Opening band Fool’s Gold, from LA, had great energy, it it was kind of a wonder that we went from their tremendously  upbeat music to  Cat Power’s much more subdued delivery — it speaks a lot to the talents of both.  My favorite moment from them was “Ha Dvash” which managed to get Tianawaren-sounding Tuareg desert guitar with the chords and beat of “Don’t Rock the Boat Baby.”  And I guess it is in Hebrew.  Fool’s Gold pitch themselves as tropical, drawing heavily on Afropop, but try as I might, I kept hearing space for fiddles and the drone of bagpipes in the three guitars.  It left me wondering if there is a category for “Afro-Scotch.”  I think in part it was the guitars not quite getting the polyrhythmic thumb-piano and xylophone derived rhythm playing of the best soukous and other Afropop guitarists.  Mind you it still sounds great if you  just give up the desire for authenticity, which is way overrated in music, and embrace your inner Scotsperson along with your Juju-dancing, high-life playing Afropoppish self.  The ryhthm section was awesome, especially Argentinian percussionist Erica Garcia, who played full-body percussion, sometimes stretching time to its limits while other times being totally in the pocket.  She was funnest to watch, but the rest of the formidable drum and percussion crew were also excellent, as you will discover if you give them a listen.  You can do that on myspace (change the text color or the background so we can read it though!) or live at the Echo in Echo Park every Monday night if I heard right (better check before going though).

Finally, as always, give a listen to rreplay and the rest of my music on way.net.

Rich Rath’s “The Revolution will not be on the Internet” is going to be part of “Art for a Change,” an exhibition by artist English artist Alan Dunn on how artists, writers, and musicians have have used the word “revolution.”  I’m still pinching myself to see if it’s true.  As part of the exhibition, which will take place in May 2009, Dunn will make and give away for free 1000 double CDs each with a twelve page booklet that will include, besides “The Revolution will not be on the Internet,” a whole slew of artists and musicians.  The most famous will be John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who will be represented by a London TV interview from 1972 (I think it is London Weekend Colour show “Aquarius” listed here).  The interview took place in the midst of John’s deportation proceedings, which he ultimately beat.

Some more not too shabby company: A clip from Aldous Huxley’s dystopic 1962 talk at Berkeley,  “The Ultimate Revolution” [text] [audio] [comments], a 1968 speech by Fred Hampton, the Black Panther murdered in his sleep by the FBI,  British anarchist collective band Chumbawamba‘s “Liberation” from the Revolution 7″,  ex-Guided By Voices member Robert Pollard’s new band Boston Spaceships playing “Headache Revolution,” Fiomily, a duo consisting of two German  teenagers performing “Talking About A Revolution” from youtube, and French punk band Sylvester Staline playing “Revolution is Trendy.”

If I get some time, I’ll find out more about the other contributors and post about them.  Here is the whole list of confirmed contributors so far: Aldous Huxley, Sara Marlowe, Chumbawamba, Fiomily, Fred Hampton, Sylvester Staline, Foreign Investment, Boston Spaceships, The Pinker Tones, A Challenge Of Honour, Rich Rath, Miek en Roel, Marcel Duchamp, Giddee Limit, Cyness, Mark Dowding and Chris Harvey, Cameron Carpenter, Redskins, Charles Dreyfus, Herbert Marcuse, Rob Sewell, Schoolz Of Thought, Pekatralatak, Flag Poles, Microphone Killa, Mellow Mark featuiring Gentleman, Marcel Journet, AMBASSADOR21, Alex Dempster, David Jacques, Kurda Abdulla, Pimiento Pastel, Kelvin K, Nataliya Nadtoka, The Sound of Aircraft Attacking Britain, Simon Whetham, Gintas K, Mark Whitford, Samantha Wass, Diego Restrepo, Expresión Sonora, Yolanda Spínola Elías, Aidan Deery, Alma Tischler-Wood, Rie Nakajima, Kevin Logan, nerefuh, Sara Jones, Raul Castro, Lennon & Ono, AD&THEFILMTAXI, DZ, Nels, Marco Capelli, Warsaw Poland Bros, Derek Horton, S. Bin Astrid/The Committee, Douglas Gordon, Katrin Lock, Jeff Young, Paul Ashton, James Chinneck, Elisabeth Davies, Grrrls Next Door, Ricardo Basbaum, Peter Suchin.

