The EMS Putney is a particularly unruly beast, as I proved in an EP of Putney Improvisations a couple of years ago.

Today I was fiddling around sampling it, and it seemed to be in a particularly industrial, savage, scary mood. And it definitely varies every time I turn it on. Today was a day where apparently, the Putney had to use its AK. Contains drones, swoops, rhythmic pulsing and chattering, howling, screeching, etc.

This is a mono recording, with no effects other than normalization; the reverb is its own internal spring reverb. In particular please note any distortion is internal to the Putney. PLEASE TURN DOWN THE VOLUME UNTIL YOU KNOW HOW LOUD IT WILL BE. Hearing loss or speaker damage are likely if you aren’t careful.

Do what you want with this. I’m releasing it full Public Domain. If you want a WAV file, let me know and I’ll put it up as well.

I’m going to be 55 years old this year, and being the sort of music-obsessive nerd that I am I separate my life into musical epochs centered around particular records.

1. 1964 — watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan at my grandmother’s house with my whole family. My mom — a talented composer, among other fine qualities — insisted we all watch. It’s hard to imagine how that affected everyone then — even my Grandmother thought it was something remarkable.

2. 1966 — I saved up my allowance — for a long time — to buy the Beatles “Rubber Soul” — I got the mono version because it would have taken me another week to get the extra dollar for the stereo version. In my mind the sound of that record — uncluttered and dark is inextricable with the visual image of a dark wood, like mahogany, which of course for me was ‘norwegian wood.’

3. 1970 — the dual shot of Grateful Dead’s “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty.” Forget the Deadheads, the tie die, the bloated, sad death of Jerry Garcia. The Dead crystallized the moment, but with something that will always remain mysterious and deeply American. I wrote an essay for Little Village about it that almost but not quite captures how I feel about these records.

4. 1974 — I don’t know how exactly but I discovered — or rediscovered, it was music that was in the air in my house — John Coltrane & Thelonius Monk. In particular a Riverside re-issue called “Monk/Trane.” Jazz is a fickle thing, that works best in the moment, as it’s being played, but I learned every note of those records, and the version of “Abide With Me” — arranged by Monk but without his piano, still makes me tear up.

5. 1977 — A banner year of “Never Mind The Bollocks It’s the Sex Pistols” and “Talking Heads 77″ — I tried to play the Sex Pistols record for my dad, a symphony conductor, and he made it about 3 minutes. He just left the room, shaking his head.

6. 1983 — REM “Murmur” The first few REM records were landmarks in American Music. Like the Dead, they rather outlasted their moment — nothing after “Life’s Rich Pageant” really stuck with me.

7. 1988 — My Bloody Valentine “Isn’t Anything” — as unlike REM as a band could get, a pure, abstract, lovely roaring noise. To the whole “shoegaze” movement this album and “Loveless” basically exhausted the genre before it was fully explored — they just couldn’t be topped. Their influence is immense, and pops up in the weirdest places.

8. 1991 — The Swervedriver EPs on Creation, beginning with “Son Of Mustang Ford.” A lot less punk and a lot more rawk than MBV, Adam Franklin’s songs and the blazing arrangements thereof were impossible not to listen to over and over.

9. 1994 — Two poles of the same universe Aphex Twin “Selected Ambient Works II” and Richie Hawtin “Recycled Plastic” Aphex Twin made music that was like a series of empty rooms that were each haunted by a different ghost. Richie Hawtin’s “Spastik” was an Ars Poetica of pure Rhythm. These two records and a slew more started a headfirst dive into electronic music and led to my own attempts at music production. In an echo of the spirit of 1977, this was homemade DIY music that gave a million people the idea to do it themselves.

10. 2004 — The World Of Arthur Russell. I’m a guy who grew up in Iowa, playing the cello. Arthur Russell was a guy who grew up in Iowa playing the cello. I was aware of “Is It All Over My Face” from club parties, but this album crystallized his genius. I’d give a lot to make a track as transcendent as “In The Light Of The Miracle” or “Go Bang.”

