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… and I’m not easily upset.

The title of this post was a running joke a friend of mine had on a chat forum. You’d say something to him, and his comeback was “you’ve upset me, and I’m not easily upset.”

But really I want to talk now about Lee Scratch Perry and the Upsetters.  I finally ripped the 3 CD Trojan box set. And it is such an overwhelmingly rich collection of some incredibly original, arresting of music.

The first thing about Lee Perry is he was writing and producing and recording because he was trying to make a living. So some of the best tracks on the compilation are ridiculously commercial.   When Lee covers the Coasters hit “Yakety Yak” he makes it his own. Starting from a beat from outer space, so perfectly simple and mechanically funky.

Dave Barker’s “Prisoner of Love” whose rocksteady ska beat is topped by one of the most original, soulful voices in Jamaica.  Think Wilson Picket, James Brown, and Otis Redding rolled up into one.

“Fever” – a cover of the song made famous by Peggy Lee – has Susan Cadogan’s channelling Lou Reed (no, not really, but kindof). Her double-tracked lead vocal stays in a single octave and rides the beat like it’s a freight train.  There’s a flute part that might be a synthesizer that’s mixed subliminally low, but the stars are the drum and bass.

The classic Upsetters song “Clint Eastwood” is the definitive Upsetters groove. Simple drums, bass, keyboard and drum with an irresistable woodblock ostinato rhythm.

The conscious borrowing from American soul music and New Orleans funk is in Lee Perry but there’s also his inimitable internal riddim.  He was not a man who made much sense when he spoke, but his instincts as a producer are deliriously focused and full of his unique soulfulness.  That would be enough, but layered on top of compelling music is an extra layer of surreal kookiness.  He had something in common with Wesley Willis: he was a fountain of weirdness, and you’re never sure how seriously he takes his weird.

Three different Lee Perrys talk at once over “Evil Brain Rejecter”  It’s a later production so the beat is not as greasy and low down as his 60s & 70s material.  The  beat sounds like it was made in Garage Band, but having three Lees at once is like Ken Nordine’s “Word Jazz” cranked to eleven.

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VCVRackTutorial: Using modulated delay times in VCV Rack

This is a method of patching and modulating delays I find so compelling I felt moved to write about it. This is all done in the software modular system VCVRack, and assumes you have a basic working knowledge of it. It involves the VCV Router plugin, which is non-free plugin from the makers of VCV Rack, but I consider it a mandatory purchase.

As a start, consider this simple patch:

VCV Rack Patch (right click or command click to save)

This is a single voice sequenced by a Fundamental SEQ-3 Module. Clock triggers sequencer, clock sends pitch to oscillator and gate to envelope. Envelope modules volume of oscillator signal via a Fundamental VCA-1. The only remotely complicated part is in the middle where the pitch signal is captured in a Sample & Hold, triggered by the gate from SEQ-3. It’s then quantized by a JW Quantizer and transposed by a Fundamental Octave module.

Now, add a delay. In this case an AS Delayplus:

VCV Rack Patch (right click or command click to save)

This sounds fun, and you can play with delay time and feedback. As it happens this delay module models actual analog delays to the extent that changing the delay time affects the pitch of the delays. If you load this patch you can hear this by turning the delay time knob.

What I’m interested in here is to set up a tempo synced delay. The AS BPM TO Delay Calculator can help out there. Drag the delay time all the way counter-clockwise (it will display 1 MS) and then feed the output of a particular delay time from the BPM Delay/MS Calc:

VCV Rack Patch (right click or command click to save)

Now the delays fall in the rhythmic grid, in this case, a dotted quarter note after the dry signal from the VCA. The fun begins when you modulate the delay time. In this case I use 4 different outputs from the BPM Delay/MS Calc, for dotted half notes, dotted quarter notes, dotted 8th notes, and dotted 16th notes. You can select different delay times by clicking on the ‘Clock’ button on the Fundamental Router 4:1.

