Jay Severin and Marshall McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride

In 2002 I was in New Hampshire, listening, as I cooked in the kitchen to radio out of Boston Mass. I was pretty horrified by presenter Jay Severin on WTKK-FM (96.9) and his acerbic vitriol against anyone only vaguely to the left of Genghis Khan as my father might say. In other words, a large percentage of the population of the United States were belittled and branded ‘Un-American’. Educationalists, Liberals, Democrats, immigrants, foreigners, ‘Old Europeans’ and particularly the French of course were targets.

I have just found the recordings I made, and post 9/11 and in the build up to the invasion of Iraq, Severin said many, many things that you would not get away with on UK radio. For example, he said something pretty damn close to: “When you go to the gas station to fill up your car, and you see a guy standing there at the pump and you think he looks like he might be an Arab, and you think to yourself, ‘that guy probably supports Al Quaeda, don’t be ashamed, your right!”

I was also horrified at the rational person’s inability to be heard without being branded the Enemy, and the opposition politicians and journalists’ capitulation and abject failure to counter the McCarthyesque climate of fear disseminated by President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld et al at that time.

Severin, who’s catchphrase was to refer to his listeners as ‘Boston’s Best and Brightest’, as in “Good morning, Best and Brightest…”. kept a tight control of his phone-ins with various techniques, the first by being kept well informed of current events and having access to facts and figures, whereas callers by and large were more in touch with their gut feeling and expressed their emotions about the issues rather than anything arguable, and they fell largely into two categories; one being those who agreed with Severin, who were lauded, sympathized with, encouraged and honoured by Severin with his ‘Best and Brightest’ accolade, and listener type two, who disagreed. If, in the uncommon event that Severin could not defeat them in open argument, he could always keep the upper hand with his ability to cut them off at any time, and sometimes telling them cordially that he disagreed before doing so, only to call them an ‘A-hole’ after they had gone off air. He always had the power of the last word.

It is really important to understand, and my example above is a good one, just how Severin was scaring the crap out of his listeners, and at the same time, re-assuring them with his catchphrase that they are the smart ones and especially so for listening to him. His endorsement became a sort of security blanket for them.

How is this relevant to Marshall McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride? In his 1951 book, each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan’s analysis thereof. Through the advertisements on WTKK-FM during Severin’s shows, I made, at the time, an analysis, which I refrained from phoning into him on the grounds that any call was food for his show and the propagation of his message, although I was sorely tempted. I regret now, not at least giving it a go, especially since I was in a position to record it. I simply did not want to be humiliated on air, so I did not engage.

Any commercial radio show, especially in the USA, runs on a balance between ratings and advertisers, who will want to see the demographic breakdown of a station and a show’s listenership and its finer details such as what kind of listener does the show attract and how they spend their money, before they spend theirs. Therefore the advertisers on the show return a clear insight into the listener, in this case, Boston’s so called Best and Brightest. We can see who Jay Severin is talking to exactly.

Apart from automobile related advertisers, commercials during Jay Severin’s show were persistently for Viagra type products and dating agencies. A very simple analysis reveals that not only were Severins male listeners unable to find a girlfriend on their own, but when they eventually did, they couldn’t get it up. Jay Severin’s Best and Brightest not only lacked the confidence to find their own partner, but needed pharmaceutical assistance to perform the most basic and insistent of all human functions. Severin was able to scare the living daylights out of these most insecure of people with tales of enemies in the gas sation, Mexicans taking their jobs, French products infiltrating their shelves, of impending doom and Muslim conspiracy, and in turn make them love him for unifying the greatest nation on earth and the only one that matters, with his rational sense and indisputable logic and the subsequent affirmation of what is obviously right that he instilled into their insecure and jelly-wobbled fearful and paranoid brains.

I am pleased to notice that the very same day I write this, albeit 11 years too late after this distressing listening experience, Jay Severin has finally been sacked from WTKK-FM (96.9)

Timing. The art of good comedy.

UPDATE: see here for audio.

