From 2010. Found a few audio files I submitted as part of my first module but had not yet made it onto these pages.
April 28, 2011 • 3:38 am 0
Outside the Hackney Empire
April 28, 2011 • 3:21 am 0
There comes an Improvisation
April 25, 2011 • 2:22 am 0
Xenochrony
Everythings a Mashup:
Xenochrony:
Pain & Humiliation:
Right Back:
Xenochrony is what Zappa called taking parts from completely unrelated multi-track recordings and combining them. One such piece was called Rubber Shirt, from the Sheik Yerbouti album in 1979. Combining the piece’s bass and drums here streaming live from Youtube with various instruments streaming live from Inbflat.com, Freesound, some speeches by Aldous Huxley and Terrance Mckenna streaming from the Deepthought website and a William Burroughs/Bryon Gysin clip, also on Youtube, the piece evolved into several edits and is accompanied here by a similar jam combining with some different elements, including Boulez’ Improvisation sur Mallarmé-I and Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything is a Remix” film, focussing here on Led Zeppelin’s music in the context of originality.
The choice of material is based on the content of saved tabs from the last few months of research. Frankly, I don’t remember all the sources, and theres one I have absolutely no idea what its doing there, but there were two main starting points for the research; firstly Anton Von Webern and the 2nd Viennese School, basically because Stockhausen talked about them so importantly and secondly, John Oswald’s Plunderphonics document of 1985. That it is still relevant today is testament to the strange situation we find ourselves in where on the one hand, amateur artists are thriving with the new technologies yet the ‘creative’ industries struggle to cope.
There were some good edits I have not posted because they are both long and repeat some of the content in these pieces. They would however make a good radio show or alternate versions for a later date.
April 23, 2011 • 6:19 am 0
OCD
A quick mashup that stared at me through the daybreak. Ol’ Dirty Bastard vs. Patsy Cline.
One of the things I find interesting about these multiple streams of information is how they often unexpectedly, by the sum of the parts, suggest something other, than the separate parts can. Here, ODB’s vocals seem to be the additional voice, and Patsy Cline fits so well, particularly with the bass and string samples. She sits so effortlessly atop the beat with no time warp or stretching technologies employed at all. This is recorded live from the internet.
April 21, 2011 • 8:05 pm 2
Ode to Jesu mashup video.
Beaker vs The Chalkwell Ladies Drum & Bass league. I did the audio mashup in September last year but only just got round to the video. It had to come sooner or later. Essential mashing.
I had invaluable help from my friend Mike Shepherd, without whom the video would remain incomplete.
Mike kindly gave a me a night’s worth of his time and editing expertise. Having laid out the video myself in Ableton, alongside the mashup audio arrangement and mix, Mike imported the video files into Final Cut and made all the sophisticated edits, overlays and effects.
Many thanks Mike.
Many thanks too to the Chalkwell Ladies for being spot on and to Beaker for being a good sport too.
April 16, 2011 • 5:24 pm 1
The Mechanical Brides of Frankenstein
1. The Mechanical Brides of Frankenstein
2. Accapella mix << this is my favourite at the moment.
3. Piano mix
4.Star spangled mix
Having dug up some old recordings from American talk radio made in 2002, as we were just about to invade Iraq, I remixed them, having written about them a week or so ago here, where the title of the piece is explained more.
Continuing my theme of simultaneous information streams and using noise gates to have them interact, I have taken three radio show hosts, recorded during the same week, from the same radio station and pitched them into the ring against each other. Their timing becomes interdependent, and when the hot air gets too much, they cancel out, to a large degree, the fluidity of their own and each other’s speech and for the most part, their comprehensibility as well.
Some words remain comprehendible, as our brains fill in the gaps for us, and as a pause to breath might allow some other dialogue to be clearly audible, some words do emerge clearly, like, as I hear in London, so often, a foreign language being spoken, with the occasional use of a word or two in English breaking surface.
I have made four versions. The first used an intermittent sine wave to trigger the gate on the first voice. The key for the gate was taken not directly from the sine but from a delayed signal, in order to avoid such a literal call and response effect. The delay echoes away at a regular tempo so when the tempo of the sine wave notes changes, the echo makes a poly-metric rhythm, augmented by some notes, also responding to the sine via a keyed gate signal, from a Roland JD800 synthesiser. As the sine wave plumets from its high pitches down to its lowest audible frequencies, the notes from the JD remain fixed, although there are changes by way of a repeating pedal.