11. 2006 — Burial’s self-titled debut on Hyperdub — I can’t believe it’s been 6 years. Again, someone much imitated since then, but never equalled, except by his subsequent productions. A gateway drug into the world of Dubstep and the whole crazy universe of UK Bass music.

Since then… not sure. I listen to so much new music it’s hard to pick out anything as epochal as these records. And maybe it’s something you only really see in retrospect.

There are two things that I’ve done consistently for 18 years I’ve been using a computer to make music is to experiment with random processes to generate something musically.

EXAMPLE ENSEMBLE: http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/AbletonLiveRandomizeExample.zip

Ableton Live has a ton of effects. People spend a lot of time and money (or time looking for W4R3Z, which imho is wasted) to find third party VST instruments and effects to give them a palette of sounds. But before you go crazy buying and downloading stuff, it’s a good idea to fully explore the stuff built in to Live.

The Live MIDI effects are an under-utilized resource for creative sequencing, and the MIDI effect rack I’ve built does something that is to me really inspirational: It takes a stream of midi notes and randomizes their pitch and velocity.

That doesn’t seem like much except for this particular context: If you have a drum rack after this MIDI effect rack, when a MIDI note occurs, it adds a random offset to the note number, and assigns a random velocity. If you load a drum rack with an assortment of sounds — in the case of my example, latin percussion samples — it will generate endless variety of drum patterns with continuously changing accents.

From left to right the components of this rack are

1. Pitch Effect. Adds a fixed offset to incoming notes.
2. Random Effect. Adds a random offset to incoming notes.
3. Velocity Effect. Randomly changes velocity of incoming notes.
4. Velocity Effect. Filters out notes with velocity outside the range lowest to lowest+range.

The actual rhythm is determined by the note pattern that’s playing in the current MIDI track. This is cool because you can use groove templates on (for example) clip with a steady stream of 16th notes, and the output of the rack will follow the groove template. Every time a note is triggered by the clip, a random offset is added to the pitch, which has the effect of choosing a different drum sound, with a random velocity.

The Macro controls on the left side give you control over various parameters.

1. Lowest: notes with velocities below this value won’t play
2. Range: notes with velocities above Lowest+Range won’t play
3. Pitch: Constant offset added to incoming note numbers
4. Rand Velocity: How much randomness is added to incoming note velocities

Here’s a use case: If you play the third clip in the KW Conga track in the example ensemble, it is a steady stream of notes with a pitch of C1, which in my drum rack corresponds to the first sound. If you don’t want a hit on every 16th note, turning up the Lowest knob will discard notes with low velocity, and turning down Range discards notes with higher velocity. You tune the velocity range with these two knobs to thin out the incoming stream of notes by discarding some of the lowest and highest velocity notes.

The Pitch knob is to get around a limitation of the Random MIDI effect — it only goes up to a maximum offset of 24. Since I have more than 24 sounds loaded in the drum rack, in order to play any of the sounds more than 2 octaves above C1, I have to add an offset. You can also play this knob — or automate it — to change the set of sounds played by the incoming notes. In this particular rack, all the flams are at the top of the drum rack’s note range, so if the Pitch knob is below 8, you won’t get any flams.

The Rand Velocity knob, if turned to zero, doesn’t change incoming velocities at all. This would be useful in the case where you want the Velocity of the Groove template to determine note volumes.

All this is harder to explain than it is to use. Try downloading the example ensemble and fiddle with the knobs, and I think you’ll find that there’s an intuitive feel to using this effect rack. The main thing you need to start with is a drum rack — like the conga rack in the example — driven by clips usually consisting of C1 notes, which is the default lowest note for drum racks. The more sounds you add to your drum rack the more useful the pitch knob will be; if you only have 24 sounds, turning up Pitch will just cause notes to be sent to empty slots in the drum rack.

And if you don’t want to just let this sort of constrained randomness do its thing forever, you can record the output of the MIDI rack in another MIDI track, and then choose a few bars to loop, or find the 4 bars that’s almost perfect and tweak it a bit.