Filed under: Thoughts & Observations, Words, Jay Severin, Marshall Mcluhan, WTKK-FM (96.9)

Ramjac Radio Revolution Riot

News has travelled faster than Phidipedes for quite some time now, though most wars, revolutions and riots have been documented well after the event in the mediums of art both public and private; prose, poetry, sculpture and paintings.

World war two was documented on location with photography, film and official war artists, with radio both a communication tool for the military and a public eager for news and by 1966, with 93% of American households owning a television, news from the Vietnam war arrived daily and influenced opinion and ultimately influenced government policy.

Today, and I mean today, graffiti on Cairo walls reveal how the people of Egypt, in revolt against 30 years of repression, are using social media websites, particularly Facebook and Twitter, to co-ordinate, organise and disseminate information about their revolution, to each other and to the wider world.

Journalists, activists and the wired class in Egypt persistently blog tweet and update their status to let us know whats going on, what they think and what they want and importantly, bypassing the media and it’s inevitably filtered version of events.

Monitoring the differences in the same event reported on Egypt National television, Fox news in the US, the BBC and Al Jazira, reveals each organisation’s differibg allegiances and politics. A quick look or listen to the postings of people on the ground in Tahir square can be simply and directly understood as intended by the poster. The un-guided, leaderless, party-less people(s) revolutionaries are sending their voices filter free, direct to the world.

http://www.mibazaar.com/egypt.html

It was in the context of these politics, these technologies and the particular historical timing of Friday 4th February 2011; the day dubbed as President Mubarak of Egypt’s ‘Day of Departure’, that I streamed a performance made up of live and recently posted audio, aggregated from various sources on the internet, listening to and contrasting the unfolding information from Egypt almost as it happened. The primary sources I used were Al Jazeera English news channel, Russia Today news channel and telephone conversations recorded with people in Cairo and other cities in Egypt, which were posted on websites including Tweetdeck and Audioboo. Twitter was my primary source for links to these audio files as activists both in Cairo and abroad regularly updated their information feeds.

I disseminated information about my activities in similar manner, posting links and info on Twitter and Facebook as well as via email. The audio was streamed on my own streaming ‘internet radio station’ which sends audio from London to a streaming server in Zurich with a potential capacity of 100 listeners.

Having sent the initial invitations to listen, I commenced the performance with a strategy of improvisation, starting simply and adding more layers of information as I could find them. Some audio was a constant stream, some, like the telephone calls, or videos found on Youtube, were only a few minutes long at a time. I was able to repeat these at will and play with the audio files, mixing them simultaneously, creating a sonically rich Koshari of sound, emotive, as complex as the situation it reported and relevant to the moment.

Having gathered several simultaneous listeners, the technical limitations of my equipment revealed themselves as both computers I was using crashed simultaneously. In one case this was not altogether unexpected due to the age and recent behaviour of the computer and the other was without doubt to do with the process load exceeding the capacity of another out of date machine, usually used for streaming, but with one stereo file at a time only.

Having rebooted, I made a critical procedural error in assuming that the streaming preferences would remain as they were at the last use, which was not the case and I failed to observe this until hours later, which meant that the enthusiastic feedback I received from some listeners referred only to the music I was adding from my own hard drive. Relevant music, but not the streamed audio I was mixing it with. The information I was receiving from listeners (through comments on my Facebook posts) made no reference to anything that might be amiss, so i continued peforming in my ignorance. It was only in playback of the audio file that I found that what had been streaming was not the same as what i had been hearing as I did it in my studio environment.

That disappointment aside, I did record some audio before the computers crashed, when all was well with the technicalities and the system was functioning correctly. However, again to my disappointment, this was before the improvisation had really warmed up to the peak of its positive energy. The combined sounds paralelled the turmoil in Tahrir square as it was happening. Indeed it included some audio from that location via the news channel streams. The excitement, conflicts and aspirations of the occasion were a unique moment which i found myself motivated to both capture, reflect and pass on, lending my support to the people of Egypt in what is a defining time not only for them and the Middle-East but for the technological age which arguably provided much of the motivation for the wired class in Egypt to leave their computer terminals and take to the streets. Being connected to the world via the internet without a Chinese style firewall can reveal how net users in other countries live. Tired and literally sick (nearly a quarter of Egyptians have Hepatitis) of their situation, it is clearly a painful contrast to see how the mineral-rich country of Egypt delivers so little to its people as they watch the rest of the wired world apparently taking their wealth for granted. Complain as we might, the price of petrol in Europe is not enough to get us out of our homes and take over the streets in not just protest, but positive action to change the situation once and for all. That takes something altogether larger.