VCV Rack Patch (right click or command click to save)

Now comes the fun part. I add a Hetrick Random Gates module, and send it the gate output of the SEQ-3 to trigger it. I also turn down the Max knob on the Random Gates so that only gates 1/4 are triggered. I then feed the first 4 trigger outputs on the Random Gates into the ‘Sel’ inputs on the Router 4:1. What is the result? Every time a new note is triggered by SEQ-3, a different delay time is randomly selected.

VCV Rack Patch (right click or command click to save)

What is the result? Something rhythmically and harmonically interesting — it’s continually changes, and each time the delay time changes, it changes the playback speed and pitch of the delayed signal. Now, since we chose 4 differented dotted note delay times, they each have a relationship that is both harmonically and rhythmically coherent. A dotted 16th note is 1/8th as long as a dotted half note, and if you switch between them, the frequency jumps by a factor of whole octaves. In the case of dotted 16th to dotted half note, the transition drops the pitch by 4 octaves. If you haven’t considered the math involved it’s exponential: Twice the time or frequency, increase by one octave, 4 times the time/frequency, increase by two octaves, etc.

It gets even more interesting if you don’t choose delay times that are multiples of each others. Say, use dotted 1/2, quarter note, dotted 8th note and 16th note. The dotted half note is 3/2 the time of a 1/4 note, a dotted 8th is 3/2 of a 16th note. Now as it happens, the pitch releationship of 3:2 is a major 5th, so when the delay time changes it also changes the pitch by an interval that is musically interesting! I haven’t worked out all the pitch relationships between different note durations, but listening to the output, it always seems to add up harmonically, no matter which note duration you choose.

Here’s an example of the output of this last patch. While recording, I tweaked the sequence a little bit as it played.
Download audio file here (left- or command-click)

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Favorite 10 … err… 11 albums …

This is something they were doing on Facebook — the ’10 albums 10 days’ challenge, where you were supposed to just post the album cover without comment. I’m terrible at following instructions though.  I actually did 11, and I took a couple of weeks to finish it. I’m collecting them here as a more coherent way to archive them.  No particular order implied.

Beatles “Rubber Soul”

This is the first record I bought with my own money, when I was 9 years old, at the Gemco in San Jose, California. I chose it over Revolver, which was the current record at the time, for reasons I don’t remember, but I still prefer RS to Revolver.

I bought the mono version because it was a buck cheaper, and hearing the stereo version still feels wrong.

This was the record where they hit their stride as a recording band, when their collaboration with George Martin elevated them from their status as pop phenomenon to something more. The quality of the sound on this record always felt mysterious to me, tied in my mind to the title “Norwegian Wood” — like dark wood, with a deeply figured grain. Ironically at the time and now, that song is probably the slightest one on the album; the groove of “The Word”, the melodic and lyrical depth of “In My Life,” the propulsive anger of “I’m Looking Through You” all surpass “Norwegian Wood.”

I had the American version, which followed Capitol’s practice of releasing records with fewer tracks than the original UK release. In this case only, I think the US version is superior, both for leaving off “Drive My Car” and “What Goes On” and for including “I’ve Just Seen A Face” which is a much superior song.

John McLaughlin “Devotion”

 John McLaughlin is a polarizing artist, and kind of a difficult person from all reports. He claims to hate this record based on how it was mixed, which is silly, it has always sounded fantastic, and I have no idea what McLaughlin would do instead, and probably, neither does he.

This record is at an interesting intersection: the drummer, Buddy Miles toured with Jimi Hendrix in the Band of Gypsys. Larry Young, the organist had played with McLaughlin in the Tony Williams Lifetime, and they’d both played with Miles Davis. The bass player, Billy Rich was Buddy Miles’ bass player.

At any rate, this album is McLaughlin’s answer to Jimi Hendrix, with whom McLaughlin had jammed in New York. So there’s some of Hendrix’ blues influence, but combined with McLaughlin’s own compositional style, which is related to Jazz, but is rooted in his own odd chromatic exploratory style.

