I played solo with my home-made/bent gadgets, some percussion instruments, a couple of miniature keyboards, and the Mobius looping software, in a similar fashion as I did for the Idioelectric project a few months ago.

Not being particularly organised for this one, I forgot to start recording until I was well underway with a few loops already rolling, so it starts pretty abruptly and there’s a bit of a jump toward the end when the recording device was briefly powered off.

Apart from that there has been very little editing done. A little taken out here and there but nothing added.

Instruments used, roughly in order of first appearance:

• wooden tongue drum
• shaker
• sine and square wave generators and filters
• wood blocks/sticks
• distorted drum machine sounds from the Alesis HR16-B
• LFO pitch modulated square wave generator with bandpass filter
• DSP echoes from Behringer mixer
• Yamaha ps-2 mini keyboard with wah wah pedal
• mutant radio synth
• ribbon controlled square wave synth
• toy keyboard with wah wah pedal

Mostly djs I think but I’ll be doing live stuff along these lines. It’s either free or very close to free, opens about 6. See you there.

The following b-side music is on sale there on CD, cassette and download card:

• the newly released “Idioelectric” recorded live at the Hamilton Fringe Festival 2011
• the Baldwin Fun Machine album “Stereo Also Playable Mono“
• the “Holy Cow” compilation
• the “Harmonica Lewinsky” album on CD and hand-drawn cassette
• the “b-mixes vol 1” remix compilation
• the “Sunshine Dub Sessions” album
• a couple of brand new e.p.s that I haven’t even gotten around to writing about yet

Lots of other interesting stuff at Artifice too: fashion, craft, art, recycled shoes and more. Best place in Hamilton for your Christmas shopping. 27 Collingwood St in the city.

The Idioelectric project is one part of an attempt to explore ways of performing with multiple instruments as a solo musician, and to experiment with looping in what I hope will be a less obvious than usual fashion.

The music presented here was recorded live over 7 days at Draw Inc Gallery in Hamilton as part of the 2011 Fringe Festival. I spent a couple of hours a day in the gallery space – as a living part of an exhibition – experimenting with the process of layering loops of percussion instruments, home-made electronic devices, and environmental sounds captured on the fly.

The results are presented here as Idioelectric, two album’s worth of instrumental music now available for download or as a two-CD set. (The CDs come with 3 bonus tracks, and schematics of the devices used to make the music are individually hand-drawn on each disc. If you’re in Hamilton you can check them out at Artifice on Collingwood Street, this week only.)

recording process

The instruments and devices were set up on a table in the gallery with the electronic devices plugged directly into the mixing desk and a single microphone for the acoustic percussion instruments. Other microphones were placed further off in the gallery space to record the room reverb and ambience, and outside on the footpath to capture the sounds of the city going by. There was a bit of construction going on just up the street which was helpful.

I used Mobius do the looping, it’s a great piece of software that works like a loop pedal.

[Note: Not everyone reading this is familiar with recording tech & terminology, so if you know how loops work then this paragraph is not for you, ok?
A loop is just a piece of recorded sound that can be played back repeatedly and seamlessly; originally a literal "loop" of audiotape, now most commonly a digital equivalent. In the context of loop pedals & software it works like this: You press a button to start recording and you make some sort of sound. Press the button again to stop recording and what you just recorded immediately starts playing back over and over as a loop. You can then repeat this process and keep adding layers of loops which all play back in unison. It's a simple idea but it takes a bit of practice to do it smoothly and seamlessly and keep everything in time.]

The Mobius software allows for eight simultaneous loops and has fully customisable MIDI implementation, so I used the assignable knobs on my Akai LPD8 (conveniently there are eight) as a mixer for the loop channels.

Using the submix bus on the desk allowed me to have any number of things happening live at any one time, and send any one or any combination of them to the looping software.

The entire output of the mixing desk – including the loop playback, the indoor and outdoor microphones, and whatever else was playing – was recorded live in stereo onto Minidisc. This is the source recording, and just over seven hours of audio was recorded in total.

editing process

In editing this project down from seven hours I followed two basic principles:

1. Subtractive edits only. So lots has been taken away but nothing has been added to the source recording.
2. The sequence of events within each piece should remain unaltered. So (A)(B)(C)(D)(E) might become (A)(B)(C)(E) but never (B)(A)(C)(E)

Following those two principles helped to preserve the integrity of the recordings and ensure that the project remain live in orientation and not become a studio-based creature.