Filed under: Thoughts & Observations, Words

AWE remix

Following a tutorial involving some in depth discussion on this piece I am taking the audio down to replace it when I have articulated it more concisely. It’ll go straight back up again when I’ve done it.

One question that came up was is this a remix or a mashup? My answer is that there is a spectrum between the two and despite it involving 3 separate pieces of music, it still lies more toward the remix. It is a remix of a 3 track EP, they just all get included in the one piece.

—>

Angels with Enemies are a young rock band who asked me to produce a demo / EP for them. We recorded three songs and mixed them ‘out of the box’ using analogue equipment including a 24 channel mixing console and hardware processors and effects units. Having made a stereo file of each finished song, I summed the parts from each song onto their own separate stereo pair; the bass soloed, the guitar and the vocal parts similarly recorded each to their own stereo track or stem. When played together the sum sounds the same as the stereo mix, with the exception of the added system noise from the stereo bus. This is a negligible difference and the advantage of the technique lies in the ability to rebalance the parts without having to remix the entire track. If the songs were mixed ‘in the box’ ie inside the computer using software alone, making stems may not have been necessary. Bussing the parts would result in the same ability to process each stem separately, for example remixing using compression and equalisation on each stem separately and automating parameters such as volume control and muting ‘silent’ parts thus eliminating system noise. Having made the stems however, I was left with 4 separate stereo tracks for each song, plus one FX track for one song, making a total of 13 stereo tracks to work with.

I placed the tracks from all the songs into one arrangement in Ableton Live. I chose this software (over Logic) for its flexibility and speed of use. Also because some of my favourite cracked software plug-ins don’t work in Logic.

After a process of listening to a variety of combinations of parts from all three songs simultaneously and by muting tracks and deleting parts, I was able to combine the bass guitar from one song, the drums from another song and the electric guitar from the third song, whilst adding selected vocal parts from all three songs. With The Shaggs and Captain Beefheart in mind, as well as thoughts of Ornette Coleman and Free Jazz, the challenge became to make some sense of the discordant poly-meters that resulted. Sense can be made by addressing energy, melody, timing, lyrics and other aspects of the music, including a verse –chorus type structure, but with the three songs running at different tempos and potentially in different keys, the challenge to ‘make sense’ of the piece required an open mind and a clear approach.

Having chosen from the possible combinations of rhythm tracks, I made several global edits, removing as much as a minute at a time from the entire structure, but left the relative timings of the three songs in tact. If 20 seconds went from one song, it went from all three songs together at the same points. This helped with the clarity of process and served to focus on the most exciting combinations, keeping the piece concise and as interesting as possible at all times. There were clear moments of dynamism and musical tension and also some passages of confusion which were the ones to edit out. Confusion in such a piece is easily found but if it lead somewhere, I could use it. If not, it would undermine the piece entirely so I have endeavoured to remove anything superfluous or detrimental in order to keep the piece relevant, provocative and exciting.

Observations and subsequent technique.

I found, during the process, that the guitar, leading, as it does, the melodic structure more clearly than the bass, when combined with the vocal, focussed the attention of the ear best. The temptation to use this combination for a mix with drums and bass from the two other songs had to be avoided in order to make the challenge worth rising to and to make the piece work on a more demanding and gratifying level. That said, it would still be a worthwhile venture in my opinion, but only after achieving substantially more by addressing the far more complex riddle of mixing all three vocal parts into one ‘song’.