This sort of technique isn’t limited to drum sounds. If you’re using this rack with a pitched instrument it will do something random, and perhaps useful. With a pitched instrument, you can add a Scale Live MIDI effect, in order to constrain the notes played to the scale of your choice.

And that’s only the beginning of what you can do with effect racks. Live’s MIDI effect racks have the same ‘multi-chain’ feature of Live Effect and Instrument Racks — you can set up different chains of MIDI effects and use the Chain Select control to choose between them. And once you add in Max For Live MIDI effects, things can really get crazy.

This is some silly shit, but I had fun doing it today. Feliz Año Nuevo!!!

I didn’t post this as quickly as I usually do after the show; part of the problem was technical issues, but most of it was the Holidays. At any rate, continuing a trend, I focused on a few new releases — full lengths by Sepalcure, Author, Pinch+Shackleton and Altered Natives. All of which are wicked good, you should give them your Christmas money. Also features a premier of my remixes for Peter Kirn who writes the well-known Create Digital Music & Create Digital Motion blogs.

Worth special mention: Cherie Pyne’s non-dance music track “Tender Steps” which is the closing credits music for the fantastic and fantastically depressing Canadian movie Crackie. I loved the song when I saw the movie; apparently the only way to get her music is to contact her directly — cheriepyn at gmail dot com. Cherie graciously sent me “Tender Steps” by e-mail. She’s also in the band Ledge’s Blast. She’s part of the whole separate musical world going on in Canada; I listen to the Canadian stations on XM Radio and often think that the Canadians that we know about in the USA aren’t necessarily the best, just the most ambitious and luckiest.

http://chaircrusher.bandcamp.com/album/memoriam

Recorded this last Saturday Night. David Talento came for a short visit and we set up and jammed with what was at hand. I’m a huge fan of what David got out of the DX27 and an EH MemoryMan pedal — he could do a whole live set just with that.

It’s hard not to be an electronic musician without developing a fascination with random/stochastic processes as a compositional tool. Particularly because when you pay attention to e.g. a Max Roach Drum Solo he seems to be balancing random choices with intentional ones. While Roach knows what he wants in broad outlines, part of what makes his playing great is that he has learned to simply allow his muscle memory and hind brain take over and introduce surprises. By letting go of a score and conscious control he’s participating in randomness shaped by his will.

Max spent a lifetime developing the skills as a musician to allow this sort of freedom in his playing. This demonstration clip is what happens when you set up many random Max For Live LFOs to modulate many, many different things. At the core, LFOs are modulating the Repeat and Grid parameters of a Beat Repeat effect. Then two more LFOS modulate the effect send levels, going to a reverb and delay. A third LFO is modulating the rate of the LFO modulating the Repeat parameters.

Then more LFOs modulate the regeneration level and ‘echo reverse’ parameters of the delay, and the size and predelay on the reverb.

One drum loop is the sole audio source for this. All this modulation introduces a currently fashionable sort of crackle where changing parameters introduces audio discontinuities.

I uploaded everyone’s set from the other night, and posted on the Little village site.
http://littlevillagemag.com/content/2011/08/06/ex-action-model-the-binary-marketing-show-dream-thieves-chaircrusher-blue-moose-2011-08-04/

I played last night opening for Ex-Action Model, Binary Marketing Show, and Dream Thieves. I’d have to say that this may have been the strongest bill I’ve ever played on. Totally rad.

But anyway here’s my set.

Download audio file (2011-08-04-ChaircrusherLive.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/2011-08-04-ChaircrusherLive.mp3

So this is a little different in that I wanted to focus on particular releases and artists. The stars of this show:

Kate Simko whose new album “Lights Out” raises her profile considerably in the dance music world.

Stewart Walker whose new digital label Son Of Cataclysm takes his techno experimentalism to new depths. The Sweetnighter track is an unreleased demo from his new guitar-based project collaboration with Reynold, aka Sam Rouanet, the label boss of Trenton Records

John Tejada whose new album comes out this week. John is a producer who has released a ton of music, always of the highest quality. I wonder when he sleeps.