As always, check out my music from way.net and rreplay.

First post from LA, Where I’ll be spending the next few months.  We are staying downtown, and as it turns out there is a fantastic club there called the Smell.  They are cooperatively run, with founder Jim Smith getting help from the bands and people who come to listen.  I found out about the place from a great writeup in LA Weekly this week.  No alcohol, and I saw no signs of the usual bar-like scene of fuckups fucking things up by being wasted on this or that…it’s just about the music, which is fantastic.

I dropped in this past Saturday during a great set by the Ninja Academy.  They consist of a drummer, Outdo-Ninja and bass player Indo-Ninja (who did all sorts of tapping and chord work run through distortion, echo, and a looper).  For about half the songs they were accompanied by two women, one a Taiko drummer, Gongis Khan, and the other,  Ninjamamalickum, probably getting a most awesome sounding revenge on her parents for making her learn Japanese traditional vocal music.  She had this voice that emits probably the most decibels per pound of any singer in the world.  Check “Robot Falls in Love with Computer” on their myspace page (linked above) for a taste that can’t begin to match the live effect.  The guys wore ninja masks for the whole performance so you could not tell who they were.  Khan was in a taiko drumming outfit and I think Ninjamamalickum wore a kimono, can’t remember.  Ninjamamalickum’s theatrics seemed very carefully worked out and probably drawn from Japanese music, though I know nothing about Japanese traditional music, so who knows.

After Ninja Academy came Good for Cows, a Bay Area instrumental duo comprising Ches Smith on drums and Devin Hoff on double bass.  Smith played with his feet on the drums to change their pitch, and rubbed cymbals to get a peculiar ringing buzz out of them besides rubbing the drums like they were congas.  Hoff played an electric upright bass, sometimes bowed, mostly plucked and occasionally run through some effects.  They rocked too.

I missed the other three bands that played there, Clevis (also listen to their myspace), Totally Serious, and Bay Area shredders We Be the Echo.  I hope I get to catch them some other time, especially Clevis, whose music I liked a lot.

As always, give a listen to my music if you get a chance!  Who knows, maybe I’ll get a chance to play at the Smell too.  If you are in LA, I hope you check this place out.

After a very busy couple of months, finally a little post.  Just finished mixing rreplay’s dnb piece “multigrain serial tiller.”   Give it a listen! I have lots to write, just no time to write it.  There are some great developments on the DIY scene, bringing multitouch to the masses.  I have to post some of my soundscapes from last summer’s trip to Kolkata.  One of my favorite bands, deerhunter, has a new album out…soon come, byem bye writem.

Another plugin maker who makes cool music is Skye Klein from Australia, who plays under the moniker of Terminal Sound System along with a bunch of other projects.  His music, in TSS anyway, is dubby, minimalist, occasionally bordering on ambient but at other times moving towards industrial glitching.  His latest album is Compressor, and another, Constructing Towers, is due out soon You can hear the latest music at the TSS site.  His older stuff is all downloadable from Embryo Records.  Among my favorites from the old stuff are minimal tolerance to injected errata, deep trauma, and tomorrow will not come, though I have not really listened to the whole catalogue yet.

His plugin and software site is arcDev Noise Industries, which has a frustratingly cool web interface that evokes some alien version of DOS or the ancient gopher net protocol.  Type ‘help’ if you can’t figure it out.

I use two of his plugins a lot.  The first is the aptly named hosebeast, which you can hear in action on rreplay‘s sizzle.  Hosebeast is a “5-part fx processor for noisy, lofi, glitchy and general audio mayhem” with a filter, granulator, warper, bitcrusher, and ring modulator in any combination, including multiples of the same.  In other words a FSU device.