The first way I addressed this was by choosing the moments where all three vocals happened simultaneously. I then looked at potential start and end points for each vocal track and used the beginning and endings of lines or phrases to make some sense of the flow. I did not get round to trying a ruthless edit of start and end points, i.e. starting them only when all three were in already, potentially cutting into words. This would have added a particular character which may yet prove effective, but I stuck with my existing criteria of clarity of process and outcome and this helped in the long run as I was able to move on to choosing lines from all three songs throughout the piece, individually and in pairs as well as all three simultaneously. Sometimes the successive lines are humorous, which is another desirable element as it makes more tangibility for the listener to latch onto from the depths of the troubling melee surrounding them.

Despite the stems having been balanced for the stereo mixes, the intensity of this piece lead me to process the stems with compression and try stereo bus compression and Limiting. In the end the stem compression was enough, or rather the stereo bus compression too much, and I used a limiter only to boost the output levels with very little gain reduction. The resultant sound is more up front but clear. I changed volume levels of all the tracks in an organic process (rather than a technical exercise) of fader movement (no automation was needed) and settled with a balance quite different from the original and possibly more effective. I look forwards to re-mastering the original tracks from the stems and re-presenting them to the band.

One of the outcomes of this piece is that the ear becomes lead by the vocal joining in rhythm and or melday, the most prominent matching part, so the guitar and vocal combine with a very strong pull, the drums a little less so and the bass least of all but both the guitar and drums have moments where with the vocal they both lead and punctuate the piece.

The instrumental combinations both pull away from themselves and unexpectedly, sit for several moments in rhythm, the tempos of two of the pieces being close enough at key moments. At other times, the confusion of three instruments and three vocals can provide a rush of energy, some leading perfectly toward a crescendo before a new section becomes apparent.

Conclusion.

I have found that the processes I have gone through to make this and other pieces have lead me to approach more conventional music production in a more direct and forceful manner. My decision making is more acute, concise and aggressive in a positive way, taking namby-pamby as the polar opposite.

If there is a weakness to be identified in this work it may lie in the attempt to use this particular source material in the first place and in my approach to it, seeking to maintain some clarity as I did. Perhaps this is namby-pamby and that what is needed is a far more incisive approach. If this is the case I can only hope that the process undergone so far will constitute a step in the right direction, but right now, I am enjoying the results.

Filed under: Mashups, Sounds, Thoughts & Observations, Words

4 Mashed Potatoes

Whenever we hear Bill Dixon

Moving Waves

The Mouth of Hamlet

Dazed and Confused

These 4 pieces are remixes or re-mashes of previous mashups. Up to 5 tracks of audio per piece, are triggering each other via side-chained gates. Each piece has its own character compared with the originals but I particularly like the dynamics in the Bill Dixon tribute and the way that the Malcom X speech is a more powerful rendition of the original idea, the punctuation coming in the same places but more forcefully, the gates on several other tracks being side-chained from the original. I also like the way that the problem of words in the speech becoming inaudible is improved upon from the original version by the other sounds rendering the confusion rational to the ear rather than leaving the ear straining and the brain frustrated. Overall, this process has made the pieces richer and deeper than the originals.

Filed under: Mashups, Thoughts & Observations

Mashup concepts

its high time i put these links up.

Kutiman

Inbflat

and this one is hot off the press:

Tubeify

Larry Lessig’s 2007 TED presentation on user generated content in relation to laws that choke creativity:

Filed under: Thoughts & Observations

New Acid Movements.

This is a new body of work involving old technology.

I have replaced my ‘clean’, perfectly serviced and functional Mackie 16:8:2 mixer with a 1984 Souncraft Series 400b which has 7 stereo channels (6 functional) and 4 mono channels, with 4 busses and 4 sends. The limitations of both the configuration and the serviceability require creative patching with consequences of a restrictive nature which impact on the stylistic outcome in a positive manner.

The only sound making devices are hardware. Software serves merely as a stereo recording device. Hardware apparatus includes analogue drum machines, synthesizers, processors and effects from a similar era to the desk, bringing a particular flavour to recordings.

The process is progressive in nature. New Acid Movement No.1 was a recording of a Roland TR909 and TB 303 out of sync. No.2 added a Roland SH101 and a hand made sine wave generator housed in an old tobacco tin. No3 added a Sequential Circuits Drumtraks drum machine and a Crumar Bit 99 Synthesiser. Sync was by hand with the exception of clocking the Drumtraks format he TR 909. The Bit 99 was triggered by the note outs form the Drumtraks.

