live on
“yourself presents!”

mike salud performs live with amiga desktop tracker software on san diego public access television.
i’m taking notes. via channel 53

courtesy of franc

the ball in my mouse is not rolling properly, in fact it hasn’t been rolling properly for a long time. is this some kind of weird allegory for my mental state? is the proverbial “ball” in my proverbial “mouse” busted? perhaps. but my actual real mouse is also busted, so i’ve had to buy a new one.

i’ve never been so acutely aware of how much i rely on my mouse when making music. it really is the main physical thing that mediates my creation of music - i’ve got keyboards and knobs and faders and pads too, but an unnervingly large amount of my work is done via the frustratingly fine movements of my shaky hands, trying to wrangle a little white arrow to do my bidding. drawing envelopes, grabbing hold of virtual pots, tapping in tempos and drawing midi notes with the unreliable click of the mouse button. now that i’ve got this new mouse, i’m finding that i have to learn its movements - its sensitivities are subtly different, the shape of the mouse in my hand is different. i took for granted how transparent my use of my mouse had become. now when i’m trying to navigate my way around music software i’m finding that my formerly trusty motor memory can no longer be trusted - i can’t make the fine and immediate adjustments i used to, because when my hand moves to where my brain thinks that things are, the mouse pointer now consistently misses the mark. i feel like a guitarist who wakes up to find he has webbed fingers. i must resolve to become less reliant on my mouse.

this, combined with the unseasonal heat, has plunged faux pas productivity to record lows in the last weekend but it means i’ve been doing a lot of reading. i’m learnin mama i’m learnin. a friend of mine - lets call him an ‘academic’ though that might make him shudder - he told me the other night that he wished that he could just learn knowledge and not be expected to do anything with it. i feel the same way. i have a tendency to suck knowledge in and then struggle to find meaningful ways to re-express it. knowledge just cumulates and confuses in my mind. i’m not sure what practical or specific use most of this knowledge has - i hold on to some lame hope that one day something will spring forth from my subconscious thanks to years of the gestating knowledge-mess. my mind is like the compost heap that i continue to pile shit on to, hoping that miraculous flowers will emerge despite my complete lack of interest in gardening.

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i find this whole trent reznor thing that happened last weekend really exciting and fascinating. i’m not a NIN kind of guy, though i’ve got a soft spot for the perfect drug (admit it, you do too). reznor still gives me the willies for sure. his $1.6 million windfall points to a couple of things. firstly, if you are a musician with control over the distribution of your own material, and you also happen to have a huge, obsessive, internet-savvy fanbase, new digital distribution options give you the opportunity like never before to suck millions of dollars out of your plebs.

now, let me stop here for a sec. i’m going to riff a little bit on music and money. if it makes you uncomfortable reading about this stuff, look away now. i, like many others, am trying to make sense of all of this because it feels like somewhere in there, with all these new options, there might be a way in which i can set myself up to have a sustainable music career without making artistic compromises. thats a pretty big carrot dangling, so i’m not ignoring ‘the new model’ or leaving it to someone else to figure out. i’m no expert; lets figure it out together.

click to follow me down the rabbit hole (mice hole?): (more…)

its good to know that even my songwriting heroes like adam levine from maroon 5 can get down sometimes… tom from one of my favourite blogs music thing has written an article on why all records sound the same, which led me to this clip. its adam and the rest of maroon 5, in the studio struggling to piece together the song that would eventually - after what seems an unbelieveably painful, uninspired and above all tedious process of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s - become a number one hit “makes me wonder”:

It’s fourteen minutes of elegantly dishevelled chaps sitting in leather sofas, playing $15,000 vintage guitars next to $200,000 studio consoles, staring at notepads and endlessly discussing how little they like the track, and how it doesn’t have a chorus. Even edited down, the tedium is mind-boggling as they play the same lame riff over and over and over again.

adam levine actually says: “honestly its so boring that when i sing it, i’m like ‘when is this gonna be over’.” strangely this is very close to the feeling i have when i hear the song. without wanting to spoil the ending, there are no excited high-fives when the song is completed, no joyous celebration of their finely crafted pop hit, no release of tension - nope, the video actually more or less ends with footage of levine closing the door on the camera saying something along the lines of “i’m sick of trying to engineer songs to be hits”…

the song went on to be a number one hit in nine countries, and a couple of weeks ago won a grammy for best pop song. whooo pop music!

it seems bob from zeal has been on a similar journey rediscovering old 8-bit video game themes recently. bob is currently digging the 1986 nintendo game labyrinth, which was of course based on the bowie-in-spandex movie of the same name. head to bob’s blog for a ridiculous 8-bit version of magic dance…

LUDO FRIEND

hey bob! check this out!

i myself grew up on the c64 version of labyrinth. i could never get very far in it though - this was a pretty recurring theme for me playing commodore 64 games. i was not a good gamer. i tended to give up when things got hard, which is a philosophy that i have tried hard to carry over into my adult life. things would be much easier if david bowie visited me in a freaky dream

my man in adelaide bob jarvis has spent a big chunk of time in the last few months making a film clip for my song “coach” - and he is just now starting to leak some of the details out onto the internet via his blog. check out this behind the scenes still:

yes. i’m blogging on my blog about a guy on another blog who is blogging about me! i have dreamed of this moment ever since the invention of the internet in 2003.

check out bob’s blog for more. it is worth mentioning at this point that bob records music under the name zeal, and as some of you probably already know, one of his songs - “yumi and the sky” - appears on my changes ep from late last year. he has recently uploaded to youtube some live footage from a gig he did in adelaide on valentine’s day - so, here check out this live stripped back version of “yumi and the sky”, and if you like what you hear head to bob’s site and buy his ep. i like to blog about my changes friends

visit the faux pas myspace to hear my remix of “yumi and the sky”

last week, i talked about commando, my favourite commodore 64 video game theme… well here it is, as its meant to be heard:

one thing i had forgotten was how the melody of the track dropped out whenever you triggered a sound effect - ie by throwing a grenade, or powering up. so cool. i had also forgotten that the game had only, like, three levels. so it only takes 3 minutes to sit and watch reinhard blast the hell out of all the pixelated military sprite dudes..

andre duracell - a one-man 8-bit band.. a drummer who uses drum triggers to play step sequencers synchronised with his frenetic, hardcore drumming.

how does he describe himself on myspace?

Sounds Like: Lightning Bolt & chiptunes :p

duracell plays bubble bobble live in san guistino, italy:

duracell plays space harrier and turrican:

bbc collective interview with duracell:

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bigger font. why? i’m going blind. and i’m bored.