The only thing the end of a college term means to me now is that the grad students in my office are scarce for a week or two, and we get a break on Noise Radio. But I tried to end the term on a high note, or at least a loud one.

I’ve noticed my tastes, at least for DJing, changing, in that more and more I crave things that are simpler and more straight ahead. I prevailed on my friend Tom Butcher to pull out some of the hard techno tracks he recorded in the 90s, that he’d sent me on a casette tape. I wore that tape out listening to it in my car, and luckily he’d rescued those tracks from DAT at some point. He also provided me with pre-release copies of his new record on Roam Recordings. so I used some of his oldest and newest music.

The irrepressible Shawn Rudiman has been releasing a backlog of his tracks digitally on Detroit Techno Militia. I took several tracks from the 4th volume. I’ve always been a fan of his live shows, and I’m frankly in awe with his ability to go into the studio and crank out so many high quality tracks. I don’t know when he sleeps.

Kataconda (Barry Ryan) is another guy who’s been going nuts putting out killer techno for a long time — he came to Iowa City and played at my ‘Off Seamus’ event concurrent with the 2002 SEAMUS conference for Electro-Acoustic music.

Bleupulp (aka Maxim Tanguay) is another prolific composer and the guy behind Pertin-nce net label, which has a huge catalog of mostly free, high quality music.

Andy Vaz produces his own intricately layered deep house from his base in Cologne, and Yore has graciously put me on their promo list. Two upcoming releases — a remix EP for his ‘Straight Vacationing’ album, and ‘My Love is 4Ever’ by Librah — are also featured here.

Along with those things, I’ve been trying to keep with my promo e-mails, and what Facebook friends are tipping, which accounts for the vocal pop I include in the mix. So maybe not 100% a techno purist, but hey, good music is good music, and I try to shoehorn in whatever’s making me happy at the moment…

I had Ableton Live’s audio get interrupted several times last night. The culprit was a nonsensical ‘warning’ to reattach my ‘file history drive.’

I had never set up File History, and certainly not set it up to write to an external drive. Grrr.

Anyway — turning it off.

Instructions on turning it off here.

I think it’s probably better to keep to a regular schedule of backups, rather than to have some mysterious background process periodically hosing up your audio performance.

And the Windows 7 backup is still available in Windows 8, they just hide it. I’m happy overall with Windows 8, but man they sure can make some strange decisions, and it sure seems like they don’t care one bit about hosing up real time applications like audio production and performance.

More specifically Techno & House than usual. Featuring new Shawn Rudiman on Detroit Techno Mlitia, new Cephax Acid Crew album Cro Magnox, Kommon+Appleblim, Trus’ Me, and things found trawling through my ITunes collection…

With the advent of Windows 8, Sound Forge users may run into a registration brain fart that can’t be fixed simply. I ran into this on two different machined. The symptom is that Sound Forge works fine, for a while, and then forgets that it is authorized, and refuses to re-authorize, either on-line or off-line.

I don’t know what the minimum fix is, but following the instructions from Sony Tech Support below get you past this problem. It isn’t lost on me that this requires digging into things that 99% of Windows users are not comfortable with. Complain to Microsoft and Sony, not me.
We are still looking into the matter why this could not be registering properly on your system although all the information is being entered correctly. If you have not already, try using the registration repair tool for the program: http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/link?id=3126.0 If this does not yield any results please follow the instructions for a clean uninstall and reinstallation of the application below. A clean uninstall is more indepth then a regular uninstall and will clear out any data of this application that may have been accidentally installed incorrectly through the application.

Before doing a Clean Reinstall, it is important to do the following:
•All audio and video effects chains and presets will be erased, so if you need to make a back up of your presets please download our Preset Manager program. For more information about backing up presets: Backup and Restore Audio Presets | Backup and Restore Video Presets

•Safely disconnect any external USB or Firewire devices like hard-drives or dongles.

•Temporarily turn off ALL anti-virus programs, as well as disabling any Registry Blockers, Spy Ware, Firewalls, etc. These applications have been known to interfere with software installation and registration.

Start the process of removing programs go to Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features – find and remove your Sony Creative Software applications (ACID, Sound Forge, Vegas, DVD Architect, Cinescore, CD Architect or Media Manager, as well as any other Sony Media Software or Sony Creative Software programs).

Also, remove the Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (SONY_MEDIAMGR), any and all Microsoft .NET Framework versions, and the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable software if it is listed.

