Once a year (at least) I re-mix and re-invent white collar criminal, a track I started work on in 2004 and don’t intend to finish. The first one was a zero birthday present for my godson, Rhythm, and they’re all dedicated to him.
This year’s version is a noisy, glitchy, live-in-the-studio jam on my drum machine with a ring modulator, an oscillator, a crusty old sampler, an optical theremin, and lots of echoes.
It’s unedited and I filmed it so you can see I didn’t cheat. The only thing happening unseen is the occasional tweak of the delay feedback on the desk, just out of shot.
The new toys are the ring modulator and optical theremin: the former is used throughout to warp the drum sounds via the Good Will Audio Generator and the latter makes an appearance just before the end of the clip.
But more about them later, it’s 2 am and I still have noise to make. Download the track(s) here.
I just found out about this live-in-the-studio project and I think it’s worth mentioning: www.fromthebasement.tv/home
The short version is they invite performers into this nicely decked out cosy studio and capture quite unique, intimate performances, beautifully recorded and filmed. I’ve seen a few web projects along similar lines but nothing quite like this, and nothing with such high production standards and general good taste. Think Jules Holland but without the audience, the bright lights, and the prancing tit.
So far the stand outs for me are:
gnarls barkley who do a surprisingly stripped down set with hammond organ, guitar and vocals
and seasick steve who I’d never heard of before but plays some really sweet blues
I haven’t even got to Radiohead, The White Stripes, PJ Harvey, Beck, Sonic Youth, QOTSA and all the others yet but this looks like a really good way to burn up some excess data at the end of the month.
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Also just a quick note: I’ve only got a few of the B*S*I*D*E mash style t-shirts left so be in quick if you want one. They’re only $15 til the end of the year and it doesn’t look like they’ll last that long. Email me to order.
Couldn’t quite say Raglan is starved for live music but it’s not exactly Mecca for touring bands either. There’s a fairly steady diet of competent-but-very-ordinary reggae and somewhat-less-than-ordinary house, so last night was a rare treat.
The Shrugs are humans, made from flesh and The Trons are robots, made from Meccano. They’re both (mostly) from Hamiltron and they’re both excellent and that’s about all I have to say about that.
(Except to add that I bought perhaps the coolest bit of merch I’ve ever seen at a gig ever, pictured above. It’s a lathe-cut record made by Greg Locke (The Trons) and if it looks a little strange that’s because he cuts them on aluminium pie dishes. He claims that they sound awful. I haven’t played mine yet and I’m not sure if I will. Playing it would require punching a hole in the cardboard backing which would diminish the collectibility, for me anyway.)
These songs and videos were made by sampling and mashing up unrelated you tube clips of people playing instruments and singing. Nice work by Kutiman.
This one is the third of seven, the eighth is Kutiman talking about the project.
If you click through to the youtube pages, in the sidebar (under more info) there are links to all of the original clips of each instrument part so you can see exactly what materials he’s used.
The idea seems glaringly obvious in a “why didn’t I think of that” kind of way when you consider the massive number of videos on youtube of people showing off their skills or demonstrating their new toys etc.
Tim Van Dammen (drummer for Collapsing Cities, visual artist, videomaker) made this awesome new video for NZ group Kidz in Space and it’s so damn cool I thought I’d better share it. I believe they’re expecting the birth of an E.P. soon too.
A few people have asked how this mixer operates and sounds so here’s a wee video:
As you can see there’s a scratchy pot or two to clean and I still need to make some knobs, but so far so good.
Since I posted here about my fancy new plate reverb I’ve made a few adjustments and tweaks.
I’ve chopped the frame down closer to the size of the plate (about 600mm x 1800mm) and stuck a couple more piezos on it, but more significantly I’ve just about finished building a fancy new mixer for it. And when I say “fancy” I really mean “it’s the first mixer I’ve built and it works!”
The piezos seem to give the best results nearer to the edges of the plate (don’t know why) so I’ve got one centred at each end and one centred at each side like cross, and the inputs on the mixer are arranged to correspond to the placement of the piezos like so:
left long
left short
right short
right long
The switch on each channel is for determining stereo/mono. The two left channels can be switched LEFT or MONO and the two right channels RIGHT or MONO (e.g. in the picture above the channels are assigned to left, mono, mono, right). This simple arrangement allows for a surprisingly wide range of possibilities.
The mixer itself is insanely simple. It’s completely passive (no amplification) so it needs no power source. The circuit consists entirely of:
the 4 input jacks,
the 4 faders,
the 4 switches,
2 sets of 4 resistors in parallel,
and the 2 output jacks. In that order.
I used 4.7 k ohm resistors which seems pretty low according to what I’ve read and heard, but frankly I struggle with the theory of a lot of this stuff so I just tried a bunch of different resistors of different values until I found some which seemed to make everything work ok. The tin it’s all mounted in is mostly empty, so I should be able to fit plenty of other stuff (like preamps) inside without too much trouble if I ever want to.
Do let me know in the comments if you have any ideas or questions. I’ll post some audio clips here soon, probably after the weekend.
For now though, I’d just like to find some more screws and some fader knobs to finish it off. I’m sure there were some around here somewhere…
Lauren from Norwich sent us this direct film animation which she made as part of a college assignment. Her techniques for marking the film stock include
“scratching with knives and different grades of sandpaper, drawing with marker pens, painting and sponging food die, collecting dist patterns and probably some other things too.”
Busy in the studio with Jinja Jamboo at the moment (that’s why I haven’t posted for a coupla weeks).
Last time Jinja and I worked together we made this track (below) called Ruff n Ready which is on the Holy Cow album.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This time we’ve got 5 or 6 tracks to play with so I’ll let you know how it’s going.
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