The key track is “Devotion”, which starts with an almost atonal riff, before opening up into a expansive modal chord progression. It is at once rocking, loud and meditative.

McLaughlin went on to be one of the seminal artists in the jazz rock fusion movement, with his group Mahavishnu Orchestra, but “Devotion” is everything great about his music with none of the annoying things he was prone to.

 Wendy Carlos “Sonic Seasonings”

 

It’s frustrating that Wendy Carlos’ “Sonic Seasonings” is out of print and not available except as pricey second hand CDs. Partly it’s Carlos prickly fussiness about her own work, but I think mostly it’s that she’s always been a better artist than a manager of her own career; it’s quite difficult to find her stuff, aside from the millions of copies of “Switched On Bach” you can still find in thrift stores.

This was my study hour music in High School, though it was not really music by the standards of the day; it was a recreation of natural sounds with synthesizers, and had a curious feel to it. You could go to a rain forest and listen to your surroundings, and it would be like “Sonic Seasons” but it wouldn’t be the same; every second of this dual vinyl record is carefully and obsessively arranged. It was ambient music before Eno had the idea, and it’s still a great achievement of that genre.

The natural world can be engrossing and if you really pay attention, the sound of the natural world can be fantastic, but there’s something special about how a dedicated artist can start with nature and end up with something both artificial and authentic.

Joni Mitchell “For The Roses”

Again, while “Blue” is the obvious choice, this Joni Mitchell album is my favorite. “Blue” was a masterpiece of misery as art. By comparison, “For The Roses” was more an album of adult concerns. The opening song “Banquet” could have been written yesterday; it is always current and outside any moment: “Who let the greedy in/And who left the needy out/Who made this salty soup/Tell him we’re very hungry now/For a sweeter fare.”

Every song has arresting details, from the multitracked chorus of Jonis singing close harmonies in chords of her own invention, and the menace of ‘”Come with me I know the way” she says “It’s down, down, down the dark ladder'”, “when you dig down deep you lose good sleep.”

It continued where she left off with her piano-centric tunes on “Blue” but there’s some of her trademark guitar songs, like “For The Roses”: A meditation on fame that goes deeper than most songwriters go: “Just when you’re getting a taste for worship they start bringing out the hammers and the boards and the nails.”

And always her lyrics are conversational, and conversations with an implied other, “Did you get around rezoning for you way up here?”

I have a long difficult Joni Mitchell essay in my head, but I’ll try and boil down what gets me about her: She is what every artist should be, an observer off to the side, but her self-reflection is endless and uncomfortably sharp, so much so she seems as estranged from herself as she is from others. Her music makes you feel as though she’s shown you her inner self (and the album art includes a long shot of her naked next to the ocean), but this is an artistic construct.

You listen to her music and think you know her, but what you really know about her is her sharp eye for detail, the way she sees things in others, and herself, and the abiding emotion behind every song: loneliness, a yearning to connect that seems impossible to fulfill. She connects with us, her audience, in a way that it seems like her personality and intellect denies her in her own life…

Or maybe that’s a construct as well, but it’s fascinating to dwell in the cloud of uncertainty she creates.

My Bloody Valentine “Isn’t Anything”

“Loveless” is the obvious MBV choice, but I played the hell out of this (and the various EPs that came out pre-Loveless) at the time. It was the synthesis of contemporary influences (Jesus & Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr) but still sounded completely original.

If there’s a moment on this CD that still slays me, it’s that opening riff of “Feed Me With Your Kiss” that ends with a repeated hammer on the root note of the key. Each time it’s repeated they add another BAM on the tonic. I pointed this out to my kids once, and thence after when it came on the car stereo when we were driving, they’d count out the BAMs at the top of their lungs.