New Acid Movements No.4 added reverb from a Midiverb II. No 5, 6 and on will add a noisegate with sidechain, an echo, compression din sync etc. The process is an ongoing build. Editing of pieces will be done on software, in a manner not dissimilar from 2 track tape edits.

Having made a body of work involving poly metered, multi layered ‘mashups’, my ear for texture and timing has been stimulated in such a manner that I now feel very relaxed about riding rhythms in a conventional sense. This convention, when adhered to, is now a much more flexible parameter, one which I am exploring in obvious and not so obvious ways, for example synchronising technology by hand instead of by MIDI but also combining this MIDI in some areas, to make a rich combination of rhythmic possibilities.

====> UPDATE: I made several attempts and planned to follow up this idea more successfully than i did. I have learned a lot about issues of hardware over software in simple terms of space and time.

One simple progression would be to combine these pieces made so far into one mashup. Ultimately I hope to develop the original idea as planned.

Filed under: Thoughts & Observations

Entropy

Dj Entropy makes a really good harcore mashup defying convention and yet turns out to be a Bush-ite, Obama-slagging dung-head conservative so I don’t feel any empathy for him as an artist and do not want to include his work in my references despite having been keen to do so before researching him.

Daniel Barenboim on the other hand, who’s politics have pitted him against the Israeli authorities has my support and admiration for, amongst other things, performing Wagner in Israel, where many people including some Holocaust survivors regard the composer as taboo because of revulsion with the racial anti-Semitism that Wagner had espoused in print – which presaged and quite likely influenced Hitler.

Barenboim says; “Wagner, the person, is absolutely appalling, despicable, and, in a way, very difficult to put together with the music he wrote, which so often has exactly the opposite kind of feelings … noble, generous, etc.”

Barenboim regarded the performance of Wagner in Israel as a political statement, and despite heated opposition, said he had decided to defy the taboo when a news conference he held the previous week was interrupted by the ringing of a mobile phone to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries and said “I thought if it can be heard on the ring of a telephone, why can’t it be played in a concert hall?”

I thought that was a great point. I am Jewish by birth, in the UK as a result of the Anshluß, with family who fought for the foundation of Israel, but who also left Israel because of the unfolding politics. I am on the side of the Palestinian right to autonomy and freedom from Israeli oppression, so why so I boycott Entropy’s music but support Barenboim playing Wagner?

I see the contradictions in my choices and see that it is the allegiance that make the policies, not the points of the argument. Decisions are instinctively pre-made, not only in politics and arguments are made to support the position, not the other way around.

I was saddened to learn that Miles Davis was a “wife- beater”. This revelation made me look at Davis differently as a man but did not make me turn away from his music. He is one of my biggest heroes. This neither makes me a wife beater nor a supporter of wife beating or of wife beaters. Would I understand it if he was boycotted as a wife beater by those in the political ring? Yes I would understand that. His mistake. But I would want to cross the picket line to see him play.

I wouldn’t pay to see DJ Entropy though. If I stumbled across him it would not be with a sense of joy. His music is not of any great importance compared with Miles or most other people really, its just that I thought it said something useful and it surprised me with its progressiveness within it’s genre. I’d rather boycott him though and I do of course see why Wagner is Taboo in Israel.

I’m not entirely sure how clear I have just made myself but the contradictions are self evident and serve only to re-enforce my belief that life is very fuzzy round the edges.

Filed under: Thoughts & Observations

Whitherism?

There are clearly defined parameters of the MA Sonic Arts to which I have to adhere to gain my qualification. Research for example, as presented in the form of a question to be answered in practice and in theory. A proposal to be realized. A dissertation. I was asked last night what do I want more – which is more important to me, the qualification or the experience? My answer is actually both equally, for the same reasons that brought me to the course in the first place.