The other great arcDev plugin is arcDev’s entry in the 2007 KVR Developers’ Challenge plugin contest, Ellipsis.  It, along with mdsp‘s livecut, which I’ll discuss in its own post some time, are responsible for the drums in cubanecho and f it from rreplay.  Cubanecho also relies on mdsp’s entry in the 2006 KVR Developers’ Challenge, fire.  If you take a guitar and set it standing up with the strings against a tabletop, then pull it away a little and let go, then the strings will bounce on the edge of the tabletop ever more rapidly, just so: Booooooooing Booooing  Boooing Boing Bng Bn bn bnbnbnbnbn (I take no responsibility for any damage to guitars or furniture this may cause).  Mdsp has figured out how to mathematically model that warping speed change using delays in fire.

The way Ellipsis works is that you load ten samples into it, most usefully, drum loops that will more or less go together.  You have to tweak the settings a bit to make the drums play at the right (or wrong!) speed.  Then when you hit a corresponding note on your midi controller (usually a keyboard, but I use a footboard), it triggers the loop.  You can set it for any BPM and it will speed up or slow down your loop accordingly, or sync it to your plugin host.  If you only like the last half or the first quarter of the loop, you can play just that, or play it in reverse.  One useful way to set it is to put the same drum loop in several times and play different portions of it frontwards or backwards to give some variation to the drums.

So that’s it for today.  I couldn’t find any of mdsp’s music to play for you, but I hope you enjoy rreplay and Terminal Sound System.

I’ve long been intrigued by ambient music.  I like the idea of playing a space and blending in, becoming part of the atmosphere, reflecting it as much as creating it.  With that in mind, here is new ambient loop.  If you put it on repeat, it should loop pretty seamlelessly, with just the fade in and out.  It might be good for working or chilling.  This one was created with Oli Larkin‘s dronebox again, which I wrote about just a few days ago.

So, all these people making vst plugins, it seems they do it first so that they can get some sound or another from inside their head out into the world, or lacking that they try to just see how badly they can fuck with it, mangle it, stretch it, scratch it, chebyshev it, stomp it, or otherwise apply some arcane equation to hear what happens themselves and if it is anything interesting or they actually get the sound they hear in their heads out into the world, then the coolest of them release them unto the world with it sometimes becoming a business, and there are some amazing plugins that are worth parting with a few bucks, but mostly I suspect its about the sound.

So I have been listening a little to the music of plugin or bidule writers to hear what they are doing with their own inventions.  Let me start with Jerry Smith, who makes what are called “groups” for plogue bidule.  These are like plugins, but because they remain within bidule they don’t crash, which is a lovely thing.  Not that crashes aren’t sometimes lovely.  Sometimes.  Jerry and his wife Sonsherée Giles collaborate on multimedia performances.  Sonsherée is a dancer and Jerry does sound installations/music for her performances.  I don’t know anything about dance but enjoyed the pieces, but I’ll keep the details of what I enjoyed to myself so as to cover up for some of said ignorance.  The soundscapes/music are textural, you can practically feel them (tactilely rather than emotionally is what I mean here).  David Toop, in writing about the experimental music scene in one of his books (either Haunted Weather or Oceans of Sound can’t remember which, but they are both great) , talks about how musicians are playing with very short and long times, and exploring very quiet sounds.  The quiet sounds are the stuff of the textures here, and one of Toop’s points is that it makes people listen if not more attentively then closer.  I have not been through the whole site yet, but a good example of this is the first piece, “opening” for the dance piece performed by Sonsherée, Music for
One Breath is an Ocean for a Wooden Heart.  While this piece is entirely texture without notes, when the notes do come they are sparse and placed carefully.  No pyrotechnics here, something much better.  Consider “theme 3: Collapse” or “Sad Ending” for examples.

Jerry, who travels under the moniker jersmi on the plogue bidule forums, helped me out on the one group I’ve worked on, called the rhythmecho, and has provided a bunch more help to anyone trying to figure out the workings of bidule.  To hear an example of one of his groups, called J-BGran-X, a granulator if you know what that is,  along with the rhythmecho and several others (all referred to in the title somehow or another…no time to unpack the whole thing now) check out my newest, awkwardly named crackly kerrstinn granulated double lama (fixed corrupted file. 8/6).