Reggie Dokes is one of the 4th or 5th wave of Detroit dance music producers. Detroit is really a crucial center of house music’s renewal, with a long list of amazing musicians making crucial tracks. He’s not as well known as Omar S, or Moodyman, or Theo Parish, but he’s every bit their peer, and I expect him to become even more prominent.

Not a person, but a singular constellation of genre-bending music Hessle Audio just released 116 & Rising, a label retrospective that features 12 new exclusive tracks. It’s the only current label in the UK dance music world about which I’m an absolute completist.

Anyone know where any of this music is available besides Youtube? Only thing I’ve found is > $50 vinyl.

I’ve put a new album up on Bandcamp: For Delia Derbyshire 2011-03-10

This EMS Putney came into my hands when I purchased it from Iowa City South East Junior High School in 1997. It is one of the unique artifacts of electronic music. The Putney & it’s close relative, the attache-case-housed Synthi, were workhorse synths at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and was a favorite of musicians like Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, and other Space Rock bands of the 70s.

It’s sonic character derives in large part from the cheapness of the design and construction. Moog Synthesizers were laboratory grade audio equipment; the Putney is cheap and difficult to use in a traditional musical context. And yet it was seductive. It’s limitations and imperfections enlarged musican’s ideas of what sounds could be musical.

Delia Derbyshire was one of the pioneers of electronic music during and after her tenure at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She was both a gifted composer and an audacious and precise engineer. Since seeing her in documentaries, and hearing her music I’m both awed by her and have a synth-geek’s crush on her. She was on my mind as I recorded these pieces, and I dedicate them to her memory.

The 5 parts of this piece were recorded in one evening, with no editing or overdubbing. The Putney was plugged into the Stereo Memory Man pedal, and the pedal was plugged into my computer.

The only post processing applied was normalization. These recordings are as close to the original, raw sound of the instrument as I could make them.

I’ll let go of my obsession with Anika soon, really. But among the interesting covers on her debut record was of “Sadness Hides The Sun,” which was originally recorded by someone called Greta Ann.

As a child of the 60′s I’m always looking for the awesome stuff I missed out on when I was, y’know, eight years old. And listening to the song on Youtube you realize why Anika covered it, it’s a brilliant song. But who was Greta Ann, and where did she go?

There’s precious little to discover on the Internet. The song is featured on a couple of compilations, including Merseybeat -The Story Of The 60s Liverpool Sound, and the awfully named Dream Babes 5: Folk Rock & Faithfull. The song was written about in the June 1965 New Music Express. But aside from the Youtube video, there’s nothing of substance about her. It seems crazy to me that someone could pop up, make one record, especially one that memorable, and disappear.

Download audio file (2011-03-05-DJSet.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/2011-03-05-DJSet.mp3

A little different than the last few sets I’ve done, as I brought the computer; I just didn’t have enough fresh vinyl for a show. It’s a combination of things that have been on mind, some for months, some as recent as this week. The Darkstar album North has been haunting me since it came out last year. Incredibly moody, emotional music.

Of course, for some of us, Radiohead’s new album King Of Limbs has been a recent obsession. It’s without hit singles, per se, but it does have something of what the Darkstar album has — inventive sound design & production as a way to make emotional connections. The When Saints Go Machine song “Fail Forever” is a recommendation from my son Lucas, who is music director at the Earlham College Radio Station. I never was into Radiohead before Lucas fell hard for them when he was 11; I got him to listen to Arthur Russell, so he knew I’d like anything that had some of that AR magic to it. I’m not sure When Saints Go Machine are Arthur Russell heads, but “Fail Forever” is haunted by him.

And then there’s Anika, who I was turned onto by Peter Kirn’s interview with her. The eponymous Anika is produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, and has the sort of dark, noisy, rough production values that make the Jamaican work by Lee Perry and Clement Dodd so compelling. Two of the songs I played appealed to the hippy pacifist in me, Dylan’s “Masters of War” and Greta Ann’s “Sadness Hides The Sun.” Odd, but not that odd, that 60s era protest folks songs are so relevant still. Same assholes killing brown people then as now.