There is a synergy between what made me look for jobs and what has kept me away from jobs, encapsulated herein. The MA represents a good qualification in context of the jobs market, which I looked at last summer and the course allows me the freedom to express myself and to investigate the possibilities of my interests in sound and art, which have been my background and passion for so many years.

Having said all that, there is a great unknown that makes me a little nervous (“Its called life, it means you’re doing it right” according to Charles) as to what my MA project is or rather, will be. I am determined that whatever it is, it must be something that I want wholeheartedly. I do not want to do a degree in teaching, for example, as has been suggested over time. I would fail through lack of motivation. I am happy to work with young people and music, as I have been for years, as part of my course and possibly as a major project. But whatever “instrument” I use in that work, I want to play it myself, as with the drum. Lead by example, sure, but express myself. That way, the energy gets across. This is the subject of another post; an essay about the work I have been doing with young people with physical and learning disabilities in the context of my MA studies.

“Instead of shooting arrows at someone else’s target, which I’ve never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.”

Brian Eno

When I told an old friend and musical associate that I was pursuing an MA in Sonic Arts, he reacted in a very unexcited manner. I said ” So your not impressed?” He replied; ” I have never had anyone in the music business ask me if I have an MA”. My response was simple. I am delighted to have an opportunity to get outside of the music business.  The music business hasn’t done anything for me in 20 years and is now saturated with what was unique about what we did in the 80s. The sounds I made never seemed to fit enough with what anybody in the industry wanted. The industry is in decline and Art represents a far more exciting path of activity. Education too, has always been my biggest source of income, so pursuing an MA in Sonic Arts is a no-brainer, tho’ f I had had a brain I would have embarked upon this course long ago.

“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.”

Brian Eno

I once met Mr. Eno when I had my studio in Community Music House in Farringdon Road. He had booked Studio A to give a presentation entitled “Whither Capitalism?”  I wonder if he was hinting at one ‘h’ less but the organization was part of some think tank and various businessmen in suits were invited so perhaps not. He was referencing music art and technology though. As part of my job was to record the event, I told the organizer that I had opinions on this subject and despite her protective and somewhat lofty attitude she offered me an opportunity to speak at the event. This never materialized however, so I made my points to Brian Eno afterwards. Since they were points that he was struggling to illustrate to his suspicious and doubting audience, namely that technology is often used beyond the purposes for which it was designed and once in the hands of the people takes on a manifestation all of it’s own etc, he was not best pleased that I had not piped up. I blame the lofty woman for keeping me in my place until it was my non-existent time to speak. You had to be there. Anyway, this anecdote provides me with my blog entry heading here.

Filed under: Thoughts & Observations

Sonic activities

In the last month I have worked on a variety of projects.

*       Dr Das performance on Resonance Fm, playing percussion in a ” dub noise” ensemble of Samples & Sequences, acoustic percussion and electric bass.

*       3 workshops in schools leading with drums, with Chas Mollet providing a visual interaction with the sound through a mic, into his bespoke software, projected onto walls and manipulated with Wii remotes, or Wii-motes as he calls them. We paint with sound.

*       1 day and 1 night programming drums for Juno Reactor’s Drum & Bass remix of Japanese artist Sugizo in Ben Watkins’ Brighton studio.

*       ‘Remix the Orchestra’ animator for London Symphony Orchestra’s educational Discovery programme for schools. Using Garage band to re-interpret some of the LSO’s performances pre-edited and loaded into Garage Band software.

*         Programming and editing a piece of work with and by Producer Zafrul Satar, sometimes known as Agent Iqbal, sometimes as the Encona Kid, and once upon a time as Felchley B Hawkes. The piece is revived in anticipation of the World Cup. It is called Brazilian Carnival and starts with the sound of a ball being kicked and the crowd cheering. I also taught him this week how to edit audio and build a sound library using Ableton. These sessions tend to be between 4- 6 hours long.

*       2 days and 2 nights on a drum & bass remix for the Indigenous Resistance project. This is a donated time for a great worthwhile project. Other contributors include Adrian Sherwood, Asian Dub Foundation, Underground Resistance and Dave Watts Riot. I took the drums from the Juno Reactor session as the start point and played with some sounds from the palette sent by the IR team. I asked Producer Feelfree to help and we have spent a couple of sessions so far. It is developing quite nicely into 2 mixes.