Basic Channel “BCD Vol. 1”

Like a lot of things I learned about Basic Channel from a mixtape by Aran aka DJ Teep, and playing that tape in the janky car stereo was the best way to get up on the music.

Also notable for the Metal Box packaging which invariably destroyed the CD after inserting and removing it a few times.

Now that this kind of music is such an institution it has it’s own category on the Boomkat website, it’s hard to express how odd and otherworldly this music sounded the first time I heard it. I’d heard a lot of techno before hearing this but this was something else. It was music that seemed to bring it’s own abandoned factory with it, barely lit, and filled with fog.

Brian Eno “Before And After Science”

I’m hot and cold on Eno. Never really warmed up to the stuff he did after he stopped writing songs and singing, but this album (and “Taking Spider Mountain By Strategy”) is is close to perfect.

Side one is more up tempo and reflects his antic ideas about lyrics: “Anna with her feelers moving round round round Is sharpening her needles on the wheel.” he sings in “Kurt’s Rejoinder,” an homage to Kurt Schwitter, the 20th Century avant-garde artist, whose “sound poetry” is is the background on this track.

But the authentic substance of this album is Side 2, particularly the sequence beginning with “Julie With” and ending with “Spider and I.” This is ambient music before Eno “invented” ambient music, and it’s slow quiet music built from layers and effects. It culminates with “Spider And I” which is what I want to hear while I’m dying.

Wishbone Ash “Pilgrimage”

Another one from back in the day: Wishbone Ash are a band with remarkable longevity. This album was their peak for me. It’s a player’s album — it was their second album after a lot of live shows, and they’re just plain hot. The album opener “Vas Dis” seems to be played at double speed, but it’s no problem, they an do that and make it look easy.

The peak for me is the second track “The Pilgrim” which starts out with a simple phrase repeated forever as echoey guitar floats in the grid created by repetition. This is eventually crossfaded into extended math-rock-esque riffing.

“Alone” follows a similar pattern, with a 4 measure repeated melodic pattern that transition into interlocking lead guitar solos, but the star is the bass, which defines the rhythmic pocket while still improving.

This kind of mostly-instrumental guitar-led music shows up again decades later with bands like Tortoise, but Wishbone Ash were there first.

An aside: They were on their first big US tour and played a show in Cedar Rapids, after which they invited Cedar Rapids police into their hotel room for some reason, having forgotten there was a suitcase open on the bed with a giant bag of weed sitting on top. They were arrested and sent home to England, and it was a long time before they were back touring in the US.

Gentle Giant “The Power And The Glory”

In this cavalcade of favorite albums, I’ve focused on things that were artifacts of my youth, because they’re the things I’ve live with the longest. In general I don’t feel nostalgic for being young, particularly the run from when I was 13 to about 25, because it was a period of untreated depression, family upheaval, and being completely unprepared for any of the normal growing up/adult business.

So what stands out for me isn’t nostalgia, but rather what music was the most effective escape from the buffeting winds of negativity and despair.

This Gentle Giant album I actually had to mail-order from an import company that advertised in the back of a music magazine. I’d sent something anyone born since about 1980 knows nothing about — a Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope (SASE) to the company, in order for them to mail me a paper catalog

I was intrigued by the album art and the brief description, and ordered it. For better or worse, it was music unlike anything I’d heard before.

These British beardos had this unbelievably ambitious idea for a concept album about political power and manipulation. They were the sort of hyper-technical musicians turned out by the British university system, who constructed herky-jerky jigsaw compositions. No melody too atonal, no rhythm too awkward. When they calmed down for a moment (listen to “Aspirations” in the comments) they could make really lovely, heartfelt music.

Mostly, though, they were the kings of making hyper-proggish girl repellant music, the sort of thing that got women to yell “take that shit off! Put on some Earth Wind & Fire!”

And no one did it better.

Sonic Youth “Daydream Nation”

I guess my assessment of Sonic Youth was rather soured by events of the past few years, let’s just say Kim Gordon got me in the divorce.