And there are 3 of my tracks, for better or worse. The Pete tracks are meant to get some additional instrumentation added when I can get Pete Balestrieri captured to put down some saxaphone, but I kind of like Music Minus One sounding stuff. Then there’s my shoutout to Muammar Gadaffi, “Hallucinogens in the Nescafe” which I wrote about earlier. He really is an epically evil motherfucker, and sometimes I think he says the hilarious things he does to soften the blow of his unrelenting, remorseless cruelty. He’s not Charlie Sheen, and of course, Charlie Sheen is another real-time tragedy whose humorous aspects can’t be denied.

But I couldn’t resist last night during my show when I tweeted “Thom Yorke doesn’t have tiger blood, innit? Tabby blood maybe.”

On a technical note, this mix is a cleaned up in a few places from the on-air performance — I was warping tracks in a mad rush yesterday and a couple of things were fucked up, resulting in dead air, tracks falling out of time, and one track getting played twice as fast as it ought to have been. There was one hilarious moment when somehow the tempo was following mouse movements when I wasn’t initially aware, so one track swung up and down between 120 and 200 bpm for a few seconds. But I photoshopped that out.

In the Herzog film Strozek Bruno S shows a small sculpture of twisted wire and says “this is a schematic model of how it looks inside Bruno. They’re closing all the doors on him.”

So this track goes out to my boy Muammar Gaddafi; it’s a schematic diagram of how it looks inside Muammar. Thug Life 4Ever, Brotherly Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya!

Download audio file (ChairCrusher-HallucinogensInTheNescafe.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/ChairCrusher-HallucinogensInTheNescafe.mp3

For those who give a shit about such things:

Drums: Battery3 with tweaked percussion presets.
Funny noises: 2 instances of Reaktor.
High synth: Jupiter6
Bass: FM8
Effects: Audiodamage Dubstation delay, Audiodamage Eos reverb, UAD EMT140 Reverb (on filtered snares), a Reaktor BBD delay simulator, UAD LA2 Compressor on some tracks, Audiodamage RoughRider Compressor on others. UAD Pultec EQ on some percussion sounds.

Sequenced in Live, several passes of live recording of effects tweaks. This was actually a track that came together when I was actually focusing on something else — i.e. it was a scratch track to test something.

I like the tracks, but I like her command of Yardie patois as well:

New year… its here again 2 rassclart…kmt bout New Year! Nuttin nuh fuckin New… old debts, old bills, old job, old partner, old mix up, old car, old house, old settee, old frens dat owe u money frm last year, old new year resolutions yuh nuh keep, old fuckry wid di youts pon road, same old tired gyal dem, same old wutless bwoy dem, same old nah wash dread dem weh fraid a water like fire, same old tired weed weh lace wid crack, same old miserable old people, same old excuses from di stinkin baby fada dem weh smell like shit n nah look bout dem pickney, same old attitude from di sour cratches gyal dem, same old tear up draws, same old fem fresh dem nah use,..same old same old. What’s required is a New Vision, New drive, New purpose or a new fuckin planet fi good people like me & u…and this can come at anytime of the raass year!!… Yuh zeeeeeet… :)

I get e-mails from Akwaaba Music and the latest linked to this DJ mix, Pan African Music Stew

I don’t like all the music in that mix, but skipping through it reminded me of this map showing the relative sizes of Africa vs other continents,which shows the truth: Africa is huge.

It’s also deep, musically.

Consider for example Just A Band from Kenya, who seamlessly integrate Detroit House beats, Daft Punk, R&B and Hip Hop. Those flammed backbeats kill me. Oh and they’re sort of a boy band. A completely badass African boy Band.

Or check this craziness from Angola, on the compilation Akwaaba Sem Transporte. If you’re following the latest dance music trends, this sounds like Chicago Footwork only with guys rapping over it in Portugese.

All I got to say is don’t forget about Africa when it comes to dance music. And a ton of it is for sale cheap on BandCamp.

This post has been making the rounds this week and I had to respond. Not so much because it needs defending, but because I believe this post fundamentally misunderstands Peanuts and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

“F*ck You, Charlie Brown.” Poor Charles Schultz would cringe to see that; he was a pretty old fashioned guy for whom outbursts like “Darn it!” were strong language. But these days, when coarseness and vulgarity are the order of the day, Schultz is an anachronism. He grew up in Minnesota after all, where being nice is the state religion.