*         Rehearsal with Dub Colossus in anticipation of tour to Australia and New Zealand. Tour is a pro engagement but these rehearsals are unpaid. The rhythm section is having a series of rehearsals. The first one went well. I played Tambourine shakers, bells and congas. Next rehearsal I have to integrate the MPC sampler. Files have been flying about, new material, new arrangements and reminders of the old.

*         WonderWAC is a project every Tuesday and Wednesday evening where I work with a group of 25 plus people, 15 or so with learning and physical disabilities. We use music, art, drama and dance. I lead the drumming and have been trying to integrate technology this term, but have been frustrated by the state of disrepair of the Roland Pad 8 belonging to WAC. This week I am brought my Roland V-drums which were played by up to 4 players at once. A feature was to change the sounds by scrolling through the presets menu. Chas Mollet often uses his projection software with the Wii-motes in addition to head switches triggering sounds in Ableton. The sessions tend to be brief and intense.

*       I lead the Wonderwac group on a weekend trip to Stubbers adventure training centre. We had a percussion workshop lead by Zedekiah. He is the master of the percussion workshop and I have learned a lot from him over the years.  I was unable to involve myself in this workshop but it was great to hear the group at work. This is the sort of event I can bring more sonic activities to in time so I choose to mention it here.

*       I went with Charles to the London Improviser’s Orchestra’s evening at the toe cafe in Ashwin Street. What a great venue and such a great project. I recognized several performers including Lol Coxhill, special guest Phil Minton who was brilliant as ever, Adam Bohman, who I spoke to about possible recording session at Cat Hill in the Surround studio and Steve Beresford, who I will see again on Friday when I play with Dr Das at the opening of the Usurp gallery in Harrow where he is performing too.

*       WAC radio project involves preparing material for live broadcast on WAC Wonderweb. We are particularly looking forward to playing live form the keyboards and Ableton and using the hand – midi device. We will perform live too at Paddington Arts on the half term project.

*       Ramjac Radio is a 24-hour stream I have been running for 3 years now, adding music by friends and associates. It started out as just my own music but now has over 3 days worth of music on random playback. After a re-vamp and a modicum of Web.2 publicity, the listening figures are consistently higher than usual. Result!

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Filed under: Thoughts & Observations

Past Realizations

Over the years I have worked on several Sonic Art pieces though it is only now that I am a student of the subject at Middlesex University,  that I choose to think  of  them as such.  At the time, they were simply an idea I could and did realize. I was writing music all the while, but I did not try to include these pieces, nor exclude them from my repertoire, they simply existed as my creations,  happenings, events, recordings, manifestations;  something I had done, located wherever and whenever they happened.

The Answerphone.

I lived in my brother’s house for some months in the early 90′s, before the days of the mobile phone. There I wrote a stack of music and edited my days away using an Emax sampler and an Atari  520ST, sequencing with Dr T’s KCS. Acutely aware  of sound and on a new phone number, I put the two together in an answer phone message, for which I switched on every electrical noise-making appliance in the house; the TV, radio, my sampler, alarm clock  etc, bashed everything I could that was as noisy as I could make it; something metal with a drumstick and the wooden floor with  my fists and feet, and shouted my message as loud as I could into the answerphone’s condenser microphone.

I was absolutely delighted with the result. My brother however, who’s phone and house it was, was outraged when he discovered it and insisted I remove it immediately. His message had simply said: “This is David’s answer phone.”

FM Surfer & Resonance Fm.

Live transmission:

This hour of improvisation took place in one of Resonance’s FM’s Clear Spots probably in 2000 or 2001. I have an audio file somewhere or at least one short clip I have kept. Along with collaborators  Charles Matthews and Mick Ritchie, we took 3 radios into the Resonace FM studio, along with a mixer and various effects with  which  to process the sound. Each of us tuned in to radio broadcasts from whichever  stations we chance d upon that suited us and to complement each other’s choices. We would  jam a while and then moved on, along  the dial for a new piece to evolve. Some lovely moments occurred,  memorably one with a ragga beat from a pirate station, gated and echoed, some white noise filtered as it tuned just in and just out on the dial, topped by a classical  aria  bathed in a digital delay.