But it can’t be denied, this is a seminal record that does what great art does: Take the the discarded things, the things thought of as ugly, ungainly, misshapen according to current conventions, and make them the center of a new kind of beauty. There are moments of dissonance and thrashing around that at the time this record was released were hard to take, but they serve as frames for sustained passages of great beauty and meditative calm.

They got extra points from me for the references to William Gibson novels. This is the sound equivalent of Gibson’s dead television channel sky.

XTC “Black Sea”

There’s several truly great XTC albums but this one stands out for me. Starting with the hilarious over the top skronk of “Respectable Street” that royally takes the piss out of the British middle class, this is subtle song writing beginning to end, fleshed out with a huge, rude rock production.by Steve Lillywhite.

Favorite Songs:

1. “No Language In Our Lungs,” which is one of the few rock songs that addresses the inadequacy of language directly: “I would have made this instrumental but the words got in the way”

2. “Towers of London” That opening riff is purest XTC. Like “No Language …” it takes as its subject something unexpected. It’s a love song to London and the long dead people who built it: “Pavements of gold leading to the underground, Grenadier Guardsmen walking pretty ladies around, Fog is the sweat of the never never navvies who pound, pound, pound, pound, pound spikes in the rails to their very own heaven ”

The Beatles have much to answer for; XTC’s perfectly distilled British eccentricity is one thing they can be proud of.

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The Discrete Charm Of The VCV Rack

Every so often I discover a piece of music software that makes me giddy with the possibilities it presents. That’s what I feel about VCV Rack. It presents the on-screen equivalent of a Eurorack modular. It has a large number of useful modules, some actually based on popular Eurorack hardware modules. It has a community of 3rd Party developers who are constantly adding new modules to the collection. And the application and most of the modules available for it are open source, supported by an enthusiastic developer community.

We don’t really need VCV Rack.  There’s Reaktor, Max/MSP, Pure Data, and a number of other tools. Propellerhead Reason also uses a rack & wires visual design, but most of it’s rack devices are higher-level objects than those presented in an actual modular, real or virtual.

What makes VCV Rack fun to work with is that it doesn’t have (as e.g. Max & Reaktor) a distinction between programming and presentation. There’s no “under the hood.” You insert modules and wire them together. There’s nothing wrong with Reaktor and Max, they just require more actually programming and debugging to get something working. I write code for a living, so when I want to make music, I don’t want to think like a programmer any more.

I’ve also found it very stable, though the documentation on using the user interface is lacking. Some tips:

  • To wire an output that already has a wire plugged into it, hold down Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or Option(Mac)
  • When you right click to add a module there’s a search box at the top of the dialog, something I missed completely.
  • To learn different manufacturer’s modules, try making an instance of each of them and play around with them.

A lot of exciting things are happening in the VCV world in the near future. The main developer, Andrew Belt is continually improving the user interface and making new high-quality modules. He’s also hinted at adding a ‘package manager’ so that you don’t have to manually download plugins and unpack them in the Rack directory. That’s the biggest drawback to VCV, that it hasn’t really been ‘productized.’ You can be a computer musician without knowing how to to do manual installs, and Belt is putting some effort into making it more of a polished product.

As a demonstration of the sort of thing one can do with VCV rack here’s an experiment I did today: http://cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-VCV6.mp3.

There are two Oscillators driven by JW-Modules GridSeq. The Gridseqs are stepped through randomly (and periodically randomizes the notes), but it more or less adds up because it quantizes the note values to a scale. So the 3 GridSeq instances might be constantly spewing more or less random notes, but they all fit in the same scale and key.

The other technique I use is to use logic modules and comparators such that if a note is playing on one of the oscillators, it won’t start a note on the other. This was an attempt at emulating what I hear in Autechre’s music of late, where there will be 2 or more parts that alternate chaotically, but stay out of each other’s way.