Once un-installed, delete the following folders:
•C:\Program Files\Sony\
(Do not delete this entire folder if you have other Sony applications installed such as Sonic Stage, Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies, etc. If that is the case then only delete the folder for the Sony Creative Software application you are using as well as the Shared Plug-Ins folder.)

•C:\Program Files (x86)\Sony\
(Do not delete this entire folder if you have other Sony applications installed such as Sonic Stage, Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies, etc. If that is the case then only delete the folder for the Sony Creative Software application you are using as well as the Shared Plug-Ins folder.)

•C:\Program Files\Sony Setup

WARNING: The next step will require you to delete Windows Registry Keys. The Registry is a very sensitive area to work in. If you are not comfortable with advanced configuration and system changes, ask an administrator to help you with this. (Related Topics: How to back up and restore the registry in Windows: http:////windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/back-up-the-registry)

Next, open the Registry Editor. Select Start and type REGEDIT in the ‘Start Search’ box.

In the Registry Editor, locate and delete the following registry entries:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Sony Creative Software
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Sony Creative Software

32 bit applications (like ACID and DVD Architect) installed in 64 Bit Windows 7 will also store registry keys in a different location. Locate the following registry keys and delete them. (Depending on which versions you have installed you may see one or more of these entries. If you do not see all of these, that is normal. Delete those which you do find.)

If you locate a folder labelled “Sonic” please DO NOT confuse this with Sonic Foundry. Leave it alone.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wow6432Node\Sony Creative Software
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wow6432Node\Sony Media Software

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Sony Creative Software
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Sony Media Software

Close the Registry Editor.

After removing all of the previous items, you may download and re-install from this link -

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/updates

When finished with all reinstallation, please restart your computer. When your computer has restarted, you will have a complete clean installation.

So 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:

Download audio file (RubberDucky-WubMachine.mp3)
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”

It was cold and snowy and there wasn’t much in the way of an audience, but I got to try out some new stuff. Starting about 14:00 I have a section that samples (well, granulates) Milk & Eggs aka Jordan Sellergren. It ultimately bears only the most tenuous relationship to the original music which is wonderful in my opinion.

I don’t get to play out that much — I’d like to do it more often — but the general framework of what I’m doing goes back a couple of years, so it’s time to tear it down and build up something new. Expect more chances for live mistakes and chaos.

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-2013-03-19-LiveSet.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-2013-03-19-LiveSet.mp3

So it’s been a bit since I did a radio show, so I have a backlog of new stuff to work through. New Burial, Autechre, My Bloody Valentine, Alex Under, Ron Trent, Terrace, and of course Chaircrusher….

This grew out of a discussion on Facebook about bread making. Kylie Buddin requested a recipe.

Bread really seems daunting to many people who are otherwise confident cooks. My first advice to people is to lower their standards: Your lumpy, under-risen loaves will still taste better than store-bought bread. Don’t be afraid to fail, and always eat your failures. You put good stuff in, and as long as you don’t burn the crap out of it, it will be good.

It is also a process, like playing the piano, that awards practice. In particular, knowing when bread is well-kneaded is a feeling that is unmistakable when you know it but that can only be approximated in words.

Whole Wheat Bread, the currently evolving recipe

• 1/2 cup warm water
• 2 heaping teaspoons dry yeast
• 2 1/2 cups buttermilk
• 1/3 Cup Molasses
• 1/4 Cup vegetable oil or butter
• 1 Cup White Flour
• 2 tablespoons Wheat Gluten
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3+ Cups Wheat Flour — as needed.

1. Combine yeast and warm (not hot, around 110F) water with a couple teaspoons whole flour and stir. Set aside. It should bubble a bit after 5-10 minutes, indicating the yeast is alive.
2. Mix buttermilk, molasses and butter/oil in a pan on a stove. I use a digital thermometer to warm it up to 110F while stirring. If you don’t have a thermometer, you can just stick your finger in it. It should be like bathwater you could climb into without it stinging.
3. When your liquid mix is warm take it off burner. Add a cup of white flour and the warm liquid to the yeast & water mix. Stir until smooth.
4. Add salt and gluten and stir until fully mixed.
5. Add a 1/2 cup of whole wheat flourr and stir until fully mixed in.
6. Keep repeating step 4 until the dough mix starts separating from the side of the bowl.
7. Turn out on liberally floured counter or breadboard. Cover your hands in flour and knead dough. Every time dough starts getting sticky add a few tablespoons whole wheat flour and continue kneading.
8. When dough ceases to be sticky to touch, continue kneading for 5 minutes or so.
9. Cut into 2 equal sized blobs. Roll and stretch blobs until they’re long enough to touch both ends of the bread pan.
10. Add a teaspoon of oil to each bread pan. Put the dough blobs in pans and roll them around so that they’re well coated in the oil.
11. Set aside to rise. Use a clean towel or plastic wrap draped loosely over the bread pan. Keeps dirt and vermin out, and heat in, while not restricting fresh air flow.
12. Allow to rise until bread is above the edge of the pan.
13. Put in 400 F oven for 25-35 minutes. It is done when the top is dark brown and when you thump it it has a hollow thud quality.
14. knock out of pan onto a wire rack to cool.