Gotta run to the airport, so that’s it for now.

I confess, I’m a plugin freak.  I have at last count, about 500 VSTs and VSTis installed, and have just set up an ubuntu studio version of my desktop so I can try out the LADSPA plugs for linux.

I finally broke down and bought Oli Larkin‘s great dronebox and polycomb VSTs.  I’ve been using an old demo version of dronebox for a while, but when I figured out how to run midi notes out of my guitar into the polycomb filter, the results were too cool so I straightened up and bought it.  Dronebox is a set of six or seven resonant comb filters with all sorts of tweakable settings.  You tune each one to a note, and when the corresponding note gets fed through, it resonates like a sympathetic string.  I use it as the wash in these two ambient pieces: “ambient 040328” and “ambient 040428“.  The loop is recorded live with the elogoxa Elottronix plugin, which has a great filter section you can hear tweaked in both pieces.  A bit more rocking, this song combines the dronebox with another of my favorite plugs, Krakli’s TrAmp, in a song suitably named “dronebox tramp.”  This time the looper is loopy llama or mobius, can’t remember which.  Both are great…I’ve generally gone with loopy llama lately ‘cuz its simpler and uses less resources.  You can hear it a lot in rreplay, where TrAmp, Dronebox, and DK+ drums, all get worked out regularly in plogue bidule.  Mobius is a spot-on emulation of the Gibson echoplex.  You can use the same manual for most of the controls.  Oh, except mobius is like having 8 echoplexes. Oh, and with unlimited loop length.  Oh, and its free instead of about a thousand bucks.

And now back to Oli’s plugins.  If you want to know what polycomb will do to guitar, check out this freshly recorded piece, polycombatose, where I am just working through all the presets.  The looper is loopy llama this time, recording just the bass (the trusty Hohner slammer run through an electri-Q eq and ruby tube tube emulator).  Missing Eric on the bass… The drums on both dronebox tramp and polycombatose are from nusofting’s most excellent DK+ drum machine, this time imitating an ancient Acetone rhythm box.  In order to get midi notes out of the guitar, I use G-Tune (which besides being a strobe-accurate tuner, converts the signal it reads to a midi note) and then run its midi out to a maple midi port. Of course, everything is played and recorded in one take via the ever-amazing plogue bidule.

Leave a comment if you wish, would love to know if you are listening.

Ahh well, Eric has gone back to Boston, thus ending for now one of the funnest musical projects I’ve had in a while.  rreplay recorded our last-for-now session on July 1.  It was a bit out there for a number of reasons on my part.  First, I had not regularly practiced in a month while I was away in Kolkata and Japan (more on the sounds from there later…), so the ideas were bubbling up but the fingers were a bit sluggish.  Second, I had just returned from Tokyo, where Monisha and I stayed a few extra days so I could catch the avant gard Japanese experimental guitar festival (also about which more later).  So what’s to listen to?  My favorite for weird factor is “squelch.”  What is not bass is manipulated guitar echo.  “drip grind” has a cool wash thing going that mutates over time.  I think my favorite is “nothing to declare,”  though “spider camp” and “flow control” are kinda cool in an experimentalist sort of way…all three are in the key of z.  That leaves “low town twilight” where I was trying too hard to evoke a particular mood instead of just going with it, and “neither flotsam nor jetsam.”  Not bad all in all.  I’ll certainly miss rreplay-ing.  We’ll put together an album or two more from it…if you find anything in the rrepository particularly compelling, in part or in whole, let us know in the comments here!

Just a couple more weeks to go and I leave for India and Eric goes back to Boston. For last week’s session, go to the rrepository and look for files dated 080505 at the bottom of the list. My favorite for the moment is Hoffman’s bicycle ride [fixed link, 5/14/08]. Besides some timing issues here and there the whole session came out well so check out the other eight cuts too.

As always, check out rreplay‘s album rrepertoire and the rest of the music at way.net.