All the notes (and drum hits) are triggered or not triggered based on chance, but they are on a steady 16th note grid. So it wonky but there is a constant pulse in there somewhere. I muck that up a bit by having effects that are not tempo synced, but hey, that’s what the cool kids do these days.

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Olive Kitteridge Music & the synchronicity of chord changes

The new HBO series “Olive Kitteredge” is great television, and the music, composed by Carter Burwell provides a lot of the moody atmosphere for the show.:
[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/CarterBurwell-OliveKitteredgeTheme.mp3|titles=Olive Kitteredge Main Theme|artists=Carter Burwell]
But I was sure that I’d heard the main theme music before, or something very similar to it. It nagged me all day and then I remembered: The song “Paradise Circus” by Massive Attack, used for the theme of the British crime drama “Luther.”

This is also, in the form of a Gui Borrato remix, used in a 2011 car commercial in the United States.

This is a really simple chord progression:
F minor, A flat Major, C Major, E minor diminished.
ParadiseCircus

But quite evocative. You can never know for sure whether Burwell had heard the Massive Attack song, and incorporated that core chord sequence, or if he came up with it independently. I’m reminded of the Axis of Awesome’s “40 songs, same chords” performance:

Trailer for “Olive Kitteridge”

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In which SoundCloud sends me a hilarious takedown notice

Anand and SchatarSo today I got this interesting message from Soundcloud:

Hi chaircrusher,

Our automatic content protection system has detected that your sound “Rubber Duckie (Wub Machine Remix)” may contain the following copyright content: “Get Some Fruit (Wubstep Dubstep Remix)” by Anand Bhatt, owned by Favorecido Productions. As a result, its publication on your profile has been blocked.

You can dispute this report, if you believe the copyright content has been mistakenly identified or if you have obtained all the necessary rights, licenses and/or permissions to upload and share this material on SoundCloud.

Please do so by filling out our dispute webform at the following link:https://soundcloud.com/settings/disputes/6512879

If you would like to learn more about copyright, please visit our copyright information page.

Thanks,

The SoundCloud Copyright Team

FYI I didn’t even remember uploading it to Soundcloud — it was just a joke that took about 5 minutes to put together. I kind of love how it turned out, since Sesame Street is embedded in my DNA. If you need to hear it:

[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/RubberDucky-WubMachine.mp3|titles=Rubber Ducky Wub Machine Remix|artists=chaircrusher] http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/RubberDucky-WubMachine.mp3

There are several things that are awesome about this:

  • Soundcloud’s automated copyright infringement detector did NOT detect my actual ‘infringement,’ which was against Jeff Moss and Jim Henson, who wrote and performed the original Rubber Duckie.   I claim this is fair use, but I’m not going to the wall on that; this was a JOKE track, it isn’t worth it.
  • Soundcloud’s audio fingerprint software did detect that there was some common source material in the Rubber Duckie Wubstep remix and that track by Anand Bhatt. That common material is there because Bhatt and I did the same thing: Took an audio file and fed it to the Wub Machine, which is a neat hack that ‘converts’ any audio file into bad dubstep.  Feed the Wub Machine random songs, traffic noises, outgoing voicemail messages yadda yadda, and hey presto! Bad dubstep! it’s hours (well, minutes) of fun.
  • The most hilarious part of this debacle?  This guy Anand Bhatt has released a digital EP which you can buy here on Amazon.  Bhatt took what sounds like random crappy songs, ran them through the Wub Machine and released them as his own original ‘remixes’!

What conclusions can I draw from this?

  • Soundcloud’s audio fingerprint software is able to detect common elements in two songs.  That’s great, but it can’t distinguish between one song sampling another, and two songs containing common source material.  So it’s going to generate thousands of false positives.  I guarantee that the worst-paid people at Soundcloud are the poor shmoes who have to wade through all the people contesting false positives for copyright infringement.
  • Anand Bhatt is a complete tosser.  Don’t believe me?  Visit his mega-awesome website, or his Amazon Store.  All those pictures at the Grammies are curiously absent of any other people, as though he snuck in after hours to get his picture taken in front of the Grammy background.  This man has been spending his time inventing an imaginary international rockstar career.