Random thoughts:

The inside of the bowl will have dough stuck to it. When you turn out the dough to knead, you can rub off the bits of dough from the bowl into your big dough blob. Waste not want not. If you don’t have experience kneading, you can watch videos on Youtube about it.

The two main gestures are stretching and folding. You do it because it stimulates the protein in the flower, in combination with the liquids, to form long chain molecules that give the the dough structural integrity, such that small bubbles of gas can form as the yeast consumes starches and sugars.

There are endless variations one can introduce. If you beat an egg white and brush the top of the loaf it will make it shiney. You can add nuts or dried fruit. You can substitute a cup of oatmeal for some of the flour — in that case, heat the buttermilk mixture almost to boiling, and drop in the oatmeal. Let the oatmeal absorb liquid as the mixture cools — again, to warm going on hot.

Rising time is quite variable, and depends most on ambient temperature. In fact you can put the dough in the refrigerator and let it rise over-night. One good method is to put a dish of boiling water in your oven (before turning it on) and put the loaves in the oven.

OK, new MBV first reactions. The overall sound hasn’t changed much if at all. If I had made a record as epochal and evocative as Loveless, I guess I’d have problems finishing a follow-up. There are kids in their 20s who literally grew up listening to it. I know it was on heavy rotation in my car driving kids around, and my sons are 24 and 27.

Where it’s different? “New You” is pretty sunny and not as fuzzy as the usual MBV song; the focus is on Bilinda’s multitracked vocals. It points up the influence of 60s french singers like Jane Birkin and France Gall on Shields. The album almost sounds like a noisier Stereolab at times. The two bands were more or less contemporaries; Stereolab had french women vocalists who made that connection more explicit, but it’s a serious part of Shields’ stylistic vocabular.

“If I Am” bears close listening, because it’s maybe Shields most fully realized, appealing vocal melody. If anything has changed in 22 years, it’s that Shields has progressed as a songwriter, especially in the songs he wrote for Bilinda Butcher.

“Nothing Is” in my opinion should have been left a B side, and replaced with another pop song. It is a relentlessly repetitive loop that gets slightly louder and then ends. It would be fun to hear them play it live, but compared to the more fully composed songs it comes off as a piss take.

If you’re at all a fan it’s worth tracking down the Tape Op interview where he describes his recording techniques. It’s easy listening to MBV to feel like there’s something complicated there, but once you know how simply he recorded the music it’s more impressive — there aren’t a whole bunch of overdubs — he spends time getting the sound he wants, and he might have 4 tracks of different microphones on a guitar cabinet, but compared to a Beyonce record they’re very simple and transparent.
Image stolen from Mojo Magazine without permission.

The last show of the semester! Found some stuff downloadable on Soundcloud (Ekko, Delany Duvall), some recent-ish Terrence Dixon/Juju&Jordash/Sigha. Merry frikken Xmas!

So this was a vinyl mix, which means it isn’t as perfect with respect to mixing as my Ableton Live sets. It’s more fun, and scarier, actually, and track ordering is more spontaneous. I did a few level adjustments and cut out the skips at the end of Mercedes Boy, but other than that it’s what went out over air and the radio, including skips in the Depeche Mode track…

Rather than my usual grab bag of tracks, this mix focuses on just a few releases:

• Deepchord’s Sommer
• Mala’s Mala In Cuba
• Deadbeat’s Eight
• John Tejada’s The Predicting Machine
• Dom Dumoulin’s Gone EP
• DFRNT’s Fading

… which takes things several different directions: John Tejada’s melodic Techno (which echoes/gives homage to The Black Dog’s late-90s sound), Dub techno sounds from DeepChord and Dom DuMoulin, the post-everything bass music of Deadbeat, and the incredible Dubstep/Cuban mashup from Mala.

I showed up and KRUI was dark, and there was nothing coming out of the studio to go out on the air. So I started up early, which accounts for the 140+ minutes of this mix. During my set I got onto Facebook to announce it, and the last DJ had left themselves logged in. I left a snarky message on his wall (isn’t that required?) and a few minutes later, he called the studio to tell me that he was going to come down to the station every Saturday night at eight to punch me in the face. So I have that to look forward to!

