Miscellany – Page 5

Many happy returns

Last night I did the unthinkable; the unimaginable; the unconscionable: Last night I sang karaoke. In violation of a years long treaty with the agents of common decency, I succumbed to the forces of silliness and sang in honor of my best friend’s birthday. The night had been fun up until that point… Simple apologies are insufficient consolation for the crime I have committed. Redemption will be difficult to find.

C. Reider, fellow aural oddball, released over the weekend a tribute to himself, in the form of a three-volume remix compilation featuring his work remixed by dozens of experimental artists. A track from my secret project (the astute reader should figure this one out quickly enough) appears along with tracks from a handful of some of my favorite noise and ambient artists – SIGHUP, Mystified, Gurdonark, Pavonine, ENE and Red Fog.

Download and/or stream for free

I’m listening now and have yet to hear anything that I haven’t enjoyed.

I had seen adverts around town for a gallery at the local art museum for “Nick Cave – Meet Me At The Center Of The Earth” and I thought – “Whoa! Nick Cave has an art gallery? Weird. I must see this.” As it turns out, none of this is untrue, it’s simply not THE Nick Cave, just SOME Nick Cave. Fortunately I didn’t have to spend my money to find this out, and allegedly there’s a plaque in the exhibit that explains that this is not the Nick Cave you are looking for. Seems to me like there should be some manner of elucidation in the adverts. I’m quite certain I would have demanded my money back had I paid to see an art gallery by Nick Cave, and it was not THE Nick Cave.

I got a super ridiculous vintage shirt from a thrift store yesterday. It made me smile. Though it is rather more bold than what I’m used to wearing, so it may take me a while to work up to wearing it with the pride it so obviously requires. Baby steps.

Listening to this C. Reider release is inspiring me to get back to the new Controlled Dissonance material at which I have been picking. Time to get crackin’.

Nil desperandum, dears.

Seriously

I still can’t get that fucking Steve Perry song out of my head. It’s. Driving. Me. Bananas.

Just got in from a lovely dinner at a local Vietnamese place. My friend ordered pink snapper, only to discover, much to her surprise, that it is fried and served in toto. The waitress graciously de-boned it for her while we watched on in plebeian awe. I made my friend kiss the fish’s head before she could eat it. I giggled. The fish won that battle, but most decidedly lost the war. Note to self: No matter how reasonable an idea it may seem first thing in the morning, under no circumstances are you to walk again to work without a jacket until it is unarguably summer time.

As was alluded last week, my current streak of TCB* has rekindled a desire to create some noise. I’m starting work tonight on a new collection of tracks that shall ultimately be released under the title Mitten Foot and the Noise Scout. Full credit will be given at the appropriate time.

If you’ve been living under a rock, you might not get THIS. But if you aren’t, then you should. And it is pretty damned entertaining.

Until then, etc. etc.

A SIGHUP a day

Keeps the doctor away. At least, that should be the marketing angle for SIGHUPyear, a new project from Canadian ambient/noise/drone artist, and longtime Intelligent Machinery friend, SIGHUP.

The short version: SIGHUP will endeavor to create one new piece of audio work every day for the year of 2011. You can follow the results at the link below.

http://2011.sighup.ca/

If the first four days are any indication, this is going to be a good year.

Cheers.

Goodness

Time can really get away from you, when you stop paying attention. We’re already three weeks into September, and I have no idea where it went. Potentially good news on the job front, but I’m not getting my hopes up until I see some ink on paper. Been down this road too many times the last few years.

What strikes me as funny this morning is the predictability of my site stats. The last six months have been relatively flat, in terms of average visitors, with the same five sites contributing virtually the same number of click-throughs each month. It’s mildly comforting that I can count on these visits. It does appear, though, that word of the recently revived Sound Design Tools has spread. My bandwidth usage is way up compared to earlier this month.

Spent some time last night working on a Controlled Dissonance track for the new compilation project. I haven’t really been much inspired to make noise lately. I’m loathe to pull out any hardware, because it’s such a pain in the ass in my tiny bedroom. But I’m also sick of just taking sound sources I find on my computer and beating them to death with VST effects. And that’s why I’m trying some new techniques. I had a short and very minimal live performance that I’d recorded a few months ago. Over that I’m layering some tracks that have been culled from a sample performance on my old SH-101, databent and then processed acoustically with cassettes, stereo mics and a snare drum (snare drum distortion for the win!). It turned out to be a pretty decent bed of sound that I now have to pull together with something. It may not be my best work, but I feel that I’m pushing my boundaries a little bit and that is refreshing.

What I would really like to do is find out what has been sapping me of all my energy lately. If I can figure that out, I might be able to turn this thing around and get myself rolling. I need to score a short film and have that finished before November, so I can concentrate on NaNoWriMo.

Until then, etc. etc.

Pour some Quaaludes on me.

Tonight is part one of the season finale of Warehouse 13. Do you know where your favorite nerd will be at 9:00 PM? (I’ll be folding laundry in front of the television. Booyah!)

I spent some time yesterday reading reviews of the new Resident Evil movie, and it sounds as though most people took from the movie exactly what I saw in the previews. What I haven’t heard is that the CGI is effing atrocious, which makes me feel that either the trailers are really misleading, or that the effect is lost on the big screen. Needless to say, any movie that was “written for 3D” can suck a stale fart out of Gene Siskel’s desiccated ass*. All I know is that the trailer could have been half as long as it was, if the scenes weren’t all in slow motion. I just don’t know how the guy who brought us Event Horizon could end up such a horrifyingly bad director…

In other news, I got Drone Structures up this morning. What reminded me of the fact that this sample library ever existed was an entry in my visitor stats from a site that is hosting edited versions of the library. I remembered that someone took the free version, added some loop points and converted the samples to software-specific formats and then made them available on their own website. They’re freely available, but only after you have signed up for a mailing list. Which, in a way, rubs me wrong – to use my efforts as incentive for people to sign up for your newsletter? I don’t want to start a pissing match over it, because I already acquiesced years ago, but I can just host the files here, without that hassle. After all, fuck it. They’re my sounds anyway.

I’ll be uploading those files throughout the day.

Still haven’t recovered from Sunday night. The good news is that I’m making more progress on the new sample library. I’m just not really sure what will be useful and what will not. Most of what I have is interesting by virtue of being atonal and noisy, which doesn’t lend itself to traditional keyboard mapping samples. The other option is just a straight-forward sample of the sound, but that doesn’t necessarily provide a sample that can be looped or played in some manner other than a simple sample trigger. What I have so far is largely the latter. Hopefully that will be sufficient.

I’m considering caffeine. It’s that kind of morning.

* Sorry Gene, wherever your voodoo animated corpse may reside. I could think of no better insult for such an atrocity; a travesty to the great art of film.