The second voice is triggered by the first, only ducking instead of gating when triggered by the amplitude of the first. The third voice does the same, only ducking from the amplitude of the second voice, again delayed, this time by a plug-in Audio Unit delay from Apple, before it is triggered. The timing of the delays was arbitrary. Since the main relationship between the first two voices, one male one female, were so clearly defined by an amplitude based ducking of the second voice, keyed from the first, as long as the third voice did not obscure either of the others, this system worked well. The outcome involves some musical ground, to the figures talking within the setting.
The second mix used just the voices and involved much more severe gating. This is where, haviing started with thier subject matter and approach ot it clearly audible, the voices soon talk each other out of comprehensibility.
The third version used the second mix in its entirety but added some audio from various versions of the Star Spangled Banner, sung by singers of mixed heritage as well as choirs from military academies, all fitting to the subject matter.
The noise gates in this project were triggered initially by sine waves in order to provide frequent impulses with which to stimulate the voices through the gates. Having a program run the impulses meant that I could work hands free for many hours as opposed to triggering the gates by hand. However, having calibrated the gates and other integral constructs of the piece, I was at liberty to change the impulses for something else. Having used a MIDI drum kit on previous experiments with gates and multiple sound sources, no drums were available to me here So I chose to trigger the gates using a grand piano sound, which gives an entirely new ground for the voices to figure against. Hence the fourth version.
I am indebted to Vicki Lynch at the WAC recording studio, who enabled the project and assisted me throughout.
April 15, 2011 • 2:52 am 0
Ode to Jesu
April 11, 2011 • 8:08 am 1
Vg8s No.2
Korg MS10 and Dubmatix customised tobacco tin making the siren noises, which are interrupted by a Drawmer noise gate every time a drum pad is hit. MIDI notes go straight from the drum pads to a Yamaha TX7 playing pitched tone. The drum sounds go through a one-repeat delay before they sound, courtesy of a Midiverb II.
April 7, 2011 • 2:59 am 1
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)
April 1, 2011 • 12:53 am 0
Vg8s?
This piece is the first to illustrate my thoughts on the methodology behind mashing different source material, no matter what it may be. Using analogue synths and a Roland V-Drum kit fed into a series of Drawmer noise gates thru a mixing console, I was able to interrupt or introduce the various following sounds using the key inputs on the gate units, via the auxiliary sends on the mixer:
1. the repeating sound of the Korg MS10
2. a sinewave with added white noise from a Frontline X-2 Drum Synethsizer
3. the continual siren like sound of the Dubmatix sinewave generator (housed in an old Ogden’s Lanyard tobacco tin)
The Roland V-drum kit TD6 brain has only two audio outputs, so panning 4 of the 8 pads to the left and four to the right audio output channels, I was able to use the left to open a gate and the right to close a gate on the different sounds. Every time I hit a drum pad, a gate would close or open momentarily.
I added a delay to the MS10 sound from a Maplins Voice Vandal unit. My thinking here was to blur the edges a little of what was coming or going, to add another dimension to the piece. Perhaps I was seduced by the Dub. Well ok, I was.
Playing the piece was a process of discovery, calibrating my sensitivity as I went, listening to hear each beat and each cluster of notes played on the different drum pads and the outcome on the gated sounds.
I chose the Tabla kit to avoid drum kit sounds and I played from a standing position, though still able to use the footpedal. This also helped to avoid drumming cliches. Being seduced by playing the kit is another criticism I accept.
The Tabla kit also provided me with a variety of sounds both short and long, high pitched and low, giving me opportunities to open and close the gates for different periods of time, albeit all relatively short and percussive. The highest pitched sound is a star chime sample and the longest sound is a gong but it does not resonate for as long as hitting the real thing, another reason for adding the delay, although in this piece that did not trigger any other gate, it did add some ground for the shorter sounds to sit or figure on.
The setup process seems evolutionary. A series of building blocks. At some point it becomes important to record in advance of other possibilities. The piece opens up with me un-muting the sounds from the mixing console, one by one. The delay Is un-muted last.
Following posts will include similar ideas featuring a Roland TR909, SH101, TB303 and a Yamaha TX7.