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.

Haven’t done a radio show since the spring, and had rather a backlog of interesting stuff that has been filtering in. Mr. DE from Detroit Ad– the man from ElectroFunk — Has a new album Sol+Mind which has an eclectic variety of tracks ranging from Prince-esque electro pop (Uh Oh) to R&B (Tonight) to Detroit House (All for Granted). Cooly G put out her album a few months ago on Hyperdub, and she’s a genre of her own. I got the entire Absoloop discography from Kevin Kennedy (aka FBK), Art Bleek is newish on the incomparable Eevolute label. Adam Jay did a IndieGogo campaign to release an EP and raise funds for exorbinant medical bills. I’ve included two tracks from the Mediastinum EP. The Orb just released an album of collaboration with Dub Reggae legend Lee Perry. And of course, I’ve induldged myself by including some of my own tracks from this spring and summer.

At KRUI, Joe couldn’t make his show, and apparently the guy that was supposed to play after me didn’t come, so this is a longish set — over 2 hours. Once again, I find it hard to gauge how much material to have available — I had 41 tracks cued up and actually got through 30-something.

My friend David Talento was trying to organize his studio and found some cassettes I’d sent him in the 1990s. The real find was what may be the last remaining copy of tracks by Jason Welch, local rave promoter and sometime musician. But I’ll deal with that stuff later.

One of the other things is a recording of a live set I did in 1996 (I believe) at the Great Midwestern Ice Cream Company (what is now Moonrakers restaurant). In those days I pretty much dragged my whole studio out to play live — a Roland Jupiter 6, Casio CZ-1, Roland TR707, a home-made plywood rack of gear, a desktop computer and CRT.

I don’t even remember most of the stuff I played, or even how I played it — I suspect I was using Opcode Vision and a Turtle Beach Pinnacle card as a sampler. Vision had a facility something like Ableton Live’s clips — you could trigger chunks of midi sequences live. The beginning of the set sounds a bit like Drexciya. Anyway it isn’t bad, and interesting to hear it as a time capsule from 16 years ago.

Bonus, David put up a remix I did for him around this time on Bandcamp:

This is being played tonight (June 1 2012) on WNUR Radio’s long running Street Beat radio show in Chicago. Thanks to Max for the hookup.

Music-wise it’s my usual thrashing all over the map under the guise of eclecticism. Some Detroit, some UK Bass, some new Dutch Techno, Vince Watson, and my dubbed to frack slow-mo house version of a Desmond Dekker track.

I previously had posted about a couple of sample sets I made by banging on stuff in the basement hallway, (Hallway 1 and Hallway 2) but today I went through the steps to package them as an Ableton Live ALP file.

These are Sampler presets, so I don’t know if you can load them if you don’t have the Sampler License, or rather I don’t know what will happen if you try. But you can always use the original zip files and load the samples wherever you like. Just click through above to the original posts.

Ableton Live Hallway Live Pack

A performance of Guitar Trio by Rhys Chatham is always a stunning, overwhelming, transcendent thing to experience. The composition itself is a schematic set of instructions for 3 or more guitarists, a process that Chatham directs from the stage as he plays himself. It has been his practice to perform the trio with local musicians, as Chatham did in Iowa City nearly 5 years ago with a completely different group. Every performance is the same, and every performance is completely different.

Rene Hell, former Iowa Citian who has gone on to some renown in the experimental music scene delivered a performance that was a departure from his past forays into fuzzy analog electronica. Most of the set was a chaotic blizzard of digitally synthesized sounds; like a Warner Brother’s Cartoon soundtrack done by Karlheinz Stockhausen for an audience of deranged robots. And I mean that in the best possible way.

Solid Attitude were, err, solid. These guys play their punk rock like demons possessed by other, more evil demons, and Mickey Shaw’s lead singer/ranter performance is a thing to behold.

This mix was delayed in posting to the blog because…I forgot it. It reflects some of my recent obsessions, including the new Burial EP Kindred which seems to reflect my mood right now in ways I can’t explain. It also is a bit more tilted towards techno than my mixes have been recently, because there’s a lot of good techno coming out. There’s also a lot of stuff that is roughly house and/or techno but comes from producers who a few years ago were thought of as Dubstep artists. But as Peter Kirn pointed out, there’s Dubstep and there’s “Dubstep” and no one who’s serious about good music wants to have anything to do with the latter.