Here’s the transcendent, timeless, original “Rubber Duckie”

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Chaircrusher Live @ Gabe’s October 11th 2012

I had a fine time, though it would have been great if more people showed up — I mean I’m used to playing to mostly empty rooms, but we had guys in from out of town who hit a deer trying to get there. But hey, Thursday night at Gabe’s — hard to draw a lot of people. Anyway Moldover sounded great. I particularly liked the a cappela song he opened with, and his guitar playing, which always drove the songs and sounded great. Exaltron has evolved a unique approach to live performance, combining voice, trumpet and guitar, live looping, expertly programmed sampled drumming and crazy electronic messing about.

I was mostly happy about my set, which may have come from working myself into a tizzy for weeks getting read to play. Mostly new stuff done in the past couple months, some of it bespoke for the live set.

[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/2012-10-11-Chaircrusher-Live.mp3|titles=Chaircrusher Live @ Gabe’s 2012-10-11|artist=Chaircrusher] http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/2012-10-11-Chaircrusher-Live.mp3
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Even More Granulosity – PaulStretch

GO HERE FOR LATEST AND GREATEST

When I did the OS X build for PaulStretch, it became the most popular and enduring blog post I’ve ever done.

Paulstretch has kind of a funky user interface, but the way it sounds, and the sound variations it is capable of are fantastic. And it’s free. It also can take a 3 minute song and turn it into a week-long ambient drone. The dude who wrote it (Nasca Octavian Paul) shows up on the web every 5 years ago and drops a piece of interesting software, then disappears again. He’s never returned my e-mails, and I’ve maintained the OS X port!

Anyway, this is Paulstretch operating on “Mal Hombre” by the legendary Lydia Mendoza
[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/LydiaMendoza-MalHombre-PaulStretched.mp3|titles=Mal Hombre (PaulStretched)|artists=Lydia Mendoza]
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/LydiaMendoza-MalHombre-PaulStretched.mp3

The original. I should mention that Lydia Mendoza is absolutely fantastic. A pioneer of Norteño music, the popular music of Mexican-Americans in the United States, she plays that music kind of like what’s playing in Mexican Restaurants, only she’s as fearless a singer as Aretha Franklin. She can bring me to tears, and I don’t even know Spanish.
[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/LydiaMendoza-MalHombre.mp3|titles=Mal Hombre|artists=Lydia Mendoza]
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/LydiaMendoza-MalHombre.mp3

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Waking The Dead — Kickass Sound Design

Waking The Dead is a BBC Crime Drama that I watched a lot of last weekend. It is basically the UK version of “Cold Case” but is a lot less gimmicky and a lot more hard-boiled. It’s not quite Prime Suspect but it’s rather good.

I usually watch TV and pay attention mostly to whether I enjoy it, without a lot of deep interest in the craft of how it was made. But I watched the first 2 minutes of the Episode Deathwatch and the sound was so badass I backed up and played it again. Every detail of how this is put together — the slamming of doors, the sliding of the cabinet between the waiting room and the gallows room, the occasional sub-bass drop added for drama, and most of all, the faint, subliminal bird calls in the background.

I heard this and immediately thought ‘there’s an entire track in those samples!’

[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/WakingTheDead-S2E2-Opening.mp3]
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/WakingTheDead-S2E2-Opening.mp3

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Malawi Got You Down? Come To Iowa!

Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza, who were jailed for being openly gay in Malawi. News reports say they’ve considered leaving Malawi. I say, “come to Iowa!” You can get married here! People are nice! I’ll put up $100 to help you get here! Who’s with me!

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i beat the internet

Since going to my sister’s wedding (a week ago today) I have yet to ‘catch up’ on all the blog feeds & such I have in Google Reader. And this morning I just started marking ‘all read’ entire categories.