What Peanuts brought to the funny pages was only rarely more than mildly funny, but the occasional wry chuckle it evoked was just a spoonful of sugar to make the strip’s exploration of human failings more palatable. Charlie Brown was insecure and depressed, a victim of the thoughtless cruelty of his friends and his own self-doubt. Lucy was sadistic, self-centered and vain. Linus was in his own world, clinging to his blanket and sucking his thumb. Peppermint Patty was well-meaning but clueless, oblivious to the embarrassment her misguided, blustery invasion of Charlie Brown’s life caused him. Snoopy was just plain nuts, a chymera of doggish impulses and fantasy. Schroeder was self involved, and the only person whose indifference could wound Lucy emotionally.

These characters were the only ones with any emotional authenticity in the funny pages. Peanuts could be occasionally jokey, but it always had heart. Schulz was a committed Christian — one of the real ones who actually worried about what Jesus would do, instead of wearing a plastic bracelet about it. The Peanuts kids had conflicts, indulged in each of the Seven Deadly Sins, but they each had a saving grace: Linus’ compassion, Lucy’s fearlessness, Charlie Brown’s humility, Sally’s innocence, Peppermint Patty’s good cheer. Moreover, Schulz’ treated his characters with loving kindness, even as he looked directly at their failings.

All of the qualities that made Peanuts special were on display in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Maybe you had to be there, but when this show came out in 1965, it was a revelation. There were kids who were sad, angry, cruel, vain, and silly. If you’d grown up on Frosty The Snowman, Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer and even Miracle Of 34th Street, you were used to candy-colored fantasies and, not to put too fine a point on it, being lied to. Peanuts kids were like the children you knew. They felt real, and you could share their point of view.

There was funny bits, like the Snoopy Dance, and oddly touching stuff, like Linus’ long quote from Luke 2. The message of A Charlie Brown Christmas was that people can set aside their differences and baser impulses and join in community, with compassion for each other and shared joy.

As a Thomas Jefferson Christian, I have learned to appreciate what feels like the true Christian spirit of caritas and let all the supernatural stuff slide. Life and history are stories we tell each other, and reality (as Paul told the Corinthians) is essentially unknowable. Peanuts illustrated the uncertainty, loneliness, and anxiety of life, but also the loving kindness that is the only thing (as Paul said) that abides.

Another thing about Drew Magary’s post: he dismisses the work of Vince Guaraldi as “horrible slow Jazz.” Dude, seriously. I’m admittedly biased because my dad commissioned an orchestral arrangement of the Guaraldi’s music for the Peanuts special, called “The Charlie Brown Suite”, which Guaraldi performed with my dad conducting. Guaraldi used to come to parties at our house and play my mom’s Steinway, before climbing underneath and falling asleep.

“Christmastime is Here” is my favorite modern Christmas song, and Guaraldi’s version of “O Tannenbaum” rescues it from a million hideous Muzak rendition. “Linus and Lucy” is as close to perfect as a Jazz pop song can be. His “A Child Is Born” (Greensleeves) extrapolates the traditional chord sequence into something unexpected and exciting. I loved this music as a child, and as an adult I hear a rare emotional depth in it.

As my Grandmother taught me, it’s impolite to say “I don’t like tomatoes.” One should rather say “I don’t care for tomatoes, thank you.” It’s OK to not enjoy the Peanuts TV specials. Frankly they started out strong with the Christmas and Halloween specials and devolved into annoying kicking-a-dead-horse potboilers. But if you can’t appreciate a work of art in the spirit in which it was intended, “F*ck you” seems like a pretty mean way to address it.

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-2010-12-04-KRUI.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-2010-12-04-KRUI.mp3
I usually have a track listing, but I left it at the studio last night, so you’re going to have to be surprised. Various 80s dance pop obscurities and hits, some house and a lot of Detroit techno, ending up with the Afx remix of 808 State’s “Flow Coma”