Article  and Radio Programme:

The FM Surfer  is a concept I came up with having spent hours surfing  through radio stations and eventually recording  my wonderings across the FM dial. I wrote a piece on this for the Resonance FM magazine entitled FM Surfer referencing the internet and the overlooked wonder of the FM dial. It centred around a game I made of my surfing which I called  ‘Next Station’. The rule was to change station every time it got boring or referenced a celebrity or the media its itself, thus avoiding the media’s incestouus  self obsession and keeping my interest fresh all the while. Tapes I made of these surfing sessions resulted in an audio piece for Resonance FM, again titled FM Surfer. This was edited on Pro-tools in the resonance studio in Brixton.

Another piece I did for Resonance was a show at the South Bank during and for the radio station’s first 28 day license way back in… I do not remember exactly what I did but I do remember bringing some vynil and bringing Louise Prey with me who  I was working for as a Logic programmer / engineer. She asked if she could come along and play some records too. I remember really disliking her choice of records for the show, and pulling the needle off frm time to time, to which she would respond by putting it back on and on the show went with this live battle of wills, tastes and ideas. I think the battle migrated to the miucrophone too. It was a great show. Live radio.

Hard drive:

One day I played an audio file from my computer’s drive, only to find it had pasted itself to another file, swapping playback momentarilly between the two files, and another, added some white noise and gone through various files on the drive in this manner, appending and mixing one to another for 45 minutes. This fascinating piece of sonic art was created by my hard drive.

I booked a session in a Clear Spot on Resonance FM, determined to share it with the world by delivering it live from the laptop in it’s native form and birthplace, only to find that come the transmission time, the file eluded me completely. Search as I might, I could not find it. I ended up playing some completely different music, not innaporopriate for Resonance, but it was months later before I found the file again.

I have been back to perform and DJ on Resonance on several other occasions, including this year already and hope to return  soon with more material for the world’s greatest radio station. Incidentally,  during a chance meeting with Radio 1 DJ Annie Nightingale, she told me that Resonance was her favourite  radio station too.

The music I did play that night when I failed to find the file corrupted / created by my hard drive was less Sonic Art but worth a mention here as it became a major collaboration and project, sadly unreleased and un-aired other than  this occasion on Resonance and latterly represented on Myspace.

Along with Brick Lane based studio owner Antoine Olivier, we invited musicians  to jam and record unrehersed, mixing live to two track, editing the results later, into cohesive pieces perhaps in the manner of Tao Macero with the late 60’s early 70s Miles Davis material.  Once a month for 18 months we ammassed an album’s worth of material  and some. The problem with selling the project seeming to be that no publisher would want  to deal with about 20 musicians, some on one recording and not on another, and getting the musicians to perform live, which we did with some success at the Union Chapel, but only the once.

To come:

*Jam sessions & Pirate Radio: InterFACE; Djing, guest slots, both live and Dj and monthly live improvisations from invited artists.

*Sonic Art pieces written on the computer with a variety of software:

Cultureclash. I had just procured a high end multi FX unit, the TC Electronic M3000 and wanted to know what it could do and how it sounded. I was also experimenting with a software  which , although I have forgotten its name at the moment, had a dock Icon in black with a lettr M in white, and could pitch bend using the trackpad. I chose sounds from avariety of sources but mostly I seem to remember from a demo copy of Peak ; some international instruments; sitar, flute etc. I improvised for a few minutes, using two different reverb spaces on the M3000, recoding the result and writing an explanitory text and some artwork to accompay an mp3 uploaded to a web page.

IXI invited me and several other artists to demonstrate their software, deliberately designed to make you work in a differnet way, thus avoiding the tyrannical cliché of the DAW sequencer, the drum machine and the 4 bar loop etc. Ixi held an evening of the results of their idea at Public Life in Spitalfields.

Filed under: Thoughts & Observations