re-pitching, compression, transient designing and gating to get a big kick sound and another on a slower loop.




Drum sounds came from an Alessis HR-16 circuit bent by Diabolical Devices. I recorded a few passes with different bends, before editing takes together.



The field recording is a wetland on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River in Wagga Wagga. You can sort of see it about a third of the way down the left-hand side below, opposite the water works on Marshall Creek that source town water from the Murrumbidgee aquifer. I have a theory that the reason the city has earned a reputation for sportspeople is partly due to this mineral-rich water supply but it does add a murky taste.

New Abre Ojos

Light On Our Foreheads from abre ojos on Vimeo.

Redacted Disquiet Junto

  Disquiet Junto this week is an open-ended exploration of surveillance and graphic notation.

The image presented is page 8 of recently declassified documents related to NSA collection of telephone metadata records.

It's became the musical score for this piece I recorded using a Casiotone MT-36 circuit bent by Frankenmusik, a kick drum and my voice.

I considered recording this interpretation in the opposite direction to the score as a form of protest to the widespread surveillance being reported since Edward Snowden's brave decision.

The Junto is an opportunity for me to try something different so I decided to record live because I liked the idea of events happening in real-tiem being recorded. Then I cast my mind about for suitable instruments.

It had to be something quick and dirty, the score was rough and black but the content was human. So there needed to be a vocal and the time signature was suggested by the page number, although I wasn't too strict once it started.

I like the sound like a dot matrix printer, it's dated but seems apt for a government record.

Current set-up

This weekend I'm making acid, driving basslines from the Mochika and looping snippets of crunchy circuit bent beats from this diabolical Yamaha device. Enjoying it so much I might not get around to recording the Junto piece that's losing my attention.

Matthew Herbert on music as documentary

...there is a huge revolution happening in music, which is that music has been kind of impressionism, it has been painting basically, for the last four million years and now it is documentary film making effectively.

If I wanted to make a record about a pig 100 years ago I would have had to use imitation or simulation whereas now I can record that pig and turn it into music. It is a hugely provocative political shift in music that we can now make music out of the fabric and matter and materials and texture of the world, it is a undisputed and fundamental revolution in the very idea of what music is and the materials and tools we have to hand.

Church of Slayer

Slayer At Church-Angel Of Death from Viatcheslav on Vimeo.

Disquiet Junto Minimal Haydn

This week's Disquiet Junto proposed a minimal techno remix of Franz Haydn’s String Quartet in F Major.

It took a couple of attempts before I found short loops of a bar or less were best for a techno feel.

The violin sounded a bit like Bernard Hermann's score for Psycho until I threw it down a flight of stairs.

The deep bass runs provided a nice kick sound by looping a small but dynamic section and adding a gate. I re-pitched loops, starting a 12-bar blues riff before it got patchy.

The structure was done on the fly for a live warehouse party in the early '90s-type vibe but the main influence was Ritchie Hawtin's music as Plastikman.

P.S. -- I've revised this remix after listening back and realising the glitch was a bit overdone. It was a sore thumb.

Harrison Young on poetry

Poetry is full of metaphor, and metaphor is where one thing means another, it is saying two things at once. And this to my mind is like reality, there are often two aspects. Or more.

Tools of the Trade

Mike Davis's Tools of the Trade

Chachi Jones on circuit bending

The instinct to make music with jugs, musical saws and washboards is an instinct that takes the abundant, inexpensive artifacts from your life and transforms them into something roughly musical. I don’t think there’s anything else that parallels that tradition more than transforming dollar-bin thrift store toys into magically glitchy musical instruments.

It’s really like a 21st-century junkyard band aesthetic. I think this generation is particularly reluctant to acknowledge the phenomena, possibly because many of the toys that are subject to the transformation — like the Speak & Spell, Casio SK-1, Touch & Tell — still have this aura of childhood futurism. It’s as if admitting that these toys are obsolete is to admit that the promise that they held for us in childhood is no longer relevant today. The reality, however, is that circuit-benders are turning trash into sonic treasure, a concept that I feel is rooted in American folk music.

Disquiet Junto Cheap Generative

This week's Disquiet Junto is based on a four-loop composition, specifically one 2 seconds in length, one 3 seconds, one 5 seconds, and one 7 seconds long with a 3-second pause to one of the elements and a 1-second pause to another of these elements.

The material comes from a recent collaboration and it was challenging settling on the final loop. The bass and bell-like pipe were given but I spent a while trying out other loops. I also cheated a bit I think, the loops length mightn't all be strictly following the rules.

It was an interesting approach to composition and one I'd like to try again. I like writing haiku for the framework and this offers a similar set of rules but I'd probably shorten it.

Kinda reminded me of John Cage:

In Zen they say, 'If something is boring after two minutes, try it after four. If still boring, try it for eight, 16, 32 and so on. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all, but very interesting.

Recent collaboration

Another result from my community recording sessions during the school holidays, this time in and around Leeton's Mountford Park.

The pipe organ sits in a church just across the road, so I bent the rules a bit but it really deserved to be part of the track as it's also celebrating a centenary. And I love pipes, so it was an opportunity to hear how it sounds without sitting through a sermon.

Thanks to local maestro Dominic Vella for the melody and thanks to the kids who joined in too.

PS -- Nice follow-up piece in The Irrigator today

Karl Bartos' purity

When I was young and studying music, like most music students of the time I was into Jazz. My professor once said to me, 'Why are they playing so many different notes? They're searching for the right note.' So I have nothing against improvisation but I'm more into defining what note I want to have. That's why I've always been keen on visual pictograms, like traffic-signs as its pure information. If you can find a chord progression and a pure, authentic melody it's all you need. The most important information is definite pitch because it's the purest information our brain can remember. That's why everyone can remember so many different melodies.

Beatreport

After having a laugh and then shaking my head about this post on the homogenous sounds in Beatport's EDM chart, one talented producer whose work appears on that service pointed me toward the video above. Ha!

David Lynch's seed

You have ideas, and I always say ideas are the most important thing, and the idea tells you everything. The idea is like a seed. The tree is in the seed, but it doesn’t look like the tree. So, when you finally see the tree, you might make some changes, but when you get an idea you really do see the whole tree, but it’s in an abstract form.

More Dinosaur Park

Think I should call this track 'Having a Barney' for the role of the purple dinosaur. As mentioned elsewhere, this song is one of many remixes made from playground recordings. I'm really keen on this Belgian producer's take on the material:

Screenings

Tonight was the last of the three screenings. Mountford Park looks magic at night and tonight it sounded magic too, as the church bells chimed six o'clock during one of the Mountford remixes.

The response was positive and it was satisfying to see my work projected large.

From last night's screening

This is one of the videos I've made from the community recording sessions held last week. It was screened on the water tower in Leeton's Central Park last night.

Recording around town

My local paper have this story on the screenings organised for later this week.

Roger Linn on drum machines and drummers

If you’re comparing a drum machine to a master drummer I would be one of those who argue that drum machines and quantization don’t have the same feel as a real drummer. But I don’t think most people use drum machines to replace history’s great drummers. They use drum machines to create a particular looped groove that works well in a particular musical context, with full knowledge that the drum machine won’t respond in dynamics or tempo to the other musicians, won’t spontaneously think of creative and complimentary drum parts drawn from a lifetime knowledge of thousands of recordings, and won’t produce subtly-nuanced percussive timbres by tapping, rubbing and bending a drum in hundreds of possible ways.