I’ve also tried not to clean the recordings up too much as the glitches and accidents are all part of this way of making music.

equipment used

• Sinewave/Squarewave generator
  
• Circuit-bent and otherwise toy pianos
  
• Alesis HR16-b drum machine
  
• Ring modulator
  
• Optical theremin
  
• Atari Punk Console
  
• THE DESTROYER
  
• LFO-controlled squarewave siren
  
• LFO clock (555)
  
• Bandpass filter
  
• Mutant radio synth
  
• Ribbon-controlled squarewave monosynth
  
• Sovtek Big Muff
  
• Delay/distortion/pitch-modulation pedal built by Sean Kerrigan
  
• Plus a pile of percussion instruments including sticks, wooden tongue drum, wood block, agogo bell, oven timer bell, other bells and shakers, a few mics and a ten-channel mixing desk.

I learned a lot on this project that I hope to incorporate into the various other ongoing projects I’m involved in. I particularly enjoyed blurring the edges between real-time sounds and looped sounds – listening back I’m not always entirely sure which are which – and finding ways to blend acoustic and electronic elements rather than juxtapose them, both tonally and in terms of playing style.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

oh ps I stole the name from my friend Chris, I hope he doesn’t mind but it seemed appropriate (and dude, you’ve been sitting on that word for years )

Artifice opens in Hamilton this Saturday, and Karin and I will be performing glitchy experimental electronic music on the opening night alongside Der Kranks, Martin TenBroek and others.

It’s a week long gallery show of fashion, music, design, and functional art. An incredible array of stuff represented, facebook page here. There’ll be food and drinks and things.

2.

In Sept-Oct this year I recorded some new experimental music live at the Hamilton Fringe Festival. I’ll be releasing it as a two-disc set at the Artifice show. It will be on sale in various formats along with other bside music.

It’s all instrumental, a bit ambient, performed & recorded live with a looper, and kind of a blend of electronic, acoustic and environmental sounds. I’ll try to post more about that before Saturday but here’s taste: mp3

See you there, and remember to vote before you come.

• Artifice
• 27 Collingwood St
• From 6pm Sat 26 Nov

a riotous smorgasbord of art events brought to you by over 300 local artists, performers and directors. Proudly providing unique opportunity for the exhibition of creative work, the Fringe is a stage upon which anything may happen. New and emerging talent steps up into the limelight alongside established artists in this annual celebration of the regions enviable creative abundance.

Blah blah blah.

Anyway, I’ll be making, performing, and recording experimental music throughout the festival mostly at Draw Inc. gallery on Ward St. I’ll be using home-made gadgets and instruments, circuit bent toys and other devices, and I’ll be inviting some friends and collaborators to join me.

I can’t be precise about dates and times, but I can say:

• Sometime between 10am and 4pm
• Most days from Saturday Sept 24 to Sunday Oct 2
• Draw Inc, 35a Ward St.

See you there!

At the opening I played some live experimental electro, and Silke from bFM sang and played ukulele. This is a short clip of some of the music I played, with images of some of the artworks for those who missed seeing them in the flesh. Below the video, some detail about the instruments used.

• The pulsing rhythm is the nand machine I built a few weeks ago, video here.
• In places, the nand is driving THE DESTROYER to make squelchy rhythmic sounds along with it.
• The constant sweeping harmonic squarewave sound is played manually on the Good Will Audio Generator.
• The feedback echo explosion sound are made by manipulating a Boss DM-2 analogue delay pedal.
• The helicopter sweeps and other sounds are made manually with a homemade LFO device.

You can see/read about more of Sean’s work here: http://artiwon.blogspot.com/ and less often here: http://artyone.blogtown.co.nz/

• Tuesday July 12th, 5:30pm
• Pierre Peeters Gallery, Habitat Courtyard, 251 Parnell Rd
• The facebook event page is here

I’ll be bringing lots of noise and lots of toys, and I might even have to bring my newest toy of all:

I play music there – not entirely unlike the way I do in the following videos – and this Sunday my good friend Devon (ex Knights of the Dub Table) will be joining me. Will be fun.

In between jamming out new tunes, I like to play lots of old school funk, soul, afrobeat and such. If you’re looking for something to do in the Waikato, drop in. It’s on Stewart St (easy to find) and runs from about 9ish ’til about 2ish.

Videos:

I don’t know anything about Jason, but I know Josephine has made some stunning recordings in St Matthews In The City which you can hear here: Josephine Costain at Amplifier.co.nz. Quite haunting and beautiful.

We, on the other hand, will be playing a bunch of ill-conceived 3-chord songs about death and destruction with a casiotone and a big muff.

I’ll also be taking some live electro-dub out into the sunshine at the Ostend market on Saturday morning.

I’ve got my ironing boards ready.