I feel like I no longer have the appetite to ‘keep up.’ Of course, the Internet is a giant time-sink, and makes newspapers (which were derided as ‘fish-wrap’ back in the day) look like engraved stone tablets by comparison.

It’s all so ephemeral. When I was going to sleep last night, I was thinking about this, and also about quantum physics (and no I’m by no means deep) and all the fizzing and nattering on the Internet made me think of virtual particles in a vacuum, that keep popping into existence in particle/anti-particle pairs. They only exist for the tiniest moment before annihilating each other.

Now unlike protons and anti-protons, all this gabbling on the net actually tries to mean something, and insofar as the Internet is the public commons for this age, and is where everyone carries on political discourse, it’s important.

But even as I have some desire that people pay attention to ME, out of vanity or whatever, do I have any particular obligation to pay attention to the Internet? Any more, I think I like listening to NPR better — no commercials (well …) and precisely one person at a time is talking to me.

Of course, you can’t beat Björk the bear shaking her cub out of a tree.

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He sweat so much, he could keep fish alive in his armpits…

I had a not-enough-coffee moment this morning, where I wanted to look up something about Traktor and instead went to Traktor.com which is a company of film-makers who among other things make commercials. It’s worth going to the site for the demo reel that plays automatically. It’s structured as a movie trailer, but since it packs in “trailer moments” from something like 50 short films, it makes your head reel to construct a mental model of the non-existent movie it promotes.

And their individual films are pretty great too. This one tells a story that needs no words:

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Liaisons Dangereuses – Los Niños Del Parque

I noticed DJ Pierre tweeting about “Los Niños Del Parque” by Liaisons Dangereuses, and checked out the Youtube video that was making the rounds. This is apparently a miniature Twitter phenomenon, so I’m jumping on a bandwagon yet again. Oh well…

Anyway, I went looking for some place to buy the music, and it turns out Hit Thing has re-issued it, so I ordered it. In the meantime I found it on the Internets. Below is my ‘refix version’ — I tweaked the EQ and compression for modern DJ’ing, and warped it to steady 116 BPM. The original was a fairly constant 114, but I think there are a couple of clumsy tape edits or stretches in it to throw it off here and there.

[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/LiaisonsDangereuse-LosNinosDelParque.mp3|titles=Los Niños Del Parque|artists=Liaisons Dangereues]
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/LiaisonsDangereuse-LosNinosDelParque.mp3
LiaisonsDangereuse-LosNinosDelParque.flac

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Ableton Live Cheap Trick — Transient Stretch Mode Abuse

1. Load some audio into a slot.
2. Select ‘Beats’ for the warp mode.
2. Select Transient mode for the Grain resolution
3. Select ‘Off Mode’ for the Transient Loop Mode — icon looks like ‘->|’
4. Dial Transient envelope down to zero

It ends up sounding like a gate effect, but it can be further confused by, for example telling it to use 16th notes instead of transients for the Grain resolution.

The track below is entirely comprised of Ableton Live time stretching abuse of various sorts….

[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-MessedUpStrings.mp3]
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-MessedUpStrings.mp3

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Lackluster “Portal EP” — CC Net Release – Free Download


Lackluster “Portal EP”

This is a collection of tracks that was supposed to come out on another label that closed up shop. I offered to do a Creative Commons release for Lackluster. He located the masters (on backups, and backups of backups!) and I mastered them.

Lackluster has been one of the most well regarded artists in the genre known (controversially) as IDM. With a discography going back 10 years, he has released music on Merck, Monotonik, deFocus and many others.

Graphic design by Matt Seeman

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NI Guitar Rig Test

God bless those teutonic DSP elves at NI. Guitar Rig is part of Komplete 6, and it’s tons of fun to screw around with.

I of course, went straight for the extreme noise
[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-GuitarRigTest.mp3]

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