I have Soundclouded:
oh look, i’m modern
By November 25th, 2011, underI live and breathe
By September 15th, 2009, underMuch to my own surprise.
OK, folks. Back to it. Dust off the keys, blow chinchilla-hair out of the sliders, hand-crank the CPUs. Lack of art is death, and I’ve been sleeping in a coffin.
atelier today
By December 5th, 2008, underi’ve added a bunch of my older material to the atelier as well as put up a fragment of the thing i’m working on now (“pelagic”)… which is actually a year old.
i really am right on the edge of finally getting over the worst of the barriers, or just giving it all up completely.
in any case, i’m going to spend some time transferring more of my older material and getting it online. keep an ear out.
electric face
By October 24th, 2008, undervia ectoplasmosis
of note
By October 16th, 2008, underthe Haken Audio Continuum controller:
and the ReacTable:
sonic circuits
By October 1st, 2008, underso last night i did my bit and attended the local instance of this festival. paid my $6, bought the comp CD for $10 more, put an ass in a chair for the scene.
a chief motivation for doing so was to catch up with a friend who’s been out of the country for years but is now back in the area. as it happened his performance was first, which allowed me to enjoy myself thoroughly and immediately. developing a theme he’s been pursuing for a long time, he set up what sounded like a computer-based feedback and processing system. i expect he had supercollider on his laptop, sampling input, chopping, delaying and distorting it, and pushing it back out both to the quad monitors and to the mixer which fed the inputs. the result was an aggressive, rich soundscape that sometimes chirped and dinged, and sometimes careened around the room flinging about hunks of chattering overload.
if he had had heavy-duty monitors in that space it could have been truly frightening. i loved it, of course.
the second piece made me grimace from the start, however. whenever the composer stands up and tells you that you are “privileged” to hear his work (for the first time in the states, yadda yadda) you know you’re in for some serious wank. involving two clarinet players and a sound system balanced such that the tone from the monitors was often indistinguishable from the sound of the clarinets, it opened inauspiciously, with the worst cliché:
bass clarinet: <extremely low tone>
clarinet: <breathing>, <highest possible squeal>
well, i thought. at least i know what territory i’m in. all too well. so i settled back for a while and did the Deep Listening thing, just following the timbres. after a while the piece entered an extended passage of long clusters, playing with beat frequencies and harmonic reinforcment. about halfway through i lost my patience and started chewing my gum again.
at the end i clapped earnestly, not for the composer or the composition, but for the clear fortitude of the performers. i then snagged my friend’s contact info – he had it for me already as i reached to hand him pen and paper – and made my exit, deciding that i’d done my duties for the night.
inventory and ultimatum
By September 24th, 2008, underthis year i’ve been completely rebuilding my studio, moving away from keyboards and much more heavily into the virtual environment. i’ve sold the immense cases that held all the rack gear, have been selling off modules and keyboards, and have been trying to assemble a workable digital studio.
after the hartmann neuron VS i bought a suite of virtual analog synths, recreating some truly classic instruments from the early days of the genre including the big modular moog… the instrument i essentially grew up with.
so my studio now consists of:
virtual instruments: moog modular, minimoog, arp 2600, yamaha cs80, jupiter v8, prophet v (which includes a prophet vs vector synth), absynth, pentagon, hartmann neuron, yamaha fm8 and a few other oddments, all available both as standalones or as VST plugins to Sonar.
physical synthesizers: roland jd800, kawai k5000, roland jx8p (which i will sell as soon as i fully sample two of the most beautiful and indispensable patches in electronic music), korg ms2000, waldorf microwave xt, alesis d4.
other instruments: 5 string bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, hammered dulcimer, electro-acoustic autoharp, multiple hand drums, jaw harps, didjeridoos, singing bowls and various twiddly noisemakers.
which doesn’t include any of alison’s gear, and which one would think would be enough to be getting on with, yes?
and which i will sell all of, with little hesitation but much shame and regret, if i don’t produce a real piece of music by the end of this year.
still alive
By September 20th, 2008, underand indeed i am
the long view
By July 14th, 2008, underi came to a conclusion this weekend.
you see, all my life i’ve been jealous of conductors: they live their professional lives deep in beauty, immersed in a rare vibe. and they don’t have any required retirement… they do what they do right until they die, living their lives right to their real ends.
the same goes for the best musicians, of course, but it’s the conductors i see standing there, faces wreathed in concentration and bliss.
i’m not a conductor and not much of a musician, but i am a proven engineer. i did it professionally for a while. loved the work, hated the job. i’m about to become immersed in it again, as i begin production on my partner’s demos and projects (and of course my own, but that’s a different train of thought).
i think i want to do this for retirement. by the time i hit the end of my effective current career i’ll have sustained and worked with a small modern studio for quite a while. all i have to do is open it up, bring in local artists – probably the folkies and pagans, who would be best suited to such an arrangement – and make a side-living as a working engineer.
that’s a twilight i think i can live with.